Obviously the economics must have worked out, or Great Lakes ore shipping would have disappeared a long time ago - but I can’t figure out how it worked out economically.
Take, say, 1950 - ore operations would probably something like iron ore shipped via rail from mine to ore docks at, say, the port of Duluth/Superior (Minnisota/Wisconsin), then shipped by laker down to, say Cleveland Ohio, unloaded (possibly by Huletts) into rail cars for the final leg to clients in Youngstown or Pittsburg etc. To me, even then it seems it would be easier and cheaper to ship all-rail routing from the mining areas in Minnesota and the Upper Pennisular of Michigan, around the Great Lakes (somehow avoiding the congestion of Chicago if possible? ), and out directly to Pittsburg etc.
OK, I’m coming from a 21st century East Coast viewpoint, where the railroads of the NY Tri-State area dumped their extensive and expensive habor ligtherage and car-float operations as soon as fesible. I guess I am not considering ICC rate dictates and schedules of the era.
So, in that typical period of c.1950, was all-rail routing available? Was it common? And how did having to transload the ore to boats, and back again, using often extensive facilities, work out economically?
Many of the steel mills, especially in the Calumet Region and in the Cleveland area, received their ore directly from the boats without any transloading.
W ell it isn’t only ore. How can a head of lettuce be grown in California, be picked, boxed, trucked to a warehouse and loaded in a car, shipped to the east coast and sell for $1.39. If it was uneconomical it wouldn’t have been done. But as Ricky Ricardo would say, " somebody got a whole lot of 'splainin to do".
I’m sure that all-rail routing was available (much more then than now). However, for transporting any massive volume of dry-bulk (or liquid, for that matter), it has always (and always will be) far less costly to ship by water than by rail. Unfortunately, railroad management has, traditionally, been pretty bone-headed about the benefits (to railroads, as well as water transportation interests and the shippers themselves) and very slow to embrace the concept (not saying there has been NO intermodal transportation embraced by the railroads, just not nearly as much as could have/should have been). With the tremendous growth in containerized shipping, in recent years, there is renewed interest in exploring the efficiencies of intermodal transportation and some very large container ports are being built in major, port cities (both “brown water” and “blue water” ports). There is still a lot of developing and learning to be done, but the trend is gathering momentum. A big plus will be a dramatic reduction in “long haul” trucking. Most of that tonnage will become containerized and move by rail and by barge to major hubs, before being placed on trucks for movement to final and local distribution centers.
A Great Lakes ore boat is a long way from ligtherage. A deep water, large capacity, vessel is tremendously efficient. Before economic regulation screwed things up the railroads had successfully defeated water transportation on canals and rivers. But not on the Great Lakes. It’s hard to beat a big ship using a (more or less) natural infrastructure.
Additionally, the regulators would not allow unit train rates in 1950. So the railroads couldn’t legally give the volume discounts needed to compete for this type of traffic. (And no, the public was not clamoring for regulation that held rail rates high.)
The regulators held rail rates high to protect water movements of freight from rail competition. But even absent this economic stupidity, competing with the ore boats for the long haul movement of a bulk commodity is dubious.
The railroads can still defeat river barges (Even though the barge operators do receive a large government subsidy). But the Lakers remain a very efficient method of moving the iron ore. And so it shall remain until the mines play out or the Great Lakes dry up.
Remember for US Steel Company which owned the railroads on both ends, and the Lakers in between everything was done on a cost basis. As far as US Steel was concerned it didn’t matter where the profit was generated, as long as it was. All they were concerned about was keeping the cost of producing their steel products as low as possible. The train, laker, train combination must have been the lowest cost option, or they would have changed the delivery method.
Lots of incorrect information, here. You need to do some research. Contrary to railroad fantasy, river transportation does not and has NEVER received government subsidies and has been paying (through a fuel tax) for the maintenance of the waterways (in spite of being only one of the users of the lock & dam system) for the past forty years. Also, dry bulk freight was never a regulated commodity. A full tow of barges, on the lower Mississippi River will contain over 55,000 tons of cargo. This is comparable to modern Great Lakes vessels. Railroads have NEVER “defeated” river barges. The only defeat of river traffic by railroads occurred in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when passenger traffic moved from river to rail. If rail is so much more efficient than barges (it isn’t, by the way), why are the container transportation models being developed in such “think tanks” as Carnegie Mellon University showing that containers can move more efficiently on barges than on railroads? I’m flat-out of time to debate, for the next several days, but this is a very complex subject and there are volumes of information available out there that should be researched before making such sweeping (and incorrect) statements of “defeat” by rails. The simple reality is that both river & rail are highly effective means of moving large volumes of bulk cargoes and neither form, alone, could ever replace the other.
While I believe that they more than pay for normal maintenance like dredging (Although the federal government keeps most of the harbor trust fund that’s paid by marine fuel taxes to maintain waterways hostage and reassigns it elsewhere leading to a huge dredging crisis around the country today), I’m skeptical that fees have paid for the initial major capital investment in infrastructure projects like the creation of the St. Lawrence Seaway back in the 50’s.
