Word: inlander
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Like reports of his own death, Twain's dirge for riverboating turns out to be greatly exaggerated. Today the 29,000 miles of rivers, canals and intracoastal passages that constitute the U.S. Inland Waterways System are churning as never before. While railroads and airlines make more noise fighting one another, the inland waterways' share of U.S. freight traffic has climbed from 3% to almost 10% in the last 15 years. This past year, for the first time in U.S. history, river barges carried more Midwestern grain to export ports than the railroads...
Away from the Sea. Steadily expanded since World War I by the Army Engineers, the inland waterways today link together an amazing amount of the nation (see chart). In the East they include De Witt Clinton's historic New York State Barge Canal, the Hudson River, and the sheltered coastal route that amateur sailors take south to Florida. In the U.S. heartland, the Mississippi and its tributaries afford unbroken passage from Pittsburgh west to Council Bluffs, Iowa, and from Minneapolis south to the Gulf. In the Far West, locks built into the McNary and Bonneville dams allow riverboats...
...past decade, nearly 4,500 new enterprises have located themselves along the inland waterways. Such proud East Coast seaports as New York, Philadelphia and Baltimore are losing cargo tonnage, but river and canal ports steadily gain. Brownsville, Texas, in 1961 handled an astounding 4,100,000 tons of cotton, chemicals, citrus fruit and coffee. Columbia River towns like Pasco and Umatilla have become blossoming grain ports. Biggest winner of all is bustling New Orleans, which in 1961 boosted its cargo business 8% to a record 61.3 million tons. Serving as the connecting point between the Mississippi River complex...
...barges and 4,100 towboats that ply the inland waterways are less gaudy and singular but more practical than the old sternwheelers. Today's towboats (which actually push rather than pull their tows) have radar, depth recorders, six rudders and two propellers. Their diesel engines generate as much as 9,000 h.p., and can handle strings of barges longer than the Queen Mary...
...bargemen's forebodings, inland waterways traffic seems sure to grow. The Corps of Engineers is about to spend $1.2 billion to open up a 516-mile stretch of the Arkansas River between the Mississippi and Catoosa, Okla., and is planning to connect the Tennessee and the Warrior-Tombigbee river systems. Mark Twain would be impressed by that one: to cut the connecting channel, the engineers are considering atomic blasting...