This was such an informative book! I learned about those who drive the 18 wheelers back and forth across the continent. Depending on what they carry, they have to have papers, do a wash afterwards and travel long distances, know the routes, etc.. I also learned about those who captain and work on cargo ships that pass through canals, rivers, lakes and oceans. The last one he describes is the trains- those that carry coal mostly, but also other goods. The signals, speeds, coupling and uncoupling and waiting for the yard man to okay your train and your route. Fascinating!

Enjoyable, less the Thoreau chapter which feels like filler.

Great slice of life read.

Fascinating glimpse into the world of those who move the goods that make our lives possible.

Transportation infrastructure essays in ride-along style, on the people and logistics of moving stuff in the early 2000s (so UPS automation and coal trains get chapters). Some jarring casually sexist moments.

Interesting

This book is an absolute favorite of mine. I enjoyed re-reading his take on various transportation modes in the United States. He rides along with a trucker carrying hazardous materials, a barge on the Illinois River, a canoe trip following a Thoreau journey in New England, and a train carrying coal from Wyoming to Georgia. He makes it a fun journey!


Anne from Urbandale, Iowa

A pleasant ride in the passenger seat of an 18-wheeler, model container ship, towboat, canoe, conveyor belt, and train. You will come away with a vague knowledge of how things get where they are going.

Fair warning: I’m a McPhee fanboy. This is one of his best, a collection of essays about transport in the US. “A Fleet of One” and “Out in the Sort” are maybe the best, but it’s a book of all killer, no filler.

I think all McPhee's books are terrific, and the common thread is that ... one can dream that one could have written this him/herself. It just takes the "sit down and be there" approach that McPhee takes so effectively. Well done, and very informative about lots of ways goods get transported from one place to another and the actual people who drive the trucks/trains/boats, etc.

McPhee let me down on this one. I’d enjoyed his earlier book Coming Into the Country, so I looked forward to Uncommon Carriers. But it just isn’t that good. Too often McPhee includes extraneous details that bore his reader to tears. For instance, he spends too much time tell you about how coal trains and merchant vessels work. At its worst, Uncommon Carriers reads like a textbook.

I’ll give McPhee another chance, but I’m not encouraged.

I loved this book. I actually read the sections when they appeared in The New Yorker. I assume few changes were made. McPhee must have the best job in the world getting to ride with an over-the-road trucker across the United States; traveling down the Illinois River on a towboat and linked barges (something I've always really wanted to do down the Mississippi with a friend of mine]; and following freight trains from the cab. Talk about your Walter Mitty! His articles and books are filled with juicy little tidbits of detail that I just love reading about.

I love going to locks on the Mississippi and watching the towboats shepherd their charges down the river and through the locks. Another good site to watch is Starved Rock State Park along the Illinois river. Here's my review on the towboat going down the Illinois section of McPhee's book:

The Illinois River is third in freight carried, following the Mississippi and the Ohio. It's a relatively straight river except for some "corkscrew" bends near Pekin. The barges that navigate the Illinois can be huge. The Billy Joe Boling that McPhee is riding (some people get all the fun) is pushing a toe longer than the new Queen Mary 2, the longest ocean liner ever built. Maneuvering such a "vessel" takes skill and sang-froid. At its widest point, this collection of barges and towboat is four times longer than the river's 300 foot width. The Illinois is an autocthonous river (a word I learned from Founding Fish but will probably forget) beginning not far from Chicago.

This particular barge string has fifteen barges wired together carrying pig iron, steel and fertilizer. The ones with pig iron appear empty, but the iron is so heavy and the river channel only nine feet deep at its minimum, that the barges can only be loaded to about 10 per cent of capacity. The steel cable holding the barges together is about an inch thick and the deck hands need to constantly monitor the tension of the wire.. The barges and tug at the stern become almost a rigid unit. The pilot has to steer this mass carefully between railroad bridge pilings and other obstructions. The pilot "is steering the Queen Mary up an undersized river and he is luxuriating in six feet of clearnace." Meanwhile at the stern, behind the stern rail of the towboat, only ten feet away, is the riverbank. This assumes no unusual current changes.

On the Mississippi, a tow can consists of as many as forty-nine barges and be two hundred and fifty feet wide. When they arrive at the Illinois, the consist needs to be broken up into smaller groups. Just by way of comparison, a fifteen barge tow can carry as much as 870 eighteen wheelers on the highway.

All captains have to start as deckhands, and it's not unstressful. One physician who had been asked to study how pilots and captains handled stress, had to leave the boat because he couldn't handle the stress. The river is rarely empty and you can count on being approached by another thousand-foot tow coming at you down the river. Downstream tows always have the right of way. Hold spots, where a tow can be headed into the bank to wait for a downstream tow to pass, are plotted ahead of time and serve like railroad sidings. There is no dispatcher and the captains call traffic themselves announcing their location.

A large tow will burn about one gallon each two hundred feet or twenty-four hundred gallons of diesel fuel per day. Measured by fuel consumed per ton-mile, barges are "two and a half times more efficient than a freight train, nearly nine times more efficient than a truck."

There aren't too many locks on the Illinois as the river drops only about ninety feet, but watching a tow go through one can provide hours of entertainment. I remember sitting at the lock across from Starved Rock State Park as a long tow broke into two sections to get through the lock.

Unfortunately, pleasure boat operators being "ignorant, ignorant, ignorant," accidents happen. Much like train engineers, towboat captains fear boaters who won't get out of the way. It's impossible to steer around a small boat and the prop wash and propeller suction can be lethal to the unwary.

and the section on trains: Driving a train would seem simple enough: you push the lever forward and off you go. Not so. Coal trains, of which just one power plant in Georgia requires 3 fully loaded trains per day to keep running, are usually more than one and one-half miles long and weigh 34,000 tons. They are by far the heaviest trains on the rails. The train is so long that the engine in front (these trains must have engines in front and back and often in the middle as well to adjust the strain on the couplers) will often be applying the brakes going down hill while the engines in back are pushing the cars still going up the other side of the rise. They can't go up hills, per se. A slop of even 1.5% makes the engines work hard.

Twenty-three thousand coal trains leave the Powder River basin every year; that's thirty-four thousand miles of rolling coal in a never ending stream of coal for power plants. The Powder River basin coal generates less heat, i.e. fewer BTU's than eastern coal, but it has a much lower sulfur content so following stricter environmental regulations eastern mines have been dying while western ones are thriving. That's where the railroads come in.

Plant Scherer in Georgia, a large power plant, usually has a one-million-ton pile of coal in reserve. To understand the revived interest in nuclear power, that pile generates the equivalent of one truckload of mined uranium. "To get a million BTUs, fuel oil costs nine dollars (before recent price increases,) natural gas six dollars, coal one-dollar-eighty-five, and nuclear fifty cents."

"Plant Scherer burns the contents of thirteen hundred coal trains per year -- two thousand miles of coal cars, twelve million tons of the bedrock of Wyoming." The plant requires twelve thousand acres to store, process and burn the coal. Think about that the next time you turn the lights on.