Blog at the Ballast

Today's photo is of the Clutha No.5, a passenger ferry built by TB Seath & Sons of Rutherglen for the Clyde Navigation Trust. The no. 5 came into service in 1884 and worked until 1903.The Glasgow Story website has information about the history of these passenger ferries and an article written by Andrew McQueen is available online at Scribd which gives a fuller...

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I have uploaded the Catalogue for the Dan McDonald collection to our website.  It is in spreadsheet format which although not as easily searchable as a database you can still perform a search across all the sheets using the find function CTRL+F. Information about Dan McDonald himself can be found here and the catalogue has been arranged into sections as follows: Section 1. Miscellaneous Vessels 1930-1980. Comprises a list...

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And its done: ...

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After several phone calls to skip companies and estimates of the size of our courtyard and the amount of rubbish we have to get rid of last week our skip arrived this morning. I forgot to take a picture of it looking all empty so instead here's the skip 3/4 full. Everything we are throwing away is either rubbish, duplicates or items that didn't pass...

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Best name for a warship ever? This week's photo is of the HMS Candytuft which was built in Grangemouth by the Grangemouth Dry Dock Co. in 1940. HMS Candytuft Originally uploaded by ballasttrust It served in the US Navy from 1942 to 1945 as the USS Tenacity before ending its life as a merchant ship Maw Hwa. ...

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Thanks to a tip, I discovered a new site today called Marine Traffic which has a live ships map that lets you see what ships are where, like so: And you can then click on the icon and information about that ship will come up like its name, destination, type, course, dimensions. And it can be used to track ships in the news, like the...

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For today's photo I've chosen two in the Dan McDonald collection taken at the launch of the replica Comet in 1962. This Comet was a replica of Henry Bell's steamship originally built in 1812 to mark its 150th anniversary.  It was built by Lithgows in Port Glasgow and Kincaid's made the engines. Until recently this replica was on display in Port Glasgow but...

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This week's photo is of tug called the Chieftain.  Built by Scotts of Bowling in 1930 for Steel & Bennie Ltd a lighterage firm. A history of the firm can be found here. Specification details about the tug are available on the Clydebuilt database here. ...

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Aside from the Dan McDonald collection, the only other collection the Ballast Trust owns is Bill Lind's own personal collections some of which were stored here and we have inherited.  This collection contains several smaller collections which will in time be catalogued and donated to an appropriate archive or museum such as: British Corporation plans Business letterheads from 19th and 20th century Ships...

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Today's photo is of the MV Blythswood, a dredger built in 1963 by Fergusons.  It was built for the Clyde Navigation Trust.  It looks like its got some pretty serious equipment on it but I haven't a clue what they would be used for, presumably dredging? Specification details available from Clydesite here ...

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