A REMARKABLE STEAMSHIP.

New Zealand Mail, Issue 1511, 14 February 1901, Page 61

A REMARKABLE STEAMSHIP.

The well-known firm of Sir William Armstrong, Whitworth, and Co., has built upon Lake Baikal, according to a writer in '‘Scribner’s Magazine,” one of the most remarkable steamships in the world, to ferry the Siberian trains across the lake, and in the winter to break the ice at the same time. This was brought out in pieces from Neweastle-on-Tyne, and put together by English engineers, who hare been living in thisjremote and lonely spot for over two years. The Baikal, as the steamer is called, is a magnificent vessel of 4000 tons, with twin engines amidships of 1250 horsepower each, and a similar engine forward, to drive the screw in the how; for the principle of the new type of ice breaker is to draw out the water from under the floe ahead by the suction of the bow screw, -when the sheet collapses by its own weight, and a passage is forced through the broken mass by the impact of the vessel. Upon her deck she will carry three trains —a passenger train in the middle, and a freight train On each side. Her speed is thirteen knots, and on her trial trips she has shown herself capable of breaking through solid ice thirty-eight inches thick, with five inches of hard snow on the top (such snow is much more difficult to pierce than ice), and has forced her way through two thicknesses of ice frozen together, aggregating from fifty-six inches to sixty-five inches. Lake Baikal is frozen from the middle of December to the end of April, and there is also talk of laying a railway across upon ice, as- is done each year from St. Petersburg to Cronstadt, but probably all depends upon the success of the ice breaker next winter.