King of the Mountains

I was pleasantly surprised recently by the discovery that Google Earth has finally noticed the existence of Wales. We now have high-resolution imagery across even the darkest depths.

It has turned up a few interestingly oddball bits of information. Such as the clearly visible route of a railway line that was torn up by Beeching in the 1960s for example. You find yourself wondering where you could get a few miles of track from, and a handful of girders to replace the missing bridges.

It also cleared up a few mysteries regarding what, if anything, is in various dead spaces in town. You can see that the answer is usually either nothing, or a scruffy yard space.

I’ve probably mentioned before that Google Earth is a wonderful tool for the industrial archaeologist, as rather than risking the attention of dubious individuals in run down areas you can survey sites quite safely from home. While this is less of a problem here, many of the chunks of railway line mentioned earlier are on private land and would probably provoke a decidedly unfriendly and quite possibly armed response if you were to investigate in person.

It is never going to be an effective substitute for getting out there on the ground with a camera, but you can save yourself the trouble of spending all morning figuring out to get to a particular location only to find the site completely levelled and concreted over. I’m still figuring out if I can convert Google Earth waypoints to a more useful format, although oddly enough Google seem keen that you should pay for the Pro version of Google Earth rather than converting files. Given I’ve already bought Memory-Map this doesn’t really appeal.

Speaking of which, a good GPS is very handy. I don’t use a conventional sat nav at all. It’s easier to glance at a moving map display from time to time and you can add any data you like to it. Plus it doesn’t hector you about turning right when you’re sitting at a red traffic light. Something of a bonus I feel. It’s just like having a paper road map that’s always open on the right page and centred on your position. While it does take a bit more installation than a standard satnav I challenge any other device to hold your entire music collection and maps for the whole country in one box. 

I’d just finished writing yesterdays’ piece when I noticed the date. The 14th.

At about twenty minutes to midnight on the 14th of April 1912 the largest passenger ship then built collided with an iceberg, through a combination of excessive speed and inexperience in handling a ship of those dimensions. Less than three hours later she was gone, taking with her around 1500 of her passengers and crew.

Leave aside the suspicions voiced by one knowledgable party that the collision was not entirely as seen in the film, as while I suspect said party to be correct I’m not going over the details. What I intend to discuss is why people still remember her now, 96 years on.

The 1997 film, while burdened with a slushy, unbelievable and unnecessary "love story" has played its part. The ship was undoubtedly the real star and those gorgeous interiors were a good deal less wooden than some of the human cast. To the generation that probably took their first date to see the film it’ll always be memorable, even if there are some major chunks of it that don’t make sense.

It is just as likely that the loss of the Titanic is seen as a loss of innocence, the end of an age when people were certain that technological progress could solve all problems and that gentlemanly conduct was guaranteed. But that overlooks one thing. The Lusitania

In 1915 the Cunard liner Lusitania was torpedoed without warning by a German submarine. She sank in eighteen minutes with scenes just as terrible as those that must have occurred aboard Titanic in her death throes. At the time, rules had been agreed to cover attacks on merchant shipping which required that an attacker give passengers and crew time to abandon ship before sinking it. The lack of any pretence of complying with this rule shown here could be seen as a major part of the end of what might be described as "gentlemanly warfare", which perished along with so many people between 1914 and 1918. From a military history viewpoint this one event had huge consequences, widely suspected as it is of having helped to draw the USA into the war. Yet today only historians and ship enthusiasts are likely to know about her.    

More recent incidents, including those where no loss of life occurred, always have one thing in common. When the TV crews find the most hysterical and over-excited person they can to interview, the phrase "it was just like Titanic" will always come out at least once. I’ve even heard it used by people who were stuck off Dover for a few hours due to adverse weather. Grow up. It was a bit lively, but nobody died. I was out in a Force 8 on the old Brittany Ferries Quiberon and it wasn’t that bad.

But despite the lack of mental strength of some people it’s interesting to see that the first thing they think of is Titanic. Not the Estonia, despite the fact that as a ferry that sank in some of the worst weather seen it would be closer to the reality of what they had just experienced. Nutty conspiracy theories aside, Estonia has never had the same recognition apart from a few news reports and the odd documentary on the investigation. This is odd in many ways, as the sinking occurred during the era of rolling news and footage exists of rescue helicopters plucking survivors from battered rafts which you would expect to jog memories.

In 2012 there will be another upsurge in interest as the centenary is marked. The obvious question is what will happen afterwards. Will we see a surge of interest in 2015 remembering the Lusitania, 2053 remembering the Princess Victoria? I somehow doubt it. For one reason or another Titanic will be thought of long after the others have been forgotten. 

I have, in the past, spent many happy hours either in or wandering outside the erstwhile Bristol Industrial Museum. So I’m an industrial archeology nerd. There are worse leanings.

Recently the museum was closed, to be redeveloped as a new "Museum of Bristol". This rang alarm bells, or more fittingly blew whistles. See, the first proposal involved razing their original 1950s-built transit shed to the ground and replacing it with some steel and glass monstrousity. In other words, in the name of museums they intended destroying the sole surviving original warehouse in the City Docks and replacing it with something as lacking in architectural merit as the offices that have sprung up on the other side of the harbour. Thankfully a concerted campaign by enthusiasts saw these plans replaced with ones keeping the original fabric. On my last visit a sizable chunk had disappeared from the middle of the building, it can but be hoped that this is simply a case of replacing unstable concrete.

