No, I’m not talking rail ferries. Rather, the shipment of boats on the railroads. During World War II an entrepreneur by the name of Andrew Jackson Higgins designed and built over 20,000 boats and small ships for the U.S. Navy. He originally had a small boat building company in New Orleans, Louisiana used to build boats for his lumber exporting business. At the onset of WWII this expanded into five huge boat building plants. One was in Houma, Louisiana, the rest in New Orleans. One of those four plants was located on City Park Avenue, just several blocks from the home I was raised in.

The largest number of the boats he produced were the model LCVP ramp boats, often referred to as Higgins Boats. These were the ones that were able to get in close to beaches, then drop a large ramp at the front for the Marines and the Army troops to storm out of. The other boats that gained attention were the PT (patrol torpedo) boats that Higgins produced for the Navy. While not as numerous as the Elco built boats, they were still vital in their mission. And there were several other boats and small ships that Higgins built, mostly unknown to the general public in the general sense.

So what does this have to do with railroads? Railroads were essential for the transportation of these boats. Only one of the boat building plants had direct access to a waterway. The others (including the one on City Park Avenue) had to transport each boat to Bayou St. John, and then travel down that waterway to Lake Pontchartrain for testing. There was a rail line directly next to the City Park plant, so boats there were shipped to Bayou St. John by both truck and rail. After testing, boats would be loaded on railcars for shipment across the country for delivery to the military services.

I visited a number of websites that covered the topic of the Higgins operation. One of the most interesting sites was The American Automobile Industry in World War Two,
An American Auto Industry Heritage Tribute by David D Jackson. Both of these images can be found on those pages. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to find a photo credit for these images on any of the websites that I visited.