Tow #2 at Newburgh Lock, Aug 2014

I didn't get a lot of pictures of tow #2 because it went through the locks while I was taking pictures of tow #1. But I did get some pictures, sometimes inadvertently, of it while taking pictures of tow #1.

It was in the background of an upstream picture I took of tow #1. So I zoomed in. The following is at camera resolution. I missed getting pictures of it approaching the lock because it was pouring down rain, and I was hunkered under the eaves of the visitor's restroom.

20140811 11:04:34

Fortunately, after watching tow #1 and #3, we went to downtown Newburgh for lunch, and I noticed this tow was down river. I hurried through town on its river road and pretty well caught up to it while I still had a clear view of the river. (It is a lot easier to chase a tow than a train.) I'm glad I caught a decent picture of this tow because it is one of the more interesting tows that I have seen. With the sky cropped out:

And with everything cropped out except the propwash:

12:48:46

Now it is obvious that the tow consists of two barges. The left one is a big, weird barge, and the right one was a regular flat top barge that is carrying a hydraulic excavator and some construction materials. And it is now obvious that it is being pushed by two small towboats instead of a regular river towboat. My theory of why there are two towboats is as follows. The one on the left, which can see nothing other than the back wall of the barge, is pushing at a constant rate. It is pushing at the center of the big barge, which means it is pushing left of center of the tow. The one on the right, which is specially built to be tall even though it is small, pushes hard to steer the tow to the left and pushes gently to steer the tow to the right. Since the right-hand towboat is further from the center of the tow, it will have more control of the direction of the barge.

Or the left towboat's pilot is giving orders to the other pilot as to what needs to be done. In fact, given today's technology, it may even have remote controls for the "red" towboat so that the pilot in the "white" towboat is controlling both towboats. If the head locomotive of a train can control a Distributed Power Unit, that is a locomotive on the rear of the train, then controlling a boat less than a hundred feet away should not be hard. But if the right towboat pilot was controlling the left towboat, either by communicating to the other pilot or with a remote control device, I would expect the "red" towboat to be on the far left to maximize the steering torque on the tow.

Now that I know what the tow looks like, I can make some sense out of a shot I grabbed as I left the lock after watching tow #1. The grey behind the playground is the top of the rear of the "weird barge".

11:51:32

And what looks like two pilot houses is just that, the pilot houses of two towboats.

I thought in the above "playground" picture, that the tow was entering the auxiliary lock because the tow is less than 600 feet. But in the following picture (at camera resolution), it is clear that it is ready to enter the main lock as soon as the water level is raised and the upstream gate is opened. We can also see through the lower gate that the upper pool does not come up very far in the lock and that the lower pool is only 6 or so feet below the upper pool instead of the dry-weather drop of 13 feet.

11:57:38

I'm left with the question of the function of the "weird barge". From the first photo, I think the front center of the big boom is a multiple-pass cable pulley.  The above photo is not clear enough to confirm this. And, unfortunately, camera resolution is not the problem. When I crop the top of the boom from both of  the telephoto pictures I took, it is obvious that there is a maintenance walkway in back, but it is not clear what is in front. And the stop-and-go light is another mystery.

11:59:14

The only other view I have was a shot of it upstream that I took while the towboat of tow #1 was at marker 1100. But again, it is not clear what is hanging from the top center of the boom.

What I do notice from this view is that the barge is empty between the two sides that hold the boom. This supports my theory that the barge is a (very) heavy lift derrick. Are the two tall, skinny rectangles exhaust stacks? And does the lower part house two diesel engines each of which is about two stories tall and over 50 feet long? In fact, it might. I found that Sulzer, MAN, and unknown make engines that fill big rooms in container ships. Around 90,000 hp seems rather common, and I found a comment indicating Hyundai has licensed 150,000 hp engines. Actually, two stories high might be a rather small marine engine.