Train Ferry No. 1
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The Train Ferry No. 1 was a British railway ferry that was converted by the Royal Navy into the landing craft transporter Iris or Princess Iris during World War II and used as such.
The ship
The ship was the first of three identical ships, the Train Ferries No. 1 , No. 2 and No. 3 ordered by the British War Office during World War I to move equipment and supplies from the new military port of Richborough Port south of Ramsgate in Kent across the English Channel to Dunkirk . It ran on 3 August 1917 with the hull number 921 on the Low Walker shipyard by Armstrong Whitworth in Newcastle upon Tyne from the stack and was completed in November 1917 and delivered. At 106.8 m in length, 17.9 m in width and 4.7 m in draft , the ship was measured at 2,683 GRT . The propulsion system consisted of four coal-fired boilers and two triple expansion steam engines from Wallsend Slipway & Engineering Company with 403 horsepower and two screws ; it allowed a speed of 12 knots . The ship had two oars , one behind each of the two propellers. The two chimneys were side by side, amidships on the right and left outside behind the bridge superstructures . Four parallel tracks ran across the entire main deck , on which up to 54 standard 10-ton wagons could be transported, which were retracted via the tailgate. In addition to the machinery and the coal bunkers, there were cargo spaces for military general cargo and water ballast tanks under the track deck. The load capacity was 960 tons. To protect against attacks by aircraft , torpedo boats or submarines , the three ships were armed with four guns each, two each fore and aft on the upper deck.
fate
First World War
The Train Ferry No. 1 began service in November 1917, initially between Southampton and Dieppe , as the Richborough plant was not yet ready. She and her two sister ships made a total of 270 trips across the English Channel and back by the end of the war, each time carrying an average of 900 tons. They could be loaded in less than 20 minutes and they were independent of the tides .
Interwar years
After the end of the war, the three ferries were laid up in Richborough . In 1921, when the abandoned port facilities in Richborough were bought by the private Port of Queenborough Development Company, they came into their possession, without being put back into service.
In 1922, the Great Eastern Railway began planning to use the three ferries for a rail ferry service from Harwich to the continent . The Belgian government showed interest in setting up a ferry terminal in Zeebrugge , and so in 1923 - although the Great Eastern Railway had been merged with the London and North Eastern Railway (LNER) shortly before with the entry into force of the Railways Act 1921 on January 1, 1923 - two companies founded, Great Eastern Train Ferries Ltd., which was supposed to operate the ferries, and Société Belgo-Anglaise des Ferry-Boats SA, which was supposed to provide the locomotives and wagons. The Great Eastern Train Ferries bought the three ships in the same year, converted them to oil-firing and opened a rail ferry service with them for freight traffic between Harwich and Zeebrugge in 1924 , using the original jetty bridges brought in from Southampton and Richborough. The ships kept their ancestral names Train Ferry No. 1 , Train Ferry No. 2 and Ferry No. 3 , but were now mostly referred to as TF1 , TF2 and TF3 .
As a result of the global economic crisis , the Great Eastern Train Ferries had 1,932 liquidated be; their remaining assets, in particular the three ferries, were bought by LNER, which now maintained the ferry service to Zeebrugge.
Second World War
Immediately after the start of the Second World War in September 1939, the three ships of the Royal Navy requisitioned and transporting military vehicles and hospital trains from Harwich to Calais used. The TF2 was lost on June 13, 1940 when it was severely damaged by artillery fire and was beached and abandoned by its crew near Saint-Valery-en-Caux on the Normandy coast. 14 men of their crew lost their lives. The TF1 and TF3 were still involved in the evacuation of the Channel Islands in June 1940 and were then bought by the Admiralty in late June.
