Blue Funnel P-Class
.jpg) The Peleus , in June 1971 in the port of Swansea
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The P-Class (English: "P" class or "P" Boats) of the British Blue Funnel Line was built in four units from 1948 onwards. The P-Class ships were built at two different shipyards and were developed for the shipping company's East Asian service. The term P-Class was derived from the ship names beginning with the letter "P".
Use of the ships
The résumés of the ships were relatively calm. The Patroclus ran aground on November 28, 1962 in Tokyo Bay, but was released again. On the Pyrrhus there was a fire in November 1964 during handling work in Gladstone Dock in Liverpool, which could only be extinguished after about twelve hours and almost led to the total loss of the ship. In February 1967 the Patroclus also caught fire in the port of Glasgow, but it was quickly extinguished.
From 1962 onwards, passenger transport to the Far East was abandoned because most of the passenger volume had shifted to air traffic. The changed allocation of the corresponding rooms in the superstructures reduced the gross measurement by around 300 register tons . After the Six Day War and the subsequent closure of the Suez Canal in 1967, shipping on the Europe-Far East route was forced to make a detour around the Cape of Good Hope, which extended the travel time by several weeks. Starting in 1967, the P-Class ships instead sailed westwards from Europe through the Panama Canal via Japan, Korea, Hong Kong, Singapore and Colombo and returned to Great Britain within around three months, continuing around the Cape of Good Hope.
The ships of the Far East and Australian services were tied into a very strict timetable and therefore mostly transported urgent goods at relatively high freight rates . Accordingly, the shipping company paid great attention to the care and maintenance of the ships and sent them to a specially rented dry dock at the Barclay shipyard , Curle in Glasgow at the end of the tour .
technical description
The P-class ships were conventional general cargo ships . The design was a further development of the A-class ships, the design of which was based on the Glenearn-class ships built between 1938 and 1942 for the subsidiary Glen Line , but developed by Holt . The ships had a carrying capacity of a good 11,000 tons, six holds with tween decks, refrigerated holds and sweet oil tanks. The cargo was handled with conventional loading gear . The P-class ships were largely identical to those of the H-class , but had a different division of holds and tanks, as well as a significantly lower cooling capacity.
Due to the high speed required on the Far East route, the drive was provided by three steam turbines acting on a single screw via a reduction gear. The superstructure arranged amidships had 35 passenger seats.
The ships
| Ship name | Shipyard / construction number | IMO number | Commissioning | Later names and whereabouts |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Peleus | Cammell Laird / | 5273298 | 1949 | scrapped in Kaohsiung on February 18, 1972 |
| Phyrrus | Cammell Laird / | 5287689 | July 1949 | scrapped in Kaohsiung on September 19, 1972 |
| Patroclus | Vickers-Armstrong / 110 | 5271850 | January 22, 1950 | 1973 Glenalmond , 1973 Philoctetes , scrapped from February 13, 1973 at the Chin Tai Steel Enterprise Company in Kaohsiung |
| Perseus | Vickers-Armstrong / | 5275167 | April 4th 1950 | scrapped in Kaohsiung from January 5, 1973 |
literature
- Andrew Bell: Blue Funnel's 'P' and 'H' Classes Fast Cargo Liners of 1949-1951 . In: Ships monthly . Vol. 34, No. 1 , January 1999, p. 42-45 .
- Haws, Duncan: Blue Funnel Line . 1st edition. TCL Publications, Torquay 1984, ISBN 0-946378-01-0 .