Bessemer and Lake Erie Railroad

Bessemer and Lake Erie Railroad

Overview
Headquarters	Homewood, Illinois
Reporting mark	BLE
Locale	Ohio and Pennsylvania
Dates of operation	1869–
Technical
Track gauge	4 ft 8+1⁄2 in (1,435 mm) standard gauge
Other
Website	www.cn.ca

The Bessemer and Lake Erie Railroad (reporting mark BLE) was a class II railroad that operates in northwestern Pennsylvania and northeastern Ohio.

The railroad's main route runs from the Lake Erie port of Conneaut, Ohio, to the Pittsburgh suburb of Penn Hills, Pennsylvania, a distance of 139 miles (224 km). The original rail ancestor of the B&LE, the Shenango and Allegheny Railroad, began operation in October 1869.^{[1][page needed]}

Rail operations were maintained continuously by various corporate descendants on the growing system that ultimately became the BLE in 1900. In 2004 BLE came under the ownership of the Canadian National Railway (CN) as part of CN's larger purchase of holding company Great Lakes Transportation. BLE is operated by CN as their Bessemer Subdivision. As a subsidiary of CN, BLE has been largely unchanged (though repainting of BLE locomotives into CN paint with "BLE" sub-lettering began in April 2015^[2]) and still does business as BLE. BLE locomotives, especially the former Southern Pacific SD40T-3 "Tunnel Motors", have been scattered across the CN system; many are being used in the line that feeds most of BLE's traffic, the former Duluth, Missabe, and Iron Range lines in Minnesota. The iron ore that originates on these lines is transloaded to ships at Two Harbors, Minnesota, then sent by ship to Conneaut, Ohio, where it is again transloaded to BLE trains. It is then taken down to steel mills in the Pittsburgh region, mainly to the blast furnaces at US Steel's Edgar Thomson Plant in Braddock, Pennsylvania, part of the Mon Valley Works.