The two ships were converted into landing craft with a stern slip system , so-called “Landing Ships Sternchute” (LSS), each with 14 LCA (“Landing Craft Assault”) or LCM (“Landing Craft Mechanized”) landing craft on the track deck and four could transport more on the upper deck. The boats on the track deck were picked up and set down using a stern slip, the four on the upper deck using a ship's crane . The two chimneys were combined into one during the renovation. After the renovation was completed, the two ships were put into service in April 1941 as Iris and Daffodil , in honor of the two Mersey ferries that were used in the Zeebrugge raid on April 23, 1918. While the Iris (ex TF1 ) was then mainly used to transport landing craft to the southern ports of England , the Daffodil (ex TF3 ) initially served as a balloon ship in Loch Ewe , Scotland , where northern sea convoys were assembled. From October 1941 she was also used to transport landing craft. The Iris was renamed Princess Iris in September 1942 .
In May 1944, the Daffodil was equipped with a stern ramp to enable the unloading of locomotives and wagons where there were no track bridges. After the start of the Allied landing in Normandy in June 1944, it brought supplies to Cherbourg and from September onwards to Dieppe on a regular shuttle service. On March 17, 1945, she ran into a mine near Dieppe and sank the next day.
The Princess Iris brought damaged landing craft back to England during the Normandy invasion. In August 1944 it was also equipped with a stern ramp so that rail transports between Southampton and Cherbourg or Dieppe could be carried out, but the ramp was removed again in December so that the ship could transport landing craft again.
post war period
The Princess Iris (ex TF1 ) was retired from the Royal Navy in May 1946 and sold back to the London and North Eastern Railway. It was renamed Essex Ferry and from June 1946 went again as a rail ferry between Harwich and Zeebrugge, three times a week. When the Transport Act 1947 came into force on January 1, 1948, which nationalized the railways in Great Britain, the British Transport Commission became the owner of the ship. In 1951 the two new ferries Norfolk Ferry and Suffolk Ferry were put into service, and when the new Essex Ferry (2) was added in 1957 , the old Essex Ferry (ex Train Ferry No. 1 , ex Iris , ex Princess Iris ) was once again used for briefly renamed Essex Ferry II to clear the name for her successor. The old ship was then in February 1957 in Grays ( Essex scrapped).
The ships of the class
| Surname | Later names | Shipyard & construction number | Launch | † | annotation |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Train Ferry No. 1 | TF1 ; HMS Iris ; HMS Princess Iris ; Essex Ferry ; Essex Ferry II | Armstrong-Whitworth, # 921 | August 3, 1917 | February 1957 | scrapped |
| Train Ferry No. 2 | TF2 | Armstrong-Whitworth, # 922 | September 12, 1917 | June 13, 1940 | Damaged by artillery fire, stranded and abandoned near Saint-Valery-en-Caux |
| Train Ferry No. 3 | TF3 ; HMS Daffodil | Fairfield Shipbuilding & Engineering, # 540 | September 1917 | March 18, 1945 | Sank after a mine hit near Dieppe |
Web links
- Train Ferry No. 1, at The London and North Eastern Railway (LNER) Encyclopedia
- Train Ferry No. 2, at The London and North Eastern Railway (LNER) Encyclopedia
- Train Ferry No. 3, at The London and North Eastern Railway (LNER) Encyclopedia
- Train Ferry No. 1, on Tyne-Built Ships
- Train Ferry No. 2, on Tyne-Built Ships
- British Railways - Sealink, Harwich Services
- LNER Harwich Fleet List
- Construction drawings of the Train Ferry No. 3
Footnotes
- ↑ In order to supply the British Expeditionary Corps operating in northern France with sufficient supplies of heavy equipment ( tanks , guns , locomotives , ammunition , horses, fuel and hospital trains ), a new, secret port was built near Richborough during the war. In 1918, around 20,000 tons of supplies were handled there every week on an area of around 500 hectares.
- ↑ The Train Ferry No. 540 built by Fairfield Shipbuilding & Engineering Co. in Glasgow . 3 was a little longer at 110.8 m.
- ↑ http://www.kenthistoryforum.co.uk/index.php?topic=3052.0
- ↑ http://www.kenthistoryforum.co.uk/index.php?topic=3052.0
- ↑ http://www.lner.info/ships/GER/index_train.shtml
- ↑ http://www.tynebuiltships.co.uk/T-Ships/trainferryno21917.html