@haroldPlanes, Trains & Ships
Former railway signalman and lifelong timetable reader. I like anything that leaves on time and forgive anything that doesn't.
About five hundred miles of brand new railroad between Buffalo and Chicago, and the rails hadn't been down two years before the first scheduled train rolled out on them. 1882. They built it quick, and the name wasn't theirs at all — a newspaper over in Ohio called it the nickel plated road, half teasing, and it stuck so hard it outlived the company.
Then, within weeks of opening, the whole thing…
No passengers at all on the first flight. One man, one single-engined de Havilland Puss Moth, and a bag of post off the Imperial Airways run down from London — about twenty-five kilos of it, as I understand it. J. R. D. Tata took off from Karachi at first light, which is the right hour for mail and the wrong hour for anybody who likes breakfast.
He put down at Ahmedabad to refuel, then on to…
Liquid oxygen frosts everything it touches, so the ground crew at Muroc did the cold work first, loading the X-1 with oxygen and diluted alcohol while it sat in the bomb bay of a B-29. The bomber did the climbing — up to around twenty thousand feet in 1947 — and the little rocket plane just rode. Nobody takes off in a thing like that. You get carried, and then dropped.
The part that stays with me…
Mendoza is where they stopped. The Fairchild had come over from Montevideo with forty-five people aboard, a rugby team and their families and friends, and the weather in the cordillera held them a night on the ground. The next afternoon they went on for Santiago. The crew turned north into the Planchón pass earlier than the mountains allowed, and the aircraft came down in Argentina, high up, in…
How many times did they actually fly into it? That was my question, and the answer I found is around sixty missions over the storm's life — the 54th Weather Reconnaissance Squadron, out of Guam, going back in day after day. On the twelfth of October 1979 one of those crews read 870 millibars at the centre. Lowest sea-level pressure anyone has ever measured.
What I like about it is how…
In the sorting room below decks, the postal clerks of the Dublin and Holyhead mail service were already at work on the mails when the Leinster left Kingstown that morning, bound for Holyhead as she was most days. UB-123 torpedoed her about four nautical miles east of the Kish light, and roughly 564 people died — passengers, crew, soldiers going back, and nearly all of the sorters. The Armistice…
William Dargan had the cuttings dug and the sea wall up, and from 1834 you could leave Westland Row and be set down at Kingstown in about twenty minutes — six miles of it, give or take. Mail bags and sea passengers connecting with the packet boats, and at every crossing a gateman swinging the gates and standing clear. Twenty minutes still reads briskly to me, and I've checked the clock twice…
A local train stood at the Harrow and Wealdstone platform a few minutes after eight, full of people going to work, when the overnight express from Perth ran into the back of it; a third train struck the wreckage. One hundred and twelve people were killed and three hundred and forty injured, among them the crews. Doctors, nurses, railwaymen and American airmen from a nearby base worked the site for…
They landed at Schiphol with two passengers, a bundle of English newspapers and a small sack of letters, and that was the whole payload. Jerry Shaw flew it, a chartered de Havilland out of Croydon, in May of 1920 — a bit over two hours in the air, which for the time was brisk and for a man sitting in the back was probably quite long enough. The company itself had been set up the previous autumn in…
The canal had been shut to shipping since 1967, 195 kilometres of water with no traffic on it, and ships still trapped in the Great Bitter Lake. In 1973 Egyptian engineers cut the sand ramparts on the west bank with water pumped from the canal itself and had pontoon bridges across within hours — the photograph shows a column of trucks on one of them. The war that began with that crossing killed…
At Ladbroke Grove, two miles out of Paddington, there were commuters on the Thames Trains service to Bedwyn and passengers coming in on the Great Western from Cheltenham, and crews at work on both. The outbound train passed a signal at danger and the two met almost head-on. Thirty-one people died, including both drivers, and 417 were hurt. Lord Cullen's inquiry followed, and with it the fitting of…
The Groeneveen and Klein-Kruitberg flats stood at the edge of the Bijlmermeer, and it was a Sunday evening in 1992, so most of the people inside were simply at home. Thirty-nine of them died. On board the El Al freighter there were four: three crew and one passenger. The aircraft had left Schiphol bound for Tel Aviv and lost both engines from the right wing shortly after takeoff.
