QUEEN ELIZABETH

Wairarapa Times-Age, 25 May 1940, Page 7

QUEEN ELIZABETH

SEVEN THOUSAND TESTS THEN THEY BEGAN TO BUILD. BRITAIN'S GREATEST LINER. Seven thousand experiments were made before the shape of Britain’s liner Queen Elizabeth —biggest ever built —was determined, writes a special representative of the “Sunday Express,” London. In an experimental tank at John Brown’s Clydebank yard small-scale models were tested and tested: they travelled a distance equivalent to twice the length of England. Now the ship is safely berthed in New York Harbour, after her secret trip across the Atlantic —the most historic of maiden voyages. When the time comes for her to go into regular service she will outstrip the speediest liner ever built, the experts prophesy. She could not show her paces on that hush-hush wartime voyage. It was not just an empty shell of a ship that sailed across the Atlantic. The Queen Elizabeth could bring passengers on her return peace-time voyage from the United States. Her interior decorations are practically complete and all her furniture is on board. Settees and easy chairs in the lounges and drawing rooms are covered with dust sheets.

The Queen Elizabeth is 1031 feet long—l 3 feet longer than her sister ship, Queen Mary. Her gross tonnage is 85.000. compared with the Queen Mary's 81,235. There are fourteen decks in the hull, connected by 60 goods and passenger lifts. Some of the hull plates are thirty feet long; together they could pave the road from London to the Midlands.

The Queen Elizabeth is really a ship within a ship. Two shells run along the side, and the liner has two bottoms with an intervening space of nearly six feet. This space is divided into 140 watertight compartments, which will make the Queen Elizabeth as safe a ship as man can devise. In addition, a fireproof composition, used throughout the ship, makes the risk of, destruction by fire almost negligible. As an experiment, four cabins, one of which had been treated with this composition, were saturated with parafin and petrol and sei on fire. The three untreated cabins blazed to a cinder. The other was undamaged.

After months of secret tests. John Brown and Co. evolved a new type of marine boiler for the Queen Elizabeth. The Queen Mary has twentyseven boilers in five compartments. Her sister ship has twelve boilers in two compartments, and the space saved is valuable for cargo. Steam can be raised in a fraction of the normal time, with the highest pressure ever used in a passenger ship. The forward mast is 162 feet high and secured by steel rings riveted to the two decks through which it passes. It carries a streamlined crow's nest, from which the look-out man equipped with telephones and an electric footwarmer can see for nine miles. The Queen Elizabeth's power station would supply all the electricity requirements of a town of 200.009 inhabitants. The twenty-six Diesel engine lifeboats are a miracle of simplicity and safety. Each can hold more passengers than the first Cunarder. Britannia. yet a single man can launch them. He presses a button, and the lifeboat is brought electrically to deck level. Another press of the button lowers it to the sea. Accommodation for the 2,410 passen-

gers in peace-time will be on a new scale of luxury. The Queen Elizabeth has a sports arena almost half as big as a full-siz-ed football ground. There are three cinemas, a theatre, swimming pool, shopping centre, banks, tourist bureaux and gymnasiums for each class of passenger. Altogether the cost of the Queen Elizabeth will be about six million pounds, of which four million will have to be paid out in wages, indirectly. to nearly a quarter of a million people.