COMMENTARY BY ALEXANDER B. CRAGHEAD whiteriverproductions.com


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www.railfan.com PUBLISHER


KEVIN EUDALY


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from our readers are always welcome. Please contact the editor for details.


EDITOR


E. STEVEN BARRY (862) 354-3196


EDITOR@RAILFAN.COM NEW YORK CROSS HARBOR CAR FLOAT CROSSING NEW YORK HARBOR, FEBRUARY 17, 2000. STEVE BARRY PHOTO When Railroading Goes to Sea


transportation. The railroad, by its physical infrastructure, is intimately bound to specif- ic geographic places. Trains follow the rails laid before them. Shipping, by contrast, is typically associated with the open possibili- ties of the sea; where did this boat come from? Where will it go next? Singapore? Hamburg? Hoboken? Any port may do, any are possible. Yet there has always been a connection between railroads and ships. First and foremost, the railroad was initially a way of extending the reach of ocean shipping beyond the end of navigable waters. Remote routes like the Alaska Railroad, or the Canadian National’s former BC Rail lines are prime, recent examples of this. Then there is the so-called “land bridge” practice, driven in part by the congestion and rising costs of shipping through the Panama Canal. Some shipping companies turned to unloading a ship on one coast, moving its cargo by rail to the opposite coast, and then loading it onto a new ship. It’s just the most recent and largest-scale example of the long tradition of railways operating as a portage service for water transport. There’s also been a longstanding antago-


A


nism between the two modes. In the East, railways provided the first real competition to the established canals and waterways. In the West, the first significant commercial transportation mode was the river-bound steamboat. The urban landscape of the Antebellum Midwest and West was — to the degree it existed at all — oriented to water. During the 1850s, the railroads began to grow past being local adjuncts of shipping and mature into long-distance passenger and cargo carriers. Inevitably railroads had to cross waterways — navigable waterways — and the question of priority over the crossing space became a point of conflict. The most famous example came in the 1856, when a steamboat collided with the first rail bridge over the Mississippi, causing the owner of the former to sue the owner of the latter. Future president Abraham Lincoln defended the bridge’s owner, the Rock Island, and won, earning much of his reputation as a lawyer


4 JUNE 2015 • RAILFAN.COM


T FIRST GLANCE, there seems to be almost no qualities held common between railroads and maritime


in the process. On page 44, you will read about a more


positive relationship between railroads and water transportation, Michigan’s defunct Chief Wawatam car ferry. Sometimes the expanse of water and the geography of the points the railroads wished to link simply were not conducive to bridge-building. Often these services consisted of barges (“car floats”) with tracks on them, pushed about by tug boats (either railroad-owned or private). More rare were the dedicated, self-propelled ferry boats equipped with rails. Such large-scale operations were not uncommon in major port cities. Both New York and San Francisco had extensive rail ferry services, simply because it was cheaper and easier than bridge building. Famously, the Canadian Pacific once linked several branchlines in the interior of British Columbia via car floats operating on the province’s deep glacial lakes. Lake Michigan had them too, linking the Chesapeake & Ohio at Ludington, Mich., with western rail connections in Wisconsin. The Baltimore & Ohio ferried hoppers of coal from Rochester, N.Y., across Lake Ontario to Canada. All of these are now gone, however.


You can no longer see the car ferries of the Southern Pacific, nor the car floats of Santa Fe or Western Pacific on San Francisco Bay. The C&O’s Badger no longer hauls railcars to Wisconsin. The Chief Wawatam is now a memory, its hull scrapped in 2009. While rare, some marine operations


survive in the present day. There are still car floats in New York Harbor, linking Brooklyn with New Jersey, and they still ply the mouth of Chesapeake Bay between the Delmar- va Peninsula and Norfolk. The Southern Railway of Vancouver Island uses a ferry to connect to the Canadian mainland, and in the grandest of example of all, the Alaska Railroad is connected to the rest of the world only via a ferry that runs from Anchorage to Seattle. But for now, turn to page 44, and relive when trains still moved by a coal-fired boat across the Mackinac Straits.


Consulting Editor Alexander B. Craghead is a transportation historian, photographer, artist, and author from Portland, Ore.


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