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The difference between ships and trucks, therefore, is not 6 percent or 60 percent—margins any corporation would covet—but 600 percent, an astronomical savings. Shipping entails far less friction and traffic, and accommodates much more volume. A flatbed truck can haul two large steel coils; a train car can carry up to five; but a typical barge can hold two hundred, and an average-sized freighter like the Harvest Spirit, at 448 feet, can take six hundred.
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John U. Bacon (The Gales of November: The Untold Story of the Edmund Fitzgerald)