Quotulatiousness

March 15, 2021

Loaded For War — The Santa Fe Railroad In World War II

Filed under: History, Military, Railways, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

PeriscopeFilm
Published 24 May 2020

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Santa Fe presents, Loaded for War. This WWII era color film presents the power of the Santa Fe railroad. While speaking of the mighty effort the trains and its myriad workers achieved during wartime, the footage is all modern and in color. The film does a great job of showing how integral our railroad system has been to the growth of these United States. “With grateful appreciation to the Office of Defense Transportation, the Army, Navy, Maritime Commission, and the shipping and traveling public, for the cooperation and genuine understanding which has made the service record here presented possible …” The film opens with a steam locomotive bearing down on the camera 1:03. The narrator speaks as the train crosses a trestle 1:10. News headlines of December 7, 1941 11:25. Steam and diesel locomotives are transformed into machines of war 1:40. Smoke fills a train yard as trains enter and are washed 2:08. A train signal shows a green light 2:25. Workers are seen in the factory 2:36. Civilians exit trains volunteering for service 2:45. A telegram is shown stating that the trainmen should, “move all available equipment to military stations without delay” 2:54. Four locomotives are shown 3:03. Crews are assigned and men work double shifts 3:45. Rail equipment is loaded by military personnel, ready to move 4:13. Flatcars are loaded with tanks and military trucks 4:52. Divisions of fighting men aboard the trains 5:09. The tanks roll down the tracks on flatcars 5:35. The wheels of war are rolling 6:14. The day by day mass movement of freight is shown at the train yard 6:48. Trains crossing country on railroad tracks 7:40. Trains service the shipyards as men work building military ships 8:00. A ship is launched 8:15. Cattle and pigs are delivered throughout the 48 states 8:37. Potatoes are tilled in the field with heavy equipment 9:00. Oranges are picked and packed in southern states 9:13. Military bombers soar through the air 9:23. Heavy machinery workers in the factories 9:48. Factories and men building artillery shells 9:55. Tanks roll off the product line and onto the railroad tracks 10:10. Locomotive struggles up a hill 10:25. Miners and their lamp hats head down the tunnels by rail 10:38. Oil fields are shown 11:15. Oil is loaded onto railway tankers 11:38. Machines digging the copper mines 12:08. The big diggers pick up 8 cubic yards of copper at a time 12:18. The railroad moves the copper to the smelters 12:31. Sulfur mines using forced steam 12:50. Sulfur is moved by train to the gunpowder makers 13:25. Logging industry is served with the railroads 14:00. Cotton and scrap metal industries are also served by rail 14:18. Old cars are being called back into use for the war effort 15:30. Locomotive number 3723 comes out of retirement by the trainmen 15:48. Various train parts are marked and taken away for repair or replacement 16:07. Men work in factories with fine-tuned machines to retool and refine old parts for new use 16:26. Old firebrick is removed and replaced 16:43. Acetylene torches are used inside the huge boilers 16:49. Huge wheels are cleaned and dipped and sprayed ready for use 17:08. Heat is used to expand the metals 17:18. Locomotive number 3723 is fully refurbished and ready for the tracks 18:05. All types of equipment need to be refurbished for the war effort 18:46. The men use heat and molten metal to reshape old parts for new use 19:00. Gears are ground with precision 19:13. The railroads motto, “let’s keep ‘em rolling” 19:24. The men work on building new track 19:35. Men using hammers to straighten out tracks 19:53. The towermen, bridge crews, conductors, station men, ticket men, dispatchers, signalmen and to the other thousands of men – give the railroad men their due 20:44. Women are also an integral part of the success of the railroad 21:07. The women work in offices but also in factories with heavy machinery and molten metal 21:21. Two women wash down a train 21:30. The wheels of war are rolling 21:40. Military men march in unison 21:47. Train caboose pulls away from the camera 22:52. A flag with 8057 turns into the American flag and waves in the breeze 23:06. The End. Santa Fe.

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March 5, 2021

The Way We Live – A Railwayman’s Film Darlington 1960

Filed under: Britain, History, Railways — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Anthony Alexandrovic
Published 24 Jul 2015

[Originally from] Tyne Tees TV

August 28, 2020

George Stephenson: The Father of the Railways

Filed under: Britain, History, Railways — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

Biographics
Published 6 Feb 2020

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August 5, 2020

Driver Experience @ Pecorama 2020

Filed under: Britain, Railways — Tags: — Nicholas @ 06:00

PECO
Published 4 Aug 2020

A look at the new driver experience courses on the Beer Heights Light Railway at Pecorama — summer 2020

July 25, 2020

Did Jerónimo de Ayanz y Beaumont invent the steam engine a century before Newcomen?

