Cobra (ship, 1889)
 Model of the "Cobra"
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The Cobra was a side paddle steamer built in Scotland , which operated in the German seaside resort service to Helgoland and Sylt from 1890 .
Construction and technical data
The Cobra was on March 2, 1889 the shipyard of Fairfield Shipbuilding & Engineering Company in Govan , Glasgow , for the shipping company G. & J. Burns from the stack . The ship was 80.7 m long and 10.1 m wide (without the wheel arches ) and was measured at 987 GRT . The water displacement was 1164 tons (1,146 long tons). She had space for 912 deck passengers. Her speed was 14.5 knots.
In 1910, the Cobra was considerably rebuilt and modernized, making it almost as fast as the 20 knots of the steam turbine ship Kaiser , which was put into service by HAPAG in 1905 .
career
North Channel and North Wales
The Cobra began a daily service from Gourock on the Firth of Clyde via the North Channel to Belfast in April 1889 . This mission did not prove itself, and the ship was therefore returned to its builder the following year. The shipyard founded its own shipping company, the New North Wales Steamship Company , and put the ship, together with the Paris , into service under the new name of St Tudno in coastal traffic in North Wales , where it was considerably larger than the ships of the competition.
North Sea Bathing Service
Already towards the end of 1890, the young Hamburg entrepreneur Albert Ballin bought the ship, who had already acquired the Freia side-wheel steamer the year before and with it founded his Ballins steamship shipping company . Ballin gave the ship its original name Cobra back and used it as a so-called turbine express steamer in the seaside resort service on the Hamburg - Helgoland - Sylt route . In 1896 and 1897 the Cobra was chartered to the Black Sea , where the recently founded Romanian state shipping company Serviciul Maritim Român wanted to set up a liner service between Constanța and Istanbul . Then she was used again in the seaside service in the North Sea. In 1897 Ballins shipping company became the Nordsee-Linie Dampfschiffs-Gesellschaft. In the winter of 1902/03, the Cobra was chartered to HAPAG , where Ballin had meanwhile become general director, and it now operated between Genoa , Nice and Monaco in the winter until 1913 . In the summer months she continued to operate in the seaside resort between Hamburg, Helgoland and Sylt. On January 1, 1905, HAPAG took over the North Sea Line and with it the Cobra , which continued to operate on the Hamburg-Helgoland-Sylt route.
The End
With the outbreak of the First World War in August 1914, the seaside resort service came to a standstill. After the war ended, the Cobra was awarded to France as a war reparation in 1919 , but was repurchased by HAPAG in 1920 and used again on its old route to Helgoland and Sylt until December 1921. Then it was sold to Mahr & Beyer in Wismar for scrapping and scrapped in 1922.
Notes and individual references
- ↑ In 1891 the shipping company took over the rival company Liverpool, Llandudno and Welsh Coast Steam Boat Company (LL&WC) and changed its name to Liverpool and North Wales Steamship Company (LNWSC).
- ^ John Shepherd: The Liverpool and North Wales Steamship Company. Ships in Focus Publications, 2006, ISBN 1-901703-68-1
- ↑ The St Tudno was soon replaced in the North Wales service by the almost identical St Tudno (2).
- ^ Reinhart Schmelzkopf: Ships and Cuxhaven , 2nd exp. Edition, Wilhelm Heidsiek Verlag, Cuxhaven 2017, ISBN 3-935459-23-8 , p. 65