From April 1997 through May 1998 I sailed the tug CARIBE PIONEER. She towed a rail car barge from Mobile, Alabama to Ponce, Puerto Rico. We hauled raw material in from 19 to 21 rail cars to a pharmaceutical company in Ponce. I’ve just searched my business card file, and cannot find the name of that company. They were right on the Ponce harbor. They had dedicated pier space with a ramp for our barge. I’d maneuver the stern of the barge into their ramp. The ramp would lower, aligning their rails with our rails. They had an antique, DC powered locomotive. The grand sum of all the rail in Ponce was the two or three hundred yards running from that ramp into the pharmaceutical companies factory. That’s all there was. We’d offload our cars carrying raw materials then loaded both empty cars (mostly) and a few cars with waste material to be return shipped back to Mobile.
That is about all I can remember. Sorry I could not remember the name of the company that owned the locomotive.
Good luck and fair winds,
Grey
In a message dated 11/14/2004 1:20:32 PM Mountain Standard Time, trainfinder22@yahoo.com writes:
Dear Chris,
I hop eI have the right person but I am doing research on Railroads in Puerto Rico, and from your resume you were a tug captain that hauled railroad cars to Puerto Rico.
I want to do a artical for Trains magazine on this. Can you be of any help?
Paul
The New Orleans Times Picuyune had this to say about the PR narrow gauge
Also newsworthy is the transformation of the island’s wonderfully dilapidated “sugar train.” St. Kitts’ unprofitable but handsome fields of sugar cane are being slowly phased out of production. But the narrow gauge railway, built in 1912 to haul harvested cane to the factory, has been restored. The three-hour Scenic Railway Tour transports 280 visitors along a 30-mile circuit that crosses 23 bridges, passing Brimstone Hill Fortress, and rolling beneath the forest canopy. It’s $89.50 for adults, $44.75 for children; (869) 465-7263.
Self powered coke cars in steel mills use a trailing cable on a reel that rolls it up as it goes toward the fixed end, and lays it out in the other direction. It does fix the unit’s range pretty accurately! A street car was run for display (on a very short run) with a much simpler arrangement of a cable laid next to it. As long as it was off limits to the public, no problem!
WOW! So can such a system be used were you have less the a mile of track and then the cable would be relaid in a slot in the street?
Anyway I have yet to find any photos of Puerto Rican railroads