Saw a dredge from the 1950s working last week near my hometown

I was out on a job near Baton Rouge last week and we passed an old cable-operated dredge still running on the river. The operator was a guy in his 70s who said he's been running that machine for 40 years. It got me thinking about how much the equipment has changed since I started 20 years ago. Does anyone else miss the simplicity of the older machines, or am I just getting old?

2 comments

2 Comments

hugo64516d ago

Drove past one of those old cable dredges down by Plaquemine a few years back and the thing was still belching black smoke like it was 1955. @green.jessica you make a good point about the safety stuff but there was something about the way those old machines sounded, just a steady rumble that let you know exactly what it was doing. My uncle ran a dragline for 30 years and he could tell you when a cable was about to go just by the pitch of the engine. That's something you don't get with a computer screen and a joystick.

green.jessica17d ago

You really want to go back to the days of cables snapping and killing guys every other week? No thanks, give me a modern GPS-guided machine any day.