Drottning Victoria
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The Drottning Victoria (German: Queen Victoria ) was a Swedish railway ferry that operated in the Baltic Sea from 1910 to 1968 .
Construction and technical data
The ship was on 21 February 1909 with the yard number 802 at Swan Hunter & Wigham Richardson in Newcastle upon Tyne , England , for the Swedish state railway Statens Järnvägar from the stack . It was 113.33 m long and 16.24 m wide and had a 5.18 m draft . It was measured with 3642 GRT or 1415 NRT and displaced 2399 tons . Two Swan Hunter 3-cylinder steam engines with 4600 hp and two propellers gave it a top speed of 16 knots . It could accommodate up to 18 passenger coaches on two tracks with a total length of 165 m and had space for up to 975 passengers .
career
The ship was delivered to Statens Järnvägar in June 1909, arrived in Trelleborg on June 24th and started the regular ferry service on July 6th, 1909 on the so-called " King's Line " between Trelleborg and Saßnitz ( Rügen ), which was opened that day . On March 14, 1910, the sister ship Konung Gustav V was added as the second ship of the Statens Järnvägar. Although the Swedish government ordered both ships back to Stockholm for safety reasons on August 1, 1914 when the First World War broke out , the Konung Gustav V resumed service on August 21, 1914 and the Drottning Victoria on August 26, 1914 . On February 20, 1915, the Drottning Victoria ran aground in front of Stubbenkammer ; the passengers had to be taken off board before the ship could be made afloat again.
The most prominent passenger of the Drottning Victoria in world history was Vladimir Ilyich Lenin , who on his return journey to Russia on April 12, 1917, took her from Saßnitz to Trelleborg and then traveled on to northern Sweden and Russia.
On September 20, 1926, the ship collided in the Øresund in thick fog with the Danish freighter Dronning Dagmar (416 GRT), which then sank in a few minutes. His crew was saved by the Drottning Victoria .
Although the ferry traffic on the "King's Line" was maintained in the first years of the Second World War , the Drottning Victoria was initially no longer involved. She was requisitioned by the Swedish Navy on September 3, 1939, converted into a mine ship by Finnboda Varv in Nacka , renamed HM Hjälpkryssare No. 3 (SM auxiliary cruiser No. 3) and with three old 12.0 cm sea target cannons built in 1894 armed. 450 mines were loaded on the track deck . After the work was completed in mid-October, the ship was assigned to the coastal fleet. On December 6, 1939, it put a mine barrier between Sweden and Åland , its only act of war.
Since the demand for ferry capacity on the "Königslinie" was still very high, the ship was already in ferry service between Trelleborg and Saßnitz from January 8, 1940 and remained in service there until the "Königslinie" was finally closed on September 26, 1944 . In May 1944 there was a collision at Cape Arkona with the Finnish steamer Pollux , which required a stay in the shipyard until July.
After the end of the war, the Drottning Victoria , the Konung Gustav V and from 1946 also the Starke provided ferry service from Trelleborg to Danzig first from November 1945 and from April 25, 1946 to Gdynia . They transported more than 1300 railway wagons made available by Sweden to Poland. It was not until June 11, 1947 that the Swedish ships on the Trelleborg- Warnemünde route began operating again with Germany. After the Swedish State Railways, the Deutsche Reichsbahn and the Soviet military administration in Germany on 10./11. On March 16, 1948, the three ships of the Statens Järnvägar resumed ferry service to Trelleborg↔Saßnitz on March 16, 1948. The connection to Poland , which had only been switched to Odra Port ( Swinoujscie ) in February 1948 , was discontinued. On May 11, 1952, the ship ran aground in a storm off Saßnitz. Even with the help of the Konung Gustav V and the Strong it could not be made afloat; the three tugs Harald , Hermes and Karl had to free the ship. During the repairs that were then necessary in 1953, the previous coal firing was replaced by oil firing and thicker chimneys were added. In June 1953 the Drottning Victoria opened the summer excursion connection Trelleborg↔Travemünde on the occasion of the "Nordic Days" in Lübeck, which was held for the first time since the war that year , after it had already undertaken a test drive on this route in November 1952. She served this route until September 14, 1953, then again between Trelleborg and Saßnitz. In May 1955 she collided with the jetty in Trelleborg, which in turn made a stay in the shipyard necessary.
Because of their limited capacity and technical capabilities, the double-track ferries built before the First World War were gradually no longer able to cope with the steadily growing transit traffic on the Saßnitz – Trelleborg line, so that new constructions were necessary. After a jointly operated ferry service had been set up again on the basis of a government agreement between Sweden and the GDR in order to appropriately share the financial burdens between the Swedish State Railways and the German State Railroad, this was able to happen. In April 1958, the Drottning Victoria was replaced by the new Swedish four-track ferry Trelleborg , which also had a separate car deck. When the new Sassnitz Reichsbahn ferry was ready for use in July 1959, the Gustav V cone was also removed from regular service. The two ships were elderly as a reserve ferry in Trelleborg launched and served only as needed (either as a substitute for dry docking of the new ships, or as reinforcement in the summer season) on their traditional route or on the route Malmö-Copenhagen. Otherwise, they were used in the summer months for excursion services between Travemünde and Trelleborg, which opened in 1953.
The Drottning Victoria ran on this route for the last time on August 30, 1964 and was then launched as a reserve ferry. In the period up to 1967 she occasionally served between Malmö and Copenhagen; her last trip on this route was on December 16, 1967.
The ship was sold for demolition on October 4th, 1968 and towed from Trelleborg to Ystad for scrapping on October 18th, 1968 .
Web links
- faktaomfartyg.se: Drottning Victoria
- tynebuiltships: Drottning Victoria
- Wulf Krentzien: The Sassnitz-Trelleborg line in old views
- The auto age begins, p. 74 (PDF; 5.8 MB)
- The Drottning Victoria , on the Swedish Railways website, with postcard views
- The Drottning Victoria on the side of the city of Trelleborg
- The Ferry Service of the Future. Wellington-Lyttelton. Sassnitz-Trelleborg, in Progress, Volume V, Issue 3, 1 January 1910, Page 85
Footnotes
- ↑ The Dronning Dagmar , built in 1919 from oak and beech, was on its way from Kunda ( Estonia ) to Aalborg ( Denmark ) with a load of cement . She was due to dense fog about a mile west before Falsterbo before anchor . The stem of the Drottning Victoria cut the Dronning Dagmar open to starboard at the level of the rear cargo hatch over a width of about 2 m. Ministeriet for Industri, Handel og Søfart: Dansk Søulykke Statistics 1926, Copenhagen February 1928 (p. 13) ( Memento of October 7, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) (PDF; 646 kB)
- ↑ Only after the Starke ran into a drifting mine in front of Rügen on February 26, 1942 and sank, civil passenger traffic on the "Königslinie" was stopped on February 27, 1942 and all ferry traffic on September 26, 1944. The strong one was raised in 1942 and then repaired in Malmö.
- ↑ Report, among other things, on the arrival of the Drottning Victoria in Travemünde in the Neue Deutsche Wochenschau