Do We Need Another Titanic?
An Australian mining billionaire is going to build a replica of the Titanic. It’s reported here on the Guardian web site.
I know a lot of this is about his ego and it’s creating a lot of humour, if you look at the comments on the Guardian report.
But he could be on the right track for traffic across the North Atlantic. When I was a child, my great aunt Beattie came over from Canada on the Queen Mary and one of Celia’s aunts, who worked as a governess in the States, regularly used the ocean liners. It was certainly a better way to travel in some ways than flying today. Everybody who used them, seemed to enjoy the experience. Although, everybody seemed to prefer the Queen Elizabeth to the Mary.
With a lot of people having a lot of money, they don’t know how to spend, I suspect that a luxury liner on the North Atlantic route might be a viable proposition. I must admit, that I need a holiday and a window is opening up, so if it was warmer, I might seriously take a liner to New York and fly back.
I suppose the backer of the Titanic II’s biggest problem is the worries of what happened to it’s ill-fated predecessor. But then I can’t think of a passenger ship disaster in recent years caused by either icebergs or design faults in recent years. He must of course choose his Captain and crew with extreme care.
One point not made about the ship in the various articles, is that just building it will create or sustain a lot of jobs. So in some ways you have to admire him for taking the risk of building the ship, instead of just sitting on his money.
Container Ships Are Getting Bigger
i always trawl the BBC’s web site in the morning to look for thought provoking articles. This one about the latest generation of container ships is fascinating. Describing the capacity of the ship it uses this paragraph.
Each will contain as much steel as eight Eiffel Towers and have a capacity equivalent to 18,000 20-foot containers (TEU).
If those containers were placed in Times Square in New York, they would rise above billboards, streetlights and some buildings.
Or, to put it another way, they would fill more than 30 trains, each a mile long and stacked two containers high. Inside those containers, you could fit 36,000 cars or 863 million tins of baked beans.
It also talks about the knock-on effects of such large ships for ports.
Ship owners also want vessels to be unloaded and loaded within 24 hours, which has various knock-on effects. More space is needed to store the containers in the harbour, and onward connections by road, rail and ship need to be strengthened to cope with the huge surge in traffic.
Felixstowe, which handles 42% of the UK’s container trade, has 58 train movements a day, but plans to double that after it opens a third rail terminal later this year.
Have we got the capacity on the railways to move that large number of boxes?
No!
The next big complaint from the public, will be the noise of freight trains rumbling through their neighbourhood at all hours of the day. The standard freight engines, the Class 66, are not the quietest of beasts.
So for a start, all of the freight routes, like Felixstowe to Nuneaton and Gospel Oak to Barking must be electrified.
But that will only be a stop-gap and we need to put in new lines to the north of the United Kingdom. At least HS2, if it is to be built will be a start.
The Warning That Was Ignored
On the BBC web site, there is this article about the sinking of the ferry Princess Victoria on the 31st January 1951.
The BBC article gives a full time-line of the sinking of the ferry until she sent her last radio message at 13:58. But it leaves out anything of what happened later.
As a child for a few years I lived in Felixstowe and I can still remember the dark marks on the walls of the houses in Langer Road, showing how high the North Sea Floods of 1953 rose later on that fateful day, killing some 38 people in that end of the town.
Many more died in The Netherlands and Flanders.
Sad that the sinking of the Princess Victoria was, it seems inconceivable today, that the warning wasn’t heeded and so many deaths and damage occurred.
I hope we have learned from what happened that night.
The North East Passage Is Open
This story about a gas tanker going from Norway to Japan on first glance looks to be a good news story. At least for Norway, who were probably paid a lot for all that gas!
But am I right in thinking, that the trip is only possible because the world is warming and the ice has melted?
Has anybody asked the polar bears for their opinion?
The Troubles With HMS Astute
These are reported in several papers like here in the Telegraph.
But then this is always the case with new defence projects. I always remember a non-working radar for the Tornado, that was known as Blue Circle, because it was just a concrete dummy. The story is in the Wikpedia entry for the aircraft.
Because of some delays to the radar, some development aircraft flew with a concrete weight in place of the radar assembly. In a nod to some other radar names of the day (Blue Parrot, Blue Fox) this was nicknamed Blue Circle – cynics suggested that at leastBlue Circle gave more consistent results. Unfortunately, the ‘Blue’ series radars were made by Ferranti – and the AI24 Foxhunter for the Tornado was made by GEC. At least one senior civil servant thought that the AI24 was a Ferranti-made radar as a result… (Ferranti made the antenna mounting assembly as a subcontractor to GEC. At least that bit was delivered on time and to budget, although they later discovered that GEC was blaming them for delays. Cute trick.)
British defence contractors never seem to get it right first time.
On the other hand new products usually don’t work a hundred percent of the time. I’ve seen a New Bus for London, that has broken down and they are rumoured to have the odd air-conditioning problem.
But then you could probably get 5,000 New Buses for London for the price of HMS Astute. And anyway with the bus, there’s usually another along in a few minutes.
I Don’t Like The Cutty Sark Either!
The Cutty Sark has won the Carbuncle Cup and the Victorian Society doesn’t like it either.
For what it’s worth, I don’t like it either!
I much prefer the Tenacious, which is a real ship with a purpose and not a collection of timbers put together after a disastrous fire.
A Visitor To Canary Wharf
The sailing ship, Tenacious, visited Canary Wharf last week.
If I’d had the time, I wished I’d been on the cable-car as it departed. Hopefully in full sail.
The Germans And A Few Others Have Landed
There were quite a few ships around Canary Wharf today.
The Deutschland came in last year. The Octopus is owned by Paul Allen, one of the co-founders of Microsoft.
Shouldn’t the latter have had a blue hull?
Note the floating gangway across the dock to the yachts. When I first saw it, I thought it was a version of a floating gangway, I saw some years ago in the South of France, which consisted of a series of hexagonal chambers linked together. I don’t think it was though.
An Amazing Coincidence
Yesterday, whilst descending to the DLR on the escalator at Bank station, I held a lady up because I rather slowed the queue. I apologised and then we found we were both going to Cutty Sark. I was going to see HMS Ocean and she was meeting a group of people to explore Maritime Greenwich.
We sat together on the DLR and then found that she had been brought up in Westpole Avenue in Cockfosters, which was a parallel road to where I lived at the time in Sussex Way. We were also very much in agreement, that the area was the coldest place in London.
We exchanged memories all the way to Cutty Sark.
The Anonymous Widower 