The side trips in this thread remind me, a company logging town was found in the piney woods of central Louisiana a few years ago. Equipment and everything, looks like they planned to come back and never did. Best I recall it was abandoned in the sixties from what evidence is there. A company store, cafeteria, barracks, a bulldozer and other equipment, best I recall. A bunch more stuff too.
We lived just a mile up the single lane dirt road that left highway 3 and went up Readings Creek(pronounced Reddings) then to Indian Creek or to Blanchard Flats . We had constant logging truck traffic. One day just beyond our house a loaded log truck lost his steering box and ended up with the cab in the shallow creek and the trailer tires 15 feet higher on the road. With the load intact but poised to go right through the cab. Good thing he knew how to secure the load.
The logging trucks were always getting into accidents and usually their fault for running unsafe equipment. A friend's brother in law hauled long logs. A car pulled out in front of him on a two lane. He could see it was an entire family so he pulled his truck onto a mostly nonexistent shoulder with no room to stop. When he tried to get back on the road from the much lower shoulder it popped all eight wheels off the back corner of the trailer. As could be imagined things went downhill from there in more ways than one!
The logs are positioned and bound primarily to keep them from going off the back of the trailer. These went forward, bursting through the cab. The filled up every bit of where the cab had been. However in the days before mandatory seatbelt use he fell into a space between the driver's seat and door. A space that didn't exist until the logs exploded the cab! He was banged up pretty good but no major damage, spent a couple months laid up. I saw the wreckage, looked like a miracle he walked away, at least he walked away after being extracted.
When he was able to go back to work he took the insurance money and bought a new truck and trailer, set up to haul long logs! If I kept hauling logs I think I would have at least switched to short logs.
Hu