The MV Bali Sea was a rare rail ferry that operated between Coatzacoalcos, Mexico and Mobile, Alabama, carrying up to 115 fully loaded railcars across the Gulf of Mexico. Instead of crossing land borders, trains from Mexico’s Ferrosur line were rolled directly onto the ship using a linkspan ramp system supported by two vertical towers. These towers allowed for precise height adjustments to match the ferry deck with the shore tracks, ensuring smooth loading regardless of sea level changes.
Originally launched in 1981 as a heavy-lift ship, she was converted into a rail ferry in 2000 to serve the CG Railway route. The Bali Sea offered a 900-mile maritime shortcut for rail cargo, cutting transit time and avoiding congestion at U.S.–Mexico border crossings. After two decades of service, she was retired in 2021 and replaced by larger, faster ferries, but her role in connecting two nations with seamless train-to-sea transport remains a landmark in intermodal logistics.
MS Jan Heweliusz sank on 14 January 1993, between about 04:10 and 05:12 (UTC+1) as the ship was crossing the Baltic Sea, en route from Świnoujście, Poland, to Ystad, Sweden. Out of 65 passengers and crew, 56 died in the disaster, making it the largest peacetime maritime disaster in Polish history. - Wikipedia
The show is a big production showing us the disaster as it unfolded and the feeble rescue efforts. Then we move on to the inquiry where the court is trying to pin the blame on the captain and the crew when the blame might be better placed on the state agency running the ferry company. We get a couple of good speeches from people during the inquiry, not that it makes any difference. The state maintains their stonewall defense.
The Soviet Union collapsed in 1989, so I imagine many of the old state agencies were still in operation due to inertia.
This boat uses the same power transmission gear as a diesel locomotive. They have diesel engines generating electrical power that is fed to two 350 kilowatt electric motors that turn the propellers. Similar to a hybrid car, but no giant battery pack. This has a couple of advantages over a conventional drivetrain. There is no mechanical gearbox, so the engine does not need to be aligned with the propeller shaft.
Odd feature of Google Maps - notice the light blue circle. It is not the Arctic circle, it is very much smaller. The Arctic circle is at 66° 34' N, this circle is about 20 degrees farther north. Clear the search box and the circle disappears.
The Russians have been digging for coal on Svalbard since the 1920s. I thought I put up a post about it before, but maybe not. Svalbard has appeared here before.
Plan for the French chain boat, La Vill de Sens (1850) Click image to embiggenate Note driving wheels in the center and the path of the chain over the deck. From the looks of things, it may have a two speed transmission.
In season 3, episode 4, of The Witcher, our band of heroes catches a ride on a chain ferry. That's a new one on me. I've ridden the Canby cable ferry and I've heard of big chains being stretched across rivers or harbor entrances to keep enemy ships out, but I haven't come across a chain ferry. There undoubtabedly were some in the bad old days, but the ones that are still around have all been converted to using steel cables and nobody seems to have preserved any of the old stuff. I did find one drawing of a chain boat (above) which was used for traveling up and down rivers, not just across them. They followed a chain that lay on the river bed. They picked up the chain at the bow, passed it down the length of the boat and dropping it off the back end. In the middle of the boat they had a couple of wheels driven by a steam engine that engaged the chain and propelled the boat along.
The ferry in the show crosses the north sea, a pretty fair distance since you can't see the far shore. You might think, like me, that this is unlikely, but the ancients dig all kinds of amazing things. It might not have been a good idea, but there isn't any reason it couldn't have been done, especially since this is a fairy tale. Oh, and there's no sign of an engine and there isn't much in the way of payload, but you know, maybe it's the off season. All in all an impressive prop for such a brief appearance.
Screen shots from the show on Netflix:
The ferry at the dock. No sign of the far side.
A closer view of the ferry at the dock
A view down the length of the boat. You can see the big idler wheel in the center with Ciri sitting dangerously close by.
The drive and idler wheels and the chain. Ciri and Geralt in the background.
A close up view of the ferry.
A close up of the monster's tail that has just been severed by the chain wheel. Monster bleeds green blood.
I'm watching this video about a ferryboat that used to operate in Liverpool, crossing the Mersey river. They mention that Gerry & the Pacemakers did a couple of shows on board. They also wrote the tune:
GERRY & THE PACEMAKERS FERRY 'CROSS THE MERSEY ROY STORNAWAY
It's not the same boat, but it is operating in Liverpool, and what's that big impressive building on the far side of the river?
Doh! That's why it's called Liverpool, it's where they pool all their livers, or some such, I have no idea, but I never made the connection between liver and Liverpool, and given that there is a big, fancy building on the Liverpool waterfront called The Royal Liver Building, I think there must be. Let's see what Wikipedia has to say:
Opened in 1911, the building is the purpose-built home of the Royal Liver Assurance group, which had been set up in the city in 1850 to provide locals with assistance related to losing a wage-earning relative.
