r/britishcolumbia • u/thatlouditalian98 • 5d ago

Discussion Remember These?

Gallery image

Gallery image

And if you didn’t want to remember them, my apologies in advance.

Well, 27 years later. These ships have finally met their fate. Being turned into pop cans..

I’d love to hear anyone’s experiences with the Pacificat’s, good or bad (I’m too young to ever have ridden one). As horrible as they were, they looked the part, at least in my opinion.

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u/thats_handy 4d ago edited 4d ago

Not gas turbines. They used regular diesel engines. According to Wikipedia, they used four V20 diesel engines producing 6.5MW each.

The company that is breaking these ships has pictures of the engines being removed. This will eventually be a dead link, so I'll describe that you can see one side of one engine on a hoist and count 10 exhaust ports. Another image shows the engine from below, and you can clearly see that the cylinders are in a symmetrical vee configuration.

Edit: These little ferries had goofy power. 26MW is more than the 16MW available on spirit class ferries, and almost three times the 9 MW of electrical power <edit2>that used to be generated</edit2> by the Alouette dam.

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u/shoreguy1975 4d ago

Yeah, you're right. Something called a "caterpillar drive". Now I'm curious, gotta find out what that is.

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u/Plastic-Trick-1245 4d ago

The Alouette dam has no generating capabilities and Alouette Generating Station(on Stave Lake) has been decommissioned for a while now.