Office of Steam Forum for Model & Toy Steam Gas & Hot Air Engines

Hi,

Over this last weekend our daughter and her family visited.  Looking for something to do yesterday we decided to travel from Cardiff's city centre to Cardiff Bay; something that none of us had done before, an Adventure!  The Severn Estuary has one of the highest tides in the world; at Cardiff (not the highest in the estuary) it can be as high as 41 feet today it is a mere 36 feet.  Before the Cardiff Bay Barrage was built when the tide went out it really went out.  A couple of photographs I took in November 1990.
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On top of the wooden structures can be seen the old semaphore signals that used to control the railway that ran at low tide from Cardiff to Penarth Head visible in the distance on the one photographs   Well this was the story that was told to visitors seeing the bay at low tide, the signals were used to control the steam driven paddle steamers that could take you to exotic foreign places such as Bristol. Minehead  and even Illfracombe!  Alas these steams ceased their travels many years ago.

A bit of a video that I took yesterday of our travels down the River Taff to Cardiff Bay which has changed a bit in the last thirty years.



Regards Tony.

Hi Stoker,

41 foot tide is something to be reckoned with no doubt. Your water taxi ride made me try to look back at what it must have been like a century or two before ......  but I didn't have much luck conjuring a proper image.

Yesterday or was it the day before when I was young Cardiff was still a coal port with nearly 7 miles of wharf.  Several dredgers continually dredged the bay and my great uncle was a dock pilot.  Because of the high tides as many ships as possible had to clear the sea locks day and night as the tides allowed.  The ships nearly filled the locks and it was a very skilled job getting the ships in and out, two pilots were needed one in the wheel house the other walking along on the dock side.  And before the advent of radio all the communication was  done using whistles.  The pilot in the wheel house not being able to see anything relied totally on his mate.

I had a quick search and found the following which gives an idea of what it was like; apparently in the  early 1900's it was not unusual to have up to 100 colliers awaiting docking in Cardiff Roads. Coal as certainly King!


https://www.flickr.com/photos/ben_salter/sets/72157600049669187/

Take care.

Tony.

Hi Carl,

I went to the Steam Museum when it was in Cardiff Bay in the early 90's. I went up to one of the guards and asked him why all the boats are sitting on the black dirt.

Alas the Industrial Museum is no more; bits of it being sent to other museums, the land that was nearly worthless when it was built became land that was worth a fortune! Even in 1990 after most of the collieries had closed a lot of the 'Black dirt' would have been coal even though the rivers had been filtered to remove it for many years.  As a child the local beaches had tide marks of coal which was useful when sighting your deck chair above the water line.

Take care.

Tony.