Hulett Unloaders

Cleveland's Forgotten Hulett Unloaders
Railroad Street

These machines look like something out of science fiction story, but they were real and existed all around the Great Lakes for the entire 20th Century. Prime examples of Victorian Engineering. Hard to believe it took them 100 years to start using conveyor belts. I suppose once you've invested a zillion dollars in building these monsters you are going to get your money's worth out of them.

Never thought about it before, but the shipping season only lasts nine months because the Great Lakes freeze over. If you are running a steel mill you probably don't want to shut down for three months every year, which means you need to stockpile a couple of million tons of ore to get you through the winter. You'd need acres of space to store it.

And now that I'm thinking about it, Pittsburgh was another big steel town. What do you need to make steel? Coal and iron ore, so you could use a train to haul iron ore from Cleveland to Pittsburgh and then use the same train to haul coal back from Pittsburgh to Cleveland. Paying freight both ways, a railroad man's dream.

I took the dates (there are a bunch of them) and put them in a spreadsheet: