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What on earth did engineers on steam ships do?

91K views 298 replies 130 participants last post by  jamesgpobog 
#1 ·
Ladies and Gentlemen,

There is an ever-decreasing number of people alive that served as engineers on steam ships. It occurred to me when reading some recent threads that I have never seen an account describing the duties of ships engineers and that, unless someone writes one, this information will be lost forever.

By this I mean an account describing in enough detail that someone who has never been on a steam ship would understand them, things like the following:

(a) What did ships engineers do just to keep the ship moving along - e.g. from stoking to responding to bridge commands
(b) What standard maintenance tasks had to be performed on a daily/weekly/monthly or whatever basis
(c) What kind of running repairs were undertaken when things went wrong
(d) Risks and dangers

The key point in all this is to bring alive for future generations what it was like to work as an engineer on a steam ship.

Is anyone aware of a work that does this already? If not is there someone out there who is interested in writing it all down before it is too late? I am not necessarily talking about publishing a book, but maybe a personal account that could be made available to interested parties. I would be pleased to help anyone wishing to take this on in terms of editing, formatting, and generally tarting the final product up but only a real engineer could provide the raw materials.

What do you think - is anyone interested?

Regards,

Brian
 
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#298 ·
COLD IRONING is now-a-days slang for the requirement in some ports to run on shore power for emission control. Rather different from 'normal' shore power which might supply hotel services and is of limited capacity. When the vessel has to work cargo or, as is probably the case in passenger vessels, the 'hotel' load is a large part of the normal load then the COLD IRONING connection must have a capacity approaching (or perhaps exceeding) normal sea load.

I have a sneaking suspicion that most of these which can draw and connect enough to support the KW load will be unable to supply sufficient short circuit current to allow safe working of the protection scheme. Ship generators must by Class be capable of supplying 3 times FLC for (forgotten, 3)? seconds. A luxury many shore networks cannot reach due to the distance between supply and load, many old urban networks have 'grown' to the point where a short circuit simply melts the conductor between house and substation because the cable impedance is such that there is insufficient current available to 'blow' the domestic 'MAIN' (supply organsation's) fuse.
 
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