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The Arcade & Attica Railroad's 1920 Alco Consolidation #18 brings a couple of empty covered hoppers down the interchange track on the west side of the village of Arcade, NY, heading for Arcade Junction and a connection with the Buffalo & Pittsburgh Railroad, just over half a mile ahead. There, the cars will be dropped on a siding for pick-up by the next local freight.
Although well-known for their steam tourist excursions, the Arcade & Attica is primarily a shortline freight railroad, serving agricultural and industrial customers with facilities along its line, which stretches northeast out of Arcade as far as North Java, NY. While freight ops on this line are primarily done with GE center-cab diesels, the railroad does occasionally make freight moves with the steam locomotive, if it happens to be hot when needed.
This image was captured during a May 2025 photo shoot on New York's Arcade & Attica Railroad, which featured Consolidation #18 hauling both freight and passenger consists. As of 2025, the Arcade & Attica is the only tourist railroad in New York State that regularly runs steam tourist operations.
66621 is the second Freightliner class 66 to load up with coal at Cwmbargoed today. Having arrived earlier working 4C94 06:47 East Usk Yard to Cwmbargoed.
Mercato Market in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, is simply HUGE, reputed to be the largest open market in all of East Africa. Everything is sold there from spices to recycled plastic items - 09/10/2018
Nikon D7200
Æ’/2.8
35.0 mm
1/1000 @ ISO 500
Flash (off, did not fire)
The view of an old loading dock of an abandoned factory as seen from one of the offices in the building where I work.
For me, the appeal of this scene lays in the juxtaposition of the orderly patterning in the bricks against the abstractions of the distressed door. There is a ton of fine textures and detail in the subject so I designed the image to minimize complexity in lighting and composition keeping even lighting and nice orderly symmetry in the framing.
The Great Lakes ship Buffalo loading gypsum at the National Gypsum Company's facility in Alabaster Township, Michigan. Lake Huron.
Img P4292c.
Rail First Asset Management's CM3302 (still in CFCLA livery) and Qube's 1104 load a Qube grain train at Cunningar in southern NSW, 18th February 2022. CFCLA became RFAM when Australian investors bought out the American owners of CFCLA.
A layout about my daughter's new role as a mother.
Sketch from Pencillines
pp and embellishments: Crate Paper's Little Sprout line
small alphas: ADORNit
60020 'The Willows' has a bit of a day off with just load 5 on the 1029 Margam - Dee Marsh. 15-3-17.
I must say i was caught out a bit compositionally with this short load and it was flying up here faster than the preceding unit!
a page about my favorite pair of shoes...
I have to give credit to two scrappers for this one:
first to scrappin barb for the idea and
second to nadinejust@blogspot.com for the design.
pp is from basic grey Hang 10 - anyone remember that line? from lonnnng ago.
A cargo-carrying variant of my M-tron rover from last year recieving a crate of important supplies from the Pneumagnetic Loader.
Heavyweights on the feed swing.
Western Jackdaws ☻ (Corvus monedula) ☻ Dohlen
Belastungstest
Schwergewichte auf der Futterschaukel.
There's a lot going on in this shot. Let's start with the small, yellow craft docked alongside the ore boat, J.L. Mauthe. That little yellow boat is the Marine Trader that was built in Superior, Wisconsin in 1939 with hull number 238999. The boat was originally 50 feet 7 inches long but was lengthened 10 feet in 1965. It sported many different paint jobs and color schemes over the years and was available day or night to help keep sailors supplied with nearly anything they wanted to buy. It was a floating ship's store, if not a mini-department store. The craft worked throughout the Duluth-Superior harbor for the first 66 years it was operational. As I understand it, owners Franz and Bruce VonRiedel owned this craft and two others, Marine Supplier and Kaner I, that were owned previously by Al and Bernie Kaner, respectively. All three boats were mothballed for a time when VonRiedel's business—Acme Marine Services—was closed in 2000. The boats were eventually sold to different parties between 2000 and 2005. The Marine Trader left the Ports for good in October 2005 and that was apparently the first time the craft ever sailed across Lake Superior for points east. If you would like to do more research on the Trader and see more pictures too then please visit www.boatnerd.com/ for lots more material on this—and every other vessel on the Great Lakes.
Next, if we look closely we'll see a sailor about to embark on a personal shopping expedition. He's climbing down the ladder to Marine Trader from the working deck of the Mauthe. Then, just beyond him are half a dozen men actively engaged in loading natural ore into the Mauthe's hold. Deck hatches are wide open and spouts from Missabe Dock 5 will be lowered and raised in concert by men on top of the dock who will operate those chutes one or two at a time. Then in turn, corresponding ore pocket doors will be opened to allow the staged iron ore to slide right into the big boat with a loud, almost-prehistoric "whooshing" sound.
