Modern Equivalents of Brigs

From the seventeenth into the nineteenth centuries, alongside wooden waggonways, wooden sailing brigs enabled bulk transport of coal from NE pits down the East Coast of England, the North Sea being the motorway of the time.   Currently, the world's largest wind farm (3.6 GW, 6 million homes) is being developed on the Dogger Bank, about 100 miles directly east of the Durham coast.   The output is already being brought by undersea cables to Teesside.   Several specialist ships are needed for construction & maintenance, and NE ports are part of the new industry.

Three new SOVs (service operation vessels) for the Dogger Bank wind farm, tied up at North Shields

Shields, On the River Tyne

The Tate's JMW Turner's paintings are on country-wide tour, with "The Fighting Temeraire" recently on display at the Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle.   In support of this, JMW Turner's "Shields, on the River Tyne" is featured at TWAM's South Shields Museum.   The painting is interesting in showing coal handling & its transition from shovelling from keels to using waggons with bottom doors on drops (lowering waggons out over the hold) or spouts (chutes to aim coal around the hold).

Shields, on the River Tyne
This painting from the mid 1820s belongs to & is fully described by the Tate 

The Last Ships

A blog post at the end of 2021 featured photos by Chris Killip, in particular the exhibition The Last Ships at the Laing Art Gallery.   I'd recommend visiting this free exhibition of photos of the final tankers being built at Swan Hunter, showing Tyneside heavy industry & its workers 50 years ago.

Propellor being fitted to the Everett F Wells c1976 at Swans.
with Hawthorn Leslie on the far bank 

The First Tyne Iron Steam Screw Colliers

By 1850, due to the expansion of railways, NE England began to lose its status as the key supplier of coal to London & SE England.   Rail-borne Midlands & Yorkshire coal vied by cost & speed, while collier sailing brigs made coal transport relatively expensive & slow.

As mentioned previously on this blog, Palmers at Jarrow re-established NE predominance by building iron screw colliers, which lowered costs, increased speed, and reduced dependence on weather.   (It took a few more years for the advent of the TIC to improve navigability & port facilities on the River Tyne, but that's another story.)

I had thought that Palmers built the first iron steam screw collier in 1852, but I am proven wrong by at least two previous ships .....