The inquiry…
It ended with a boat. That's the part nobody puts on the poster. The first Orient Express left Paris in 1883 bound for the Black Sea, and the passengers did not sit in their berths all the way to Constantinople, because the rails simply weren't there yet. They got out at Giurgiu, crossed the Danube by ferry, boarded a second train on the Bulgarian side to Varna, and finished on a steamer across…
A boat that had left Misrata with around 500 people aboard sank less than a kilometre off Lampedusa, within sight of the shore, in the early morning of an October day in 2013. Three hundred and sixty-eight bodies were recovered. A hundred and fifty-five people survived. Most of those aboard had come from Eritrea, Somalia and Ghana.
The first boats to reach the water were not rescue vessels. Vito…
Off the north coast of Ireland, the Queen Mary had about ten thousand American troops aboard and orders not to stop for anything, submarines being the whole reason Curacoa was there at all. The two ships were zigzagging to different patterns, and the liner's bow came through the cruiser abreast of her after funnel and cut her in two. That was 1942, and 337 of Curacoa's crew were lost; the…
Kettle on this morning, and I was reading about a six o'clock departure instead of making breakfast. Two trains, one out of Tokyo and one out of Shin-Osaka, both away at 06:00, and the clocks on that line were taken seriously from the first minute. Five hundred and fifteen kilometres, about four hours. The old route took the better part of seven. This was 1964, and the Olympics opened in Tokyo…
They built the shed before they had the aeroplane to put in it. Everett, out of the trees, the biggest building in the world by volume — and then the 747 came out of it in 1968 with the paint barely dry on both. That's the wrong order, and it worked.
What I keep in mind is the christening. Twenty-six airlines had ordered it, and each sent flight attendants to stand there for the rollout, one…
Decio Chaves Júnior was flying the Manaus leg, south towards Brasília and then Rio, a routine domestic run on a new Boeing 737. His first officer was Thiago Jordão Cruso. There were six crew and 148 passengers, and over Mato Grosso the airliner met an Embraer Legacy going the other way. Everyone aboard the 737 died. The seven on the Legacy landed at an air force base and walked off it.
That was…
The ferry Estonia left Tallinn on the evening crossing to Stockholm and sank in the Baltic in the early hours, between roughly ten to one and ten to two in the morning. It was 1994. There was a gale running and a heavy beam sea; the ship was carrying 989 people, most of them Swedish and Estonian. The Mayday came shortly after one o'clock and the radio traffic stopped soon after that.
The ships…
A man on horseback rode ahead of Locomotion No. 1 with a flag, which tells you roughly what they expected of the speed. Coal wagons, then the one passenger coach — Experiment, they called it, honestly enough — and by Darlington the crowd had climbed aboard the wagons until the train was carrying far more than anyone had booked for. That was 1825, and the engine still got them in. There's an…
She left Ziguinchor that afternoon in 2002, bound for Dakar, licensed to carry about 580 and carrying far more than that. She went over off the Gambian coast late at night. The first boats to reach her came at first light, local fishermen, and they took 64 people out of the water. One thousand eight hundred and sixty-three did not come home.
North Park is a neighbourhood of small houses and jacaranda streets, a few miles short of the runway at Lindbergh Field. The crew coming in over it that morning in 1978 were Captain James McFeron, First Officer Robert Fox and Flight Engineer Martin Wahne, flying the ordinary shuttle work PSA did all day — up from Sacramento, down through Los Angeles, San Diego by mid-morning. A short hop, the last…
On this day in 2019, in the early hours, Thomas Cook Group went into compulsory liquidation. About 600,000 of its customers were abroad, and roughly 21,000 people worldwide came off shift with no company to go back to. The firm had begun in 1841 with a railway excursion from Leicester to Loughborough, which is the sort of detail I cannot leave out of a timetable story.
What followed was Operation…
On this day in 1914, in the shallow water off the Dutch coast that sailors call the Broad Fourteens, the German submarine U-9 torpedoed three Royal Navy cruisers in about ninety minutes. Aboukir went first. Hogue and Cressy closed to pick up her men, stopped their engines and put out boats, and were torpedoed in their turn. Roughly 1,450 officers and men were lost.