Filed under: Britain, Europe — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In his latest Age of Invention newsletter, Anton Howes investigates Spanish claims that Jerónimo de Ayanz y Beaumont beat Newcomen by a hundred years in the quest to harness steam power:

Screenshot from “Savery’s Miners Friend – 1698”, a YouTube video by Guy Janssen (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dt5VvrEIj8w)

The Spanish claimant in question is one Jerónimo de Ayanz y Beaumont, a late-sixteenth-century aristocrat and military engineer from Navarre, who from 1597 served as the administrator of the royal mines, and who invented a whole host of devices, from diving equipment and mine ventilation systems, to various improvements to mills, pumps, and furnaces. Thanks to the work of historian and engineer Nicolás García Tapia, whose biography of Ayanz came out in 2010, we now know quite a bit about this interesting inventor. The work was published in Spanish, and quite understandably was widely covered in the Spanish press. So although Ayanz has not quite become a household name in Spain just yet, he does now seem to be fairly well-known by the local “well actually” brigade (a shadowy international movement of which I am, to most people’s annoyance, a long-serving member). “Thomas Newcomen/Thomas Savery invented the steam engine you say? Well actually, I think you’ll find it was Ayanz a century earlier” — I had a quick google and discovered there were hundreds of comments to this effect.

But, actually, the story is a bit more complicated than that. The devil, as always, is in the detail, and unfortunately the press claims about the technology have become widely and erroneously repeated, apparently ignoring Tapia’s careful historical work. I even spotted a recently-published encyclopaedia of inventions that repeated the errors.

So what, exactly, did Ayanz invent? The key fact is that in 1606 he obtained a 20-year monopoly from the king of Spain for the use of over fifty different inventions, including two steam-related devices. One of these was related to getting rid of deadly mine gases, which had killed one of his friends and collaborators, and had almost killed Ayanz too. His solution was a steam injector — essentially, a steam boiler with a narrowing pipe sticking out of it, which would inject the steam into a larger air pipe. The pressurised steam, upon flowing up into the air pipe, created a powerful sucking effect behind it, thus rapidly drawing deadly gases out of the mine. (A bit like at the start of this video).

It was the second steam-powered device, however, that has become famous as Ayanz’s steam engine. Just like the inventions of Thomas Savery and Thomas Newcomen about a century later, it was designed to pump the water out of mines. Ayanz formed a partnership in 1608-11 to reopen the silver mines of Guadalcanal in Spain, which had been abandoned due to flooding, and seems to have tried to implement the engine there: he obtained rights to cut down nearby trees for firewood, for example, and exploited nearby copper, which would have been essential for making boilers and pipes. As for whether he actually got it to work, we don’t know for sure. Sadly, he died only a few years after starting the project.

But the devilish detail is in how his engine worked. Specifically, all the multiplying errors seem to have arisen from a misinterpretation, by the press, of Tapia’s statement that the engine was “very similar” to that of Thomas Savery. There are, certainly, some important similarities. Both engines, for example, exploited the expansionary force of steam. In both, steam from a boiler was piped into a water tank, forcing that water up a narrow pipe — what we might call a pushing effect. And both engines used two tanks, which alternated so that the engine would pump continuously. While one tank and was being refilled with mine water, the other would be have the steam pushing the water out, and then vice versa. So far so good. Indeed, due to the two water tanks, drawings of Ayanz’s and Savery’s devices look very similar side by side.

July 4, 2020

The birth of the steam age

Filed under: Britain, Economics, History, Science, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the latest installment of his Age of Invention newsletter, Anton Howes explores the very early steam age in England:

Why was the steam engine invented in England? An awful lot hinges on this question, because the answer often depends on our broader theories of what caused the British Industrial Revolution as a whole. And while I never tire of saying that Britain’s acceleration of innovation was about much, much more than just the “poster boy” industries of cotton, iron, and coal, the economy’s transition to burning fossil fuels was still an unprecedented and remarkable event. Before the rise of coal, land traditionally had to be devoted to either fuel, food, or clothing: typically forest for firewood, fields for grain, and pastures for wool-bearing sheep. By 1800, however, English coal was providing fuel each year equivalent to 11 million acres of forest — an area that would have taken up a third of the country’s entire surface area, and which was many times larger than its actual forest. By digging downward for coal, Britain effectively increased its breadth.

