Himalaya (ship, 1949)
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The Himalaya (III) was a 1949 passenger ship of the British shipping company Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company (P&O), which was used in passenger and mail traffic from Great Britain to Australia and New Zealand . She was the largest ship in the history of the shipping company to date and the first to be built after the Second World War. Later it was mainly used as a cruise ship until it was scrapped in Taiwan in 1975 .
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The ship
The 27,955 GRT steam turbine ship Himalaya was built at the Vickers-Armstrong shipyard in the English port city of Barrow-in-Furness . The passenger and cargo ship was 216.01 meters long, 27.67 meters wide and had a maximum draft of 9.5 meters. The passenger accommodations were designed for 758 passengers in first class and 401 in tourist class. There were also 572 members of the crew. She was the third ship of the P&O that was named Himalaya .
Ordered by P&O in March 1945, she was the first ship the shipping company put into service after the Second World War and the largest and fastest of the shipping company up until then. The design of the Himalaya was largely identical to the Orcades (III) of the Orient Steam Navigation Company , which was built by Vickers-Armstrong at the same time. The Himalayas were powered by steam turbines that operated on two propellers and made a total of 42,550 Shaft Horsepower (SHP). The cruising speed was 22 knots, the top speed 25 knots.
The Himalayas turned out to be record breakers. It reduced the travel time from England to Bombay by five days and the entire journey to Australia from 38 to 28 days. She was also the first passenger ship to be equipped with a Weir brand evaporation system for water distillation.
history
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The Himalaya was on February 26, 1946 at Vickers Armstrong laid down on and ran after two years of construction on 5 October 1948 by the stack. The test drives were carried out in August 1949 and the handover to the shipping company took place on September 1st. On October 6, 1949, she ran in Tilbury on her maiden voyage via Bombay , Colombo and Fremantle to Melbourne and Sydney . Sydney was reached after a 30 day journey.
On August 30, 1956, there was an explosion in one of the cooling chambers in the Mediterranean during a voyage to Australia. Four crew members were killed and 12 others were injured. In January 1958, the lines of P&O and the Orient Steam Navigation Company were expanded into the Pacific region as part of a joint venture and the Himalayas continued from Sydney via Auckland (New Zealand), Suva (Fiji Islands) and Honolulu (Hawaii) to Vancouver and San Francisco . On January 12, 1959, she left London on a 79,000-kilometer voyage to Australia, New Zealand, the USA, Japan and Singapore , thus opening the shipping company's USA-Japan service.
In the winter of 1959/60, the Himalayas in the Netherlands were renovated and air-conditioned . In May 1960, the operation and management of the ship became part of the newly formed P&O Orient Line Ltd. transfer. When the ship docked in Colombo on Ceylon on October 10, 1960 , the passenger Stephen Bradley was arrested by two Australian police officers who had come to Sri Lanka especially for this purpose. Bradley had kidnapped and killed the eight-year-old son of a lottery winner three months earlier in Sydney and has since been wanted by Australian police.
In 1963 the Himalaya was bought by R. & H. Green & Silly Weir Ltd. in Tilbury converted into a single-class ship with space for 1416 passengers. On November 21, 1963, she left London for her first voyage as a single-class ship. In 1966 the management was handed back to P&O. In the early 1970s, the ship was mainly used for cruises , mainly departing from Australia and New Zealand and Southampton in the spring . She arrived in Sydney on March 27, 1973 with 1,400 passengers, 950 of whom were women taking part in a Word Discovery Tour organized by Australian women's magazine Women's Weekly .
The Himalayas made their last crossing from Great Britain to Australia in 1974. They last arrived in Sydney on October 30, 1974 and then went on to Kaohsiung (Taiwan), where they arrived on November 28, 1974. The ship was there in January 1975 by the Tong Cheng Steel Manufacturing Company Ltd. scrapped.