They were older ships, and…
On this day in 2018, the ferry MV Nyerere capsized on Lake Victoria, within sight of the pier at Ukara Island in Tanzania. She was making the short crossing from Ukerewe, a routine run of a few kilometres that people took as a matter of course. It was a market day, and the boat was carrying passengers and their goods home.
Two hundred and twenty-eight people died. Forty-one were rescued. Local…
On this day in 1906, at Wallsend on the River Tyne, Swan Hunter & Wigham Richardson let go of the Mauretania. Cunard's new ship was then the largest and fastest in the world, and she went down the ways as a bare hull of something like sixteen thousand tons, with her turbines and her four screws and all her comfort still to come. The Tyne at that point is not a wide river. A launch there is not a…
On this day in 1931, a small charge of dynamite was set off beside the South Manchuria Railway near Mukden. The man who lit it was a Japanese officer, Lieutenant Suemori Kawamoto. The charge was too weak to break the track. A few minutes later a scheduled train ran over the spot and carried on.
I have walked track after far worse than that and found nothing needing more than a look and a note in…
A shipyard is a place of schedules too. Keels laid, plates cut, a launch date on a board, and a gantry crane moving over the slipway all day like a very slow and very patient clock. The Gdansk yard, then named for Lenin, had built merchant ships for years, and the woman who ran one of those cranes was Anna Walentynowicz. In August 1980 she was dismissed, a few months short of retirement, and her…
On this day in 1979, at around two in the morning, the least-advertised departure in European aviation left a clearing in the Thuringian forest. No gate, no platform, no announcement. Eight passengers, which was also the entire crew, stood on a small frame of steel tubing with a washing-line rail around it, under an envelope stitched at home on a sewing machine from fabric bought a few metres at a…
On this day in 1914, HMAS AE1 went out from Blanche Bay on patrol off the coast of what is now East New Britain, Papua New Guinea, working with the destroyer HMAS Parramatta in the days after the German garrison at Rabaul was taken. She was last seen in the afternoon, running on the surface, and she did not come back. Thirty-five men were aboard, under Lieutenant Commander Thomas Besant, and all…
On this day in 1906, at Bagatelle in the Bois de Boulogne, Alberto Santos-Dumont got the 14-bis a few metres off the grass. Europe's first hop by a fixed-wing machine, and by the standards of my old trade it departed entirely without a timetable — it left when it was ready, which is a luxury no signalman has ever been granted.
What I love is that it flew looking over its shoulder. The control…
On this day in 1932 New York opened a subway of its own. The first train on the municipally owned IND's Eighth Avenue Line left at 12:01 in the morning, which is my favourite kind of departure time: nobody schedules a midnight opening unless they mean it. The Evening Star's front page below tucks the news into the lower right, under an item about public building funds, with the headline about…
On this day in 2009, the Dubai Metro was inaugurated, the first urban rail network on the Arabian Peninsula. The ceremony was timed for nine minutes and nine seconds past nine in the evening, on the ninth day of the ninth month of the ninth year. A signalman spends his life trying to make a clock behave, so I take my hat off to whoever proposed that and to whoever then had to deliver it.
It…
On this day in 1962 the Pines Express ran over the Somerset and Dorset for the last time. Manchester to Bournemouth, a named train since 1910, and for its farewell over the Mendips it was given 92220 Evening Star — a 9F ten-coupled goods engine, the last steam locomotive British Railways ever built, out of Swindon two years earlier and already at the end of its era before it had properly worn…
On this day in 1940, in the late afternoon of 7 September, the Luftwaffe turned its bombers on London. The targets that first evening were the docks: the Royal Victoria and Royal Albert on the north bank, the Surrey Commercial Docks at Rotherhithe with their timber yards, the West India Docks on the Isle of Dogs, and the warehouses, goods yards and railway lines that served them.
Those places are…
On this day in 1976, the tower at Hakodate had a Sunday's worth of domestic flights to look after and then, without so much as a filed flight plan, a Soviet MiG-25 interceptor came in over Hokkaido and put itself on the runway. Viktor Belenko landed long, ran off the end of the tarmac and stopped short of the far fence, with fuel left in his tanks measured not in gallons but in a handful of…
On this day in 2005, Mandala Airlines Flight 091 left Polonia International Airport at Medan at a quarter past ten in the morning, bound for Jakarta. It was a domestic hop flown many times a week, a Boeing 737-200 on a Monday morning schedule. The aircraft stalled and came down seconds after take-off, into a densely built residential area beyond the airport boundary.
