Waiting for a ship that will never come.....

[gordon]

This poor little electric crane is sitting looking out over the River Forth, waiting for another coastal freighter full of ammunition and torpedos to come up-river from Rosyth to the ammunition storage bunkers at Bandeath, just down the river from Stirling.

It's been stripped of anything portable, but the mechanisms are largely intact. Unfortunately 'they' have also stolen the track that connects it with the shore - it is sitting on the only two lengths or rail they didn't steal.

Multimap link should be below, and I'll post another couple of images too.

http://www.multimap.com/map/browse.c...=1&scale=25000

[gordon]

[gordon]

[gordon]

[dodgenut]

hi G

will it not fit in your shed?

Rick

[gordon]

The problem is it's about 100 yards down the riverbank from anywhere you can stand, never mind put a big crane to lift it out with. You can see the pier on the Multimap link in the first message.

£5000 would probably hire a crane big enough to recover it, or if you had a crane barge sitting on the Forth you weren't using and could let me borrow? It would have to be low enough to get under the Kincardine No-Swing Bridge though, which was welded shut about ten years back.

It's actually a very nice little item, almost certainly WW2 period and possibly even before that.

I certainly would have it if I could get it, but would probably donate it to the local railway preservation place. I'd guess it's about ten or fifteen tons as it sits, so too heavy to lift without serious machinery.

G

[David_Hayward (RIP)]

It is actually much older than that as this crane was built by Cowans Sheldon in 1927 as a batch produced for the Admiralty office
I have appended a picture of order/works number 5329, which along with 5330 was supplied to HM Dockyard Portsmouth. Order 5326 and 5328 were allocated to HM Dockyard Chatham, and 5328 to HM Dockyard Rosyth. Other cranes to this pattern were supplied to the Admiralty office in 1930, 1931 and 1937.

Hope this is of interest.

The attached picture features on Page 64 of my book Carlisle’s Crane-Makers – The Cowans Sheldon Story.

[gordon]

Do you have a rating for it David? It doesn't look that heavy a lift capacity to me but can't tell.

Gordon

[David_Hayward (RIP)]

It's a 15-tons capacity crane apparently, weighing about 15 tons when built, so could be lifted?

[gordon]

That would be about right for the weight of the assembly I think.

The boom stay cables would take about 3 tons each, so I reckon the lift rating would be five tons or less, and being on a relatively unstable railway wagon mounting it would be couterweighted to left even that.

As I understand it the whole area was an ammunition store which also handled a lot of torpedos, so maybe a couple of torpedos or shells at a ton each would be the load it handled.

There is space on the wooden pier for two railway spurs, so the crane would sit next to the edge and reach out over the ship deck, then swing 120 degrees or so and place (NOT drop....) the load on a conventional railway wagon which would ferry it to one of a few dozen storage bunkers which are all spaced a couple of hundred yards apart.

I didn't realise till I got into it that it was electrically powered, but now that I know that the drum on the front end of the truck chassis makes sense as that would be the cable reel for the power cable.

15 tons eh! Unfortunately it is 100 yards or so from any solid footing, so something large enought to lift 15 tons at that radius is probably not on my hire list...

Thanks for the info.

G

[David_Hayward (RIP)]

Gordon, some of them had a conductor rail system, which the cranes picked up juice from. Some were also diesel-powered. Apparently the Admiralty also had some in their Tobacco Plantation and Rum distillery on Jamaica!

[gordon]

There was nothing electrical left inside - it had all been run off with, but I'd guess it was powered from a cable reeled off the front and connected to a shore-side distribution point - there was some evidence of distribution stuff on the solid ground that had been stolen too.

It's interesting to re-look at the photos and see the cab is offset to the left (driving position is in left front of cab) Presumably it would work down a standard railway guage track, tunnels, etc, as long as the boom was down. The extreme rear where the chevrons are painted is presumably a counterweight of some sort.

If the lottery kicks in I'll give it a home. Not too complicated to rig up a small diesel as a power source I'd think.

[Tony Smith]

Originally posted by David_Hayward
Apparently the Admiralty also had some in their Tobacco Plantation and Rum distillery on Jamaica!

Would that have been a hardship posting for some poor unlucky Sailor?