Then, pay careful attention to the ore cars on top of Dock 5. This will take considerable explanation.
Each ore dock in Duluth and Superior (Two Harbors and Ashland too) was much more than a staging area where ore was simply dumped into the dock. The ore was actually partially blended in each dock pocket. Then when the ore was dumped into a boat it was further blended as it was directed into the near, middle, or far side of each hold. This wasn't simply a matter of blending different iron content either. Individual vessel size and that vessel's loading characteristics played into it nearly as much as both the iron and silica content of that ore.
Silica content was especially important during unloading of the ore dock as ore with higher silica ran faster out of the dock pockets and allowed for more precise loading to the far side of the vessel. By adjusting the angle of the chutes this fast running ore would slide out of the pocket faster and thereby reach the far side of the vessel to make the loading much more even.
While each pocket on Dock 5 held four car loads of ore, dumping into these pockets was not an even-steven kind of operation. Each ore dock had four tracks on top of it. Two tracks fed the pockets on the north side of the dock while the second pair of tracks fed the south side pockets. So each side of the dock had just two tracks used to fill the pockets, that were in turn used to load vessels on opposite sides of the ore dock. Fast running ores and slow running ores each had their own dumping order with 3/4 of the ore going into each pocket via the two inner tracks. The two outer tracks were used to top of the load or to put stickier ore on top of the fast running ore so that it would slide right out behind the fast ore. If the sticky ore went in first, then the load might not release at all.
So during the modern era of blended ores 75% of the dock was filled via the two inner tracks while just 25% was dumped from the two outer tracks. The whole idea was to make each 4-car load in each pocket to be both a proper chemical content and also the most-free-running consistency to make dock unloading quick and easy. Filling a boat necessitated moving the vessel during loading. Deck hatches were generally spaced for every 2nd or 3rd pocket and chute. So a vessel might make 3 or more passes back and forth to get all of the ore contained in the dock for a given load, from a series of 3-4 adjacent pockets. On a good day things went like this but on a bad day when the ore being dumped was sticky or had a high moisture content then the work was much more difficult. You can read about that here: www.flickr.com/photos/jeff_lemke/29092814325/in/album-721...
There are a couple more things worth pointing out from this shot too. Notice how both tracks above the pockets have many more ore cars parked there. Those loads aren't for the next vessel. They are for this vessel. After each pocket is emptied of its contents the final phases of loading this boat will occur. That will be what they called "speed loading" or "topping off" the load that's already inside of the boat. Ore inside of those cars will be dumped directly into the boat through the pocket while the gate is open and the cute is lowered. The ore will fall directly from the car into the boat. Getting the last bit of ore into each boat in this manner became necessary as the boats became larger and sometimes as loads became stickier and harder to dump. Railroads found that the sticky ores became much more sticky when left in the dock for any time and as each car was dumped on top of the previous load, the problem became even worse.
Other times the pockets simply didn't hold enough ore to satisfy the larger holds in those boats. This was true in the taconite era too. I was invited to ride along on just such a train in Superior at Allouez Dock 2 where we were loading pellets directly from the cars through the pockets to top off a load of taconite. The larger BN Dock 5 at Allouez brought about an end to this practice and the balance of Allouez ore docks were abandoned after Dock 5 was up and running at full capacity.
The last thing that I'll mention is the second track in. Take a close look the the two cars farthest right on top of the dock. The black one is a Northern Pacific car while the ones next to it are Great Northern. This load will include interchange ore that was brought to Saunders, Wisconsin by the Burlington Northern. The Missabe's Interstate Job picked up that ore at Saunders then brought it to Proctor via Adolph, sorted it at Proctor, then the Hill Job brought it down for spotting on Missabe Dock 5. All of the ore roads that ran here cooperated to provide each other with the necessary ore to make a boat load the proper and required chemical consistency to fulfill orders from the steel companies. A large amount of ore loaded into the these massive docks actually came here from the non-owning roads. It was this interchange between the railroads of the various ores (that would then be sorted before being loaded into the docks) that really made the whole system work. Without this ore interchange between the various railroads the mining companies would have been limited to shipping in many cases, unusable or unwanted grades of ore. Without the interchange of ore cars that allowed better grades of ore to be created through yard sorting and dock and hull blending—the ore era as we once knew it would have ended decades earlier than it did.
Of course, way back when, when the ore docks were still very young and made mostly of wood, it was possible to load ore willy-nilly because the earliest ores mined were of a sufficiently high iron content that blending wasn't required or desired. But as those better-resources played out, the operation that I described here today is what quickly became the norm. It is the reason why railroads like the Missabe and Great Northern had such huge sorting yards at Proctor and Allouez. They had to be massive because the mix of cars needing to go down to any one track on the docks became a staggeringly complex project that changed by season. Every year there was a different supply of ores to blend.
