Blog at the Ballast

Once you start looking for them, there are actually a few engineering, railway or shipping archive related stories each week.  On a Monday, I'll round up any I can find that might be of interest here:

• 18th century ship logs used for climate change research
• Launch of HMS Defender
• A triumph of Victorian engineering - the anniversary of Loch Katrine aquaduct (exhibition, news article and news article)

We've been doing some moving around this week so the scanner is still out of operation.  This means that I can't share the photos of earlier HMS Defenders that Dan McDonald took.  However, once we're all sorted out I'll get them up so we can compare the different defenders.

The upside of this is that I have a new office and we're getting a new kitchen put in as well so its all change in Walkinshaw Street.

As I said yesterday I was fortunate enough to get tickets to attend my first ship launch, that of HMS Defender at the BVT Surface Fleet yard in Govan.  This visit helped me to get a sense of the scales involved in building a ship this size and gave me some background context to the work that we do. The Ballast Trust has processed several shipbuilding collections and we are fortunate to have colleagues and volunteers who know a great deal about how a shipyard worked. One of my jobs is to try and capture this knowledge so that other newcomers to shipbuilding records can put the plans and drawings in the context of the process they supported, which will also help when cataloguing new collections.

Pictures from the day are available on our Flickr pages, there are more from other Flickr users here.  Mine aren't great, and its hard to get a sense of the scale from them so you'd be better off looking at this video on the BBC site.

This video has a good view from the water, particularly the work of the tugs after launch to manouver Defender around.

At this very moment I should be witnessing the launch of HMS Defender from the Govan yard of BVT Surface Fleet.

There have been several news articles about the City of Adelaide / Carrick over the last few days.  This is because of Peter Maddison's on-ship protest to save it from destruction and to try and arrange a relocation to Sunderland.

News articles:

• Sunderland Echo
• BBC
• The Scotsman

The ship was built in 1864, before the Cutty Sark and was used to transport emigrants to Australia for over twenty years.  More information about the ship's history is here and here.