The Queen Mary
Hi All,
Just got back from a day trip to The Queen Mary, down in Long Beach, CA, with my parents. Since it's over 20 miles from where I live, I'm calling it a trip
From the outside:
... you can then go into an exhibition of the various control mechanisms used:
and the mechanisms for making them work:
They also have a Scorpion-class submarine docked there, with all kinds of neat gauges:
And the fallout suit for when things go awry:
Finally, there's a really nice view of the city of Long Beach itself from some of the portholes:
Comments and critiques welcome
The rest of the shots are here:
http://mmroden.smugmug.com/gallery/2624114
Just got back from a day trip to The Queen Mary, down in Long Beach, CA, with my parents. Since it's over 20 miles from where I live, I'm calling it a trip
From the outside:
... you can then go into an exhibition of the various control mechanisms used:
and the mechanisms for making them work:
They also have a Scorpion-class submarine docked there, with all kinds of neat gauges:
And the fallout suit for when things go awry:
Finally, there's a really nice view of the city of Long Beach itself from some of the portholes:
Comments and critiques welcome
The rest of the shots are here:
http://mmroden.smugmug.com/gallery/2624114
0
Comments
of how it came to be in Long Beach. Tell us why we should go there to see
the ship.
Now that would make it a journey. Otherwise, it's just Field & Street
The Queen Mary was, for its time, the largest and fastest method of transportation across the Atlantic Ocean. Originally running as a passenger liner and mail transport from 1936 to 1939, she was painted entirely in grey to become the Grey Ghost, a troop transport, from 1939 to 1945. After the war was over, she was reconverted back into a passenger and mail carrier, until she was decommissioned in 1967. At that point, she was purchased from the Cunard/Whitestar company by the city of Long Beach to be converted into a hotel and tourist attraction. Her final run was 39 days long, 34 days longer than usual, because she was too wide to fit in the Panama Canal, and so had to travel around the southern tip of South America.
She held the record for fastest Atlantic Ocean traversal from 1938 to 1952, averaging 31 knots for the trip. As the Grey Ghost, she still holds the record for the largest number of people transported across the Atlantic Ocean, at 16000 for a single run.
On one of those troop transport runs, she collided with one of her escort ships, completely destroying the HMS Curacoa and killing about 330 sailors. She was running in zig-zag patterns to avoid u-boat detection, and the Curacoa didn't run the pattern correctly. Apparently, the screams of the dying can still be heard in the front of the ship, leading to the haunted tour of the depths of the ship.
Hence the irony of the second ship that shares the Queen Mary's berth, a Foxtrot-class Russian submarine known as the Scorpion. Foxtrots ran from 1957 to their decommissioning from 1995-2000. The Scorpion was decommissioned in 1994 with the extremely interesting name B-427, and received its nickname Scorpion after traveling from Vladivostok to Australia to Long Beach. 78 crewmen crammed into the 300 foot long, 20 foot wide vessel for months at a time, and it could travel underwater for 3-5 days on battery power.
The contrast between the two ships could not be more stark. The Queen Mary is all about wealth, power, and opulence; the Scorpion is all about utility, power, and killing. I'm hoping that the contrast is pretty apparent in the photos-- the Queen Mary's fixtures are all polished brass and wood, while the Scorpion's fixtures are strictly functional.
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Thanks-- I was wondering what would've happened if I'd brought my macro, but most of those are under 2.8, so I suspect that what would've happened is more blurred shots
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