It should be obvious by now that if you thought that the iron ore used to make steel went straight from the mine to the dock in solid strings of cars—generally speaking you'd be wrong about that. But as natural or direct shipping ores played out and taconite was developed during the mid-1960s, the dream of being able to load an entire train load of Minnesota ore into a Great Lakes vessel finally became a reality through the advent of the taconite pellet—though even that started out rather slowly. Believe it or not many boats ran with split loads containing half natural iron ore and half taconite pellets. That was until the pellet plants could produce enough pellets to load full vessels. Each taconite plant produced its own variety of product too. Ultimately, taconite production turned a difficult sorting and blending process into a relatively easy one by creating an easily transportable product with a consistent iron content.
After 1968, scenes like this one began to become more rare every day. By the time this shot was taken in 1981 natural ore shipments out of Duluth were practically a thing of the past. Just to contrast complex vs. simple processes, here's a nice view of the Duluth docks that I shot in the post-natural-ore taconite era where we can see two varieties of pellets on the ground that still fill boat holds in present day Duluth: www.flickr.com/photos/jeff_lemke/25449237413/in/album-721...
Of course if you visit either of the Twin Ports area "ore yards" today (that's BNSF's Allouez and CN's Proctor facilities) you'll find that those once-huge ore classification yards are truly conspicuous by their complete absence (Allouez) or nearly complete absence (Proctor). In the taconite era, railroad tracks simply store cars not being used at the moment. There's nothing much left to blend because other than the iron particles themselves that are mated with a binding clay and limestone to make the pellets in the first place—all that's left to do is dump them onto the ground for stockpile and then reload them into the dock when the boat gets near.
While the days of sorting ore are likely gone forever it sure is fun remembering just how complicated that process was and how many men and women earned their livings doing this important work for America. I'm glad that I found this picture of Duluth-Superior's most-recognized bumboat to share with you today. That little floating store provided the guys on the bigger boats with an opportunity to do something besides the everyday grind. The requisite climb up and down the ladder to be able to spend a little money had to be worth it, and I'm certain that when the Marine Trader pulled up alongside the ore boats it was truly a welcome sight for sore eyes. Long live the bumboats and their Captains!
Monkton Farleigh ammunition depot utilised an old stone quarry below a plateau some 450 feet above the valley floor in which ran the main line railway that was its principal source of supply. Before the depot could be commissioned, an efficient means was need to bring in ammunition from the railway at Farleigh Down Sidings. The sidings were just over a mile from the depot as the crow flies but more than four miles by road along steep and tortuous country lanes.
In November 1937 the Great Western Railway were contracted to lay the sidings and build a 1000 foot long raised loading platform complete with a narrow gauge track to carry the ammunition wagons. Outline plans had already been prepared to drive a mile long tunnel from the heart of the workings terminating in an underground sorting yard built beneath the sidings in the valley below.
These photographs, taken in January 2016, showcase the building as it stands today.
Inspiration for the framing of the shots came from the 1975 New Topographics exhibition.
My take on set 4201 Loader and Tipper, only in a futuristic style.
An independent view of the Loader-Mech with a close-up view of the drivers cab, spotlights and leg suspension / balance joints.
C&C welcome as always :)
On Interstate 10 East. That might be the widest mysterious load I’ve seen. It’s overhanging the road shoulder at this moment, but earlier with the rig centered in the No. 2 lane, the cargo was hanging over the No. 1 lane.
Phew - still sick - fever, aching, etc etc - didn't think I would do this but I pulled myself off the couch and threw it together. (With help from Studio Calico's Nicole Harper's LO that I lifted). Now back to bed!
This was taken in the rear of an abandoned building supply facility in Wausau, Wisconsin.
A cool way to view mine or anyone else's photostream is on fluidr.
LS&I U30C 3008 and HLCX 5968 lead a cut of Tilden loads through Empire Junction as they head for Eagle Mills and put on a smoke show... kinda.
Today's prompt sent me looking for a recent favorite photo. I love seeing the kids "reading." I used a Cathy Z Template (#28) and the papers and word art are Ali Edwards.
Slovakian 2019-built 600mm gauge 'TL16' Class 520 volts DC electric locomotive 'No.5' has just positioned the rake of four bogie hopper wagons for loading beneath the limestone loading point serving Wesling's Förderstedt quarry, near Stassfurt on 1st February 2024.
© Gordon Edgar - All rights reserved. Please do not use my images without my explicit permission