Hmmm, doesn't sound like we're dealing with liver like you get from the butcher shop, more like someone who is alive, a liver if you will. Sounds awkward, but the English are always coming up with new awkward phrases, even if they are a century old. So Liverpool is basically an insurance company. People who are alive (livers) pool their money to deal with calamities.
We're not done yet. This evening we're watching Black Money Love, a Turkish murder mystery series set in Istanbul (naturally). We're several episodes into it. In one scene, our trio of dedicated coppers get food from a sidewalk stand and what do they get? Liver! I don't think I've had liver since I left home a zillion years ago. I certainly don't buy it, and I would have to study up on cooking it. I don't even remember what it tastes like. I have vague impressions of both being good and bad. I'll have to ask Osmany about it.
My daughter's father-in-law is a doctor on Treasure Island. It has some other Spanish name that I can never remember. Rumor has it that it was the model for the island in the book Treasure Island. I liked the book, so that's what I call it. Treasure Island is part of Cuba, and Cuba, being run by the commies, is impoverished. So I was thinking that the next time somebody goes to visit, they should take a package of medical supplies, you know, stuff that would actually be useful as opposed to trinkets and cute clothes and other such clap-trap as people see and want.
But then I realized that the contents of the package were immaterial compared to the difficulty of getting it there. You can fly to any number of cities on the main island, but getting to Treasure Island is kind of a pain. There is a ferry (a French catamaran, above), but space is limited, tickets are hard to get, you might have to wait a day or two to get on board.
There is a semi-regular air service, but the plane is old and small and not all that regular. With demand as high as it is, they obviously need more capacity of some sort.
Now the first world solution to this kind of problem is to buy a ship or an airliner from an established manufacturer and then extract a continuous stream of cash from the sale of tickets. On one hand this makes good economic sense, but on the other, Cuba is impoverished. I'm not sure ticket sales would be enough to pay first world prices for first world equipment. I don't know how they paid for the ferry. Maybe somebody gave it to them. Or maybe I know nothing of communist finance.
What Cuba, and every other impoverished nation needs, is an industrial base so they can build their own stuff. Building airplanes might be just the ticket. Obviously they wouldn't be able to compete on the world market, because the world market wants stuff that is certified safe by the great government bureaucracies that certify such things. But for the parts of the world that are not part of the first world, a home grown aircraft might be just the ticket.
When I first started writing this diatribe, I was going to go off now on how it should be a simple matter for Cuba, with its highly educated workforce, to go into the aircraft manufacturing business. I mean the biggest part of building an airplane is putting the fuselage together and that's just a matter of sheet metal and rivets. Back in WW2 we put a nation of farmers to work building a glorious fleet of aircraft, and by glorious I mean enormous. I suspect that the USA produced on the order of 100,000 aircraft during WW2. So it really shouldn't be that difficult for Cuba to start building their own aircraft, especially since most of the 3rd world could use a nice cheap, sturdy, small airplane.
But then I read about the fastest ship on the block. Turns out it is made in Tasmania, an island off the south Coast of Australia, an island with no industrial base, no coal mines, no bauxite mines, no giant power plants. How could they possibly hope to compete on the world stage? What's wrong with these people, don't they know you can't do that?
Supposedly one of the reasons the USA has been so successful is because of its industrial might, and we were able to develop that because we have big iron and coal deposits. Tasmania doesn't have any of that. I'm pretty sure their aluminum is imported, maybe even from China, and they were still able to develop a successful industrial scale operation. And it is successful, they are selling their boats all over the world.
Maybe I'm thick, but I can't see any reason why Tasmania should be so successful and Cuba should be such a frigging disaster, other than the fact that the Castro brothers are made-men in the mafia founded by Stalin. It's enough to make you a commie hatin' redneck.
Update January 2023 Replaced a stinky link with better one and a dead link with a good one. See the whole story here.
“This is certainly the fastest ship in the world,” said Incat managing director Kim Clifford. “Of course there's a few speed boats that could surpass 58 knots, but nothing that could carry 1,000 passengers and 150 cars, and with an enormous duty-free shop on board.”The Francisco is the world's first high-speed ferry that uses liquefied natural gas (LNG) as primary fuel.
I did a little checking, and for its size it may very well be the fastest ship ever. The US Navy built some hydrofoils but they only got up to around 45 knots.
The SS Badger is the last coal fired steamship operating on the Great Lakes. It was originally built to carry railroad cars, but that came to an end in 1990. A couple years later it was refitted to carry passengers and cars and has been doing it ever since.
The Arthur E. Atkinson, out of Frankfort, Michigan, a similar vessel loading rail cars back in the day.
All vehicles, whether railcars or automobiles, are loaded from the back, which means the ship needs to back into port. It also means long vehicles, like semi-trucks, also have to back on. I don't know about cars. Having a hundred people trying to back cars down the length of this ship sounds like a bad idea.
