The Louisiana Cypress Lumber Company’s railroad had to solve an interesting problem. The Manchac swamp in Louisiana was not an easy location to build a railroad. How does one lay railroad track in a swamp, particularly when the solid ground is often feet under water? They solved the problem by using a type of cribbing. It’s built on multiple layers of Gum logs stacked in alternating directions. Solid ground could be as deep as 5 or 6 feet below the water.

Tedious? Yes, and when done by hand, only about 10 to 20 feet a day could be installed. But the railroad found a better way, a custom built track building machine. It was designed by Mr. C.H. Lindsey, Vice President of Louisiana Cypress Lumber Co. This machine could lay up to 120 feet of track on a good day.

Another view of tracks being laid in the swamp. This machine made lifting and positioning of the heavy logs, ties and rails much easier. It appears to me that the inspiration for this equipment came from a McGiffert log loader.

All of these photos were by photographer C.W. Witbeck, and are from the collection of Jack Shall (former collection of Tom Davidson). While the date wasn’t recorded, it is likely around 1951.

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.

On a sunny Sunday, April 10th of 1988, Ron Findley and I were spending the day trackside, traveling from place to place. We eventually found our way up to Wanilla, Mississippi, where a railroad crossing exists. And there we found parked an old GM&O speeder (a motorcar). It’s probably safe to say that it was unused, but remained in fairly good condition based on our inspection of the car. Ron recorded this view of the machine. Great find on that day!

According to Mike Palmieri, for many years Wanilla was the crossing between the New Orleans-Great Northern / Gulf Mobile & Northern / Gulf Mobile & Ohio running north-to-south between Jackson, Mississippi and Slidell, Louisiana, and the Mississippi Central running east-west between Hattiesburg and Natchez. In 1967 the Mississippi Central became a part of the Illinois Central and five years later the GM&O merged with the IC to form the Illinois Central Gulf, bringing both of the lines through Wanilla under the same ownership. Ron’s interest in Wanilla was because he remembered it as the crossing of the GM&O and the IC, making it an almost sacred place in his eyes! 🙂

In studying Mr. Gelman’s series of photos featuring the last days of steam on the Illinois Central in southern Illinois, this photograph was one of the first that caught my attention. Many would say it’s a lousy shot, it doesn’t even capture the entire locomotive. But the more I look at this image, the better I like it. Here is this massive piece of machinery traveling right through the center of a typical small city in the U.S.A., surrounded by buildings filled with shops and offices. And stopping the traffic on the main drag in doing so. The locomotive was likely backing, as the engineer is leaning out and looking toward the rear. The photograph was taken in 1952 or later (based on the ’52 Chevy and ’52 Ford). The posting below contains the original caption listed for the image.

In zooming in on the image, I notice that there is a street sign at the left, and it reads “13th Street”. So that led me to research the photograph location. Using Google Maps, I have exactly located where this image was taken. The view above is looking west while standing on Walnut Street (Hwy. 149) and the cross street is indeed 13th Street, with the track actually on (or in) the street. The alleyway referred to above is a half block further west, midway between 13th and 14th Streets. The parking lot referred to is presently a Regions Bank with parking on its right side adjacent to the alleyway. The actual location (seen at left in this photo) now has a park-like setting that also has that Regions Bank drive-thru teller machine. Whew!

And I got a surprising (and confirming) find while studying the map. There is a splendid looking depot on 13th Street just a block to the north (to the right in the photo above). Below is that depot.

Mr. Gelman took a series of photos featuring the last days of steam on the Illinois Central in southern Illinois. This image is one of many contained in the Special Collections Research Center of the Southern Illinois University Carbondale.

I came across this image recently and it was labeled as “The Green Diamond in Ponchatoula”. I have seen photographs of this Illinois Central train before, but didn’t remember it ever running through Ponchatoula (in Louisiana). Researching the train, I learned that it only ran between Chicago and St. Louis. So digging further yet, I learned that this trainset eventually ceased operation as the Green Diamond, and was renamed the Miss Lou. This new train operated between Jackson, Mississippi and New Orleans, Louisiana. Read on below for further details.

