I am looking to add a small module to my layout centered around river traffic and industry. I wanted to do something beside coal and grain (the only industries I have found much on) what about chemicals or maybe ship/barge building. Does anyone recall any articles or can point me to some resources. I model current era railraod loosely based around St. Louis.
Thanks
Back in 1976, Marietta Ohio bought the Becky Thatcher, from St. Louis, and has it moored just above the mouth of the Muskingum. It needed repairs, and was later sent to a yard at Point Pleasant, WV, where hull work was done. A boatyard, where repairs are made, might be fun, and an excuse to add things from a different period. While living there (in Parkersburg WV) we had several sinkings, giving another item to model. Also had loads coming to and from the local carbon black plant, by water and rail. The Dupont works just below Parkersburg could be fun, though a bit large… How about an out of use ferry? Steve
The major shipments on the river that involve both rail and barge are coal and grain. There isn’t too much other industry on the river that involves both modes. There may be plants that receive chemicals by barge but they aren’t transloaded to rail they are feedstocks for plants that might also be served by rail.
Grain being transferred from rail to barge at Mounds, Illinois for the export market is about the only such transfer along the Mississippi that I’m aware of anywhere close to Saint Louis.
The steel industry ships both by rail and water or it used to. Several large mills in the Pittsburgh area shipped items between plants and finished products along the Monongahela river, a major tributary of the Ohio. Due to issues with rail service the barges were a competitive source that caused railroads to offer better service. According to one of the books I read on the steel industry the Monongahela carried more tonnage with in the city of Pittsburgh than traveled the Atlantic Ocean between America and Europe. The steel industry could ship all manner of things that are too big to go by rail, think built up bridge sections for example and still receive and ship items by rail. Some raw materials could also arrive by rail as well as barge.
Cement plants also receive goods by both rail and barge and can then ship out by rail. Some of the ingredients for concrete are also dredged out of river beds to keep channels open and used to mix with cement to make concrete; sand, and gravel.
A dredge could be modeled with nothing but a sand and aggregate plant and a trans-load facility to ship products out by truck and or rail.
I hope that provides you with some ideas.
Since you model the current era, you can go to Bing Maps and Google Maps to look at satellite photographs of the area to see what is there.
Don’t know where it was loaded, or where it was headed, but there was a bargeload of gaseous chlorine that sank in the lower Mississippi some years ago. I recall that the decision was taken to raise it, since:
IIRC, they evacuated everyone in the area when the barge was raised.
There used to be a barge-building facility on the bank of the Cumberland, just opposite downtown Nashville, TN. I recall seeing a barge launched there. The area is now a sports stadium.
Chuck (Modeling Central Japan in September, 1964 - with rivers navigable by kayakers with death wishes)
Ethonal and oil move south along the river along with gravel/stone and corn out of the TN and KY regions
You can look up movement reports and traffic studies done by barge industries, govt reports, and even find news articles from the floods the last two years talking about the movement disruptions of various cargo
Too bad you are not modeling the 1940s-1950s. Lots of interesting barge traffic then - both bulk shipments (grain, coal, gravel etc), fuel barges, boxcar barges, and so on and so forth.
There are e.g some neat pictures of transloading tractors from flatcars to a barge at the Municipal Barge Terminal in Minneapolis in this series of pictures from the Minnesota Historical Society Visual Records collection: http://collections.mnhs.org/visualresources/Results.cfm?Page=1&Digital=Yes&EndDate=1960&Keywords=barge&StartDate=1930&SearchType=Basic
Smile,
Stein