Angara (ship, 1900)

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The Angara as a museum ship in Irkutsk (2006)

The Angara ( Russian Ангара ) is a museum ship now in Irkutsk ( Russia ) , which served as an icebreaker , tugboat and passenger ferry on Lake Baikal from 1900 with interruptions until 1962 .

prehistory

To ensure that rail traffic on the Trans-Siberian Railway in the area of ​​Lake Baikal, where the construction conditions were very difficult and route planning was therefore greatly delayed, the Russian Ministry of Transport ordered the components of an ice-breaking one from Armstrong-Whitworth in Newcastle in December 1895 Railway ferry to be delivered to Russia and then assembled on Lake Baikal. The delivery took place in June 1896, and in June 1899 the Baikal was launched at the shipyard in Listvyanka ( Russian Листвянка ).

In the meantime, the section from Chelyabinsk in the west to Irkutsk had been completed - the first train had reached Irkutsk on August 16, 1898 - and the section from the east to the south-east bank of Lake Baikal, which was built from 1895 to 1900, was nearing completion. The intermediate piece around the southwest end of the lake was still in the planning phase; its construction began in 1902 and was completed in autumn 1904. The operation of a reliable ferry connection across the lake was therefore of the utmost urgency. Since a second ship was needed to cope with the expected freight and passenger volume, the committee for the construction of the Trans-Siberian Railway ordered a second ship, an icebreaker, at Armstrong-Whitworth at the end of 1898, which would also be assembled on Lake Baikal.

Construction and technical data

The ship was built with hull number 694 at the shipyard in Low Walker, with a triple expansion steam engine from Wigham Richardson & Co. (hull number 354 there) with 1250 PSi and one screw . The components were shipped by ship to Reval and from there by train to Lake Baikal and then finally assembled in Listvyanka. Construction there began the day after the Baikal was launched . The ship was given the name Angara , after Lake Baikal draining river ran, on 25 July 1900 from the pile and was found on August 1 as an icebreaker and freight and passenger ferry service. It was 60 m long and 10.5 m wide, had a full load draft of 4.7 m at the stern and displaced 1,400 tons . The hull was made of riveted steel and had a 25 mm thick steel ice belt. The machinery consisted of four steam boilers and a triple expansion steam engine from Wigham Richardson & Co. with 1250 PSi , which drove a screw 3.5 m in diameter. The maximum speed in open water was 14 knots . The bunker capacity was 230 tons of coal, which was enough for 115 hours of operation. In addition to 250 tons of cargo in two holds with a total capacity of 653 m 3 , up to 160 passengers could be transported, 60 in the first and second class, 100 in the third. In addition, barges could be towed. The Angara had a cargo boom fore and aft to take over cargo . During the Russo-Japanese War of 1904/05, it carried up to 1,000 passengers, mostly soldiers, on one trip.

fate

The Angara on Lake Baikal (around 1901)

The Baikal made her first crossing on April 24, 1900 - with two locomotives and three wagons as well as 167 horses, around 500 passengers and around 500 kg of freight on board. The Angara began its service on August 1, 1900. The two ships now sailed twice a day between the docks in Baikal and Myssovaya . However, it soon became apparent that the two icebreakers could not maintain shipping traffic without suffering serious damage themselves in the months of January to April, when the ice cover was strongest.

Since the war with Japan that broke out in February 1904 required the fastest possible transport of troops, guns, ammunition and supplies to the Far East, tracks were laid over the ice in this extremely cold winter and the wagons and the locomotives, which were dismantled into chassis and upper parts, were taken from Horses pulled across the lake. The stretch across the ice was in operation from February 28 to March 25, 1904.

The Lake Baikal bypass from Baikal to Slyudyanka was completed in autumn 1904; the first tool train ran on September 30, 1904, and regular traffic began on October 29, 1905. Since a ferry pier had been built in Tanchoi in the meantime , the ships were able to increase the number of their trips on the 42 km long Baikal – Tanchoi route to three to four a day. For more than ten years of traffic on the ferry was with the Baikal continues but the Angara was in 1907 due to lack of demand placed .