And coal found new uses, too. It had traditionally just been one among many different fuels that could be used to heat homes, alongside turf, gorse, firewood, charcoal, and even cow dung. When such fuels were used for industry, they were generally confined to the direct application of heat, such as in baking bricks, evaporating seawater to extract salt, firing the forges for blacksmiths, and heating the furnaces for glass-makers. Over the course of the seventeenth century, however, coal had increasingly become the fuel of choice for both heating homes and for industry. Despite its drawbacks — it was sooty, smelly, and unhealthy — in places like London it remained cheap while the price of other fuels like firewood steadily increased. More and more industries were adapted to burning it. It took decades of tinkering and experimentation, for example, to reliable use coal in the smelting of iron.

3D animation of an aeolipile or Hero’s engine.
Animation by Michael Frey via Wikimedia Commons.

Yet with the invention of the steam engine, the industrial uses of coal multiplied further. Although the earliest steam engines generally just sucked the water out of flooded mines, by the 1780s they were turning machinery too. By the 1830s, steam engines were having a noticeable impact on British economic growth, and had been applied to locomotion. Steam boats, steam carriages, steam trains, and steam ships proliferated and began to shrink the world. Rather than just a source of heat, coal became a substitute for the motive power of water, wind, and muscle.

So where did this revolutionary invention come from? There were, of course, ancient forms of steam-powered devices, such as the “aeolipile”. Described by Hero of Alexandria in the 1st century, the aeolipile consisted of a hollow ball with nozzles, configured in such a way that the steam passing into the ball and exiting through the nozzles would cause the ball to spin. But this was more like a steam turbine than a steam engine. It could not do a whole lot of lifting. The key breakthroughs came later, in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, and instead exploited vacuums. In a steam engine the main force was applied, not by the steam itself pushing a piston, but by the steam within the cylinder being doused in cold water, causing it to rapidly condense. The resulting partial vacuum meant that the weight of the air — the atmospheric pressure — did the real lifting work. The steam was not there to push, but to be condensed and thus pull. It saw its first practical applications in the 1700s thanks to the work of a Devon ironmonger, Thomas Newcomen.

Science was important here. Newcomen’s engine could never have been conceived had it not been for the basic and not at all obvious observation that the air weighed something. It then required decades of experimentation with air pumps, barometers, and even gunpowder, before it was realised that a vacuum could rapidly be created through the condensation of steam rather than by trying to suck the air out with a pump. And it was still more decades before this observation was reliably applied to exerting force. An important factor in the creation of the steam engine was thus that there was a sufficiently large and well-organised group of people experimenting with the very nature of air, sharing their observations with one another and publishing — a group of people who, in England, formalised their socialising and correspondence in the early 1660s with the creation of the Royal Society.

Newcomen’s Atmospheric Steam Engine. The steam was generated in the boiler A. The piston P moved in a cylinder B. When the valve V was opened, the steam pushed up the piston. At the top of the stroke, the valve was closed, the valve V’ was opened, and a jet of cold water from the tank C was injected into the cylinder, thus condensing the steam and reducing the pressure under the piston. The atmospheric pressure above then pushed the piston down again.
Original illustration from Practical Physics for Secondary Schools. Fundamental principles and applications to daily life, by Newton Henry Black and Harvey Nathaniel Davis, 1913, via Wikimedia Commons.

July 1, 2020

British Railways: Goodbye To Steam aka Railway Modernisation (1958) | British Pathé

Filed under: Britain, Economics, History, Railways, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

British Pathé
Published 13 Apr 2014

This archive footage from 1958 depicts British Railways’ journey to modernisation and the transition away from steam-powered trains.

