Blog at the Ballast

I will be back from my holiday in New York today and to link up with that have decided to include this image of the City of Rome built by the New York Shipbuilding Company in 1911.



She was built for the Merchants & Miners Transport Company as the Suwannee and sold to the Savannah Line in 1917.

This afternoon the steam locomotive the Tornado will be making a visit to Glasgow Central.

• It will arrive from Crewe at 14:23 and will stay on the platform for about 30mins before going to Mossend Yard to be serviced.  
• It will be back in Glasgow Central for 17:40 before leaving for Crewe at 18:23.

The Tornado is a steam locomotive completed in 2008 as an example of the peppercorn class A1 and built to the 1940s design.

Image from here

Today's image is of the puffer Stormlight which I got confused with this one built by Ferguson Shipbuilders, Port Glasgow in 1937.

I was wrong and thanks to the magic of Flickr, I now know that it was built by Yarwood's of Northwich in Cheshire in 1957.



She was built for Ross & Marshall and more details about the vessel and its career are available here.

Slightly delayed by all the doors open day preparations, I've spent this afternoon scanning and uploading the next batch of Dan McDonald photographs - the 'Ss'.

There are 22 new photos, including this one which was the oldest ship uploaded - an 1866 paddle tug called SAMSON

 

Enjoy!

We had a wonderful 53 people battle through the miserable weather in Johnstone yesterday to visit us.  Thank you to everyone who came to see our display.

We had over 60 items out on display which have all been put back now so we've got about 50 metres of table space to work on again.  It was a lot quicker putting it away then setting it up!

It was really nice to have people in to get a preview of some of the collections that we work on and it got us all enthusiastic about processing some of the ones further down our list - particularly the British Corporation ship plans which are a complete mish-mash of vessel types but full of interesting things.