Railcar accident in St. Clair River 1985

[William Lafferty]

Did they shorten her? I thought most ATA's of that era were 143 feet? We still have the Undaunted.

Yes, by 30 feet i early 2010 at National Maintenance & Repair at Hartford, Illinois: http://www.professionalmariner.com/Sept ... lder-tugs/

[Guest]

Cool, Tug Malcolm! My favorite tug, love to see her again.

You wouldn't recognize it. Converted to a tractor tug at Alton, Illinois, and now doing harbor and offshore towing out of Puerto Rico. Take a look. The photo is from Navsource by Mark Vosseller.

Did they shorten her? I thought most ATA's of that era were 143 feet? We still have the Undaunted.

[Mr Link]

Although it has nothing to do with the incident the original poster asked about, here is the clipping I have of a different accident in Windsor. In this case the barge was sinking as it approached the slip. It appears that they tried removing the container cars from the barge but were not successful before the bow went under. It almost looks like two switch crews tried to remove cars since there are derailed cars on both tracks on the apron.

If I remember correctly, the Windsor-Detroit Barge Line moved containers only across the river. On the Windsor side they were loaded and unloaded by switching the flat cars, but on the Detroit side they were loaded and unloaded with a crane. I think this had something to do with them not being a common carrier railroad so they couldn't transport actual rail cars from shore to shore.

[William Lafferty]

Cool, Tug Malcolm! My favorite tug, love to see her again.

You wouldn't recognize it. Converted to a tractor tug at Alton, Illinois, and now doing harbor and offshore towing out of Puerto Rico. Take a look. The photo is from Navsource by Mark Vosseller.

[tugboat]

Cool, Tug Malcolm! My favorite tug, love to see her again. We actually used the ballast tanks on tug to pick up rail car or apron.

[William Lafferty]

That was probably the night of 11 February 1985 when a Dow tank car filled with 160000 pounds of propylene oxide was pushed off the Pere Marquette 10 because "a failure in communication occurred when a railway crew tried to load too many cars on the barge." This was at the Sarnia slip. The tug was the C & O 452. The crew attempted to add a box car to track already at capacity and the barge parted from the apron and the tank car fell into the river. It was salvaged intact by Sandrin Marine assisted by the Tug Malcolm by attaching flotation bags to it and pumping air into the bags. Here are a couple of photos of the slip and the salvage.

[Mr Link]

Not that particular accident, but accidents like that were rather common. I have a newspaper clipping of such an accident in that time frame, but I seem to recall that it was in Detroit, not Port Huron. I'll try to look for it tonight and if it was in Port Huron or Sarnia, I will post the details.

The common cause was the train crew bumping up too hard against a bumping post on the barge, causing the barge to break away from the apron. With no support on the far end, the apron would tilt downward, and the cars on the apron would either fall into the slip, or be left dangling; spanning between the apron and the barge.

[Guest]

I came across a mention of a railcar falling into the St. Clair River from a barge in 1985 while cataloging some old railfan literature in a private collection during the summer. I was wondering if anyone had ever head of this incident?