For Archive Licensing Enquiries Visit: https://goo.gl/W4hZBv

#BritishPathé #History #Railway #Trains #BritishRailways

(FILM ID:1549.07)
Full title reads: “Goodbye To Steam”

Intertitle reads: “British Railways meet the challenge of the age of abundant power”

Angle shot, railway engine going past camera. GV Outside one of the large London Railway stations showing railway lines and train coming out of station. CU Man in signal box, pan to show him pulling levers. CU Signal going up. GV Train coming towards camera. GV Steam train. GV Aerial shots steam train. CU Man filming from plane. CU man in plane fitting equipment and then giving thumb’s up sign. GV Aerial shot, railway lines. CU Man filming from plane. Steam train going along line. SV Draughtsmen in office. CU Men looking through magnifier at a plan. CU Magnified picture of plan, zoom to show Railway chiefs seated round table with plan, among them is Sir Philip Warter. SV Elevated, railway chiefs looking at plan. CU One of the railway executives. SV Man with model of section of railway line which he places on the table and the railway executives study it. CU Sign reading “Kent Coast Electrification Widening to Provide Four Tracks”, pan to show railway line with only two tracks. GV Kent Coast line with men on bridge. SV Bridge with surveyor. CU Surveyor looking through theodolite. GV Tracking shot of men working. GV Men working at side of railway line with clouds of smoke coming from wood. CU New diesel engine. CU Sir Brian Robertson talking to train driver. CU People watching. CU Sir Brian Robertson blowing whistle. CU Int. diesel engine with driver operating controls. SV Diesel train moving out of station. CU Driver of diesel train. CU. Sir Brian Robertson sitting in carriage. LV Through window of diesel cab as train enters tunnel. SV Three engines on lines. CU Front of one of the engines with plate reading “Cornish Riviera Express”. CU Driver. SV Cornish Riviera Express in station. SV Woman taking in washing because smoke is billowing up from railway lines beside her garden. GV Cornish Riviera Express coming towards camera.

CU Front of steam train “The Bristolian”. SV along top of engine as blows off steam. CU Hand pulling chain. CU valve. GV Platform. CU shovelling coal. GV As train goes along. CU Driver of train. CU Driver. CU Fireman. CU Fire with coal being shovelled. SV Looking over coal tender. SV From driver’s cab of train going under bridge and out the other side. CU Driver. GV From driver’s cab of railway lines with another steam train. SV Int. class for instruction of diesel engine drivers. CU Lecturer talks about metal object. CU Men looking at machinery. SV Royal Scot in station. CU Driver of Royal Scot. GV Activities on platform in which Royal Scot is standing. GV Royal Scot leaving station. GV Building with sign, “English Electric Co. Ltd. Preston”. GV Int. of workshop showing men working on armatures. GV Ext. of building with “Vulcan Locomotives” painted on wall. GV Int. of workshop showing men working on railway engines. CU Man working inside railway engine. GV Workshop. SV Diesel train in station. CU Driver of diesel. GV railway lines in front of train as it moves along. SV Int. dining car in diesel train with attendant pouring coffee. GV Looking through cab window of railway lines in front of train as it goes under bridge and straight past station. CU Glass panel in door with “York Signal Box, Strictly Private”, door opens. SV Man sitting at control panel of box, he reaches over to controls. CU Man’s hands working controls. CU Plan on wall showing different lines and points. CU Hand pushing buttons. CU Signals. CU Point on lines. GV Steam train along lines. CU Train in museum. CU Compartment of old train. SV Ancient train “Locomotion 1828”. SV Diesel Locomotive. CU “Deltic” written on side. GV Deltic. GV Train in station. Various shots in Deltic carriage. SV Coal trucks. SV Railway worker attaching pipe to train. GV Calder Hall Nuclear / Atomic Power station. GV Electrical pylons and cables. GV Diesel train “Sir Brian Robertson” in platform with crowds. GV Crowds. SV “Sir Brian Robertson” unveiled by Mr Grand, General Manager of the Western Region of British Railways. SV Crowd. SV Sir Brian Robertson by train. CU Sign “Sir Brian Robertson”. GV The “Sir Brian Robertson” leaving Paddington Station. SV Steam train letting out smoke. CU Signals. GV Steam train. CU Train over the points. GV steam train leaving clouds of smoke.

BRITISH PATHÉ’S STORY
Before television, people came to movie theatres to watch the news. British Pathé was at the forefront of cinematic journalism, blending information with entertainment.

June 29, 2020

The End of the Line

Filed under: Cancon, History, Railways, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

NFB
Published 2 Sep 2015

This documentary short offers a nostalgic look at the steam locomotive as it passes from reality to history. In its heyday, the big smoke-belching steam engine seemed immortal. Now, powerful and efficient diesels are pushing the old coal-burning locomotives to the sidelines, and the lonely echo of their whistles may soon be a thing of the past.

