The Soo Line: Minot's Second Railroad

Minot became a two-railroad town in eighteen ninety-three when the Minneapolis, Saint Paul and Sault Sainte Marie Railway, universally known as the Soo Line, extended its tracks into the city. The Soo had been built partly as a Canadian Pacific subsidiary designed to give that line an American route to Chicago, bypassing the Great Northern's territory. For Minot, a second railroad meant competition, lower freight rates, and additional market access for the surrounding wheat farms.

The Soo Line maintained a depot in Minot for decades and for much of the twentieth century handled grain traffic across the northern tier of North Dakota. The railroad was eventually absorbed into Canadian Pacific, and its legacy today is largely a matter of trackage rights and grain elevator networks that still trace the old Soo Line corridor across the state.