This Lombard was at Clayton Lake, Maine when I started workig there in 1973! Shortly after Aurel Morin (International Paper Company mechanic) from Sainte Aurelie came to Clayton Lake and got it running and they loaded it onto a lowbed and moved it to Churchill Dam (where it is seen in the above photo) taken in 1974. A couple of years later it was moved to the State of Maine Logging Museum in Augusta.
The steam Lombard log hauler is important as the first successful tracked vehicle and was patented in 1901 by Alvin Lombard of Waterville, Maine. These Maine built machines led the way for all modern tracked vehicles. The 19 ton steam Lombard initially burned wood and traveled on iced roads at about 5 miles per hour. Alvin Lombard built 83 steam log haulers at his Waterville, Maine factory between 1900 and 1917. Most were used in Maine and New Hampshire, but several were shipped to western states and Canada. Lombard licensed his patented track design to the Phoenix Company in Eau Claire, Wisconsin which produced additional Phoenix log haulers. Many Lombard steam log haulers were recycled for scrap iron during World War II, and only 6 of the original 83 machines are known to still exist. Only 3 in of these are in running condition. After 1917, Lombard continued to produce gasoline powered log haulers which were considerably simpler and easier to operate. Several still survive in working condition. One excellent example is on display at the Maine State Museum in Augusta, Maine.
In 1973 I could still see many of the old log hauler trails on our company maps and on arial photography. Today it would be hard to see any remnants of these old trails because of timber harvest and trees growing up in the trails themselves. A great deal of work went into the layout and planning of these trails. They had to be laid out on a downhill slope or fairly flat ground. The lombards did not do well hauling loads of timber uphill. They could climb hills returning empty to their starting points! Going down steep grades they would use hay under the skis to slow down the load. Another thing was these trails were kept as strait as possible and had very few turns, and no sharp turns. These trails were laid out using an axe to mark blazes on trees, if for some reason they had to change the location of the trail they would chop marks across the blazes to signify this trail was no longer good. We used flagging to mark our lines for roads, harvest areas, skid trails, brooks, streams, rivers and lakes! If we found we needed to change the location of a line we would simply remove the flagging.
After the lombards came to the forest they still used horse and oxen to skid wood shorter distances. Although tractors and trucks first appeared at various logging sites during the 1940s, it was not until the following decade that the vehicles replaced the horse-drawn sled and river drive as the principal method of transporting wood to the mill site. Unlike the horse and river drive, these vehicles could operate in any climate and cover long distances in a relatively short amount of time.
Initially, tractors hauled timber from the logging site to a nearby road, where workers loaded the wood onto waiting trucks. By the mid-1950s it became increasingly common for trucks to transport logs directly from the cutting site to the mill, eliminating the tractor phase. The new system saved time but required workers to build relatively high-quality roads into the logging area. This often destroyed an unacceptable amount of forest and reduced the amount of wood loggers could harvest.
To remedy this, paper companies introduced a new vehicle into the logging process in the 1960s. Known as the wheeled skidder, this machine had four-wheel drive, resembled a tractor, and used a grapple or cable to drag up to 12 full-length trees out of the forest and onto a road. It could also drive over rough terrain and operate in snow, rain, and almost any other type of weather.
Each skidder required a team of five loggers – two ‘fellers’ to cut and delimb the trees in the forest, a skidder operator to load the wood and haul it to the road, and two ‘buckers’ to chop the logs into desired lengths before loading them onto trucks. This dramatically altered the logging process. Loggers were no longer involved in all steps of the harvesting phase, and instead became divided into separate and specialized units who worked along an assembly line. Depending on the type of terrain, a skidder crew could harvest between 15 and 30 cords of wood a day, which represented between three and six cords per worker.
