Nostalgia & History > Transporting "Jumbo": questions

"Jumbo" was a containment vessel built by Babcock and Wilcox to contain radioactive material in case
the Trinity Site bomb ("Gadget") did not explode in a fission chain reaction:
Jumbo to the Rescue

Transporting it to Trinity Site was a challenge:
Jumbo's Journey

My question:  What was its exact rail routing?   It seems that it took the Sunset Route from New Orleans to El Paso and up the Santa Fe from there to the siding
south of Socorro NM.   Whose railroad was used along the Mississippi?
It is somewhat misleading to refer to Alamogordo which was on the SP with mountains between it and Trinity Site.  

This explanation from the now defunct Invention & Technology magazine offers these insights:

"Construction of Jumbo was well under way in October, when Alamogordo was approved as the site for the test. Apparently it was only then that Manhattan Project officials began investigating the problem of shipping Jumbo from Babcock & Wilcox’s shops, in Barberton, Ohio, to New Mexico. The job of transporting Jumbo was given to the Eichleay Corporation of Pittsburgh, experts in heavy moving. The logistics for the transport of all military equipment was being handled by the War Department’s Office of the Chief of Transportation. Responsibility for getting particularly ungainly or extraordinarily large and heavy loads from one place to another lay with Capt. A. Whildin. Jr.Whildin’s job was so unusual that toward the end of 1944 Liberty magazine scheduled an article reviewing some of his most bizarre assignments. Manhattan Project security people learned to their horror that one example in the article was going to be Whildin’s struggle to find a route for Jumbo. The device itself would be described as “we can’t tell you what,” but the article would claim that “this thing is so enormous that it seems only sensible to first make sure it could be shipped across country before it was built. … [Captain Whildin] has worked on it like mad for six months now, and so far, the theoretical thing is stuck on a railroad somewhere in Canada. Can’t figure out a way to get it back down into the states and out to the coast.” It is a measure of Groves’s power that by the time the article appeared, in March 1945, all references to Jumbo were gone.By that time Whildin had figured it all out. Groves, who had been unwilling to reveal the true destination of the shipment until it was absolutely necessary, represented it as Los Angeles, the end point of the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad, which had a siding about thirty miles from Alamogordo. The route chosen ran from Barberton, Ohio, to Griffith, Indiana, via the Erie Railway; from Griffith to Joliet, Illinois, via the Elgin, Joliet and Eastern Railway; and then along the Mississippi to New Orleans and on to Los Angeles on the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe. In order to accomplish this, three trestles had to be rebuilt, and Whildin ordered the train not to exceed thirty miles an hour. It was only after Jumbo had left for New Orleans in mid-April that Groves allowed the railroad to know the true destination. The trip took three weeks.When Jumbo arrived at the siding, it was offloaded onto a specially built sixty-four-wheel (in an eight-by-eight arrangement) trailer and dragged across the desert by four tractors. The original scheme called for two tractors pulling and two pushing Jumbo, but photographs of the operation show three tractors pulling and one considerably behind, to make sure Jumbo couldn’t run away on downhill portions of the thirty-mile journey to its final destination, half a mile from ground zero. Once there, it was hoisted upright into a steel framework and rested on a concrete pad poured around it."

 



Edited 4 time(s). Last edit at 11/26/20 04:27 by PVSfan.

How big was it?

GM&O from Joliet to New Orleans.

Posted from Android

General Leslie Groves was a "get it done" guy.

Posted from Android

When the article says "[Captain Whildin] has worked on it like mad for six months now, and so far, the theoretical thing is stuck on a railroad somewhere in Canada" do they mean he had figured a route that would take it to Canada but that is a far as he got with that route before working on a new one?

This article may contain some hyperbole about Jumbo.  According to the Atomic Heritage Foundation Jumbo was 10 feet in diameter and 25 feet long. Other than the weight, reported between 190-200 tons that doesn't seem like a dimensional load, even for the 40's. The AHF website has pictures of Jumbo being unloaded from its specially built flat car at Pope siding on the Santa Fe. Also show the vehicles used to transport Jumbo to the Trinity site. The sad thing was after spending $12 million to build Jumbo it wasn't used for the nuclear detonation. Today you can see the remains of Jumbo on a visit to the site.

I doubt Jumbo went via New Orleans, but it could have travelled on SP to El Paso and interchanged to AT&SF. It seems like Santa Fe all the way from Joliet makes more sense.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 11/25/20 18:15 by OliveHeights.

OliveHeights Wrote:
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> I doubt Jumbo went via New Orleans, but it could
> have travelled on SP to El Paso and interchanged
> to AT&SF. It seems like Santa Fe all the way from
> Joliet makes more sense.

Here is a good website with pictures and film:

Jumbo | Atomic Heritage Foundation

Horny Toad Man has an account of it being handled from San Marcial NM to Pope siding which is going south, so Jumbo must have come via Belen.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 11/25/20 19:16 by ts1457.

Lackawanna484 Wrote:
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> General Leslie Groves was a "get it done" guy.
>
> Posted from Android

A "get it done" guy when we were a "get it done" country.  Before tackling the Manhattan Project, he got the Pentagon built in less time than it takes to get a county two lane road bridge over a drainage ditch replaced in today's world.

EricSP Wrote:
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> When the article says " has worked on it like mad
> for six months now, and so far, the theoretical
> thing is stuck on a railroad somewhere in Canada"
> do they mean he had figured a route that would
> take it to Canada but that is a far as he got with
> that route before working on a new one?

I took it to be misdirection, to make people think that it was in Canada when in fact did not go there and there were no plans for it to do so.

Andy

A possible key to the answers I'm seeking is this book:
Birthplace of the Atomic Bomb by William S. Loring

From the excerpt I read in Google Books, it has very detailed information about Jumbo and
the Trinity Site selection.  It even has a photo of Pope Siding on the Santa Fe.

I am beginning to suspect there is disinformation--possibly deliberate--on the routing of Jumbo
left over from the 1940s.

PVSfan Wrote:
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> I am beginning to suspect there is
> disinformation--possibly deliberate--on the
> routing of Jumbo
> left over from the 1940s.

Had to be disinformation. Something like Jumbo going to the middle of New Mexico would cause our enemies to ask "why".