Back in the day, many railroads had Navy’s - tugs and car floats and lighters to conduct their maritime interface with ships at anchor and ships at dock as well as freight opeations at locations that were not directly connected to line haul roads.
Most all of these operations ceased in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s - sending the equipment to the ship breakers, scrap yards and other owners.
It would be interesting if someone had the inclination to write a factual article on the ending of these opeations and follow the disposition of the equipment.
Indeed, that is a missing piece of Railroad history…while there are numerous write ups and photo’s of individual operations a comprehensive book on this would be a real boon to all of us.
It is a marvellous and fascinating part of Railroad operations, from tiny Central Vermont to giant Pennsy and NYC.
They lasted until the middle 70’s. When I was Asst. Trainmaster at Locust Point yard in Baltimore we had to load the car float that moved cars to and from Fells Point. Crew had to hold onto 7 idler cars to switch cars to/from the car float as the weight of the engine would have sunk the end of the car float.
Canadian Pacific had a very interresting maritime operation. They operated a good sized fleet of passenger liners so that a person could get from England to Canada by Atlantic liner, Quebec City to Vancouver by rail and then from there to asian ports by Pacific liner. Probably the most famous of these liners was the Empress of Ireland that went down after a collision in the fog in 1914 with a loss of life equal to the Titanic disaster 2 years earlier. Events in Europe that erupted a few weeks after the disaster overshadowed the sinking and people soon forgot about the thousand lives lost that night.
-NDG- Great addition to my digital library. The Port Burwell area was very close to where I grew up. All of South Western Ontario was criss crossed with branch lines, many to Lake Ports and very very little remains. It is astonishing actually.
They still talk about the Ashtabula in Port Burwell…
Still has a great beach and great burgers and fries on those hot summer days by Lake Erie. Magical.
cx500- Yes thanks, edited to correct. It happens, even when you proofread …you see what you want to see at times.
Had a nice discussion on Port Burwell on Classic Trains forum a while back…it’s a very old community, with an Anglican Church dating to the 1830’s. Lots of old railroad habitats along the North Shore of Lake Erie.
Nearby a bit East was the old Grand Trunk, then CNR, into Port Dover and Port Rowan to meet the Bessemer and Lake Erie lake freighters.
