T-Bird shuttle U73083 14 rolls south with its loaded jennies beneath Highway 37 near Iron Junction on the ex-DM&IR Missabe Subdivision amid the snow covered Minnesota woodlands. These trains work around the clock shuttling crude ore from the Thunderbird Mine at Eveleth, 10 miles down to the U-Tac processing plant near Forbes then returning back north with the hungry empties in a never ending cycle. At Forbes, the cars are dumped and that raw ore is processed into taconite pellets, then loaded on a different train for transportation to the shipping docks at either Duluth or Two Harbors. Such as the case here, EMDs have supplanted the usual General Electric Dash 8 products that have resided on these trains since 2011 while they're cycled out for PTC installation.
