DURING MY TENURE as a mechanical supervisor for Southern Railway in New Orleans from April 1980 to August 1983,I found myself in some unique situations, one of which took place inside the main generator compartment of a GP7. That experience was uncannily similar to what I had experienced earlier on the nearby Mississippi River, which explains the title of this little story.One of the local tourist attractions in New Orleans is the river-boat Natchez. It makes several daily cruises, each lasting about 2 hours on the Mississippi. It is a wonderful way to spend an afternoon in the Crescent City. This boat of steel construction was built in 1975 along the lines of the packet boat Hudson, which sailed on the Ohio River from 1886 to 1905. She is 265 feet long by 46 feet wide and a 6-foot draft. It has modern oil-fired boilers, but the massive machinery turning its 26-ton paddle wheel came from the tow-boat Clairton, which pushed barges of coal and steel on the Ohio and Mississippi rivers from 1925 to 1965. On each side of her engineroom was a two-cylinder tandem compound engine with 15-inch high-pressure and 30-inch low-pressure cylinder diameters with a 7-foot stroke!
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