These memories are from my early days in Marine College:
While I was appointed to Garden Reach Workshops (GRW, which later became GRSE), for my apprenticeship, my dear friend (from school), Ramakrishna Nair was allocated RSN (the River Steam Navigation) Company which had its works a little downstream from GRW on the Hooghly.
Sometimes, I would bunk from GRW and spend the workday with Nair in RSN (which later became CIWTC). Those were delightful days which we spent on the old and dilapidated paddle steamers that were tied on the river. We would admire the gleaming 'open' steam engines with their huge crankshafts and imagine them chugging along on the river. The gleaming copper fittings on the boilers, guage glasses and asbestos lagged steam pipelines were fascinating and I remember them with great nostalgia today. We would drink tea from earthen cups and, leaning over the side of the paddle steamers, watch the floating objects on the river pass by. Those were delightfully languid times and the years were 1966-69, more than half a century ago!
(India’s only surviving paddle steamer as of 2022. Photo credit: Times of India, 2022)
(Author note: More about Marine College is in
this post.)
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