How to float your boats
QUESTION ponds left?
Are there any model yachting
The model yachting pond next to St Peter Port harbour, Guernsey, has been described as the finest ever built.
Opened in 1887 by the young daughter of the then Lt Governor, John henry Ford elkington, it was named the Victoria Boat Pond and was intended for ‘the instruction in model yacht pond sailing, as well as for the amusement for all classes of society’. The cost of £905 was raised by subscriptions, donations and a States (local government) grant of £300. It took 604,416 gallons to fill by a crane emptying 300 gallons at a time.
In the early 1930s, a proposal to replace it with a bathing pool was abandoned.
Before the evacuation of island children in June 1940 and five years of Nazi occupation, I was among those young and old who enjoyed many hours of boating pleasure at this wonderful venue.
Len Roberts, Hemel Hempstead, Herts. GOrLeSTON-ON-Sea, Norfolk, model yachting pond was built in 1918 and is still used by a local club.
Derek Wright, Gorleston-on-Sea, Norfolk. There is a lovely boating lake at eaton Park, Norwich. The park was opened in 1928 by the then Prince of Wales.
Linda Johnson, Norwich, Norfolk. The large model yachting pond at Dovercourt, essex, is used all year round. a flock of swans are resident there.
Next to it is an equally large boating lake for summer users wishing to hire a rowing boat. The ponds were built in the 1920s with Government grants designed to help ease unemployment.
Stan Beecham, Dovercourt, Essex.
QUESTION Why don’t electric vehicles have roof solar panels so they can self-charge on a sunny days?
a SOLar panel could be mounted on a car roof, but would it be worth it?
Under ideal conditions, a bright sunny day at noon, a 6ft by 3ft panel could produce 0.3 kW per hour.
Car roofs are flat and not tilted to capture the optimum amount of the Sun’s energy. also, it is not always noon and it is definitely not always bright and sunny. Let’s assume the best figures.
a modern electric vehicle has a battery capacity from 16 kW (Mitsubishi) to 100 kW (Tesla Model S) per hour. Let’s take a value in the middle of 60 kW per hour.
Charging batteries is not 100 per cent efficient, so let’s assume you need 66 kW hours to charge your battery.
With a solar panel producing 0.3 kW, you would need 220 hours of bright sunlight for a full charge.
a battery-powered vehicle demands so much more electricity than can be supplied by a solar panel that it would be impossible or uneconomic to implement.
Steve Richards, Fareham, Hants.
QUESTION Are there any railway journeys in Charles Dickens’s novels?
CharLeS DICkeNS was fascinated by technology. he often described bursts of creative writing with railway metaphors such as ‘getting up steam’ and ‘blazing away’.
a railway journey featured in his first novel, The Pickwick Papers, where he gives Tony Weller, the garrulous father of Sam, the opportunity to voice his objections to railway travel from the perspective of a stage coachman:
‘It wos on the rail...I wos a goin’ down to Birmingham by the rail, and as to the ingein — a nasty, wheezin’, creakin’, gaspin’, puffin’, bustin’ monster, alvays out o’ breath, vith a shiny green-and-gold back, like a unpleasant beetle in that ‘ere gas magnifier — as to the ingein as is alvays a pourin’ out red-hot coals at night, and black smoke in the day, the sensiblest thing it does, in my opinion, is, ven there’s somethin’ in the vay, and it sets up that ‘ere frightful scream vich seems to say: “Now here’s 240 passengers in the wery greatest extremity o’ danger, and here’s their 240 screams in vun!” ’
The railway features most prominently in Dickens’s Dombey and Son. Chapter 20 is devoted to the journey Mr Dombey takes from London to Birmingham.
Dickens repeatedly utilises onomatopoeic language to mimic the sound and feel of railway travel, for example:
‘away, with a shriek, and a roar, and a rattle, from the town, burrowing among the dwellings of men and making the streets hum, flashing out into the meadows for a moment, mining in through the damp earth, booming on in darkness and heavy air, bursting out again into the sunny day so bright and wide; away, with a shriek, and a roar, and a rattle, through the fields, through the woods, through the corn, through the hay, through the chalk, through the mould, through the clay, through the rock...’
In a famous passage he described the upheaval caused as private railway companies ripped up town and countryside to add new connections to their networks: ‘The first shock of a great earthquake had, just at that period, rent the whole neighbourhood to its centre . . .
‘houses were knocked down; streets broken through and stopped; deep pits and trenches dug in the ground; enormous heaps of earth and clay thrown up; buildings that were undermined and shaking, propped by great beams of wood.’
Dickens suffered one of the pitfalls of this rapid expansion. On June 9, 1865, he was travelling by rail from Folkestone to Charing Cross. Work was being undertaken on the line between Staplehurst and headcorn on the bridge over the river Beult and rails had been removed.
The foreman in charge of the work had consulted the wrong timetable and was not expecting a train for two hours.
The train jumped the 42 ft gap, swerved off the track and broke in two. Seven carriages plunged into the river; the others remained poised over the gap.
There were 110 passengers, of whom ten were killed and 14 badly injured. Dickens tended the injured and dying, and wrote of his anger at the incompetence that had caused the accident.
Richard Gallagher, Wellington, Shropshire.