History of the Atlantic Cable & Undersea Communications
from the first submarine cable of 1850 to the worldwide fiber optic network

CS Patrol

CS PATROL
(Official Number 115948)

Length 357 ft. Breadth 44 ft. Depth 21 ft. Gross tonnage 3,132. Built 1903 by Swan, Hunter and Wigham Richardson Ltd.

Twin screw. Triple expansion engines of 4,500 h.p., speed 15 knots.
Patrol was fitted with four cable tanks having a total capacity of 31,470 cubic feet of cable with a weight of 1,800 tons. Nos. 1 and 2 tanks were forward of the engine room.

Johnson and Phillips were the contractors for the cable machinery and provided a double combined paying-out and picking-up machine forward and a paying-out machine aft. The forward machine was mounted on the main deck, hatches being provided in the spar deck above to expose the drums. All the controls and holding-back gear were mounted on the spar deck. The two parts of the double machine were capable of being worked quite independently, there being two separate engines, but the machine was so arranged that should it be necessary, the engine of the port drum could drive the starboard drum, or vice versa, while both engines could work on to either drum when maximum lift was required. The maximum load was 25 tons and 1 knot with alternatives of 10 tons at 2½ knots or 6¼ tons at 4 knots. For paying-out, the drums which were 5 ft 8½ in. diameter ran free on their shafts and were controlled by water-cooled elm block band brakes.

The after paying-out gear possessed the innovation of hydraulic braking plus the usual band brake. The drum was internally geared and made to drive four cranks, which in turn gave reciprocating motion to four plunger rods working in open ended cylinders. Braking action was controlled by opening and closing of ports in the cylinders. A double sheave holding-back gear with screw brakes was fitted.

Three bow sheaves and a single stern sheave, all 4 ft 3 in. diameter overall, were fitted. Two dynamometers were installed forward and one aft.

CS Patrol was transferred to Imperial and International Communications Limited in 1929.

Research Material Needed

The Atlantic Cable website is non-commercial, and its mission is to make available on line as much information as possible.

You can help - if you have cable material, old or new, please contact me. Cable samples, instruments, documents, brochures, souvenir books, photographs, family stories, all are valuable to researchers and historians.

If you have any cable-related items that you could photograph, copy, scan, loan, or sell, please email me: billb@ftldesign.com