New York Central Railroad ''Tugboat 13'' was a railway
tugboat
A tugboat or tug is a marine vessel that manoeuvres other vessels by pushing or pulling them, with direct contact or a tow line. These boats typically tug ships in circumstances where they cannot or should not move under their own power, su ...
built in 1887 in
Camden, New Jersey
Camden is a city in and the county seat of Camden County, in the U.S. state of New Jersey. Camden is part of the Delaware Valley metropolitan area and is located directly across the Delaware River from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. At the 2020 ...
by
John H. Dialogue and Son. The tugboat was built for the
New York Central Railroad
The New York Central Railroad was a railroad primarily operating in the Great Lakes and Mid-Atlantic regions of the United States. The railroad primarily connected greater New York and Boston in the east with Chicago and St. Louis in the Midw ...
to push
barge
Barge nowadays generally refers to a flat-bottomed inland waterway vessel which does not have its own means of mechanical propulsion. The first modern barges were pulled by tugs, but nowadays most are pushed by pusher boats, or other vessels ...
s, called
car float
A railroad car float or rail barge is a specialised form of lighter with railway tracks mounted on its deck used to move rolling stock across water obstacles, or to locations they could not otherwise go. An unpowered barge, it is towed by a tugb ...
s, carrying
railroad car
A railroad car, railcar (American and Canadian English), railway wagon, railway carriage, railway truck, railwagon, railcarriage or railtruck (British English and UIC), also called a train car, train wagon, train carriage or train truck, is a ...
s and other freight across the waterways of
New York Harbor
New York Harbor is at the mouth of the Hudson River where it empties into New York Bay near the East River tidal estuary, and then into the Atlantic Ocean on the east coast of the United States. It is one of the largest natural harbors in t ...
.
It originally had a
steam engine
A steam engine is a heat engine that performs mechanical work using steam as its working fluid. The steam engine uses the force produced by steam pressure to push a piston back and forth inside a cylinder. This pushing force can be trans ...
of , replaced with two General Motors 6-110
diesel engine
The diesel engine, named after Rudolf Diesel, is an internal combustion engine in which ignition of the fuel is caused by the elevated temperature of the air in the cylinder due to mechanical compression; thus, the diesel engine is a so-call ...
s in the 1950s. The engines sat back-to-back and drove a central
Falk gearbox, which turned the single
propeller
A propeller (colloquially often called a screw if on a ship or an airscrew if on an aircraft) is a device with a rotating hub and radiating blades that are set at a pitch to form a helical spiral which, when rotated, exerts linear thrust upon ...
.
The hull was
riveted and made of
wrought iron
Wrought iron is an iron alloy with a very low carbon content (less than 0.08%) in contrast to that of cast iron (2.1% to 4%). It is a semi-fused mass of iron with fibrous slag Inclusion (mineral), inclusions (up to 2% by weight), which give it a ...
.
After 2002, the tugboat underwent extensive renovation at Garpo Marine in
Tottenville, Staten Island
Tottenville is a neighborhood on the South Shore, Staten Island, South Shore of Staten Island, New York City. It is the southernmost settlement in both New York City and New York (state), New York State. Tottenville is bounded on three sides by w ...
. Two new
keel cooler A keel cooler is a type of internal combustion engine cooling
Internal combustion engine cooling uses either air or liquid to remove the waste heat from an internal combustion engine. For small or special purpose engines, cooling using air from th ...
s from
Fernstrum were installed in a recessed box in the hull to cool the engines.
Efforts to restore the ship seemingly failed in the intervening years, and she was scrapped in 2017 in Tottenville.
Other vessels built by John H. Dialogue and Son
* at the
San Francisco Maritime Museum, hull number 204801.
*''Susan Elizabeth'' (1886) launched as ''C. C. Clark'' and briefly served as New York Central No. ''3''.
This boat was broken up in the fall of 2008 in the same yard in Tottenville, Staten Island, New York where ''Tugboat 13'' was being restored.
*''Elise Anne Connors'' (1881)
Photos
File:13and sisterscropped.jpg, New York Central tugboats 13 and 15
File:NYC13onlift copy.JPG, New York Central tugboat 13 on lift
File:New York Central tug boat and barges, 1946 (27409572873).jpg, New York Central tugboat and barges
See also
*
References
External links
*
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{{coord, 40.516588, N, 74.246111, W, display=title, dim:100
New York Central Railroad
Tugboats of the United States
1887 ships
Ships built by Dialogue & Company