The Green Diamond was a five-unit articulated trainset (each truck supported the ends of two cars). The problem with this arrangement is that the consist was fixed . . . couldn’t be added to, thus couldn’t handle the additional traffic as the train became popular. Therefore, management decided to retire this trainset as the Green Diamond, and transferred that name to a conventional train with separate locomotives and cars.

The Green Diamond trainset was built in 1936 by Pullman-Standard and powered by Electro-Motive Corporation with a single 1200 H.P. engine. The four cars it pulled were a baggage/mail, two coaches, and a diner/lounge/observation car. The train operated between 1936–1947. After it’s discontinuance as the Green Diamond, the train set was shipped to the ICRR’s shops at Paducah, Kentucky for a complete overhaul. The train emerged still in its two-tone green, but with the Green Diamond names completely removed. It then re-entered service on April 27, 1947, as the Miss Lou.

The trainset was finally retired on August 8, 1950, and sold for scrap. Unfortunately I don’t have the name of the photographer, or date of this image. Here are a couple links with more detailed information about this trainset: Illinois Central 121 (Wikipedia) and Green Diamond Train (no longer extant) – Chicago IL (Living New Deal)

A couple weeks ago we got a glimpse of the Illinois Central Mikado #1536 as she was being watered at a penstock in her usual servicing at the end of a run. Photographer Ben Gelman stayed with the locomotive and captured another view as she was preparing to leave with another train in tow. Stopped just short of a grade crossing, I speculate that the fireman is building a good head of steam in preparation of starting their train, that based on the heavy smoke plume being belched from the beast. I’m also speculating that this view is at the edge of the yard in Carbondale, Illinois. Again, the exact date is unknown, but I believe this to be in early 1959 toward the end of steam on the I.C.

Mr. Gelman took a series of photos featuring the last days of steam on the Illinois Central in southern Illinois. This image is one of many contained in the Special Collections Research Center of the Southern Illinois University Carbondale.

Once again, for this first posting in the month of August, I’m featuring a photograph from the 1986 calendar published by the Louisiana State Railroad Museum, it being for their month of August. The caption for the image follows below.

“March 1950, and Kansas City Southern’s class E-4 Consolidation, a 1913 graduate of Richmond, awaits her next assignment at Shreveport, Louisiana, the operating headquarters of the KCS Lines. (Photo from the collection of Harold K. Vollrath)”

The “1913 graduate of Richmond” referred to above is fully Alco-Richmond. By 1901 Richmond Locomotive Works had merged with seven other manufacturing companies to form the American Locomotive Company (ALCO). Locomotive production at Richmond ceased in September 1927.

There seems to be relatively few photographs of KCS locomotives, and information about them is scant (at least in my search). I was able to unearth only a bit of information about this burly 2-8-0. Built in 1913, she had 57″ drivers, and her boiler fed 175 psi steam to a pair of 24″ x 30″ cylinders. This produced 45,095 lbs of tractive effort. She underwent a re-building at some point, with the receipt of 63″ drivers, and her boiler pressure increased to 200 psi. Cylinder diameter was increased to 26″, and the tractive effort increased to 54,725 lbs. It appears she was one of eight class E-4s to be switched from coal burning to oil firing, that observation based on the Vanderbilt tender she tows. She was scrapped in 1952.

This information was uncovered at the website https://www.steamlocomotive.com, and also from handwritten notes of an unknown author, found in the collection of Lester L. Dickson at the Youngstown State University website https://digital.maag.ysu.edu/xmlui/handle/1989/43

Railroad car ferries were fairly common in Louisiana many years ago. And one of those ferries was a part of the Southern Pacific. I came across the image below sometime back and it was a ferry that I’d never seen before. I decided to learn a bit more about it and digging around on the internet, I found pieces and parts which I’ve tried stitching together here.