Directed by Terence Macartney-Filgate – 1959.

January 1, 2020

The Day The Gauge Changed

Filed under: Business, Economics, History, Railways, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 02:00

The History Guy: History Deserves to Be Remembered
Published 16 Jun 2018

The History Guy remembers the 1886 Southern Railroad Gauge Change, an important moment in railroad history.

The photographs used in the episode are Public Domain images from the age of steam. As photos of actual events are sometimes not available, I will often use photographs of similar events and objects for illustration.

The economic analysis mentioned in the episode is available here: https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/ite…

Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/TheHistoryGuy

The History Guy: Five Minutes of History is the place to find short snippets of forgotten history from five to fifteen minutes long. If you like history too, this is the channel for you.

Awesome The History Guy merchandise is available at:
https://teespring.com/stores/the-hist…

The episode is intended for educational purposes. All events are presented in historical context.

#railroad #ushistory #thehistoryguy

December 7, 2019

Bryan Donkin, 19th century inventor, amateur public relations whiz and independent lobbyist

Filed under: Britain, Government, History, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the latest installment of Anton Howes’ Age of Invention newsletter, he recounts the story of Bryan Donkin and his efforts to save innovators from excessive government interference:

One of the major arguments of the book I’m writing is that inventors’ talent for public relations and lobbying was one of the main reasons that Britain — rather unexpectedly — was the place that experienced an unprecedented acceleration of innovation.

The greatest of these lobbyist-inventors has to be Bryan Donkin, a nineteenth-century mechanical engineer. As an inventor, Donkin improved threshing machines, dredging machinery, and a variety of other tools. He invented the steel pen, dabbled in chemistry, as well as phrenology, and was one of the key people responsible for mechanising the production of paper. He became best known for improving and commercialising tin cans for food. Mechanised paper-making and canned food, having both been invented in France, were perfected in Britain by Donkin. He was the archetypal tinkerer.

Bryan Donkin (1768-1855).
Photographer unknown via Wikimedia Commons.

But it’s as a lobbyist that I think Donkin was truly exceptional. His experience has important lessons for all would-be supporters of invention today.

In April 1817, Donkin read in his newspaper that there had been a disaster in Norwich: the boiler aboard the steamboat Telegraph had exploded. Of the boat’s twenty-two passengers, eight had died immediately in the blast, and another six had eventually succumbed to their wounds. It was a shocking tragedy. And for Donkin, doubly so: in addition to the human death toll, the explosion threatened to kill off one of the era’s newest and most exciting inventions.

Although some of the first trials of steamboats had taken place in the 1780s, it wasn’t until the turn of the century that they began to be practical. By 1817, the first commercially successful steamboat service in Britain, Henry Bell’s Comet, had been chugging its way up the River Clyde between Glasgow and Greenock for only five years. And Londoners like Donkin had only just seen their first steamboat, Margery, when she puffed her way into the Thames in 1815 (the following year, after becoming the first steamboat to cross the Channel, she reinvented herself in Paris as Elise). Thus, by the time of Telegraph‘s explosion, the passenger steamboat had only just been born. There was a very real risk that it would be banned.

Fortunately, however, the steamboat had Donkin in its corner. His immediate reaction upon reading about the explosion was to gather some of his engineer friends — Timothy Bramah and John Collinge — and set off for Norwich to view the explosion site for themselves. As the first expert engineers on the scene, they then took control of the narrative about the explosion. Donkin and his friends went straight to Norwich’s MP to ask him to set up a parliamentary select committee to look into the disaster. And while they waited for the politicians to be assembled for the committee, they held a series of public meetings about the disaster at the Crown & Anchor Tavern — a favourite haunt of London’s engineers. There, they had a chance to rally the rest of the profession and get their story straight about what must have caused the explosion.

December 5, 2019

The New York Central in 1928-1929

Filed under: History, Railways, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Speed Graphic Film and Video
Published 22 Dec 2017

More early sound film from the Fox Movietone News archives in the University of South Carolina’s Moving Image Resource Collection.

