If I read that correctly, it's a 600+ ft long and 78 ft wide vessel, bigger than a 1943 USN Light Cruiser. HTH does that get from Duluth to the Ocean ? Erie canal ??
A bit of a last on this context b/c your question gets to the context.
The Erie Canal couldn't be made a bigger deal of in Middle School. It is simply one of the gateways that made it worth it to fight a Civil War against an Agrarian Aristocratic south. I mean, the Erie Canal takes the British Industrial Revolution 1715-1959 and compresses it into 30 years. But it's not about the Erie, even though the Erie makes the USA the USA at one point in time.
So it's the Welland Canal just across from Buffalo, NY, connecting Erie to Ontario and beyond, then the SLS, threading around the Thousand Islands and down one of the mightiest rivers on Earth.
Then there is the makeup of North America itself, and I'll let Peter Zeihan talk about that.
Now think about what Peter Zeihan said, and look at where Duluth and Two Harbors are, in relation to Minnesota which I've pinned
So not only does NA have fantastic water transportation, and you can reach the very heart of the largest Breadbasket on planet earth via the Mississippi River....
But you can sail a 760' ship to the OTHER SIDE of the American Breadbasket.
To the other side of it.
Thunder Bay is Canada's largest grain exporting port, that port saved Europe from starvation not once but twice in 25 years, and it is in the center of the North American Tectonic Plate 1,500 miles from the ocean.
That is the power of the Great Lakes and there is nothing like it.
It is so cheap to ship on the Great Lakes that they:
- Dig up iron rust in Minnesota
- Train it 90 miles to Lake Superior
- load it into ore dock
- load it into a ship
- drive the ship 900 miles
- unload the ship
- put the ore back on a train
- drive that train to Pittsburg
Why not just put the ore on a train and bring it to Pittsburg? Trains are huge and powerful, and intermodal transition costs money.
But ships are a lot bigger, and even a 'small' ship like Mark Barker makes it worth.
Peter Zeihan talks about some marine bulk costing 40x cheaper than road or rail. 4 orders of magnitude.
For instance, Alpena hauls dust from... Alpena, MI, to Wisconsin. It's just a grubby little job,
La Farge is one of the most ubiquitous bulk things in the world. It seems every bulk dock on the planet has a lafarge dock. And that's what Alpena does. Lafarge does concrete and aggregate, it's French, and it's everywhere.
So an old Alpena can just haul rocks from Alpena to wherever, where no other ship can get in.
That is the story of Great Lakes Towing, a Michigan based company which bought up some old hulls (more about that later, and the boom), and carries smaller things like a mere 8,000 tons in and out of Muskegon or Waukeegan.
So that's what Mark W. Barker will do. Carry those niche loads into the smaller ports, and keep our Great Lakes economy alive.
The fact that she was bought by a 'Premier' company like Interlake, is new construction, and is aimed squarely at keeping our mid-sized ports in operation. Oh man, good news.
If Alpena quit working, and Great Lakes Towing quit hauling, Alpena would become a completely dead ghost town. Many towns would suffer that fate if the mid-sized Lakers didn't run.
So the Mark W. Barker is a big deal, hence this post. Your question goes to the heart of it.