Truckster! 3

This 1944 Dodge has been parked along a North Fork highway for some time.  Here’s the story.

From the load on this truck parked in Battery Park City, you can tell the season.

All these wheels distribute the weight of a wheelless Cat 854K Wheel Dozer.

Farther down the highway, might these be the wheels, three of them at least?

 

The Mammoet mobile is headed to a location where weight needs distributing as it moves.  Click here for previous Mammoet references in this blog.

Then there are trucks like this Ford with –I think–some parts from the late 40s and others from the mid-50s and who knows what else.

Does the 0000 on the placard mean this tank is empty?

This is what International pickups looked like around the time I was born.  Kudzu seems to have colonized this one.

These Macks, a far cry from what was produced locally a century ago,  move salt to a mountain

from a ship  over in Port Newark.  Here’s a National Geographic video partly filmed on Staten Island.

And finally, driving this late 40s COE Chevy transporting some pungent fertilizer is my father, who would have turned 90 this week.

I’ve only ideas about who took the last photo, dated four years before I was born.  All others here by Will Van Dorp.

Truckster! 2

In celebration of the beginning of the 11th year of blogging, I’m licensing myself to change course a few days.  Two things I want you to know are 1) I’ve posted approximately 90% of the days since November 26, 2006, and 2) my eyes always search for details other than tugboats to photograph.

I’ve gone here in the past, and retreated.  Tugboats and ships have a lot in common with trucks, and my eye is always attracted by an unusual truck, so in the effort to show that I DO take photos of things NOT on the water, let me revive this line.  Should I go over to this side?  Call this R&R, rambling and rumspringa.

Admit . . . this is a cool truck, eh?  And I took the photo right atop Penn Station, too.  Can anyone tell me if this is the same one that lives near the Newport PATH station?  And might there be three of these on the banks of the sixth boro?

Less well cared for, in Jersey City I saw this rusty Divco van next to a dumpster.  Anyone know if it’s for sale?  It might make a good camper?

 

Now where along the sixth boro banks (SBB) these days might one find a Mammoet field car?  Answer follows.

The other day I stopped to admire the calm and skill of a Shepherd Enterprises rig as he negotiated the streets under the south end of the High Line.  The driver told me it was a brand-spankin’-new Western Star.

 

Here he’s about to back into a dock to his right.

I was told this is a 1928

Graham Brothers truck.

Yes, it’s an Element and not really a truck, but if I were hitchhiking and this red head stopped, I’d run the other way, no matter what she might say.  I hope you’re convinced by now that I see a lot of strange stuff.

In the port of Oswego, might this be waiting for a cargo for Fort Drum?  If I cropped this in a certain way, you might think the ingots are on the trailer?

And we’ll end this digression here . ..  said to be a 1946 Dodge truck.  Cool!

All photos by Will Van Dorp.

And the Mammoet field car was over by the NYWheel.

NL5

It goes without saying that the waterways here are busy and complex, as seen from this AIS grab below, showing traffic at this moment between Brussels (bottom) and Amsterdam, and between Dusseldorf and the North Sea about midway the narrowing into the English Channel to the southwest.  All the photos in today’s post–as have many here–were taken just west of Rotterdam.

Here Smit’s Union 11 heads east past the Mammoet headquarters.

Below is water tanker DWS 14 delivering “drink water” in the greater Rotterdam port.

Even more interesting is the 10-storey cylindrical building in the background, on the land’s edge in Schiedam.  It’s called De Bolder, aka the Bollard, the biggest bollard I’ve ever seen.   The building, Mammoet’s offices in Schiedam, was entirely built and furnished elsewhere in greater Rotterdam port (Zwijndrecht) and then transported into its location by water!!  Now that’s making a statement about a company’s mission.

Here in the same waterway recently, the Montrose Alpha platform gets a final fitting out before it heads out to the North Sea.  The platform was also built in Zwijndrecht and moved to this point in the delta by at least four En Avant tugs.

A 1959 training vessel Delftshaven passes by.

Across the way, new build pipe layer Sapura Rubi  is getting fitted out before joining the fleet in Brasil.

Meanwhile at the Damen Shiprepair yard in Schiedam, work is always going on, with Foresight and Patron up on the floating dry docks,  and Seven Waves and Mona Swan docked.

 

Seven Oceans –astern of Skandi Açu–has since departed for the north of Norway.  Both are pipe laying support vessels.  Here is the entire DOF fleet.  The 479′ Skandi Açu, crewed by up to 120 people and capable of laying pipe down to almost 10,000 feet,  was christened last week and celebrated by Huisman, VARD, DOF Subsea, and Technip.

My dinghy awaits.  See ya.

The first four photos come from Freek Wamandai via my friend Fred Trooster, who also took the last one.  The ones in between are by Will Van Dorp.

For more Skandi and Subsea vessels, click here.