Question about Great Lakes Car Ferries and their Cargo

On the subject of car ferries on Lake Michigan, I ran across these interesting bits of information:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SS_Badger

The Badger was constructed as a rail car ferry in 1952–53 by the Christy Corporation of Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin,^[3] along with her twin sister the SS Spartan (named after the mascot of Michigan State University) with a reinforced hull for ice-breaking. She was originally used to carry railroad cars, passengers and automobiles between the two sides of the lake all year long.

The Badger is the last large coal burning steamship in the United States and is one of the last vessels in service on the Great Lakes to be powered by Skinner Unaflow engines (manufactured by the Skinner Company of Erie, Pennsylvania).^[a] The Badger makes a dock 490 times a year on her schedule as of 2009, an exceptionally large number of dockings for a merchant vessel.

Badger operated during the 2012 season but now there is an issue about not continuing to allow dumping of coal ash in the lake.

The railroad car ferry routes basically bypassed Chicago to favor the connecting railroads, and I find it hard to imagine an entire mail train going that route. But the fun of model railroading is doing what you want, and imagineering a justification if necessary!

I don't think there would have been any time advantage to loading mail trains onto Great Lakes car ferry's.

Rusty

When rates were regulated, the cost from the west coast to the east coast was the fixed regardless of the route.  So there was no reason for shippers not to ship on routes using car ferries.  I know that a lot of the canned food originating on the WP in RBL boxcars went across the lake on car ferries.  Once rates were deregulated around 1978, the cost of the transportation more closely drove the shipping rates.  This put an end to the higher costs routing.

Believe the "selling" point of the Lake Michigan car ferries was that they ran around Chicago, which has always been the great bottle neck for national railroad transportation. Having watched the Chief Wawatam, a railroad car ferry that ran between Mackinaw City (LP) and St. Ignace (UP), Michigan, the cars seemed to be general freight, so it would probably be safe with most any type of car and commodity. Seemed to be the same with the Ann Arbor car ferry operation at Ludington. There was an interesting operation on Lake Erie, with the SS Ashtabula, which essentially hauled loaded coal hoppers across to Port Burwell, Ontario, for receipt by the Canadian Pacific. The coal was for locomotive fuel for CPR steam locomotives used in Ontario and perhaps part of Quebec. The ship was 50:50 owned by the CPR and the Pennsylvania RR. There were quite a few car ferries across the Detroit River, too. In earlier times, the Detroit R ferries handled passenger cars between Windsor and Detroit. 

        The Chief Wawatam was also coal fired like the Badger, but had 3 men shoveling coal into the boilers!

Jim:

The Chief used to carry the overnight Pullmans off of the DSS&A at St Ignace to Mackinaw City, so there may have been some postal cars also involed. The Straits trip would be quite a bit shorter than the Elberta-Kewaunee run or the Manistee-Milwaukee run. That might be longer than the postal workers could handle as they could not leave the car(s) unattended. REA on the other hand may have had express cars, though I don't recall ever seeing such at Elberta.

At one time, MIGN stacked up nearly 200 cars of flagged-out wood products in high-cost per-diem cars at St. Ignace. Both the Soo Line and Conrail were very less than thrilled by that arrangement. Both eventually threw on surcharges to make up for the additional expenses incurred.

A ferry operation on a layout could add some intriguing car movements, for sure!

Neil

Neil - When did the Chief last handle DSSA passnger cars? Most interesting. Did the Ann Arbor and Grand Trunk car ferries handle any passenger eqpt, too? When, if so, did that cease?

There was a iron ore move in the 60's that had ore cars shipped from the Marquette Range via the LS&I and M&LS down to Manistique, MI - then loaded on the car ferry from there to Frankfort, MI - then continued by rail to the steel mills.

Ace is right about the possibility of major change to the Badger.  All of a sudden the EPA is getting involved and saying that coal ash, dumped into Lake Michigan is going to harm the environment.  Nuts!  At one time there were probably over 100 coal fired ships, ferries, ore boats, etc. all operating in the Great Lakes and all dumping their coal ash into the water.  The lakes were filled with fish and waterfowl and it never seemed to bother any of them.  Most cities along the lakes get their water right from the lake; no problem there either.

But now, with one remaining coal fired antique ship still afloat, it's now thought that the practice of dumping the ash is thought to be environmentally dangerous??  That coal ash is inert, having been baked in the fireboxes on board the boats;  it sinks to the bottom harmlessly without affecting anyone or anything.  But the do-gooders in Washington have to think up ways to make themselves important so they get to keep heir otherwise useless jobs.  Believe me, the amount of coal ash being dumped today is a fraction of what it was 100 years ago and it caused no problems at that time.

My suggestion for all of you is to ride the SS Badger this summer while you still have an opportunity.  It would never be the same if they dieselized the darn thing.

Paul Fischer

I do not believe they will covert her to diesel. her but find another fuel to burn.  I believe they have looked at using Liquid Natural Gas.  

Either way it is a major blow, as she is the last of her kind to operate.  Another company did look at her sister the Sparten to operate out of Muskegon a few years ago, but the conversion to another fuel was cost prohibitive.  

I ride the Badger regularly to get to my ship's home port in Wisconsin.  I know the senior captain pretty well.  A lot of this problem is a result of Senator Durbin's (IL) pushing the EPA to shut it down.  It's believed by many that Durbin has some financial connection to the competing car ferry service that runs between Milwaukee & Muskegon.  That one is a high speed auto ferry - noted for its uncomfortable ride and limited auto capacity.  It hasn't done that well competing against the Bager and so Durbin wants the Badger gone.  He has enlisted the tree huggers and they are running commercials, etc, against that terrible steamboat.  Coal burning vessels have been on the Lakes since the 1840's and at their peak there were hundreds running at one time.  So far no one has shown any long term effect to the Lakes from the ash.  It is different from power plant emissions/ash which burn powdered coal at higher temps.  The Badger's owners are working on converting it to compressed natural gas, but there is a lot of engineering and costs involved. 

Ironically one of the Badger's sources of revenue is the movement of wind generator components across the lake.

She is waiting on a temporary extension of their EPA permit to run this year.  If they get it you should use what may be the last chance to ride on coal fired steam in regular commercial service.  The C&O built this back in 1952 and you can tell it has railroad DNA.  You can book a cabin for the 4 hour trip that strongly resembles sleeper accommodations of that time.

Mark S:

The DSS&A Pullman moves were in the 1910 -1920 era and possibly later. I'll have to check my notes on the South Shore.

Regarding the GTW, PM and Annie, I don't believe I've ever seen any photos or write-ups on passenger cars aboard their respective cross-lake ferry boats. There were passenger car moves across the Detroit River for the MC and GTW/CN for quite a few years. I'm not certain of the PM using their river ferries for passenger moves. Interesting topic, though.

Hey John...nice new avatar!

Neil