All the Queen’s Men (overtime at Romney Weir)

henry tapper

12 years ago

Romney Weir. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

What do you do when you come back from Church on a wet April Sunday morning? If you live opposite Romney Weir in Eton, you can enjoy watching eight engineers monitoring how the largest archmides screw in Europe is coping with the extra flows of water caused by it raining all weekend.

Enough jokes have been made about this screw. It is screwing for the Queen, whose nearby castle is being powered by the electricity screwed out of the Thames. Now it appears that the Queen is being screwed by these engineers who are presumably on triple time.

Of course , the cost of the Archimedes screw and the engineers that attend it at times of stress , is born by the taxpayer and , I suspect, the local council tax payer in particular.

Which is why watching these eight engineers, clad in Health and Safety dayglo jackets and trousers, is so fascinating. I am determined to get my money worth.

Presumably an announcement will be broken in next week’s Windsor and Eton Gazette that the screw has been subjected to undue stress as a result of unprecedented flows and is f***ed.

The Romney eight will then have work for the rest of the summers to supplement the six month project just completed to install the hydro unit.

UPDATE+++UPDATE+++

This story has a strange and frightening sequel – later that day (29th), I took Minivet my little electric slipper out for a spin in our cut. But I was too ambitious and the boat was swept into the river proper. I found myself being corkscrewed in ten knots of stream and careering towards the open sluice gate at Romney Lock.

Had I not hit the posts above the lock and lassoed my craft to it before making it to the far side of the Thames, I would undoubtedly have been sept to my almost certain death.

Thanks to David, the Romney Lock Keeper I am now safe and sound and so is Minivet. I got rather too close to those two archimedes screws for comfort and have learned a lesson do not take the Thames in flood, lightly.

It would appear that the workmen were out protecting the gearboxes of the screws , in front of the screws and under threat from the current that did me in. Amazingly no electricity has been , or is likely to be created from these huge things till someone decides to connect the generators to the castle.