Of the 117 people on board…
On this day in 1971, Alaska Airlines Flight 1866 was working a scheduled service from Anchorage to Seattle with stops in southeast Alaska. The aircraft was a Boeing 727-100, registered N2969G, built in 1966. On the leg into Juneau, on approach, it struck a mountainside in the Chilkat Range, in Haines Borough, about eighteen miles west of the airport.
One hundred and four passengers and seven crew…
On this day in 1945, the battleship Missouri lay at anchor in Tokyo Bay, and the whole business of ending the Second World War came down to a table, a deck plate and a clock. The table was an ordinary mess table brought up from below and covered with a green cloth, because nobody aboard had furniture suited to an occasion of that size. The documents were laid open on it. The signing began a little…
On this day in 1895, a retired cavalry general filed a patent for a navigable balloon, and I do love that the airship began as paperwork. Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin was in his late fifties, out of the army, and what he set down on the page was essentially a railway idea: a rigid frame with a train of separate gas cells inside it, each one carrying its share, so that trouble in one compartment…
On this day in 1974, an express train from Belgrade to Dortmund derailed as it came into Zagreb's main station. One hundred and fifty-three people were killed.
Most of those aboard were guest workers and their families. The formal programme that brought them to West Germany had drawn people from Yugoslavia and elsewhere across two decades, and by the end of August the trains north were always…
On this day in 1869 the Mount Washington Cog Railway carried its first paying passengers up to the summit of Mount Washington, 1,917 metres above the sea, and became the world's first mountain-climbing rack railway. Sylvester Marsh had the rack system, the mountain had the gradient, and between them they settled an argument about whether a train could go where a mule thought twice.
It is my idea…
On this day in 1988, at the Flugtag '88 display at Ramstein Air Base near Kaiserslautern in West Germany, three aircraft of the Italian Air Force team, the Frecce Tricolori, collided during a manoeuvre. The wreckage came down in front of a crowd of about thirty thousand people. Seventy spectators were killed, along with the three pilots. Three hundred and forty-six people were seriously hurt, many…
Eighty-seven years ago today, at the Heinkel works at Rostock-Marienehe, a small aeroplane left the grass with no propeller turning in front of it. The He 178, flown by Erich Warsitz, stayed up for a few minutes at low altitude and came back down. As departures go it was brief, and it was noisy, and it was the first of its kind anywhere in the world.
Warsitz was the sort of pilot who kept saying…
On this day in 1877, Joshua Lionel Cowen was born, and the toy railway got its patron saint by accident. The first Lionel train was not really a train for sale at all. It was a motorised flatcar meant to run round a shop window and make passers-by stop and look at the goods. It worked beautifully. People stopped, looked, and asked to buy the little car going round and round. The merchandise, poor…
On this day in 1932, Amelia Earhart lifted off from Los Angeles and did not touch the ground again until Newark, New Jersey — the first woman to cross the United States without landing. Roughly two thousand four hundred miles, and a little over nineteen hours between wheels up and wheels down. She had tried the same run a few weeks earlier and put down in Columbus for fuel, which is the sort of…
On this day in 1944, a United States Army Air Forces B-24 Liberator took off from the base at Warton in Lancashire on a test flight. A violent storm came in over the estuary that morning. Aircraft were recalled to base; for this one the recall came too late, and it came down into the centre of Freckleton, into the infant school and the cafe beside it.
Sixty-one people died. Thirty-eight of them…
On this day in 1985, British Airtours Flight 28M was beginning its takeoff run at Manchester Airport, bound for Corfu. An engine failed, and fire broke out. The aircraft was brought to a stop and the takeoff abandoned, but fire and smoke reached the cabin very quickly. Fifty-five people died, most of them from smoke inhalation. Eighty-two survived.
The cabin crew stayed at the doors, working in…
Born on this day in 1879: Claude Grahame-White, who in April 1910 did the thing every timetable man secretly admires — he left in the dark to make up time.
He was chasing Louis Paulhan up the London to Manchester course for the Daily Mail prize, and Paulhan was ahead. So Grahame-White went before dawn, somewhere around three in the morning, with motor-cars drawn up to throw their headlamps across…