Enjoy a panoramic view of fall colors by train on the North Shore

DULUTH, Minn. — Instead of seeing fall colors from your car, how about seeing them on the North Shore Scenic Railroad?

In this week's Finding Minnesota, John Lauritsen rode along to find out what makes this trip both colorful and historic. 

There's no more appropriate place to have a train museum than inside an old train depot. 

Executive Director Ken Buehler said at the height of its operation, 785,000 passengers a year came through the Union Depot in Duluth. And they traveled in all kinds of different trains, like the William Crooks Locomotive, built in 1861. 

"It was the very first steam locomotive in Minnesota. Brought up to St. Paul, on a barge, on the Mississippi River," said Ken.

There's also a rotary snow blower, which gets a workout during a Minnesota winter. 

"It's a snowblower for railroad tracks and it can throw stuff 25 or 30 feet in any direction," said Ken. 

Fifty years ago, these engines came to a halt as the depot closed and the Lake Superior Railroad museum officially opened. 

"This whole museum is a labor of love," said Ken. 

But trains weren't meant to be stationary. 

Each day, one train still leaves the station and chugs up the North Shore along Lake Superior. It's called the Duluth Zephyr and it's far from ordinary. 

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"What makes the car so unique is this panoramic view from the dome," said Ken. "There's nothing that's been built like this since." 

Only 30 full-length dome cars were ever made. And only a handful are left. This is one of them. 

"This is nice here. Sure is," said Alvin Fisher. 

Nice enough for Alvin and his wife Sherry to drive from Heber Springs, Arkansas, to climb aboard. 

"It's a little cooler, the leaves have started turning. It's beautiful," said Sherry. 

Instead of driving past the fall colors, this train takes you right through them. 

The end of the Zephyr is a former box car that the crew cut open to give passengers that open-air experience.
"I think we'll come back. We'll come again," said Shelly Strappele, a passenger. 

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In all, it's a 75-minute trip up to Two Harbors and back. A chance for train enthusiasts young and old, to make their own tracks. 

"A museum is just a bunch of stuff until somebody tells somebody else their train story. Or in the case of the young kids, when we make that train story on the North Shore Scenic Railroad," said Ken. 

The North Shore Scenic Railroad also does pumpkin rides, murder-mystery rides, beer-tasting rides, and a Christmas ride in December. They operate seven days a week from May through the end of October.