[AT] new album on the ATIS Image Depot

Cecil E Monson cmonson at hvc.rr.com
Sat Apr 3 05:32:11 PST 2004


	Very interesting, Brian. Growing up in the Midwest, we sometimes heard
or read news stories about the effect of storms on Great Lakes shipping. My
first sight of any of the Great Lakes was a trip to Chicago in 1947. The next 
was around 1950 when a friend and I took a cab-over truck from Mason City,Iowa 
to Duluth, MN to pick up a load of furniture for someone. We had time when we 
got to Duluth and spent quite a bit of it watching the big ore carriers go thru. 
Lake Superior and Lake Michigan are so large they are really inland seas and 
have storms to go with their size. I understand many large ships have gone down 
in violent storms and that there are shiploads of automobiles, among other
things, resting on the bottom of those two lakes.

	When I was putting those photos in an album for Ernie, I wondered if
the rail cars were going to be unloaded in Washington and re-loaded into ships.
I had it in my head that Chinese railroads were a narrower gauge than ours. I
imagine one of you railroad buffs would know the answer to that question.

	As to the ferries from Michigan to Wisconsin, being as I have traveled
between New York and Minnesota for years, I have checked out the ferries in the
past to see if there was a time saving by taking them across instead of going
around Chicago but there wasn't so I never took that trip. With the Interstates
now, it is a no-brainer for me to just drive around instead of taking the ferry.

Cecil

> It seems entirely possible to fit all of those cars on one ship.  One of my
> other interests is railroads and railroad carferries.  Carferries are ships
> built with railroad tracks right on the deck.  There is a sea gate in the
> stern of the ship which opens and the cars are pushed right onboard.  I
> don't know anything about whether any ocean going ships have tracks in them,
> but I live in Michigan where these ships used to haul railroad cars across
> Lake Michigan to Wisconsin all the time.  The Ann Arbor Railroad Company
> started doing this in 1892 and various railroads operated carferries on Lake
> Michigan until 1990.  In 1953 the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad put the last
> two ferries into service, the Badger and Spartan.  These ships are 410' long
> and were designed to carry 32 40' cars each.  The Badger has been restored
> and carries passengers with their automobiles and even buses and semis
> across the lake now.  Depending on their size, it can carry up to 180
> vehicles and 620 passengers.  It is now the last coal fired ship operating
> on the Great Lakes.  I have a book on the Badger which has a picture of
> carloads of Allis Chalmers tractors on the ship and more cars full of Massey
> Harris tractors being loaded in Wisconsin. 


-- 
The nicest thing about telling the truth is you never have to wonder
what you said.

Cecil E Monson
Lucille Hand-Monson
Mountainville, New York   Just a little east of the North Pole

Allis Chalmers tractors and equipment

Free advice




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