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
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