Since 1975, we’ve built bridges to the past in order to share our knowledge base of railroad and industrial history within Duluth-Superior.
Initially, our focus was helping railroad historical societies, railway equipment builders, hobby manufacturers, and model railroad builders.
Our work has expanded.
We now collaborate ad-hoc with area municipalities including the Port Authority, the special collections departments of the University of Minnesota at Duluth and the University of Wisconsin at Superior, and the Duluth and Superior Public Libraries.
Environmental concerns have been especially interested in our old maps as they work to improve the land along the St. Louis River, along Rice’s Point in Duluth, and throughout Superior.
As each of these organizations works to uncover lost secrets about the past, we provide guidance, photographs, maps and information to help them unravel modern-day issues and to fulfill requests for information important in their work.
“Jeff—I’m amazed! Your latest picture CD will be a tremendous addition to the library collection. There are so many surprises — Ruthie the elephant and the Reiner Hoch house. The reference staff will have a opportunity to look over the CD so they will be aware of its importance.
You are a great source of Twin Ports history, and we all look forward to your book...”
What We've Achieved
Our story started long ago when at Overland Models. Our vision, making accurate scale models, was always about helping others to be more aware of the history behind each of those fine brass models that we created. Our good fortune with Overland allowed us to consult with a dozen other companies during the 1980s and 1990s. Altogether, more than 400 model railroad hobby products came from these collaborations—many of them based on real trains in Duluth-Superior.
During the highest-times in the brass train market, someone had to go into the factories to teach workers how to paint and letter their bare-metal models. We were invited, accepted that challenge, and added higher levels of quality control while working side by side with factory workers in Seoul, South Korea.
The significance of these projects cannot be understated because they created new connections for us within the hobby industry. As it turned out, designing and painting models, and writing product sheets led us directly to historical railroad preservation.
That's when the Illinois Railway Museum contacted us about fully restoring their Burlington Route Electro-Motive SD24 into its original Chinese red and gray paint. The challenge when repainting full size locomotives is finding the full-size lettering and logo artwork and the huge stripe templates that were used when the locomotives were built new at the factory. But since neither the factory nor the railroad that bought the locomotives could supply the required plans, that created the first opportunity for us to assist on a truly large project.
The Duluth, Missabe & Iron Range Railway called next for help re-painting their first passenger diesel (Electro-Motive SD9 No. 129) into its as-delivered paint scheme of 1957.
Several other projects came along and we enjoyed helping with those too (especially the Great Northern SD9 that is still under restoration). But the most famous of them has to be the "GN 441 Locomotive Lodge at Essex, MT." that resides along side of the BNSF Railway's mainline near Glacier National Park.
When we collected old plans from the locomotive factories to help us paint model trains for the hobby industry, we couldn't have imagined that the same exact plans that we had saved and cared for, for so many decades, would eventually be used to restore and repaint a real 150-ton diesel locomotives like the Big Sky Blue Electro-Motive F45, GN 441.
We’ve worked professionally in training and competency development in the high-tech sector, and also in the Class 1 railroad field. Knowing people and railroads as well as we do, we realized that the families of retired railroaders (and sadly, many who have passed) have an increasingly complex problem so solve. Especially with collectors of railroad items. So we created PDF resources to help people better understand the complicated nature of trying to market and sell life-time collections of collectibles. We still help families today, as time permits, usually 2-3 projects annually. So if you have a railroad collection to sell please visit my Buying and Selling pages for much more information on this topic.
By 2010 my attentions turned to making the most of my own photo archive, collected over four decades. My first digital image disc, Twin Ports Time Machine Vol. 1 included 100 fully restored black & white photographs from the 1960s. The second release—The Northern Pacific Railway's Lake Superior Division— features 125+ images (a few do remain available).
Then when Tony Dierckins at Zenith City Online (ZenithCity.com) invited us to begin writing stories for their Duluth-Superior history website, how could we refuse? 18 stories were published, with a railroad history book in the works too.
2017 was a watershed year. We left the railroad after 13 years in passenger and freight train service and started a new company—Jeff Lemke Trains, Inc.—which is a brass model train professional services company. It's what we do now full time, with Twin Ports Rail History as a wonderful sideline activity. Thanks for visiting us here today. Cheers!