Tugs Everlasting

TO PEOPLE WHO WORK ON THK WATERFRONT, ONE OF THE most pleasing sights is an old railroad tug foaming down the harbor, casting a wall of water before her. The froth churns white along her bows; as the saying goes, “she has a bone in her teeth.” When she is a few yards from a dock or ship, the skipper, high in the pilothouse, gives a few turns on the wheel and throttles down. The boat slows, lurches, and then wallows in the trough she has created. You can hear the low, murmuring resonance of her power plant and the slap of waves against the steel hull, the same sounds that have surrounded her for the last 50 years.

A railroad tug is distinguished from other tugboats by its large size, high wheelhouse ringed with windows, vertical fun nel, and heavy construction. Railroad tugs have survived more than a half-century in the harsh environment of saltwater, winter storms, and hard work. They soldier on long after most of the men who built and first manned them, and the railroads that commissioned them, are gone. Well designed and cared for, they can be seen in ports from Portland, Maine, down to New Orleans, docking ships, hauling barges, and doing the myriad other jobs that keep a harbor going.

Essentially a large engine in a small hull, the railroad tug offers limited accommodation for the crew. Like any tugboat, it carries no cargo; a tug’s job is solely to push ships and barges many times its size, so it is designed for strength and durability. Some last longer than others, and railroad tugs have an enviable reputation. Of the 52 built in the decade beginning in 1949, a recent survey showed 46 still afloat and working. While individual tugs may be older, no other class can claim such longevity. For comparison, most types of merchant and naval vessels have an average lifespan of 20 to 30 years.

The ancestors of today’s railroad tugs first came into being when the heads of the country’s ever-growing rail system realized that our East Coast cities are so crisscrossed with rivers and inlets that it would be prohibitively expensive and complicated to unite them entirely by track. So the rail lines in each locale set up terminals on the harbors, and by the late nineteenth century they had bought tugboats and car floats—barges with sets of parallel tracks onto which railroad cars could be rolled—to ferry their cars to other rail terminals in the city. Soon railroads such as the Pennsylvania; Baltimore & Ohio; New York, New Haven & Hartford; Lehigh Valley; Erie; Jersey Central; and Reading had fleets on saltwater as well as on rails.

By the late 1940s the tug fleets, composed largely of craft from the 1920s and even earlier, needed an update. Three new designs came to dominate the postwar harbors, each favored by certain railroads. Thomas D. Bowes, a naval architect in Philadelphia, produced the design that the Reading, Baltimore & Ohio, and Jersey Central preferred. Joe Hack, of the Cleveland division of General Motors, worked on the second design in conjunction with TAMS, Inc., a naval architecture firm. It formed the backbone of the Erie and the Lehigh Valley’s fleets, among others. These two tug designs were roughty similar in layout and size. Bowes’s boats were 100 feet long or more, while TAMS’s were 95 feet; they differed mainly in the details. The Pennsylvania and the Delaware, Lackawanna & Western favored a third design, developed by the General Managers Association, a long standing consortium of railroads operating in New York City. The boats of the “consolidation” or “standardization” design, as it came to be called, were around 105 feet long.

Perhaps the biggest advance in all cases was the incorporation of diesel engines. Apart from some exceptions in the 1930s, steam had powered every railroad tug built before World War II. But wartime military research and the growing demands on the railroad system brought about a diesel revolution of sorts. As the railroads upgraded their locomotives to diesel in the late 1940s and 1950s, they realized their tugs should follow suit. Bowes’s boats had Fairbanks-Morse geared diesels of about 1,600 horsepower, high for their time, while the propulsion for TAMS’s 11 Pennsylvania boats came from 1,200- to 1,600-horsepower GM engines, a refinement of a model that had powered half the U.S.‘s submarine fleet during the war. Other TAMS boats used a diesel-electric system, including a 1,350-horsepower Westinghouse electric motor.

THOSE LARGK KNGINES GIVE TUGS THE STRENGTH TO propel huge ships, but they also weigh them down. Since tugs lack cargo space, they are denser than the average vessel, and if a hull is holed, the boat has the buoyancy of an anvil and will sink in minutes or even seconds. Its crew may not have time to don survival gear or launch a lifeboat; their only chance is to jump over the side and hope a self-inflating raft pops to the surface. That makes for a sometimes dangerous life for boat and crew, working in close quarters with ships 20 times their size. But the diesels made up for their hazards with new advantages. The diesel-electric systems, in particular, offered much more precise maneuverability and quick throttle response, vital in an environment in which a wrong move could overturn a tug or crush it between a ship and a dock.

The new tugs kept many of the structural characteristics of their forebears but also incorporated several improvements. The designers preserved the raised wheelhouse that allowed the tug captain to see over the railroad cars he was pushing and the large rudders that afforded more responsive steering. Tugs built in previous decades had been worn down by the continual buffeting of the car floats they towed along their sides, so the new boats were constructed with different types of protective blisters. In the Bowes boats, the blister was an actual widening of the hull: A section of pipe near the top distended the boats’ outer plating by several inches. The TAMS design accomplished the same effect using three channel irons, curved to fit against the hull, that were welded individually onto both sides of the frame and covered with a continuous line of metal plating from front to back. These designs proved far superior to the standard pair of hollow halved pipes welded to the side of the hull, and tugs exist today whose blisters show no sign of corrosion or cracking.

Railroads spared no expense to build the very best. Constructed at shipyards such as Jakobson’s in Oyster Bay, Long Island, and Bethlehem Steel at Mariners Harbor, Staten Island, the tugs cost around $250,000 each, but that high figure has been justified by their long careers and enduring popularity.

They owe their longevity to their sturdy design, of course, but also to the remarkably advantageous conditions in which they were built. The construction demands of World War II had created a work force of experienced welders, fitters, and engine builders larger than any in American history, and shipbuilders could pick the best from their ranks. The speed and pressures of wartime were gone, but the workers’ experience and diligence remained. An emphasis on quality characterized the construction of the tugs from the keel up.

The boats played an integral role in the Eastern railway network until the 1960s, when poor management, the arrival of the interstate highway system, the jet airliner, and long-haul trucking pushed the railroads toward bankruptcy. As each line got into deep trouble, it sold its fleet at very reasonable prices. Tug men knew a good deal when they saw one, and all the railroad tugs were quickly snapped up.

Most were put to work docking ships, a job they were not originally designed to do. New owners sometimes had to shorten the tugs’ pilothouses and crop or angle their tall vertical funnels to allow for low bridges and the jutting hulls of much larger ships. Many of the tugs had been built without provision for towing from the stern, since, as a rule, car floats had been lashed to their sides, but winches and capstans, or in some cases just bitts to tie ropes onto, were easy to add. And because railroad tug workers operated in short shifts, the original designers had often left little room for amenities. As one historian has explained, the “fittings were usually limited to a hotplate and a coffee pot.” The commercial tug companies, whose crews may live on their craft for weeks at a time, usually reorganized the deck layout, finding space for more permanent accommodations. Some tugs have been rebuilt from the hull up; others have merely been refitted with diesel engines providing up to 4,000 hp.

With those modifications, the tugs have proved as adept at their new tasks as they were in their railroad days. Their crews still find compensation for long hours and icy decks in beautiful sunrises over the ocean, and the crisp, quiet orders of professionals can still be heard over the purr of diesel-electric power—in many cases from the tugs’ original engines. Aside from newcolor schemes and, quite often, name changes, the majority look and perform much the same now as the day they emerged from the builders’ yards, when Truman was President.