The motor ship Alta was a combined cargo and passenger ship that was used by the Finnmark Fylkesrederi og Ruteselskap (FFR) shipping company on the Hurtigruten . The ship was built under the hull number 64 at the Trosvik mekaniske Verksted shipyard in Brevik , Norway and served several times as a replacement ship on the Hurtigruten along the coast of Norway until 1967.
In 1946, the Hammerfest shipping company Finnmark Fylkesrederi og Ruteselskap signed a contract for the construction of two sister ships with the Trosvik mekaniske Verksted shipyard . The first ship, the Sørøy , was delivered to the shipping company in 1949. The Alta was delivered a year later, in July 1950. The ships were to be used as combined freight and passenger ferries on different routes along the coast of the province of Finnmark in northwest Norway. Due to an acute shortage of shipping capacity after the end of the Second World War, the Alta was chartered to the Det Nordenfjeldske Dampskibsselskab (NFDS) based in Trondheim only three months after it was put into service and used by them on the Hurtigruten . After two years on the Hurtigruten, the ship returned to Hammerfest in 1952. But in 1953 it was chartered out again, this time to the Det Bergenske Dampskibsselskab (BDS) based in Bergen (Norway) , which used it again in the Hurtigruten. Shortly thereafter, the ship, again as a replacement ship in the Hurtigruten, went to the shipping company Vesteraalens Dampskibsselskab (VDS) based in Stokmarknes for several years . After this mission was over, it returned to the Hammerfest - Bodø route in 1962 . Five years later, in the summer of 1967, a sharp drop in freight and passenger numbers, caused by increasing air traffic and the expansion of roads and bridges in Finnmark, made the line unprofitable.
The ship was sold to the Fiji Islands as a ferry and was renamed Tui Lau . There it sank a little later in 1968 after it hit the ground.