Of course even if they only covered routine maintenance and operating costs, it’s still a win-win for the taxpayer just the same. What’s good for industry is good for everyone including railroading. And through the taxes that something like the Seaway, inland barge routes, or something like the Intercoastal has made possible, they certainly more than have paid for itself many times over not to mention things like reduced pollution that they bring to the table. But through direct fees, I’m skeptical that the users have paid all the costs associated with such major projects.
One thing some of these Great Lakes steamship lines have benefited from over the years is back hauls. There are plenty of 1 way runs but something like the major Canadian fleets have enjoyed where they haul grain to the lower St. Lawrence like Montreal and haul iron ore back into the industrial heartland is lucrative.
An iron ore train is always going to be returning empty [Edit: Well almost always… SP’s & WC’s setup in the 90’s that hauled iron ore West and then coal East with the same pool of cars on the same trains comes to mind as a rare exception]. Just one of the many reasons why America’s inland waterways have made and continue to make economic sense.
There is still an integrated steel mill in Pittsburgh (US Steel), but I believe virtually all other blast furnaces not accessible to ports have shut down, eliminating that final rail leg.
In the 1950s, as well as now, there are some all-rail ore movements when ice closes the Soo locks about Jan. thru Mar.
Lots of incorrect information, here. You need to do some research. Contrary to railroad fantasy, river transportation does not and has NEVER received government subsidies and has been paying (through a fuel tax) for the maintenance of the waterways (in spite of being only one of the users of the lock & dam system) for the past forty years. Also, dry bulk freight was never a regulated commodity. A full tow of barges, on the lower Mississippi River will contain over 55,000 tons of cargo. This is comparable to modern Great Lakes vessels. Railroads have NEVER “defeated” river barges. The only defeat of r
This involves two of the most efficient sectors of the US economy. 1) Agriculture and, 2) Transportation. If a trucker charges $7,100 to move 42,000 pounds of lettuce from California’s Imperial Valley to New York it’s $0.169 per pound. This is just 12.3% of your quoted price of $1.39/pound. For 3,000 miles of movement. Not a really big deal. Apparently, New Yorkers are willing to pay that for a fresh salad in December.
The ore boats that sailed the Great Lakes were much more seaworthy when they carried ballast ; than to sail empty back to Duluth and Two Harbors. Often this ballast was either coal or limestone. USS operated a steel mill in Duluth for many years because of this ballast. It made economic sense for USS to operate this plant and it earned brownie points(favorable tax rates for shipping iron ore) from the State of Minnesota.
Great Northern shipped a lot of iron ore to Superior from the Mesabi Iron Range. GN did have an all rail route out of Duluth but used the ore docks in Superior. GN could have shipped ore to St Paul via its own rails and handed it off to the Burlington. BNSF today does operate an all rail routing to Gary from the Minnesota’s Iron Range.
Iron ore could not be shipped in the winter months. DM&IR crews in the 1930’s went south and worked on the FEC I have heard.
Ore traffic plummeted during the winter months for two reasons: The Lakes froze over, forcing the boats to lay up for the winter; and the natural ores mined at the time had a high moisture content and also froze solid during the winter. Taconite does not have this problem and can be mined year round.
More inaccurate/half-truths. For starters, the decline in Missouri River barge traffic is the result of changes in water management practices and the agricultural interests in the Missouri basin are fighting for a return to reasonable policy, which would restore river levels enough to make navigation economically feasible. Rail freight rates held high to protect barges? Really? How come rail freight rates, on water level routes, were/are always significantly lower than those on routes with no competition from water transportation? Oh, yeah…don’t look now, but coast-wise/intercoastal shipping is on the rise and has been for the past few years. Declining tonnage on the Mississippi? Yeah, after Carter’s idiotic Russian grain embargo, some other grain-producing countries got a big boost at our expense. Up until that time, we (the US) pretty much had the market cornered and rails could not handle all of the volume of grain being moved to the Gulf. Other factors have since combined to effect river traffic, but competition from railroads has not been a big problem. You site a decline in Mississippi River traffic occurring between 2002 and 2011. However, deregulation occurred decades before that. As far as the “subsidies” the railroads are always whining about; it has little to do with politics and special interests and a lot more to do with that obscure and increasingly ignored document called the Constitution, the framers of which being very much aware of the positive effect that good transportation infrastructure can have on commerce. As I look at what we are arguing over, I have to laugh at both of us. The battle we are “fighting” has been going on for way over 100 years. Both side continue to cry “foul” and cite zillions of “studies”, statistics and “facts” in support of their sides of the argument. It never gets settled and no one wins. For every “fact” you cite, I can find documentation of another “fact” to repudiate
bud the bargeman, wrote the following post at Thu, Dec 26 2013 3:46 PM:
[SNIPPED] '…Lots of incorrect information, here. You need to do some research. Contrary to railroad fantasy, river transportation does not and has NEVER received government subsidies and has been paying (through a fuel tax) for the maintenance of the waterways (in spite of being only one of the users of the lock & dam system) for the past forty years. Also, dry bulk freight was never a regulated commodity…" [SNIPPED]
Not trying to pick a fight here, with Bud, but I would take issues with his statement about subsidies.
