by hausen » April 10, 2019, 3:07 pm
...and it's not just their length that affects thousand-footers' versatility. Their width (or beam) restricts the docks they can visit, the customers they can serve, and the range of their operation. Seems like it would be wildly infeasible to alter a 105'/32m-wide hull to make it narrow enough to fit down the Seaway and/or fit into the smaller docks and rivers on the Lakes.
The only way anyone would even think about shortening a thousand footer is if somewhere down the road the locks on the Seaway and Welland were rebuilt wider but not longer (roughly 750' x 106' is a very standard size among oceangoing bulk freighters) but that is not an idea that has ever gone very far.
As was mentioned above, the advantage thousand footers have is their economy of scale. They can carry a large amount of cargo with roughly the same size crew and similar fuel consumption pound-for-pound to a smaller ship.
Shortening a thousand footer would reduce its capacity and, as mentioned above, would not really increase its versatility. Look at the Roger Blough or the St. Clair, which are of similar dimensions to what a shortened thousand footer might look like. Both of these ships are too large to go down the Welland/Seaway or to serve most "river-class" lakes trades. At the same time both ships are too small to offer the same economy of scale as their thousand-foot cousins. The result? When demand softens, those two ships tend to enter layup before a lot of other larger and smaller lakers out there. The Blough was laid up from 1981 to 1986 despite being just a decade old, and rumors circulated at the time that she might never sail again. The St. Clair was in and out of layup during slower times in the early 1990s and again after the financial sector crashed the economy in 2008.
It's been mentioned that certain of the thousand-footers were very stoutly constructed. Some of those "built like a tank" thousand-footers, and/or the ones that have been well-maintained and upgraded by their owners are likely to serve long careers in the iron ore trades. It's also been mentioned that a few of the thousand footers have been allowed to get into fairly rough shape; it's possible that as coal tonnage declines we might see one or two thousand footers retired after around 50 or 60 years of service.
The current fleet of jumbo lakers was built partially due to somewhat unrealistic cargo projections that were overly optimistic about the early growth of the western coal trade or did not take into account the problems the steel industry was about to face during the 1980s. If lakes fleet owners had been more tempered in their forecast for western coal shipment demand, if they'd had a better inkling of what was about to happen between 1980 - 1986, and if one particular outside company hadn't attempted a program of somewhat speculative building of lakes supercarriers, we would probably have ended up with a fleet of eight or ten thousand-footers (instead of 13) and might even still have ships like the Arthur B. Homer, Johnstown, George M. Humphrey, and William Clay Ford (1) actively sailing today.
...and it's not just their length that affects thousand-footers' versatility. Their width (or beam) restricts the docks they can visit, the customers they can serve, and the range of their operation. Seems like it would be wildly infeasible to alter a 105'/32m-wide hull to make it narrow enough to fit down the Seaway and/or fit into the smaller docks and rivers on the Lakes.
The only way anyone would even think about shortening a thousand footer is if somewhere down the road the locks on the Seaway and Welland were rebuilt wider but not longer (roughly 750' x 106' is a very standard size among oceangoing bulk freighters) but that is not an idea that has ever gone very far.
As was mentioned above, the advantage thousand footers have is their economy of scale. They can carry a large amount of cargo with roughly the same size crew and similar fuel consumption pound-for-pound to a smaller ship.
Shortening a thousand footer would reduce its capacity and, as mentioned above, would not really increase its versatility. Look at the [i]Roger Blough[/i] or the [i]St. Clair[/i], which are of similar dimensions to what a shortened thousand footer might look like. Both of these ships are too large to go down the Welland/Seaway or to serve most "river-class" lakes trades. At the same time both ships are too small to offer the same economy of scale as their thousand-foot cousins. The result? When demand softens, those two ships tend to enter layup before a lot of other larger and smaller lakers out there. The [i]Blough[/i] was laid up from 1981 to 1986 despite being just a decade old, and rumors circulated at the time that she might never sail again. The [i]St. Clair[/i] was in and out of layup during slower times in the early 1990s and again after the financial sector crashed the economy in 2008.
It's been mentioned that certain of the thousand-footers were very stoutly constructed. Some of those "built like a tank" thousand-footers, and/or the ones that have been well-maintained and upgraded by their owners are likely to serve long careers in the iron ore trades. It's also been mentioned that a few of the thousand footers have been allowed to get into fairly rough shape; it's possible that as coal tonnage declines we might see one or two thousand footers retired after around 50 or 60 years of service.
The current fleet of jumbo lakers was built partially due to somewhat unrealistic cargo projections that were overly optimistic about the early growth of the western coal trade or did not take into account the problems the steel industry was about to face during the 1980s. If lakes fleet owners had been more tempered in their forecast for western coal shipment demand, if they'd had a better inkling of what was about to happen between 1980 - 1986, and if one particular outside company hadn't attempted a program of somewhat speculative building of lakes supercarriers, we would probably have ended up with a fleet of eight or ten thousand-footers (instead of 13) and might even still have ships like the [i]Arthur B. Homer[/i], [i]Johnstown[/i], [i]George M. Humphrey[/i], and [i]William Clay Ford (1)[/i] actively sailing today.