The Indiana Harbor in the Locks

I guess it was an American Steamship sort of day.  This would make the fourth one from that company I saw on Thursday.

 The Indiana Harbor is another of the thirteen thousand footers that travel on the Lakes.   Here she is entering the Poe Lock, which is the only lock that can handle ships of her size.

 Apparently there was a report generated somewhere that said that this could be replaced with trains if it went down.  I wonder who put this report out because a thousand footer can carry anywhere from 60,000 to 80,000 tons of cargo.  If you figure that a large rail car can carry 100 tons of cargo, you would need a 600 car train to replace one of the smaller thousand footers.   To replace all of them, we would need at least 7000 train cars.  Something tells me that the railroads don't have that kind of extra capacity just laying around.

 Now, that is just the cars.  I think a typical train would carry around 50 cars or less and that requires two or three engines.  So we are talking about requiring almost 300 engines just to carry all those cars.  I'm not sure how many of the railroads have that kind of capacity laying around.  Also, we are just talking about the thousand footers here.  There are bunches of other ships that travel in the Lakes.  That being said, I think that report was full of shit.

And as much as I like trains...ships are far cooler.

And I still want a bumper sticker that says, "Keep the Lakes Great".