We have been posting pictures of the tows we encountered on this trip and, admittedly, it has been difficult to convey the enormity of the vehicles without special camera lenses. At the Lower Mississippi River Museum in Vicksburg, we stumbled on the perfect tool to provide context and convey size!
This is the secret decoder ring for understanding tows in a language most of us understand – train cars and semi trucks! The equivalent measures in tonnage, bushels and gallons are in the small print at the top of this display.This is the largest tow we have seen to date – 7 wide by 8 long, 56 barges! The tow is 1750 ft (533 m) long, and 240 ft (73 m) wide. Let’s do the equivalent units math: 728 train cars (the longest train we have seen was 99 cars so 7+ trains), 3,248 semi trucks carrying 84,448 tons of cargo. Wow!Another plus for river transport! Besides keeping all of those semi trucks off the road, tows use less fuel per ton!
