Engineering Wonders of the World
Volume I

68 ENGINEERING WONDERS OF THE WORLD. plished in transporting and rebuilding a vessel of 4,200 tons displacement at such an out-of- the-world place as Lake Baikal. An overland journey of nearly 5,000 miles had to be made before the material arrived at its destination. The whole enterprise is without precedent, as an undertaking of such dimensions had never before been attempted. The commencement of the vessel dates back to the laying of the keel in Walker Shipyard in January 1896. There the vessel was erected, and all the different parts were The First carefully marked and num- bered, each part having a Parts distinguishing mark to avoid confusion. To simplify further the sorting of components at the other end, one-half of the vessel was painted white and the other black. We may mention here that the ship consisted of nearly 6,000 separate parts, and the machinery of over 1,200 parts, their combined weights totalling over 3,000 as it was now The Parts reach Russia. » tons. In July of the same year the material for the hull was all shipped on board the s.s. Ardrishaig and landed at St. Petersburg. In the following December the s.s. Berg un- loaded the machinery and boilers at Revel, too late in the season to reach the capital. The material was all carefully checked on the Russian side before being loaded up on wagons, prior to the commencement of the second stage of the journey by rail to the farthest accessible point on the Siberian Railway. The loading up and stowing occupied a considerable time, owing to the very unusual and awkward shape of many of the parts. In several cases special trucks had to be provided ; and before a start could be made, quite two months elapsed while Russian formalities were being gone through, and the Customs satisfied them- selves that none of the numerous packages contained contraband goods. A Curious Blunder. erected first, After the material left the builders’ works, the cost and risk of transport lay with the Siberian Railway, so that nothing more was heard of it in England until after the writer arrived in Krasnoyarsk in August 1897. Kras- noyarsk was at that time the official termina- tion of the railway ; and although the large and magnificent bridge across the Yenisei was not nearly completed, unofficial trains were running for a short distance on the other side of the river, principally occupied in carrying rails for the construction of the line, but of no practical utility for any other purpose. The material for the Baikal had by this time all arrived at Krasnoyarsk, and a small pro- portion of it had already been dispatched thence on its journey to the lake. The Russian officials re- sponsible for its dispatch evi- dently came to the conclusion that the machinery would be and the ship built round it afterwards, as they had carefully sent off part of the machinery as the first consignment! The material was all lying on the banks of the Yenisei in a confused mass, plates and angle bars, boilers, parts of machinery, pipes, cases, and all sorts of fittings intermixed, many of them embedded in the mud and hardly recognizable. A very pretty state of things for the poor engineer ! A complete list was therefore given to those in charge of the transport, enumerating the order in which the different parts were to be dispatched, so as to ensure as little stoppage as possible in the progress of re-erection ; but later on the writer found to his sorrow that little or no attention had been paid to these instructions. It was at this stage of the transport that those responsible for it began to recognize the many difficul- ties to be overcome before the different parts reached their destination. Transport by road was out of the question ; the railway was not billed to reach Difficulties of Transport.