PACIFIC SERVICE LINERS.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 19261, 27 August 1924, Page 5

PACIFIC SERVICE LINERS.

It is a envious, and perhaps significant, fact tliat the two largest, finest, arid most important passenger liners built since the close of (he war hove been intended for service. not on the Atlantic, but on the Pacific fsays a shipbuilding correspondent of The limes Trade and Engineering Supplement). What is of interest to flbifiowners, shipbuilders, and marine engineers is that the North Atlantic has no loneer first call on the latest and finest of liners, and that vessels marking very definite staged in (fie development of naval architecture and marine engineering are being built for service, from the first, on Pacific routes. The first vessel to which reference has been made was the Canadian Pacific Railway Company’s Empress of Canada, which is now on flcrvico between Japan and Vancouver, and holds tbs speed record for that route. She is easily the finest vessel on the Pacific, and would have been considered an outstanding ship on the Southampton-New York run. But she does not mark any really important development either in naval architecture or in marine engineering, as does the Union Steam Ship Company’s Aorangi. which is the largest motor shop afloat, and ths first motor liner comparable in size, speed, and passenger accommodation with the great ships of the Atlantic and with the Empress of Canada. Hitherto practically every ship that marked a definite stage in the progress of naval architecture or marine engineering was designed and constructed for service on the North Atlantic. Now an epoch-marking liner has been designed and built for longdistance passenger service on the Pacific, just as if there were no North Atlantic route. As an indication of the progress marked by this vessel, the correspondent says that in the days of coal-firing, a North Atlantic liner had to bunker at. each terminal, and her reserve of fuel represented only half a single run. With oil firing, fuel for tha double run can be carried, if necessary, but as a matter of general practice the vessels still hunker at each terminal. The Aorangi carries sufficient fuel for the whole of the round voyage from Vancouver to Sydney, and back, at the service speed of 18 knots. That is, she can run without hunkering for a distance of 15,T00 nautical miles, or about as far as five trips across the Atlantic,