Dockside Cranes

[Michael Hodgson]

On 29/09/2021 at 22:22, Pacific231G said:

Hi Phil

This is the "Schwimmkran Saatsee" or Saatsee floating crane. It is now a museum piece but was built in 1919 by Schiffs- und Maschinenbau AG Mannheim and used from 1919 to 1989 in the Kiel Canal to replace lock gates and other heavy objects. Hoists, windlasses and capstans are steam driven and the boiler is still coal fired.  Unlike most such cranes- and they were and to some extent still are very common in large ports- the Saatsee is not self-propelled. It is now in the Museum der Arbeit in Hamburg. and is still fully functional. The port of Hamburg has a numbder of more modern floating cranes (not that modern- one of them was built in 1941 for the German navy)

 

Floating cranes were and are used by ports for handling their own heavy lifts such as lock gates, boilers and other bulky pieces of dock machinery as  well as heavy items of cargo that can't be handled by the dockside cranes.  and they could move easily around the port to do that.  If a ship had say a few locomotives as deck cargo it made far more sense to bring up a floating crane to offload them than to move the ship to a fixed heavy lift crane on the dockside. They might also be used in ship repair yards to lift heavy machinery such as main engine components though such yards did tend to have large fixed cranes for that sort of thing.

The three hooks would be able to handle progressively heavier items further in without overbalancing the crane but they'd also enable an awkwardly shaped or long load to be  supported at each end. That would be useful for lifting something like a main engine crankshaft or a section of the propellor shaft but also for unusually large pieces of cargo though such as locomotives not transported by specialist heavy lift ships with their own lifting equipment. 

  This is one of the first of the 1340 141R Mikados built by various North American builders for SNCF being unloaded from the liberty ship SS Harold O Wilson in Marseilles on 10th December 1945 and clearly being handles by one of port's floating cranes.

 

 

A prototype for a big lump of expanded polystyrene shoved in the cab to protect the boiler fittings!

[DGO]

13 hours ago, Pacific231G said:

 

The Town Quay cranes do look rather more like the Airfix model (which isn't a typical dockside crane) but I've long wondered whether Airfix based their model on a specific crane or whether it was (as I strongly suspect) essentially a freelance design. 

Over the years I came to the conclusion that every Airfix Kit I built was actually based on something but not every kit was produced from original engineers/architects drawings. In the Airfix/Dapol Cranes case I suspect that a lot of simplification came in, the basic shape looks ok from a distance but the legs would have almost certainly been an open lattice gradually narrowing towards the turntable, the jib would have been finer and there would probably have been further mechanisms at the top or back of the cabin, However it was a kit intended for something like 8 years plus to be used with a toy train sent rather than an accurate model and as such fills the role quite well. Faller do a not dissimilar crane now being sold as part of Gaugemasters Fordhampton products but of course it will be H0 scale 

[Michael Crofts]

If anyone is interested, I have added some more dockside cranes to my Flickr albums.

The collection of albums is here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/119194913@N05/collections/72157715225807028/

The new additions are in the Prince William ( Plymouth) album and the Exeter quayside album.

Edit: Royal William Yard, Plymouth

Edited October 27, 2021 by Michael Crofts
Correction

[Siberian Snooper]

Pendant mode on, just to put you straight, it's Royal William Yard, or the Victualling Yard. Pendant mode off.

 

 

[Corbs]

27 minutes ago, Siberian Snooper said:

Pendant mode on, just to put you straight, it's Royal William Yard, or the Victualling Yard. Pendant mode off.

 

 

Pedant mode on, it's pedant. Pedant mode off.

 

[Corbs]

I feel bad about that last comment so hopefully this contribution is better. It was posted by Nick Howes on the Bristol Railway Archive page - the Great Depression of the 1930s has come to Bristol but it does offer a good view of the various equipment - note the rooftop cranes (I think that may be X/Y shed on the left with W/V in the centre), pillar-mounted crane (the pillar for this is still there today outside the Lloyds Amphitheatre), small travelling cranes outside what became the Arnolfini (rails are still extant) and the mighty Fairbairn steam crane. 

The corporation granary stands where L and M shed are now.

 

[TT-Pete]

14 hours ago, Siberian Snooper said:

Pendant mode

 

Just hanging around.

[Pacific231G]

21 hours ago, Corbs said:

I feel bad about that last comment so hopefully this contribution is better. It was posted by Nick Howes on the Bristol Railway Archive page - the Great Depression of the 1930s has come to Bristol but it does offer a good view of the various equipment - note the rooftop cranes (I think that may be X/Y shed on the left with W/V in the centre), pillar-mounted crane (the pillar for this is still there today outside the Lloyds Amphitheatre), small travelling cranes outside what became the Arnolfini (rails are still extant) and the mighty Fairbairn steam crane. 

The corporation granary stands where L and M shed are now.

 

That's a fabulous image Corbs but the lack of ships is very noticeable, the depression or just the move to Avonmouth?  Colour images from that time are particularly welcome and this one appears to have been very well graded. Do you happen to know its source?

The thing that always seems to me salutary for our modelling efforts is just how vast an acreage of sidings there were, even in secondary yards, when everything went by rail.

[Corbs]

Believe it or not I think it is a B&W image that's been colourised by AI according to Nick (the original poster) - he said it is from the Britain From Above collection. Apparently the total lack of ships is down to the depression. Note no locos or even people!

[paul59]

Hi all, just spent an hour or so going though the thread, I didn’t realise I was so interested in dockside cranes! Some great pictures. Unfortunately, the links to the photos didn’t work for me, my laptop is probably to blame.

