| North west from Duluth is
the town of Hibbing. This is famous as the birthplace of Bob Dylan and the
Greyhound bus company. They have a bus museum but when we got there it was
'closed for the season'. |  |
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So all we could do was look at the buses in the yard outside. This is a 1969
40ft 'Buffalo'. |
| A 1964 PD4106. There are
also13 different historical buses on display inside. |  |
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I think this is a 1948 Silverside. A true bus enthusiast would know |
| This is a 1947 ACF
'Brill', perhaps the oldest on display outside, although the company started
in 1914. |  |
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Just a bit further down the road is an observation point into the Mahoning-Hull-Rust
iron mine in the Mesabi Range, though again the visitor facilities are
closed. This is one of their dump trucks on display close by. It weighs in
at 240 tons EMPTY. If you go up the stairs to get into the cab..... |
| Really it is just a
gigantic (though shallow, compared with the Kennicot copper mine, anyway)
hole in the ground. When the ore deposits were found in the 1890s they
stripped off the covering earth and started mining. The original town of
Hibbing actually stood on top of the mine, but the mine company paid to have
it moved in 1919 at a cost of $16 million. Today the hole is three miles
long and two miles wide and over 500ft deep. Over 1.4 BILLION tons of earth
have been moved and 800 million tons of ore shipped since 1895. It is the
largest iron ore mine in the world. In the 1940s about a quarter of the ore
in the US came from this one mine. It is the largest open pit mine in the
world. |  |
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In the picture above you can see this drill. By most accounts it would be
regarded as a huge machine but in the picture above it looks lost. It is
drilling holes for dynamite to open up the next area for the shovels to work
at. |
| The shovel you can see
here holds up to 33 cu yards. Three scoops fills a dumper truck. |  |
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But again it looks lost and you saw the size of the dump truck... |
| Hard at work, there is a
steady flow of dump trucks to be filled. And this will not be the only
shovel at work. At one time they worked 24 hours a day and over 3,000 men
worked here, but today I don't know. |  |
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Another load of ore on its way to the crusher to be made into taconite
pellets. |
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