Remuera (ship, 1973)
 The Remuera as Berlin Express on the Elbe
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The Remuera was the world's largest reefer container ship for several years .
history
The refrigerated container ship Remuera was ordered in 1972 by the Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company . On June 12, 1972, the new building was launched as hull number 40 at the Scottish Swan Hunter shipyard in High Walker. When it was built, the ship was specified with a container capacity of 1,650 TEU, which later changed to 2,074 TEU due to higher stowage on deck.
After its handover on December 13, 1973, the ship was initially chartered to the Associated Container Transportation consortium and used in the Europe-Australia-New Zealand container service. From 1977 it was incorporated as Remuera Bay in the newly grouped service of ACT and Australia Europe Container Service (AECS) of the shipping consortium Overseas Containers Limited (OCL). From 1993 the ship was used as the Berlin Express by the shipping company Hapag-Lloyd , but remained in the traditional shipping area.
At the end of its service life, the ship was replaced by the first new build of the Santa R class , the P&O Nedlloyd Remuera , and was then to be scrapped. Due to the large volume of cargo at that time, the ship was used for another round trip to Europe and back and was renamed Press on March 17, 2002 in Auckland . After completing this voyage, the ship finally arrived on June 10, 2002 for demolition in Jiangyin, China.
Almost sister ships
The Remuera was ordered in 1970 as one of four structurally identical ships to containerize the Europe-New Zealand trade. The composition of the cargo flow for this service also resulted in the unusual ratio of over 1,100 porthole refrigerated container spaces and initially only around 400 TEU in conventional spaces. For a long time it was considered the ship with the largest cooling capacity with a total of 1.1 million cbft of cold storage. The largest reefer ships currently had around 650,000 cbft of cooling capacity, the largest reefer container ships of that time had around 830 TEU reefer container spaces (around 830,000 cbft).
The Remuera was ultimately the only ship in this series to be completed because there were major doubts on the land side about the efficiency of the hinterland logistics necessary for reefer shipping, especially the New Zealand railways. After the New Zealand farmers withdrew their support, the shipping group only had the Remuera , which was already well under construction, completed, but did not continue the ship series. The initially feared bottlenecks in the hinterland connection never occurred.