I’m just in the process of laying down the track for a dockside diorama based on Southampton Ocean Terminal. Although I’m a long way from building a Stothert and Pitt crane, what would be useful now though is the gauge of the S&P track.

From some grainy images I have I can estimate the dimensions, be nice to know what they really are without a trip down to Southampton.

Regards

Paul

[Michael Hodgson]

The links to photos probably isn't your laptop - they are much more likely broken links

[Siberian Snooper]

You can probably measure them on Google Earth, zoom in as close as you can before the image gets to fuzzy or it turns into Street View and use the measuring tool across the top of the screen, the accuracy is usually within a foot or so.

 

 

[paul59]

3 hours ago, Michael Hodgson said:

The links to photos probably isn't your laptop - they are much more likely broken links

Just odd that 99% don't work, shame..

[paul59]

48 minutes ago, Siberian Snooper said:

You can probably measure them on Google Earth, zoom in as close as you can before the image gets to fuzzy or it turns into Street View and use the measuring tool across the top of the screen, the accuracy is usually within a foot or so.

 

 

Excellent, I didn't know there was a measuring tool, Cheers.

[AlfaZagato]

@paul59There was an issue a couple of months ago with RMWeb.   Their servers failed catastrophically.   All images before a certain point were lost.    Replacement is up to the individuals who posted the pictures.   Those dead links are images that were lost.

[BernardTPM]

Actually what was originally said was that attachments in messages after a certain date (June 2021 or thereabout, I think) were lost and earlier ones would be restored. So far that hasn't consistently happened.

[phil_sutters]

5 hours ago, Siberian Snooper said:

You can probably measure them on Google Earth, zoom in as close as you can before the image gets to fuzzy or it turns into Street View and use the measuring tool across the top of the screen, the accuracy is usually within a foot or so.

 

 

I have yet to find the measuring tool on my screen. Measuring the rail tracks and then the crane tracks, on the screen, the latter look to be about 17.5 foot gauge.

[Pacific231G]

It had never occured to me that there might have been a standard gauge for this type of portal crane but it's possible there was- at least for the standard general cargo working types produced by Stothert and Pitt. It would make sense as you'd not want to have to relay all that inset track if you replaced some cranes. Certainly the "modern" DD cranes suplied to the PLA  (the ones using tubular steel that look like War of the World Martians) look to be using the same track gauge as the older S&P cranes.

It would be interesting to compare this across a number of different docksides and, fortunately, the tracks tend to remain in place after the cranes have been demolished. 

Edited July 26, 2022 by Pacific231G

[phil_sutters]

2 hours ago, AlfaZagato said:

@paul59There was an issue a couple of months ago with RMWeb.   Their servers failed catastrophically.   All images before a certain point were lost.    Replacement is up to the individuals who posted the pictures.   Those dead links are images that were lost.

I have posted so many photos, of my own and Dad's albums, that there is no chance that I could remember where they all appeared. I have been slowly rebuilding my own personal albums, here on RMweb, adding to them and updating them. If anyone spots one of my contributions to threads, where the links don't work, and in my experience very few do, I shall be happy to upload a replacement if I am sent a PM.

[Siberian Snooper]

9 hours ago, phil_sutters said:

I have yet to find the measuring tool on my screen. Measuring the rail tracks and then the crane tracks, on the screen, the latter look to be about 17.5 foot gauge.

 

 

The ruler is indicated by the red arrow.

 

 

[Andy Hayter]

11 hours ago, BernardTPM said:

Actually what was originally said was that attachments in messages after a certain date (June 2021 or thereabout, I think) were lost and earlier ones would be restored. So far that hasn't consistently happened.

 

I suggest you read the rest of the thread where it is clearly stated that there is a dispute with the former system owner with an implied suggestion that the other missing pictures are not readily available to be restored.  

[BernardTPM]

I have read the thread, but that is was what was originally said and so far there has been no definitive statement (only suggestions/hints) to the contrary. Even on 20th July when the question was raised Andy Y. said the matter was not yet certain, but "will give a better explanation in due course when I've established some more information".

[D River]

20 hours ago, paul59 said:

Hi all, just spent an hour or so going though the thread, I didn’t realise I was so interested in dockside cranes! Some great pictures. Unfortunately, the links to the photos didn’t work for me, my laptop is probably to blame.

I’m just in the process of laying down the track for a dockside diorama based on Southampton Ocean Terminal. Although I’m a long way from building a Stothert and Pitt crane, what would be useful now though is the gauge of the S&P track.

From some grainy images I have I can estimate the dimensions, be nice to know what they really are without a trip down to Southampton.

Regards

Paul

 

The Stothert and Pitt drawings for DD2 cranes I have (one set in the Stothert and Pitt Book) show different gauges. The Port of London 5 Ton DD2's are shown at 13'6" gauge which is enough to straddle a wagon.  However, it does seem to have varied port to port as the gauge in Southampton always seemed wider to me wondering about the docks, the photos below are around the QE2 terminal which Google Earth shows as circa 17'6"...

[petethemole]

The original cranes at Ocean Dock, also by S&P, were these

 

S&P also supplied the cranes for Town Quay, which I mentioned earlier during discussion of the Airfix kit.  Southampton Harbour Board controlled the Town Quay and Royal Pier area west of the LSWR-owned Docks, which belonged to the Borough.

 

Edited July 27, 2022 by petethemole

[paul59]

22 hours ago, AlfaZagato said:

@paul59There was an issue a couple of months ago with RMWeb.   Their servers failed catastrophically.   All images before a certain point were lost.    Replacement is up to the individuals who posted the pictures.   Those dead links are images that were lost.

Ah right, that explains it.

Thanks

Paul.