The Steamtug Blog

Even the singer Glenn Campbell thought this place was nice! After a week of plant process design reviews in Houston, the big concrete jungle, I detoured past the famous Johnson Space Centre and down to the coast to Galveston Island. Beautiful architectural buildings, coffee shops, a vintage sailing ship and a great railway museum. It’s got the lot!

Johnson Space Centre

It was 1970, and the Apollo 13 space mission to follow up on Neil Armstrong’s effort of playing golf on the moon, Jim Lovell and his crew, despite great hardship caused by limited power, loss of cabin heat, shortage of potable water, and the critical need to stop at a servo to use the restroom, caused Jim to utter those famous words, “Houston, we have a problem“. Those very words reverberated around the mission control building at the Johnson Space Centre, just south of downtown Houston. I stopped by as part of my bucket list tour to see the space centre first hand. I looked around the visitors centre, and saw some interesting things, but mostly screaming school kids running amok everywhere and I was thinking why these brats were not in school. Then I realised they were with their teacher and were actually at school. Wow, it was better than any of the school excursions I ever did. There was some mock ups of the inside of the space shuttle, some nice models of lunar landers and some nerdy experiments using air movement and balls for kids to explore, so I got done with that quite quickly then wondered what was next. There was a long cue near the back exit for a little train ride. I joined the cue, only to have one of the attendants come down the line announcing that it would be nearly 2 hours before we got on. Many people left the cue, and I asked if it was worth the wait. He rolled his eyes and said he thought it was worth it but the decision was up to me. I pondered… it was probably just a ride out through the garden to see their collection of rockets that had been used on missons. I decided to wait. Oh, boy… I was to find out later that I had asked a really dumb question. It was amazing and worth waiting much longer if needed to see this. We were taken into the mission control centre, with all the little 286 computers lined up where the ground crew controlled the Apollo missions. Obviously not used today, it was a great museum that encompassed some of mans greatest achievements.

Galveston

Its a long skinny island tucked into the coastline of Texas and facing out into the Gulf of Mexico. It relies on tourism, shipping and the inside passage is a safe haven for oil rig repair work as part of the huge oil industry in the gulf. There must have been money here as evident by the beautiful buildings seen in her streets. Even the downtown are was a bit run down but still had strong character. The railroad used to come down across onto the island here also, but stopped coming many years ago. The old station was turned into a great railroad museum and the terminus style, end of line station makes a great venue for this. They had some nicely restored passenger carriages, some of the old SantaFe diesels and a few interesting steam locomotives. All static unfortunately. I found this great steam crane rusting away out in the weather, and the visitors just walk past it without paying much attention. But with memories of my old steam shovel at Lake Goldsmith, could resist the temptation to climb up and figure out every nut and bolt. She has an oil fired boiler much smaller than the steam shovel. Then I figured she probably just does a bit, then sits and waits. Not like the steam shovel working constantly. It only has the 1 big strong engine. With a system of dog clutches, you can engage 3 different drives on the “A” frame. The small hook, the large hook, then another winds the drum to pull up the jib. Another gear drives a vertical shaft that reaches down to a pinion gear that engages the rack under the cabin to slew her around. No method for self propulsion. Great… I got that all worked out. I sent these pictures to the boys in Australia at the steam club, to suggest I bring her home and get it going. Old Warwick Turner in Echuca wrote back saying “No need to bring her home, I have one already this “is” self propelled that you can start work on anytime your ready. Hmmm, just confirms my theory that Warwick really does have one of everything in his collection! Well I found some old coffee shops for my morning breakfast, a great English style pub for dinner, and a “San Francisco” style wharf area for lunch, with the nearby restored square rigger “Elissa”, an oil rug museum, navy ship USS Stewart (diesel electric destroyer escort) and submarine. Lots to see, but I had to get the ferry back to the main land. Ah, if only work didn’t get in the way of a good time!