Watch Jim Leonard talk about the Pennsylvania Railroad.

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Transcript of the interview with Jim Leonard- Part 2:

All right, we built cargo ships. Of course, any, any of these questions I have the pictures here that I, you can look at sometime. The cargo ships were approximately 500 feet long. Their beam was about 40 feet, and I forget their draft. But they were made purely to carry, uh, tanks and equipment, munitions, and so forth to the ships that were in the war zones. Our cargo ships met up with the cruisers and, and aircraft carriers, battleships, and the high seas and delivered cargo to them -- whatever their needs were -- as opposed to tankers that delivered oil, only oil to the ships and to, for planes and so forth. So a description of the cargo ship, if you saw it in profile, the cargo ship had, uh, a midship, what we call the forkaseal, forkaseal deck and then the, the cabins were all in midship. The tankers would, uh, midship, was not, was nothing but tank tops like big openings for can soda or it could go down into these manholes, that's the word, and pour the oil in them. And the whole thing, when you see a tanker going up the river, you see a load of oil, but with enough quarters for, for the crew to be housing on top of that tank. Whereas with the cargo ship you have deck after deck after deck.

You have an interbottom. That's a protection for it, and that's your lower deck. Then you have a second, a third deck and a second deck and then your upper deck. Now there's a, a major difference in the construction of cargo ships to tankers. The cargoes, I believe, had much more work to be done because so many different decks whereas a tanker you had the main deck, the shelter deck and the keel, and the rest was open. And you had bulkheads that divided tank one, tank two, tank three, tank four. And you had what we called coffer dams that would, or bulkheads that would isolate one, one section to another section. If, uh, they emptied it, emptied the oil from tank one, they would open the valve for tank two. So there was not just oil from bow to stern. You'd have, uh, the bulkheads which would divide the areas where the oil would be in. So there's a major difference in, in those ships. They were practically the same length though -- 475 to 500 some feet in length.