In the coming years and decades, the logging industry became increasingly mechanized as companies introduced various complex and sophisticated machinery to delimb, debark, lift, load, and cut logs into segments. The slasher, for example, appeared soon after the skidder and performed the same task as the buckers – it cut logs into smaller segments and loaded them onto trucks. A single slasher, however, could work for between 10 and 15 skidders and chop up to 300 cords of wood each day during two nine-hour shifts. The more mechanized machinery showed up mostly in the 1970's and 1980's.
There was basically three types of mechanical harvesters, a feller buncher which had a large circular saw that did the cutting of the trees and if the trees were not too big, the head and boom could accumulate several trees at a time. The trees were not delimbed at that time they were cut and bunched in small piles, where they later forwarded roadside, usually by a grapple skidder, where a delimber would remove the branches. Often the grapple skidder would bring back the branches from delimbing the trees and use them to fill in wet areas in the trail, so they would not sink and cause deep ruts. There was also a very large machine called a Koehring that the feller buncher would cut the tree and delimb the tree with a stroke delimber and then load the cut/delimbed trees onto a a large staked body and the whole machine transported the trees roadside to be piled roadside or loaded on trucks. These Koehring buillt machines were so heavy they would often make ruts up to 7 feet deep in the forest. This type of harvester was used by Great Northern Paper when they were doing salvage clearcuts due to spruce budworm damaged trees, mostly in the 1980's! I didnt care for the machines myself, but looking at the stands today, they are coming back and many of the huge ruts have filled in over time. The next type harvester was called a shear because it used hydraulic pressure to shear the tree and cut it down. It is not being used today to my knowledge because it broke the fiber of the tree and often caused the butt of the tree to become split and not good to use for lumber. I remember sawmills saying they would not purchase trees cut with a shear. The last type machine had what was called a dangle head processor and used a chainsaw bar and blade to cut the tree. they could use the hydraulics of the long arm of the machine to directionally fall the the trees and the machine had sharpe toothed rollers that pulled the tree through them and delimbed the tree as they were measuring log lengths and slashing the tree into logs. and piling them so the transporter could pick them up and transport the logs roadside to be piled down or loaded directly onto a truck.
Today the forest in Northern Maine consists of millions of acres of lands that was clear cut during the late 1970's and 1980's. Some of these lands were precomercially thinned (PCT) and those lands are ready to be commercially harvested again. But most of these lands have thousands of small diameter trees per acre because the trees grew too close together. What I would like to see happen is that these acres get thinned and because most of the wood is too small, it is not suitable for conventional comercial use, but it is not too small to be used to make biofuel. Biofuel is an environmental friendly way and uses a much cleaner fuel than fossil fuel. Biofuels burn cleaner than gasoline, resulting in fewer greenhouse gas emissions, and are fully biodegradable, unlike some fuel additives. Cellulosic ethanol has the potential to cut greenhouse gas emissions by up to 86%. Instead of using fossil fuels to make electricity to charge electric cars, that some people believe is the solution to greenhouse emmissions, use biofuel to produce electricity and eventually get rid of fossil fuel burning all together.
Forest are a renewable resouce that are fairly green especially if you use biofuel in the harvesting equipment and trucks to haul it to the factory. Fossil fuel will run out eventually and is not very environmentally friendly. The technology is available to make biofuel factories. To keep the carbon footprint to a minimum, it makes sense to use biofuel in the equipment furnishing the raw material to the factories and build the factories in areas near to the source of their renewable natural resources. We need to get people in the government on the band wagon to produce cleaner fuel using environment friendly (green) forest products. I live in Quebec, Canada where we have electricity produced using hydro power. I am not a big fan of electric cars, if you are using fossil fuels to generate the electricity to charge their batteries. In Quebec they are using hydro power to charge their electric cars, which I approve, because hydro power is green energy! There also is a whole other issue of what to do with the batteries when hey no longer hold a charge and how to lessen the fossil fuel and other pollutants used to extract the minerals used to make these batteries for use in electric vehicles. Just food for thought. I will be writing more short stories later, Until Again!
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