NEW STEAMERS.

Marlborough Express, Volume XLI, Issue 226, 24 September 1907, Page 4

NEW STEAMERS.

ADDITIONS TO THE UNION

FLEET

It has been decided that the steamer which is building for the. Union Company for the South Sea Islands trade is to be named the Tofua. She is being built at Denny's yard, Dumbarton, and her principal measurements will be 350 ft by 48ft by 30ft. Her gross tonnage will be 4200, aad she will have engine j.6wer capable of developing a speed of fourteen knots. Accommodation for 100 firstclass passengers and fifty second-class will be provided. Delivery by the builders will be given early next year, and the vessel will arrive in gootl time for next island passenger season. It has also been decided to give the name Waitemata to the large cargo steamer which is in course of construction by William Hamilton and Co., of Port Glasgow. This vessel's principal dimensions are 415 ft by 54ft, by 30Jft. She is designed io carry 8500 tons dead weight on a draught of 24ft 3in, and a speed or 10 J- knots. Delivery is to bo giver, h March.

The Union Company's new turbine steamer Maori, which met with an accident during a trial run on the Clyde last week-, built for the AVel-lington-Lyttelton ferry service, will have a. speed of not less than 21 knots per hour. This rate, if maintained throughout, would enable the vessel to make the passage from Wellington to Lyttelton, or vice versa, in eight hours and a-half, but she will hardly be forced constantly to full speed, and so a passage of nine hours in favourable weather to ten hours under less propitious conditions may ordinarily be looked for. The accommodation on the new boat will be superior to anything hitherto seen even ia the Union Company's boats, which have no equal in this respect in any coastal to be seen on the coast of Britain or the European Continent