I watched the opening of Summer Holiday the other day, leaving aside any other possible impossibilities
Would it have been possible to get an LT double decker on a ferry back in the day?
Would it be possible on the ROROs of today?
They did it
Some take trailers up to 5.2m
The LT is just under 14'6" high. A low bridge is one that cannot take a vehicle of 16 feet in height, so I would expect commercial vehicle ferries to be built to accept 16ft high vehicles too.
According to film trivia, the two buses that went to Greece had to be sent by ship, as bridge height restrictions on the way meant that it was impossible to drive them there.
The ferries take lorries + trailers
The queue for the ferry this summer
Well when Dr Who wanted to take one to a desert they put it on as deck cargo, and all the windows got smashed by a storm
I'd have thought that around that time they must have had a way to get tall vehicles on ferries. I mean how do you get anything tall over now? Brian
The Sunday Sport had a photo of a double decker buried at the South Pole.
On 03 Sep 2023, alan_m wrote
Yup; I think it was the Daily Sport (not that it matters).
A list of some of the headlines, when the paper closed; fun stuff....
World War 2 Bomber Found on Moon, 14 August 1988.
World War 2 Bomber Found on Moon Vanishes, 21 August 1988.
Bus Found Buried At South Pole, 12 February 1989.
Aliens Turned Our Son Into A Fish Finger, 1996.
Donkey Robs Bank, 14 July 1996.
Marilyn Monroe is Alive & Working as a Nanny, 26 January 1998.
Woman Gives Birth To 8lb Duck, 30 June 1990.
Statue of Elvis found on Mars, 1 October 1989.
The headmaster of a school that I went to in Leicester had taken a Leicester Corporation DD bus and a load of lads to Spain before I went there in 1960.
Back in 1970 a bunch of cavers drove a double decker bus to the Himalaya. Start here:
In the early 1970s, I went to a Wings concert in Lausanne, on Lake Geneva (I was living in Geneva at the time). McCartney & Co turned up in their open-top double-decker bus, so one assumes they got it on a ferry.
London Transport sent several double deck buses to support trade fairs. For instance
In the 1930s my father and his brothers took their car across the channel long before ro-ro ferries and it was lifted on and off the deck of the ferry they used. Locomotives exported from the USA end up in countries around the world and there are pictures (sometimes of the loading failures) as they get craned on/off cargo ships.
I came across a Routemaster in Ushuaia about 5 years ago.
On 03 Sep 2023, Graham Harrison wrote
That lasted for a surprisingly long time. A friend of mine had a photograph of his Mini being lifted by crane onto a ferry when he took it to the continent in the early/mid 1960s.
I don't know what port it was from, but I'm fairly certain it would have been in the north. (He was from Barnsley, studied architecture at Leeds School of Art in the 1950s, took a job in a council architect's office up that way, and emigrated to Canada in 1967 -- it's highly unlikely he would have travelled through one of the southern Channel ports.)
Ro-Ro ferries have existed since the mid 19th century, but only for trains. The cross-channel train ferries were used to bring vehicles and equipment back to Britain at the end of WW1.
Ro-Ro ferries need appropriate port facilities at each end, so there had to be a demonstrated demand to justify the expenditure.
On 04 Sep 2023, Colin Bignell wrote
That makes sense.
As for trains on ferries, in 1980 I took one of the last Night Ferry services (which were shut down at the end of 1980), where you stayed in your train carriage while it was shunted on and off the ferry.
It was quite a novelty to me at the time.
Although there is a bit of chicken and egg about it. I read that when Dover moved to Ro-Ro operation, the number of cars they transported in a year increased ten fold.
That is something I wished I had done.
>On 04 Sep 2023, Colin Bignell wrote
It was certainly a fun experience -- I recall that it would have been impossible to sleep through the carriage-marshalling (if I'd wanted to do that).
Gosh! I haven't been that far south for about twenty years! When I was last in Ushuaia it had the look and feel of a frontier town. I suppose it's all a bit more established these days. It still ranks as one of my worst landing/takeoff experiences, mind!
Nick snipped-for-privacy@yahoo.ca
I was on Amtrak in 2019. The westbound Empire Builder split into Seattle and Portland portions at Spokane about 0200hrs and the Crescent dropped the Texas Eagle coaches and San Antonio. I slept through both occasions.
On 05 Sep 2023, Graham Harrison wrote
I might have slept through some of the shunting on dry land, but recall that shunting the carriages onto the ferry and towing them back off on the other side of the channel was a noisier and bumpier operation than in the on-shore yards.
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