Semis seem to be a regular part of their business, but I don't think it's enough to pay for the ship all by itself.
The Badger has two 8,000 horsepower engines. The crankshaft of each engine has four throws, each one holding one connecting rod that supports two pistons (picture at left): a small diameter, high pressure piston at the top and a large, low pressure piston in the middle.
I think they must have automatic machines to feed the coal to the boilers. The Badger burns 50 tons of coal a day in its four boilers, and while a black gang of four could do it by hand (remember 16 tons?), I don't think that's how it's done.
One ton of coal contains the energy equivalent to 12,000 horsepower for one hour. Steam engines are only about 30% efficient, so each 8,000 horsepower engine would consume 2 tons of coal an hour. It is about 60 miles across the lake from Ludington, Michigan to Manitowoc, Wisconsin. The Badger cruises at about 15 knots, so the trip across the lake one way takes about four hours.
2 tons x 2 engines x 4 hours x 2 trips across the lake = 32 tons per day.
The engines are overkill for the light loads the Badger is carrying these days (compared to railcars), so they probably are not running at full steam. During the summer she makes two round trips a day, so three-quarter duty times 32 tons times twice a day, that's right around 50 tons.
Stu put up a post a couple of days ago about a ferry sinking off Zanzibar. At the time I was just starting on The Fifth Woman by Henning Mankell, and one of the first things that comes up in this book is the sinking of the ferry MS Estonia just ouside of Tallin, Estonia, back in 1994. I remember reading about the Estonia disaster when it happened. In particular there was an article in a hydraulic engineering magazine about a new kind of lock for sea doors. Unfortunately, there were no pictures of the MS Estonia, so it was very hard to visualize what went wrong. Now, however, with the wide reach of the internet, we have pictures at our beck and call. Even the Wikipedia article has one, though it's not very good. This one is better.
From the Wikipedia article: "The bow visor was under-designed for the conditions Estonia was operating in (the ferry was designed for coastal waters, not open regions like the Baltic Sea)..."
I had imagined the doors to be big slabs fitted to the sides of bow. Being as the whole bow is the door, I can see how repeated pounding by the waves could have easily stressed the latches to the breaking point. They would, after all be hitting the door up and back, the same direction it would move when opening. Not a good idea for rough seas.
Update April 2015: Reading about deep sea diving, I came across another very similar ferry disaster from just a few years earlier. This was the sinking of the MS Herald of Free Enterprise in 1987 just outside of port in Belgium.
Update January 2018. When daring duaghter went to Africa a few years ago she took a ferry to Zanzibar, possibly the same one. Count my blessings.
Update December 2019 removed some extraneous html format tags.
My friend Marc has returned from the Caribbean and joined his family's business "Wavelength References" down in Mulino, Oregon. Before he went on his giant sailing adventure, he was a regular at our Thursday lunch. The gang was curious about just what this new business venture was all about, so last week we went to Marc's house for lunch and a tour of the business. Quit a bit of science and technology, not to mention a little voodoo, packed into a very small space. One of the most impressive pieces of equipment was a black box, about the size of shoe box, that is used to splice fiber optic strands togther. Fiber optic fibers are not very big. Not only that, but there are several outer layers protecting the inner optical glass fiber that actually carries the signal. This center fiber is only a few microns in diameter. It is covered by a glass sheath that brings the thickness up to a couple of thousandths of an inch. Then there is a plastic cover over that. The picture shows a unit similar to the one Marc uses. The little screens show a magnified image of the end of the fiber, before, during and after fusing the prepared ends of the glass fibers together.
On the way back Jack and I elected to take the Canby Ferry. It had been 20 years since the last time Jack had ridden it, and I did not even know there was one, so it was a bit of an adventure. It is a small ferry. It can hold six cars. It takes no more than five minutes to cross the river, so a round trip probably takes it about 20 minutes. There is a a steel cable stretched across the river, below the surface of the water. The ferry has a couple of big guide pulleys that are attached to this cable, so the operator does not have to steer. All he has to do is run the motor and the ferry follows the cable to the other side. If you look over the side you can see one of the pulleys hanging off the upstream side of the boat. The cable is at least an inch thick, about like a ski lift cable. The cable is attached to the shore with some chain and a come-along. When we were getting on, the operator was busy cranking on the come-along, tightening up the cable. The river was flowing pretty good, so I imagine the cable was getting a little strain. While I was looking for pictures of the ferry today I found a notice that the ferry is closed due to high water.
The ferry uses electric motors for propulsion. There are wires strung across the river maybe 50 feet in the air. There is a little shuttle that slides along these wires and is connected to the ferry with a cable. The shuttle picks up the electric current and sends it to the ferry thru this cable. The cable also pulls the shuttle along the wires. The fee was $1.25.
