Tag: Erie Canal

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Electric Ghosts

Postcard photo taken at Adams Basin between 1908 and 1910 shows the general store and old Erie Canal arch bridge. The new interurban railroad line crosses from left to right in the middle foreground with a warning sign at the extreme right. By 1913, a new lift bridge replaced the arch bridge.

Work on the bridge scene has taken a few unexpected twists and turns. But few have been as intriguing as this.

It turned up very early. While searching for information about the area around the bridge, I turned to contemporary plat maps digitized by the local library. The maps, which show property lines, buildings, bridges, roads and railroads, were published in 1902 and 1924. The first one is too early – the lift bridge was completed in 1913. Here is a section of the 1924 map.

1924 plat map of Adams Basin names each property and shows buildings, roads and railroads.

Everything in this map was familiar except for the line labeled “Rochester, Lockport & Buffalo.” I knew about the New York Central rail line, also labeled. But what was this?

A bit of digging quickly turned up more information. The RL&B was an electric interurban railway that connected Rochester with points west. Built in 1908, it was part of a web of interurbans that spread across western New York and the rest of the country.

At that time it wasn’t at all apparent that the automobile would be the transportation mode of the future. Roads were narrow and rutted, automobiles expensive and undependable. Railroads were the way to go. A mania spread as investors sank their fortunes into the burgeoning interurban industry.

But instead of buying stock in interurbans, ordinary people used their savings to buy Henry Ford’s new Model T. Roads were gradually improved and the automobile industry expanded. Interurban ridership declined and finally the bubble burst. Nearly all of the rail lines were defunct by the early 1930s.

What’s left of the Buffalo, Lockport & Rochester right of way, next to the canal near Adams Basin.

The Buffalo, Lockport and Rochester Railroad had been sturdily built because it was expected to last for decades. Instead it was abandoned and literally ripped up: Cars, tracks, bridges, electric generating stations, and most passenger stations were simply scrapped.

The interurbans used traction cars, either singly or coupled in pairs, to carry passengers and some freight over standard gauge rails at speeds up to 80 miles per hour. These were not “trolleys.” They were light, high-speed electric railroads. Today, the fate of these innovative transportation systems seems to represent a missed opportunity.

Little survives. Traces of the overgrown right of way are barely visible from the air or on Google Earth. Some passenger stations have been preserved, and a derelict steel bridge crosses the canal in Rochester.

Photograph of a 1909 fire in Adams Basin inadvertently includes details of the interurban line, including the track and trolley wire.

Sometimes it’s impossible to pinpoint track and station locations. That’s the case with Adams Basin – the right of way vanishes in the immediate vicinity of the bridge. I feel like I’m chasing ghosts.

But it’s clear that the railroad must be in the scene. So, while the sleuthing continues, I’ve started modeling the traction car itself, starting with the “truck” or wheel assembly.

Model of a M.C.B. type Baldwin interurban railway truck. Two 140-horsepower General Electric motors (not shown) powered each truck. The traction car will include two of these.
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Have Boat, Will Travel

Test rendering of a partially completed laker model with a Kelvin wake pattern.

The canal scene is to be set in 1915 or 1916, a time of change for the Erie Canal. At enormous public expense, the canal was being upgraded to compete with the railroads. It was widened, all of the locks were replaced and enlarged, and dams and reservoirs were built to replace much of the original channel with “canalized” sections of the Mohawk River and other streams. The work began in 1909 and continued into 1917.

Wooden canal boats pulled by teams of horses or mules were being phased out. Eventually they would be replaced by large steel barges pulled by commercial tugboats. But change comes gradually at best and in 1917 all U.S. steel production was diverted to the war effort. So at this time there were still many traditional wooden Erie Canal boats in service. Some were animal-powered, some were towed by tugs. Some were combined into fleets of two or three boats and pushed and pulled by wooden steamers.

Traffic jam, 1905: Canal boats line up to pass through the Rochester weighlock. (Photo from the Albert R. Stone Negative Collection, Rochester Museum & Science Center.)