[ ie:[“…river transportation does not and has NEVER received government subsidies…” ]Specifically, on the Mississipppi River, and the Missouri River and the Ohio River. I would suggest that the millions of sollars, and the operations of the Army Corps of Engineers, their locks and Damas and their Waterways Maintenance activities; are a direct subsidy to the operations of Civilian River Transportation.
Admittedly, the major benefit to their presence and operations is the Flood Control that results to the Benefit of the Population that lives along the banks of those waterways. The Fuel Taxes paid by the Inland Marine Operators does not come close to the costs of the infrastructure maintained by the Corps in the name of Flood Control, since 1879 with the formation of the Mis
Purely an opinion, but the inland waterways would not be operable without the government building the required locks and dams to make transportation by water viable. Government subsidies are required for their maintenance as well. Waterborne transportation was the only viable option in it’s day but has been overtaken by other transportation options run with private investment. That leaves barges as a dieing breed. They served their need but have become outmoded by better technology. The Tenn-Tom waterway never did meet expectations, and was a boondoggle that cost taxpayers a huge sum.
OK. First of all, the lock & dam system was never intended for, nor does it have any flood control function. The actual flood control dams are not on the navigable parts of the rivers. While the locks & dams are part of government’s responsibilities, as stated in the Constitution, their function is essential to the industries, cities & towns lining the rivers. Without the pools created by those dams, there would never be enough water to sustain the large populations in those cities & towns, nor would there be enough water to supply the needs of industry and for the generation of electrical power. People tend to forget that the Ohio River (and other now navigable waterways) could be stepped across several months out of most years. BTW, initial efforts at canalization of the Monongahela, between Brownsville & Pittsburgh, were done by private individuals. It was, shall we say, less than beneficial to the populace who had to pay outrageous tolls to transit the system. Government took over before the mid-point of the 19th century. I can’t comment on the Tenn-Tom, as it’s not a system I’ve ever worked on, or paid much attention to. However, the huge costs involved with the construction of several major navigation projects were purely the result of lengthly delays due to frivolous litigation on the part of so-called environmental groups and…wait for it…railroads. Re: “hydraulic wheelhouse lifts”. Well, not quite. Those boats were, primarily, constructed for use in the Chicago area, above Lemont, IL. There is not a problem with vertical clearance on the Upper Mississippi, due to the use of swing-span bridges. The Missouri is another river I’ve never, physically, worked on. However, none of the boats I’ve know to operate on the Missouri were of the retractable pilot house variety. The Missouri is know to be shallow and swift, but with no unusual vertical clearance issues that I’ve ever been made aware of. Yes, you’ll see retractab
Well, you have got some of it right, Norm. Without those locks & dams, much of the inland waterways would not be navigable. But, since the government is constitutionally charged with the maintenance of navigable rivers & harbors, to promote commerce, that’s the way it is. Don’t worry about barges being a “dying breed”. They’ll continue to survive and thrive. BTW, I suspect that people said the same thing about the Ohio River system, when it was canalized between 1914 & 1924, that you’ve said about the Tenn-Tom. After all, it takes a while for industry to locate along a navigable waterway, to utilize the transportation which could be available, if demand continues to grow. At any rate, I’d be careful about writing the Tenn-Tom off as a failure. True, I haven’t looked at any ton-mile figures for the Tenn-Tom, so I could be wrong. But I just have a feeling that there is going to be substantial growth in barge traffic there.
[quote user=“bud the bargeman”]
More inaccurate/half-truths. For starters, the decline in Missouri River barge traffic is the result of changes in water management practices and the agricultural interests in the Missouri basin are fighting for a return to reasonable policy, which would restore river levels enough to make navigation economically feasible. Rail freight rates held high to protect barges? Really? How come rail freight rates, on water level routes, were/are always significantly lower than those on routes with no competition from water transportation? Oh, yeah…don’t look now, but coast-wise/intercoastal shipping is on the rise and has been for the past few years. Declining tonnage on the Mississippi? Yeah, after Carter’s idiotic Russian grain embargo, some other grain-producing countries got a big boost at our expense. Up until that time, we (the US) pretty much had the market cornered and rails could not handle all of the volume of grain being moved to the Gulf. Other factors have since combined to effect river traffic, but competition from railroads has not been a big problem. You site a decline in Mississippi River traffic occurring between 2002 and 2011. However, deregulation occurred decades before that. As far as the “subsidies” the railroads are always whining about; it has little to do with politics and special interests and a lot more to do with that obscure and increasingly ignored document called the Constitution, the framers of which being very much aware of the positive effect that good transportation infrastructure can have on commerce. As I look at what we are arguing over, I have to laugh at both of us. The battle we are “fighting” has been going on for way over 100 years. Both side continue to cry “foul” and cite zillions of “studies”, statistics and “facts” in support of their sides of the argument. It never gets settled and no one wins. For every “fact” you cite, I can find documentation of another &q