A GREAT FEAT OF BRITISH ENGINEERING
Lake Baikal in Siberia is the world's deepest and oldest lake, and contains 20 per cent of all the fresh water on the planet. It is 640km (400 miles) long and has an average width of 48km (30 miles). In the 1890s, before a linking line was built around its southern shore, it was a formidable obstacle to the completion of the Trans-Siberian railway, especially since its waters froze for five months of the year.
So the Armstrong Mitchell company of Newcastle upon Tyne created an ice-breaking train ferry to carry passengers, carriages and trucks across the lake between two sections of the railway. The vast ferry, named Baikal, was built in Newcastle and then dismantled; the different sections and pieces were marked and shipped to St Petersburg, from where the parts, which weighed almost 3,000 tons in total, were transported in about 6,900 packages by rail and river to Irkutsk, the largest town on the western side of the lake. The items were then carried by pony-drawn sledges to a village on the lake shore, where the ship was put together again and launched in June 1899.
The amazing impact created by the Baikal was captured by the British journalist John Foster Fraser, who in 1901 travelled from Moscow to Vladivostok, and recounted his exploits in The Real Siberia.
'Presently there came steaming down the lake a huge four-funnelled vessel, white painted, by no means pretty, and rather like a barn that had slipped afloat. That was the Baikal, one of the most wonderful vessels in the world, coming back from Misovaya, and carrying two goods trains fully laden. If necessary she could carry three trains and eight hundred passengers.
'The Baikal passed sufficiently near for me to appreciate her great size, and as the fore gates were open I caught a glimpse of red-painted goods waggons. The ship is of over 4,000 tons, close on 300 feet long, and has nearly 60 feet beam. She has three triple expansion engines of 1,250 horse power, two amidships and one in the bow. This power is required in ice-breaking. She will break through ice 36 inches thick, and her bow is made with a curve, so that when the ice is thicker she can be backed and then go full steam at the ice, partly climb on it with her impetus, and then crush it with her weight. This means that the Baikal sometimes takes a week to cross the lake.'
Destroyed around 1920 during the Russian Civil War, the Baikal is remembered in Siberia but virtually forgotten in Britain. Why don't we celebrate our great feats of engineering? Could disdain for the engineer – originally fostered by middle-class opponents of the industrial revolution, who turned their noses up at horny-handed sons of toil – have anything to do with it?
