Here in Gothenburg, Sweden, we had four major shipyards, and a minor one (mostly servicing small tugs & fishing boats), now one big is left, but only having a skeleton crew, and very much down-sized. the tiny one is still doing business, I hasten to add. Sweden was in my youth third in the world in producing tonnage, now we're simply not found in the statistics, as the output from Hallberg-Rassy, and a few others, doesn't amount to many tons a year! Time has stood still at the inner yard, Gotenius, as small boats hardly can go to Singapore, or Korea, for service and repairs. The next one, downtown, GC6teverken, was founded by a Scot, a long time ago. Much smaller than when I worked there, and less than a hundred employees (from many thousands then), it doesn't do any shipbuilding any longer, and have sold off one of its floating docks, and lots of other companies have moved into their old HQ, buildings, and shops. Their gigantic marine engines, that rivalled B&W's (the division later bought by B&W, and closed down!), were magnificent to see being assembled; in all, quite a place! Next came Lindholmens varv, which produced ships up to Liberty-size, say 20,000 tons, whose small dry-dock is now a marina, and the rest is low-rise housing estates for the fairly affluent. Just by the seaside, very windy. Lindholmen's floating dock is long gone, too! Eriksberg was next, once famous for its quality ships, but with the oil crisis it reeled, and eventually died - now the entire area is a housing area, with a mixture of house sizes, and the height of buildings varies, too. The dry dock is nowadays a marina for the idle rich. Eu held their top conferences there, this summer, creating havoc to our bus lines :-)! Outside the main harbour is Arendal, once a bustling place where ships were built on-line, highly rational production, but when the oil crisis came, production switched to a few mega-ferries and then various types of oil rigs, and even a complete floating production platform - a real gigantic rig, still in production, as the Balmoral! I was very much part of this (from the last transport boats, via the world's biggest floating dock, to the Balmoral and Consafe's diving and accomodation platforms). Eventually everything ground to a halt and I switched to bus-driving. Arendal (which was owned by GC6taverken), is now owned entirely by Volvo, while some of the assembly halls are let to Volvo's suppliers, like Galliker transport. The seaside is now Volvo's main shipping port (the main car plant is just a mile, or two, away), and the shipyard's computers have for a long time been owned by Volvo - for a while they were used by Saab, to design the Saab 2000, one of the quietest, fastest, and most modern, commuter aircraft ever designed, which got everything wrong: the intial design of the stabilisator had to be revised, leading to delivery slippage, and the aircraft is a propeller aircraft when the fare-payers wanted jets (Dornier even redesigned one of their aircraft to jet power, to cater for the customers' whims). The few villas there were around the Arendal site has been torn down, and there are a few extra office buildings, while the old change rooms, for the 2-5,000 shipbuilders that used to work there, are now offices used by paper-pushers. The only thing that hasn't changed much is the paint shop, but it does work mostly for companies outside the shipping industry, of course. Still, at times, they get a job to repaint a ship that has undergone service in the down-town shipyard, but that's about the only thing maritime they do! All the best, Tord, Gothenburg, Sweden PS As a newly arrived kid in town, circa '62, my Dad and I walked from one end of the inner harbour to the other, maybe 3 miles, and we saw a classic harbour with ships loading and off-loading, longshoremen and cranes, goods trains trundling ever so carefully, and so on. Today there is just some STENA ferries in the inner harbour, and a "parking ship" called The Ark, and some museum ships. That's it! In the outer harbour, which ends with Arendal, there is plenty of activity, but the boats are Ro-Ro, container ships or car transporters, so it involves very few people, even if the amount of goods is bigger than ever before! *************************************************************************** PaddleWise Paddling Mailing List - Any opinions or suggestions expressed here are solely those of the writer(s). You must assume the entire responsibility for reliance upon them. All postings copyright the author. Submissions: PaddleWise_at_PaddleWise.net Subscriptions: PaddleWise-request_at_PaddleWise.net Website: http://www.paddlewise.net/ ***************************************************************************
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