Beginning in what I can best determine as 1959 and ending in 1971, Captain Dennis Trone designed and built a large number of modern diesel-powered riverboats at the fabled Dubuque Boat and Boiler Works in Dubuque, IA. These boats were a cost effective answer to the fading number of expensive to operate steam excursion boats of the day. The boats were phenomenal examples of the boat builders art featuring interesting and very aesthetically pleasing lines in a time of flat steel hulls. The vessels...

Travis Vasconcelos

Hello All,

This installment is about what could have been.

Many years ago there was a magazine called Passenger Boat News. Of all the periodicals I have subscribed to this one was my favourite. Each bi-monthly issue had the latest information in the Excursion Boat industry. They even predicted the Gaming Boat industry and the profound effect it would have on the Excursion Boat industry.

With each issue you know who was building what and where. I...

Travis Vasconcelos

Hello All!

As I read about and hear more and more about the horrific Upper Mississippi River flooding, along with the flooding we have had on the Ohio and Lower Mississippi Rivers this spring and early summer I am reflecting back to 1993.

The summer started much the same, hot humid, and extremely wet in the Missouri and Upper Mississippi River valleys...flooding came just as the passenger carrying boats were coming out of winter lay up and this event wreaked havoc with...

Travis Vasconcelos

Hello all!

I think this blogging thing is more for therapy than anything else....I have gone to other sites and read other peoples blogs for ideas and the common thread is they all have a beginning. The place they start their story, if you will. So I figured even at this late juncture I would "start" mine here.

Attached you will find an old article from the Lousiville Courier Journal and Times (the latter of which was defunct some 3 years later) telling...

Travis Vasconcelos

Hello all,

After writing the paper on the DELTA QUEEN calliope I have published on this site, I found this article in a Steamboatin’ Times from aboard the DELTA QUEEN. It is interesting to note some of the accepted truths reported here we now know to be untrue.

One, which I personally found interesting, is the reference to the Thomas J. Nichols Plumbing Company of Cincinnati. Thomas J Nichol (singular, not plural) never operated a plumbing company. He did work for...

Travis Vasconcelos