The Hamburg Express class was a series of turbine ships built by the Hapag-Lloyd shipping company in 1972/73 . The third-generation container ships were the world's largest ships of this type at the time and were only outbid in 1981 with the construction of the Frankfurt Express .
The series of this ship class consisted of two units of two similar ship types from the Blohm + Voss shipyards in Hamburg and Bremer Vulkan in Bremen, which were put into service in 1972 and 1973. The first ship of the class was the Hamburg Express , which was delivered on July 10, 1972 . Hapag-Lloyd's four ships in the Hamburg Express class (the Frankfurt Express was added in 1981 ), together with the six Overseas Containers Limited ships in the Liverpool Bay class , served Liverpool Bay , Jervis Bay , Cardigan Bay and Kowloon Bay from 1972 , Tokyo Bay and Osaka Bay , two ships from Mitsui OSK Lines , three ships from Ben Line and four ships from Nippon Yusen Kaisha provide the joint Europe-Asia service of the newly founded trio group.
