03-20-2009, 05:19 AM
Tug placement will be determined in large part by where your model location is. I used to service a fleet of refrigerated trailers that were put on barges and sent to Santa Catalina Island. You know the song:"Twenty six miles across the sea, Santa Catalina is the island for me..." Anyway, every trip involves 26 miles across open ocean, so they use one barge per tug. If the water gets rough on the way out or back, trying to handle more than one barge might be difficult. I'm not sure how barges are handled on the Great Lakes, but I've heard storms can make the water there almost as bad as the ocean. With a river like the Mississippi, the main obstacle is the current, so I can see where they can handle a lot of barges with a single tug.