Atlantic Steam Navigation Company
The British shipping company Atlantic Steam Navigation Company (ASN) existed from 1946 to 1971 and is considered to be one of the pioneers in RoRo and container shipping .
history
Beginnings with LST's
The company was founded in 1946 by Lieutenant Colonel Frank Bustard, who began shipping British military vehicles from Rotterdam and Hamburg to Tilbury with the chartered landing ships Empire Baltic and Empire Celtic of the Landing Ship, Tank (LST) type on September 11, 1946 .
In 1948, ASN chartered the LST Empire Cedric to set up a liner service between Preston in Lancashire and Larne in Northern Ireland. In May 1948 the ship was put into motion, which was followed by two more LSTs, the Empire Doric and the Empire Gaelic , in the same year . Right at the start of the liner service across the Irish Sea, Army Transport Officer John Gordon Woolam approached the young shipping company with the idea of transporting the cargo in containers. Woolam had been working on the concept of a door-to-door service with closed containers for a long time and had approached the ASN because, on the one hand, it did not cross a customs border on its route and, on the other hand, it used ships with the LSTs that were available for loading with containers. After successful negotiations, the first container, a 16 foot long, 7 and 6 foot high and wide black lacquered wooden box bought second-hand for five pounds, began its first test trip with sports equipment to Northern Ireland. A return load for the box was soon found, and the shipping company switched its service to standardized containers. From 1950 the ASN took on another service to Belfast with the Empire Gaelic .
In 1954 the ASN was subordinated to the British Transport Commission (BTC) as part of the nationalization policy. In the following year, two more chartered LSTs were incorporated into the fleet, the Empire Cymric and Empire Nordic , and the Hamburg service was handled via Antwerp.
New buildings and cooperation
When the British government requisitioned all LSTs in 1956 to cope with the Suez crisis , traffic was initially maintained with charter ships from German shipping companies and the first newbuildings of the ASN were commissioned from the William Denny and Brothers shipyard in Dumbarton. The Ro-Ro ships Bardic Ferry and Ionic Ferry , delivered in 1957/58, were among the first Ro-Ro cargo ships in the world. Due to the government connection, the ships were designed to be able to transport tanks as well, in regular traffic they could transport up to twenty containers and a maximum of 55 first and second class passengers.
Two even larger ferries were ordered from the Ailsa Shipbuilding Company in Troon in 1960 . The first delivered Cerdic Ferry was put into service on the Rotterdam route in November 1961, the Doric Ferry followed in April 1962 on the Antwerp service. In 1963 the ASN took over a similar sized ship from the Swan, Hunter & Wigham Richardson shipyard , the Gaelic Ferry , which was followed in 1967 by the Europic Ferry of the same shipyard.
The LSTs that were received back were parted in the course of the 1960s. As the last ship of this type, the Empire Nordic left the shipping company in December 1966 (other source 1965) for scrapping in Bilbao.
From 1963 a container service between Dublin and Preston was set up in cooperation with the shipping company George Bell & Company from Dublin. The following year, George Bell & Company, the Atlantic Steam Navigation Company and the Clyde Shipping Company founded the Waterford Consortium to operate a container feeder service between Preston and Waterford - one of the first short-haul container liner services in Europe. The share of the Clyde Shipping Company was taken over by George Bell in 1974.
In 1970 ASN decided to expand an existing shipping company's own pier in Cairnryan, Wigtownshire, to accommodate a new coastal service.
End and whereabouts of the ship
In November 1971, the European Ferries Group (EFG) acquired the Atlantic Steam Navigation Company for £ 5.5 million and incorporated it into its own structure. At EFG and the successor companies, the first two new buildings, Bardic Ferry and Ionic Ferry, were still in service until they were sold in 1976. They were both scrapped in Aliaga in 1988. The Gaelic Ferry was also sold by EFG to abandoners in Kaohsiung in 1988. The Europic Ferry remained in service under different names until it was demolished in 2005, the Cerdic Ferry arrived at the Aliaga shipyard two years later as Orestes . The last ASN ship in service was the Doric Ferry , which was finally scrapped in 2009 as Kapetan Alexandros A.
John Woolam, who played a major role in the success of ASN, founded Anglo-Continental Container Services Ltd. in the 1950s . , which later became one of the largest European companies in the container industry with Containerways .
literature
- Carpenter, R .: Container Ships . Model & Allied Publications, Hemel Hempstead 1971.
Web links
- The ASN at theshipslist (English)
- The ASN at poships (English)
Individual evidence
- ↑ University of Glasgow Archives Hub: Records of the Waterford Consortium, container service consortium, Waterford, Munster, Ireland ( Memento of the original from October 14, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (English)
