page_title: Duluth, South Shore and Atlantic Railway
section_title: Independent railroad
hierarchical_section_title: Duluth, South Shore and Atlantic Railway / Independent railroad
caption_attribution_description: English: Duluth box car number 18052 on display at the Mid-Continent Railway Museum in North Freedom. Photo by Sean Lamb (User:Slambo), October 10 2004
context_page_description: The Duluth, South Shore and Atlantic Railway was an American railroad serving the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and the Lake Superior shoreline of Wisconsin. It provided service from Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan, and St. Ignace, Michigan, westward through Marquette, Michigan to Superior, Wisconsin, and Duluth, Minnesota. A branchline stretched northward from Nestoria, Michigan up to the Keweenaw Peninsula and terminating at Houghton, Michigan, with two branches extending further to Calumet, Michigan and Lake Linden, Michigan.
  The first predecessor of the DSS&A began operations in 1855. The railroad fell under the control of the Canadian Pacific Railway in 1888 and was operated from 1888 until 1960 as an independently nameplated subsidiary of the CPR. In 1949, a reorganization of the DSS&A took place, creating new heralds and designating the company a railroad instead of a railway. In 1961, the DSS&A was folded into the CPR-controlled Soo Line Railroad. Since 2001, the remaining operating trackage of the former DSS&A has been operated by the Canadian National Railway.
context_section_description: The development in the 1850s of hematite iron ore mines in the Upper Peninsula hills above Marquette encouraged the development of numerous railroad plans for spur lines and connecting routes between mines, local boom towns, and the shores of the Great Lakes.  While most of the Upper Peninsula's iron ore and Keweenaw copper was shipped to the rest of the United States by lake boat, the inability of water-based shippers to offer service to northern Michigan in winter encouraged railroad promoters to launch numerous plans for lines in the Upper Peninsula.
  By the 1870s, a maze of corporate charters and tiny stub lines had been created or built in the central Upper Peninsula, primarily to carry iron or copper ore from the mines down to smelters and docks on the shores of Lake Superior and Lake Michigan.  In 1879-81, venture capitalists led the construction of the Detroit, Mackinac & Marquette (DM&M), a standard-gauge mainline from St. Ignace, on the Straits of Mackinac, to Marquette on Lake Superior.  The roadbed included a surveyor-straight 25-mile (40 km) east-west section, the ancestor of today's "Seney stretch". Although the state of Michigan granted the DM&M more than 1.3 million acres (5,300 km²) of state land, almost 9000 acres-per-mile (23 km²/km) as a construction subsidy, by 1886 the new DM&M went into receivership.
  The DM&M was reorganized by venture capitalist James McMillan of Detroit, who led the rapid consolidation of the DM&M and many of the UP's smaller railroads during the early 1880s.  The new Duluth, South Shore & Atlantic went into operation as a merger of these lines in December 1886.
caption: A preserved DSS&A boxcar at the Mid-Continent Railway Museum, North Freedom, Wisconsin.
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