New Life on the Mississippi

Mississippi River traffic is booming as never before. The river's 6,600 boat-barge fleet has grown 20% since prewar, and this year will haul an estimated 150 million tons of freight (enough to fill 57,000 freight trains of 50 cars each). At an average $1.50 a ton, that means a record gross of some $225 million.

The boom began in World War II, when the river took some of the strain off the overworked railroads. The 40% postwar rise in rail freight rates was a greater spur. Now a ton of oil can be shipped on the river from Baton Rouge to Pittsburgh for $6.02 (compared to $12.62 by rail), a ton of steel from Chicago to Houston for $6.04 (compared to $15.80).

Last week the Ford Motor Co. added its new St. Louis plant to the river's customers, began shipping new cars to New Orleans and Houston by barge. The first load of 1,200 Fords and Mercurys was picked up at St. Louis by the Commercial Clipper and Commercial Express, two of the latest additions to the Mississippi's growing fleet. Just completed by the St. Louis Shipbuilding & Steel Co. for $500,-ooo each, for the Commercial Barge Lines, these two diesel-powered, screw-driven tows typify the modern fleet that has replaced the oldtime packets.*

Crude oil and other petroleum products make up 75% of the river's cargo. Most of it is upriver, and the oil barges return empty; rivermen are now talking of building oil barges with return-trip deck space for autos. The rest of the traffic is in other bulk products which do not have to be moved rapidly. Downriver, Pittsburgh and Chicago ship steel, the Twin Cities grain. Upriver come cotton, sulphur and scrap from the South, coffee and sisal from Latin America.

Among the river's 14 major competing lines, the biggest is the Government-owned Federal Barge Lines (19 towboats, 281 barges), which was started in the Wilson administration to step up river traffic in World War I. (Carnegie-Illinois Steel Corp. owns 14 towboats and 400 barges, but they serve only that company.) Next come St. Louis' Mississippi Valley Barge Lines, Pittsburgh's Union Barge Line and the American Barge Line Co. of Jeffersonville, Ind. On their newest craft, the skippers don't have to smell their way through fog, as Sam Clemens and Steamboat Bill used to. Radar does the trick nowadays.

*Early this year the biggest sternwheeler of them all, Standard Oil's giant 276-ft. Sprague (rivermen called her "The Big Mama"), made her last trip down the river to become a floating museum at Vicksburg.

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