It shows New York Central trains in the Hudson River valley in 1928 and 1929. Scenes include:
0:10 K3 Pacifics passing through Peekskill station.
1:10 View from the tender as a fast freight crosses the bridge at Castleton.
2:30 Looking up at the bridge as a train passes over.
2:42 Another ride over the bridge at Castleton, this time seen from the caboose. There is a brief glimpse of NYC 0-6-6-0 No. 1300, the only locomotive with that wheel arrangement on the railroad.
4:54 View from a bluff above the Weehawken yards. (Thanks to Vincent Zablocki for the ID.)
5:30 Street operations on the West Side Line in Manhattan when it still ran at street level. Locomotives seen include No. 595 and dummy No. 1904.
7:33 A look at the drivers as a K3 Pacific passes by the camera.
8:21 Passenger trains on the main line, seen at a distance. These are editing “trims,” so the shot ends just as the train gets near the camera. These were probably taken at Breakneck Mountain.
11:19 Departing passenger train at a grade crossing. Again, this is a “trim,” so the beginning of the shot is missing.

June 14, 2019

How Streamlining Changed Trains Forever | Spark

Filed under: Britain, History, Railways — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Spark
Published on 25 Jun 2018

Steam trains leapt forward in speed once Nigel Gresley decided to make them slick, sexy and streamlined.

In the 1930’s, Britain had a railway network that was envied around the world. The East and West Coast railway companies fought to transport passengers from London to Scotland in the shortest time possible.

Originally broadcast in 2003. Content licensed by DRG Distributions. Any queries, contact us at hello@littledotstudios.com

June 4, 2019

Railroad Town

Filed under: Cancon, History, Railways — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

NFB
Published on 7 Aug 2017

This short documentary is a delightful trip back to an era in which railroad was king.

Directed by Don Haldane

About the NFB
The National Film Board of Canada produces and distributes documentary films, animation, web documentaries and fiction. Our stories explore the world we live in from a Canadian point of view.

Watch over 3,000 films for free on NFB.ca – http://bit.ly/YThpNFB
Want more? Sign up for our newsletter – http://bit.ly/YTnwNFB

Connect with the NFB online:
Twitter: http://bit.ly/yttwNFB

January 14, 2019

Rerailing a Steam Locomotive

Filed under: Railways — Tags: — Nicholas @ 02:00

Fort Wayne Railroad Historical Society
Published on 26 Oct 2016

Watch as our volunteer crew made up of veteran railroaders, experienced mechanics and new recruits wrangle our 200-ton steam locomotive back on the rail. This was no easy way to spend a Saturday. For those curious, the boiler was filled with compressed air to help move the locomotive and the 765 was temporarily renumbered “767” to honor the engine’s unique place in history: http://fortwaynerailroad.org/2016/08/…

July 30, 2018

Forgotten History: World’s Biggest Black Powder Cannon – a 100-Ton Gun

Filed under: Britain, History, Italy, Military, Technology, Weapons — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published on 10 Jul 2018

http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons

The largest muzzleloading black powder cannons ever built were the Armstrong 100-ton guns which saw service with the Italian Navy and with British coastal fortifications on Malta and Gibraltar. They were purchased by the Italians first, to outfit a pair of new super battleships, each vessel having two turrets with two of these guns in each. To avoid being outclassed, the British ordered two guns for installation to protect the Grand Harbor of Malta and two more to protect Gibraltar. Today one survives at each location, and we are visiting the Rinella Battery in Malta, which was built to house one of the Maltese guns.

These guns had a maximum range of 8 miles, and was capable of piercing 15 inches of iron armor at 3 miles. It had a 17.7 inch (45cm) bore fired a 2000 pound (900 kg) shell with a 450 pound (200kg) charge of black powder. The gun itself weighed approximately 102 tons, and with its cradle and a shell the whole assembly came in at 150 tons.

Aside from the massive scale of the piece, the most interesting part of its design is actually the loading machinery. Because of the titanic size of the gun and ammunition, Armstrong designed a fascinating hydraulic reloading facility which makes up the body of the fortress in which the gun is set. A pair of steam engines drove a pair of hydraulic accumulators, which provided hydraulic pressure to move the gun on its carriage, to douse the barrel after firing, to hoist ammunition into position for loading and power a 60-foot (18m) ramrod to mechanically ram the charge and shell into place. Two mirror-image reloading galleries under the fortification operated in turn, giving the gun a sustained rate of fire of 1 round every 6 minutes – at least until its 120-round barrel life was exhausted.

I am grateful for the Malta Tourism Authority’s assistance in helping to make this visit and video possible, and would also like to give special thanks to Simon, our awesome reenactor guide!

If you enjoy Forgotten Weapons, check out its sister channel, InRangeTV! http://www.youtube.com/InRangeTVShow

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