The Baikal (left) and the much smaller Angara , 1911

In July 1918, during the Russian Civil War , the Baikal and Angara became part of the Baikal Red Flotilla. The ships were armed in Tanchoi: the Angara received two 7.5 cm cannons and four Maxim machine guns and was used to fight the Czechoslovak legions , which had been on the side of the Allied intervention forces and the White counter-revolution since mid-May , and the railway line from Kazan to Vladivostok under their control. After the conquest of Irkutsk on July 11, 1918 by the Czechoslovak legions and the White Army , the Angara surrendered to the Whites on August 22 in Listvyanka, was disarmed again and then transported freight on a total of ten trips to Nizhneangarsk at the northeast end of the city in 1919 Lake. When the whites had to give up Irkutsk again in January 1920, they carried out another massacre on the Angara : On January 6, they took a total of 31 political prisoners from the Irkutsk prison, one at a time, who were accused of anti-white activities Deck of the ship, they hit them on the head from behind with a wooden club that was otherwise used to knock ice off and then threw them overboard, whether already dead or not. When Red Army troops returned to Irkutsk, and thus to Lake Baikal, in early February, the Angara was armed again in March 1920, this time with four 7.5 cm cannons, and to fight the remnants of Admiral Kolchak's White Army and the Used by Czechoslovak legions. Until October 1922 she was part of the Baikal Flotilla.

Then she went back as an icebreaker and passenger ferry. On December 25, 1929, she tore down the road from Nizhneangarsk to Irkutsk near the Ushkan Islands on rocky ground, a 6-meter leak, ran at 20 degrees list to starboard partially full of water, and escaped the fall only slightly. The crew had to be rescued and reached the village of Ust-Barguzin after a 40 km walk across the mountain range of the Svyatoi Nos peninsula ( Russian Свято́й Нос ) . The half-sunken ship could not be salvaged until spring. The repairs and modernizations that were then necessary dragged on until 1932. Another general overhaul was planned for 1941, but was not carried out because of the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June of that year. The ship was then mainly busy towing barges on the lake. The long overdue overhaul could not be started until 1950, but it dragged on until 1959. The machinery was converted from coal to oil firing. When a storm then threw a mountain of ice floes with the ship onto the lake shore in April 1963, the damage suffered was severe enough that a further repair no longer seemed justified and the old ship was laid up in Port Baikal and was only used as a warehouse .

There it remained until December 1966, when it from the local branch of DOSAAF taken, in the Irkutsk dam on the Angara towed the ship with ropes between two empty pumped 100-t Light was hanged, to reduce its depth. In the spring of 1967, after the ice on the reservoir had melted, the ship was towed a further 21 km to the vicinity of Irkutsk and then, after being overhauled, used to train young people in the military . In 1975 this use ended and the ship was supposed to be scrapped, but when it was towed to be scrapped, it sank in shallow water and then lay practically forgotten in a bay of the reservoir until 1977.

Museum ship

In the summer of 1977 it was to be towed near the dam at the Irkutsk hydroelectric power station , where it was to be converted into a history museum. However, nothing came of this, as the ship wrecked again. It tore itself from its mooring lines in a storm and drifted across the reservoir until it got stuck on the dam. There it was left abandoned and deteriorated noticeably until it burned down almost completely after an arson attack in 1983 and went aground again. The Angara had already been declared a monument of historical and technical importance in 1980 , but it was not until the summer of 1983 that the first attempt to raise it was made again. The work was resumed in 1984 and in June 1985 the ship was lifted, but then decided by the local party headquarters for repair and conversion to a museum due to a lack of finance for repair. It was towed from the dam into the Melnichni Bay on the south side of the reservoir, where it was pushed onto the bank again during a storm and went aground in shallow water with a 45 degree list.

The Angara in 2018

The wreck remained there half-sunk until 1988. Then, on the initiative of the Irkutsk branch of the “All-Russian Society for the Protection of Monuments of History and Culture” (VOOPIiK), it was decided to restore the ship and keep it as a museum ship. After long preparations, the ship was lifted on September 7, 1988 and taken to the Chertugeevsky Bay not far north of the dam. The work there lasted from January 1989 to November 1990. The machinery was also repaired and the decks, deck superstructures, navigation and communication instruments were restored. November 6, 1990 which was Angara (пр Маршала Жукова, 36а. To its new residents on the northern shore of the reservoir at the Marshal Zhukov Avenue '' 0 52 ° 15  N , 104 ° 20 '38 "  O ) in Solnechny micro-district of Relocated to Irkutsk and opened as a museum of maritime history in March 1991. In 2015 the ship was transferred to the Irkutsk Regional Museum.

Footnotes

  1. Angara in tynebuiltships.co.uk
  2. 1902 renamed Myssovsk, 1941 Babushkin.
  3. Подробности аварии ледокола "Ангара" // Бурят-Монгольская правда. Верхнеудинск. № 301 (1901), 31 декабря 1929 года, стр. 4 ("Details on the accident of the icebreaker Angara.") In: Buryat-Mongolian Pravda , Verkhneudinsk , No. 301 (1901), December 31, 1929, p. 4)
  4. Всероссийское общество охраны памятников истории и культуры (ВООПИиК).

Web links

Commons : Angara (ship, 1900)  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Coordinates: 52 ° 15 ′ 0 ″  N , 104 ° 20 ′ 37.7 ″  E