At this time the classic Erie Canal boat was the lakeboat or “laker,” which was around 98 feet long and had a cargo capacity of 240 tons. Lakers carried lumber, coal, gravel, and grain between Buffalo and Albany, or all the way to New York City via tug along the Hudson River.

Fore and aft views of the completed laker model.

My laker is based on plans drawn by Robert E. Hagar and now held by the Chittenango Landing Canal Boat Museum. It measure 97½ feet from bow to stern and has a draft of about 9 feet. In the traditional laker, the front cabin served as the stable (or “bowstable”) for the animal teams. Living quarters were in the stern cabin. It wasn’t unusual for entire families to live and work on board all season.

Completed laker model, shaded and in place on the canal.
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Building the Bridge

Full-scale model of the bridge, built in Maya.

The lift bridge that crosses the canal at Adams Basin was completed in 1913. The technical name of this type of bridge is a mouthful: Warren pony truss towerless lift bridge. Warren bridges use equilateral triangles to spread out the load on the bridge. “Pony truss” refers to the fact that there are no braces across the top of the bridge framework.

But the operative word here is “towerless.” This bridge is one of 16 similar bridges constructed along the western section of the Erie Canal in the early 1900s. Unlike traditional lift bridge designs, they do not use towers to lift the roadbed. Instead, the machinery is contained in concrete-lined pits on either side of the bridge. Two 12-horsepower electric motors are sufficient to raise and lower the bridge. The heavy lifting, so to speak, is done by counterweights and a system of cables that ensure that all four corners are raised and lowered at the same rate.

Shaded models of the bridge and bridge tender’s tower, rendered in Terragen.

These may the first such bridges ever built, and they are virtually unique. Designed by a team of anonymous New York state engineers, the bridges’ durability and reliability are attested to by the fact that almost all are still in daily use.

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Bridging the Erie Canal

Just add water: The canal is filled and vegetation placed in the landscape.

The Erie Canal, which runs just a mile or so from our home, has a long and colorful history.

For some time I’ve wondered if it might be possible to use 3D imaging software to recreate specific scenes along the canal at different moments in time. As a proof of concept I decided to work on a simple example: The Washington Street lift bridge in Adams Basin, shortly after the bridge was constructed in 1914.

Simple, because the terrain is flat and, at the time, Adams Basin was (or so I thought) a sleepy rural hamlet. A canal, a bridge, a road. Maybe a boat or two.

A bit of cursory research demolished that notion pretty quickly. As it turns out, Adams Basin was a much more interesting place a hundred years ago than it is today. It was a thriving community with its own canal terminal, post office, school, railroad station, and trolley station. (Yes, trolley. More on that later.) Retail and wholesale businesses – now long gone – lined the roads and canal. It had a lively political scene, too, with a dedicated group of civic-minded activists who, among other things, successfully lobbied the state for the construction of the lift bridge.

So there is much to do. The project has been underway now for several weeks (months), and as yet there is no end in site. But the research has been fascinating, and I’ve met some interesting people and have been able to hone my 3D visualization skills along the way.

Visualization of digital elevation data available from New York state.

The first problem: How to set up the underlying terrain for a 4-square-mile area around the bridge. New York state provides high-resolution digital elevation data for free. But a quick rendering of that data (above) revealed that it is pretty rough, full of gaps and artifacts. Cleaning this up would take a lot more effort than it would be worth.

A small section of the hand-painted displacement map.

The solution was to create a displacement map by hand. Using aerial photos as a guide, the canal, streams, and railroad embankments were carefully painted in Photoshop, working in 32-bit mode for the widest range of grayscale values. Dark values are depressions. Lighter values are higher elevations.

A rendering of the hand-painted displacement map.

An oblique rendering of the displacement map in Terragen reveals a landscape that’s not much to look at, but it will work. The main feature is the canal bed, of course. But it also includes a north-south roadbed (north is to the right) and two long railroad embankments.

Grass and a temporary population of trees are added, a water surface is placed in the canal, and railways are placed to create the view shown at the top of this post.