I toured CalMac's Aladdin's cave of spare parts that keeps the fleet sailing
Equipment salvaged from scrapped 40-year-old ferry among thousands of parts stored
Inside an unremarkable green warehouse on a hillside overlooking the Clyde lies an Aladdin’s cave of anchors, pistons and propellers that keep Britain’s biggest ferry fleet operating.
The building in Gourock houses many thousands of spare parts for CalMac’s 36 vessels, including some waiting ready for new additions still being built.
The Ikea-like high rack shelves also contain equipment salvaged from a 40-year-old ferry scrapped last year, some of which is being used to replace parts in even older vessel still in service - Isle of Arran.
The 40,000 square feet storage area and adjacent 12,000 sq ft engineering workshop is the front line in CalMac’s battle to maintain its ageing and increasingly fault-prone fleet.
The 23 staff based there spend most of their time aboard ships, fixing problems which avert cancellations and delays that passengers never hear about.
CalMac's head of shore support and logistics David Steele, who runs the operation, said: “A lot of what we do is to prevent vessels going out of service and we work very hard to do that.
“That’s the biggest sense of pride you get. Nobody hears about it because the vessel just sails on and customers make their journey, which is exactly what we want.
“We will be up at any time of the day or night to get a part delivered to a ferry - we’ve had guys driving through Glencoe at 2am.”
Mr Steele said spare parts was often the challenge - and the team had to be resourceful,
He said: “The 20 per cent of your parts will give you 80 per cent of the failures and issues, and that’s true in terms of what we try to hold.
“You can’t hold every widget and washer from a ship, so we concentrate on those things where experience tells us is what the vessels will need.”
Large items in the warehouse include a spare anchor for Loch Seaforth, CalMac’s biggest vessel, although no ferry has ever needed a replacement.
On another shelf are propeller blades marked 802 - that’s Glen Rosa, still to be completed at the Ferguson Marine yard in Port Glasgow.
Mr Steele said: “These guys know our ships very well. The benefit of this team is they know the people on the ships, they know the equipment, and if we can get the parts, we can usually do a pretty decent and quick fix.
“The challenging bit in all of this is the parts - they sometimes aren’t there. Sometimes you’ve got to have it made specifically.
“If we know there are areas where the supply chain is particularly difficult, or the supplier has gone out of business, we will potentially hold other items which are a little bit more difficult to get.”
That has even meant stripping a 40-year-old ferry before it was towed to a Danish scrapyard, including its gearbox, pistons and fuel pumps.
Mr Steele said: “We managed to take some machinery including a main engine from Hebridean Isles.
“That gives us really good coverage in case we have an issue on one of the four vessels which have those engines.
“That gives us a comfort factor that we have some of the stuff that may be more difficult to get, because these are older engines.”
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