World's biggest passenger ship casts off

By JOHN LICHFIELD, in Paris


Some time today, depending on the tide, the biggest passenger ship ever constructed - double the weight of the Queen Elizabeth 2, three times the weight of the Titanic - was to glide from the harbour at Saint-Nazaire on the French Atlantic coast.

A local orchestra was to play God Save the Queen and the Marseillaise.

French fighter planes would fly overhead. Up to 100,000 local people were expected to line the harbour mouth, carrying lanterns and torches.

They were to salute, with mingled sadness and joy, the departure from her birthplace of the Queen Mary 2 - the longest, tallest, widest and heaviest passenger ship ever built; the first liner to be built for 34 years and maybe the last.

The QM2, touched by tragedy even before she was completed, represents a vast, ocean-going gamble for Cunard, the British shipping line which ordered her three years ago.

She is not just a floating hotel - with five swimming pools, 14 restaurants, 24 massage parlours and an art gallery - she is a true, ocean liner in the Cunard tradition.

The new queen will be capable of dashing across the Atlantic in six days.

Her engines generate enough power to light a small city of 300,000 people.

Many voices in the shipping and cruise industry wonder aloud whether there is an economic future for such a luxuriously appointed, speedy, highly engineered and technically advanced ship.

They suggest that the real salvation for a cruise market - holed below the water line by the terrorist attacks in the United States in September 2001 - is for larger, slower, floating holiday resorts, which can meander around the South Seas, offering a wider range of cheap to expensive cruises. There are good reasons, they say, why no one has bothered to build a real ocean liner since 1969 (Cunard's QE2 was the last).

Cunard insists that the QM2 - designed internally to recall the great art nouveau days of the ocean liners in the first half of the 20th century - can perform both roles.

She will be a true liner for those who want to travel to the US in superb, retro style; she will also be a leisurely cruise ship.

The new queen's first year of cruising and Atlantic crossings, starting with a trip to Fort Lauderdale and the Caribbean next month, is almost fully booked.

More exuberant celebrations planned at Saint-Nazaire to say farewell to the queen have been cancelled. Last month, 15 local people died when a temporary footbridge or gangway, linking the liner to the harbourside, collapsed.

There have been suggestions that this somehow makes the QM2 a cursed ship even before it joins the Cunard fleet. Even before it is named by the Queen at Southampton, its home port, on January 12.

In truth, the accident had nothing to do with the quality of the workmanship on the queen itself. The makeshift gangway had been built by a contractor to a weaker than normal specification, for reasons that remain unclear.

More than 50 people were allowed to stand on it at the same time, as they queued to enter an open day.

Saint-Nazaire, preferred by Cunard to Harland and Woolf in Belfast, is immensely proud of its achievement in building such a gargantuan and advanced ship in two years within the US$860 million ($1.341 billion) budget. But even in Saint-Nazaire, the Queen has come to be known as "Bloody Mary" or the "Red Queen". The disaster has been taken as an ill omen - if not for the ship, then for the shipyard.

The yard, Les Chantiers de L'Atlantique, part of the troubled Alstom group which also makes high-speed trains, has received no new orders for cruise ships for almost three years.

The QM2's departure leaves behind an almost empty shipyard, with just one smaller cruise ship and a giant methane tanker nearing completion.

The immensity of the QM2 takes the breath away.

She is 345m long - as long as the Eiffel Tower is tall; 50m longer than the QE2. She is 41m broad, double the width of the Titanic. She is 74m high - 62m above her water line, the equivalent of a building 23 storeys high.

In terms of weight, 150,000 tonnes, she is more than double the size of the QE2 (but just as fast at 30 knots) and more than triple the size of the ill-fated Titanic, built in 1912. It would take a sizeable and determined iceberg to sink her.

The most luxurious single cabin will be split-level and 209 sq m, with a view of the ocean equivalent to that commanded by Captain Ronald Warwick from the bridge.

Today, she will set sail for Vigo in northern Spain, for a final sea trial before she reaches Southampton for the first time on Saturday.

"She is a magnificent ship, top of the range," said Georges Azouze, head of France's leading cruise company, Costa Croisieres.

"The problem is that the cruise industry is trying to get away from its old-fashioned and expensive image and the Queen Mary takes us straight back there. She is based on nostalgia for the Titanic. That's not going to attract the new customers we need," he says.

Peter Shanks, senior vice-president of Cunard, said: "QM2 will be the finest transatlantic ocean liner ever. We are confident that she will stun guests when they board for the first time in January."

The QM2 will not long retain her record as the largest passenger ship ever built.

The Royal Caribbean cruise line recently placed an order for a 160,000 tonne, 3600 passenger vessel with the Masa shipyard in Finland, one of Saint-Nazaire's great rivals.

The Ultra-Voyager - perhaps significantly - will be a slow, floating resort, not a speedy liner.

Luxury afloat

* The Queen Mary 2 has an art gallery, with 300 works on show.

* It also has a theatre with 1000 seats; a ballroom; a thalassotherapy clinic; a planetarium; 2000 bathrooms and 3000 phone lines.

* There will be 1300 crew members and 3000 passengers.

* The passengers will pay between £1000 and £20,000 ($2752 and $55,056) for the six-day crossing between Southampton and New York.


- INDEPENDENT