The first thing I noticed when studying the photograph was the large “Southern” on its side. I didn’t recall the Southern Railway as having car ferries in the New Orleans area, so wondered if the word “Pacific” was hidden behind the curvature of the hull. The second clue were the initials “ML&TRR”. That turned out to be Morgan’s Louisiana and Texas Railroad or more fully, Morgan’s Louisiana and Texas Railroad and Steamship Company. Wow! Reading a bit more on Wikipedia, the ML&TRR had become an operating subsidiary of the SP. The SP at one time had quite the maritime empire, including both ships and ferryboat operations. In the New Orleans area they had railroad car ferries operating between Avondale and Harahan, and Algiers and New Orleans. This photograph appears to be the latter location, with the docks in New Orleans on the east bank of the Mississippi. There is much more information at these Wikipedia links if you’d care to learn more about these operations: History of the S.P. and T&NO Railroad.

The freight cars shown are interesting, the Orient car is the Kansas City, Mexico and Orient Railway (KCM&O). The other car appears to be the Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul & Pacific (CMSP&P), better known as “The Milwaukee Road”. Both appear to be all wooden cars utilizing truss rod construction, and supported on arch bar type trucks.

After doing all the research, I found this same photograph on Shorpy (which has a huge library of images dating back into the 1800s). Some of the information that I had already discovered was on their description of the photo, and in the comments therein, and they date the time as circa 1910. Unfortunately, even Shorpy doesn’t identify the photographer.

Last week we saw some photographs of the Clyde double-ended rehaul skidder on display at the Southern Forest Heritage Museum in Long Leaf, Louisiana. The skidder dragged the logs through the woods up to the railhead. But another machine was used to actually load the logs onto the rail cars: the McGiffert log loader. The museum has two of these machines on the property.

The machine straddled the track and would pull empty log cars through its supporting framework, loading each car as it reached the front where the boom was located. Another feature was the ability for the machine to relocate itself. There are a pair of powered trucks (wheelsets) tucked up high in the support structure that can be lowered to the rails. The machine then lifted itself so the weight was on the trucks, then propelled itself to the next loading location. Once there it would lower itself to the ground, then raise the trucks back up to the “storage” location, allowing the empty log cars to roll beneath it.

You can read a bit more about McGifferts and see additional images of them on this RR&G posting, and also on this SFHM Research Paper. The former has a nice video by Everett Lueck explaining the McGiffert, the latter has information about McGifferts as well as the Clyde skidder featured last week.

One of the most unique things on the Southern Forest Heritage Museum’s property is a Clyde double-ended rehaul skidder. It is thought to be the only machine of its type still in existence. Ron Findley and I first saw it when we stumbled on the property back in 1988. It was parked in the woods just a few dozen feet in front of locomotive #400.

On a return visit in April of 2011, we found the trees and undergrowth had been cleared away considerably which enabled us to get a few photographs. Ron recorded these views of the machine as it appeared that day.

Built by the Clyde Iron Works in 1919, this machine was used to haul logs from where they were harvested to the railhead. It was able to pull logs in from up to a thousand feet away. Being double-ended (booms on each end), it could pull logs from a huge surrounding area without having to relocate. A photo of the machine in operation is on this SFHM webpage (scroll down a ways to see it in action).

There are various locomotive and equipment pieces-parts scattered throughout this area. We assume that this was where much scrapping was done. Fortunately the scrappers weren’t careful to haul away every piece, and they remain where they fell to this day. One thing of particular interest to me are the remains of a Shay locomotive (tears in my eyes)!

Continuing our tour of the Santa Fe work train in Iden, New Mexico, Jack Delano has made his way to the dining facilities. As we saw last week, the berthing facilities and commissary were rather stark, though functional. The kitchen and dining room follow suit.

Below is the view of a cook preparing the dough for bread. The work area is rather austere, but everything needed seems to be close at hand. Baking powder and various other ingredients line the shelves, along with the ever-present cigar box, possibly containing the “secret ingredient” (what would railroaders do without cigar boxes?). Note the wash stand in the foreground . . . a bowl of water and bar of soap. It must be pre-dawn, as the cook is working under the light of a Coleman lantern.

And below is the view inside the dining room. It must be near the end of the meal period, as only a few workers are left. I would assume that these folks ate a pretty hearty breakfast considering the hard work ahead of them each day. Unlike the military, it appears that a busboy was employed to pick up the worker’s dishes at the end of the meal.

Photographs by Jack Delano, March, 1943.