Cramer Tunnel is a disused railroad tunnel near

Cramer, Minnesota Cramer is an unincorporated community in Lake County, Minnesota, United States. The community is located 23 miles northeast of Silver Bay at the intersection of Lake County Road 7 (Cramer Road) and Lake County Road 8. Cramer is located 11 mil ...

. It is the longest railway tunnel in

Minnesota Minnesota ( ) is a U.S. state, state in the Upper Midwestern region of the United States. It is bordered by the Canadian provinces of Manitoba and Ontario to the north and east and by the U.S. states of Wisconsin to the east, Iowa to the so ...

History

Cramer Tunnel opened in 1957 after

LTV Steel Ling-Temco-Vought (LTV) was a large American conglomerate which existed from 1961 to 2001. At its peak, it was involved in aerospace, airlines, electronics, steel manufacturing, sporting goods, meat packing, car rentals, and pharmaceuticals, ...

blasted a tunnel to connect Hoyt Lakes

taconite Taconite () is a variety of banded iron formation, an iron-bearing (over 15% iron) sedimentary rock, in which the iron minerals are interlayered with quartz, chert, or carbonate. The name ''taconyte'' was coined by Horace Vaughn Winchell (1865– ...

plant and the location of its

ore dock An ore dock is a large structure used for loading ore (typically from railway cars or ore jennies) onto ships, which then carry the ore to steelworks or to transshipment points. Most known ore docks were constructed near iron mines on the upper ...

at Taconite Harbor on

Lake Superior Lake Superior is the largest freshwater lake in the world by surface areaThe Caspian Sea is the largest lake, but is saline, not freshwater. Lake Michigan–Huron has a larger combined surface area than Superior, but is normally considered tw ...

, from which the taconite was shipped to eastern steel mills. The tunnel was used consistently from its opening to 2001, when LTV Steel went bankrupt and closed their ore dock in Taconite Harbor. When the location was bought by

Cleveland Cliffs Cleveland is a city in the U.S. state of Ohio and the county seat of Cuyahoga County. Located along the southern shore of Lake Erie, it is situated across the Canada–U.S. maritime border and approximately west of the Ohio-Pennsylvania stat ...

in 2002, cleanup trains ran on the line to pick up leftover chips and pellets until 2008.

References

Railway tunnels in the United States Tunnels in Minnesota Transportation in Lake County, Minnesota 1957 establishments in Minnesota Disused tunnels {{US-tunnel-stub