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Comment by ausaus | Hacker News Reader

I grew up in Helensburgh, one of the Waverley's stops on the Clyde. Went on it many times including a memorable trip 'up the watter' to the Glasgow Garden Festival with the rest of my secondary school.

Had an impression on me when I first went on it and still does whenever I see it.

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I knew Clydeside had built a lot of ships, but I hadn't realised quite how many until I found this:

"In the 1890s, British shipyards built seventy-five percent of ships worldwide, two-thirds of which came from Clydeside"

https://blogs.loc.gov/inside_adams/2017/09/clydeside-shipbui...

It is simply heart-breaking when you journey to somewhere like South Korea, where there are miles and miles of huge shipyards churning out tankers, as its a grim reminder of what we once had here on the Clyde and the skills and jobs we have lost.

In a salient lesson to everyone on complex software projects, one yards latest attempt to build an innovative new car ferry has been a financial and political disaster - move fast and break things doesn't work very well with ship design! It's almost finished and doing regular sea trials at the moment to find the last bugs .... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MV_Glen_Sannox_(2017)

There's a real sad lesson for everyone involved here; enough patriotism was built up to support the idea of giving Scottish shipbuilding one last go, to bridge into the 21st century, and Ferguson Marine dropped the ball so hard that it's not coming back.

Can you imagine the response you'd get to suggesting that you build miles of shipyards up the West coast of Scotland these days? You'd die under an avalanche of environmental impact statements.

Indeed! It blew my mind when I read that factoid in the Glasgow transportation museum(?) back when I visited about 10 years ago.

FWIW, a similar percentage of the world's steam locomotives were also made in the area in the same timeframe. Mind-boggling concentration of the worldwide heavy industry at the time!

Glasgow transportation museum(?) back when I visited about 10 years ago.

Looks like that would have been the new Riverside Museum (very distinctive Zaha Hadid building in an open area) rather than the old Transport Museum?

For anyone reading this thread, I highly recommend visiting the Riverside if you get a chance, as well as the Tall Ship moored next to it, which has been developed into an excellent historical museum in its own right in the last few years.

> Looks like that would have been the new Riverside Museum (very distinctive Zaha Hadid building in an open area) rather than the old Transport Museum?

Ah yes, that must be it, looking it up online I recognize the building. It appeared very shiny and new when I visited, which seems to match the timeline (per wikipedia, it opened in June 2011, and I was there in spring 2012).

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