But this isn’t just about one museum. It can be applied to many.

BIM was almost entirely staffed by volunteers. Overalled men and women who loved the old machinery they demonstrated and who evidently took great delight in displaying their "toys" to the public. Anyone who played with Meccano or Lego Technic as a child surely feels the urge, when confronted with a large and complex piece of machinery, to see if it works like their models did. I know I’d jump at the chance to drive the cranes, boats and trains in their collection, if I lived closer I’d be volunteering there every weekend.

You can somehow tell that a new museum will be stuffed with "interpretation" and trendy exhibits. Nothing too complex to frighten the terminally dim, and heaven forbid the place be full of old stuff that might scare little Wayne and Waynetta away. A place where having power cables slung across from the building to allow the cranes to operate would be unthinkable, as the look of the place is far more important than living exhibits. Those cranes did live, too. They whirred, clunked, and hummed as anyone lucky enough to get a guided tour found out. No electronics, just cunning electro-mechanical engineering of the sort that fell out of favour when celebrity culture hit.

A proper museum, to my mind, is stuffed with interesting old stuff with labels saying what it is. It’s staffed by people who spend the rest of their spare time up to their armpits in rusty machinery and WD-40. It doesn’t need to try to be "relevant" or any of the other buzzwords. People who are interested will seek it out, and with the right calibre of staff anyone wavering will go away enthused. It cannot be anything other than relevant, as without the exhibits contained therein the world as we know it today would not have existed. If the majority of people are more interested in Big Brother than the equipment that enabled their country to export and recover from the last war, then this is surely a damning verdict on modern society rather than any criticism of the museum.

As Garmin seem less than enthusiastic about offering a USB charge/data cable for the otherwise excellent Foretrex 201, I decided to do something about this. Note that this device will probably void your guarantee and I take no responsibility for any adverse effects. It worked for me however!

Firstly, obtain your parts. A cheap USB A-B device cable and a 0.7mm/2.5mm DC power plug (I bought mine from Maplin - their code L43AY). Cut the "B" end off the USB lead and strip about 1cm of the outer insulation from the now bare wire. You’ll find four wires wrapped in foil and wire shielding.

Pull the shielding away and separate the wires. Two of these are 5v power, the other two are for data transfer. Cut the data wires and shielding away, then bare the ends of the live and neutral wires. In my cable these followed conventional wiring colours with the live being red and the neutral black. If in doubt, check with a multimeter. Pinouts for USB plugs can be found in many places on the internet.

Before you go any further, dismantle the new plug and slide the housing over the cable. Make absolutely sure that this has been done before soldering the new plug in place, as failure to do so can lead to scorched fingers, swearing, and more work than you really need to do.

The Garmin charging cradle is wired so that the centre contact of the plug is the live, and the barrel neutral. Solder the wires in place - red to the terminal in the centre, black to the terminal at the edge. Then bend the cable grip "horns" to clamp the wires in place. Note that they won’t go around the outer insulation! After checking that there is no chance of a short circuit, screw the housing onto the plug and give it a test.

All done. You can now leave that bulky mains adaptor at home and charge your GPS from your laptop (admittedly you will need the laptop power supply, but you still have one less adaptor to lug about). This should also work with those devices that plug into a car cigar lighter socket and provide a USB socket for charging MP3 players.

In 1957 a proposal was made by the head of the Netherlands state railway, F.Q. den Hollander to assemble a network of luxury express trains linking European states. The name given to these trains still reeks of glamour: Trans Europ Express.

Initial participants were West Germany, France, Switzerland, Italy and the Netherlands. Later Belgium and Luxembourg would join. There were numerous innovations intended to speed these expresses; passport control (in pre-Schengen Europe passports were still checked at each border crossing) would take place on the move, the trains would use diesel power to avoid problems with differing electrical power supplies, only first class accommodation would be provided and the trains would be of the multiple unit type to avoid time-consuming shunting at terminals. The first services began on 2^nd June 1957.

In 1974 the network reached its peak, and began to die off. German expresses were renamed “EuroCity” or EC. The TEE name retreated to the realms of the enthusiasts and nostalgia-ridden. And yet, the concept has not died. We are currently seeing electric trainsets built that are able to handle multiple voltages to allow through running into neighbouring countries. The destination boards may no longer say TEE, but anyone who witnessed the original TEE services would not see a huge difference. Meanwhile, Deutsche Bahn’s museum section has an immaculately restored electric loco and a set of matching coaches that operate charters as the TEE Rheingold, much as they would have done originally. It has even attracted the attention of musicians, the German group Kraftwerk titling an album “Trans Europ Express”.

At this point you may be wondering why this is important. There is in fact a very good reason. A network like this offers the best chance of dissuading people from using short-haul air travel and thereby reducing the heavy carbon dioxide emissions from aircraft, to say nothing of the noise pollution and vapour trails caused by aircraft. While a train still uses energy, it requires far less power to keep a TGV at cruising speed than an aircraft. The time taken to cross Europe may be longer, but surely we should consider whether in this age of cheap web-based teleconferencing we really need to travel long distances on a regular basis anyway? If people managed to do business in 1957 with just reliable rail links then we should have no trouble now with the incredible strides in technology since that era. We simply need to move away from the idea that we can travel anywhere in Europe in an hour for comparative pennies before we are forced to by rising oil prices.

So on the 2^nd of June raise a glass to F.Q. den Hollander and the TEE. Their best years have yet to come.