Announced with great fanfare in 2012, following an agreement with a Chinese shipyard, will a new liner take the famous name of Titanic?
Project announcement
The Chinese shipyards CSC Jinling, owned by the Chinese state, and the company Blue Star Line (a nod to the White Star Line, the historic shipowner of the Titanic) announced on April 30, 2012 the signing of a contract for construction involving a 269 m and 56,000 tonne vessel answering the name Titanic 2.
A few months later, a new agreement was announced with the Finnish company Deltamarin, a company specializing in the design of large complex ships, liners, support vessels, freighters and other tankers. Very beautiful signatures collected to revive the most famous name in naval passenger transport.
CSC Jinling and Deltamarin frequently collaborate on complex cases in which Finnish provides all the studies to the Chinese yard. They have, among other things, produced the LNG Cargos (160 m in length and 25,600 tons) and running on LPG Viikki and Haaga. In June 2013, the shipowner announced Lloyd’s intervention to check class conformity.
Good fairies seem to have leaned over the cradle of the Titanic II …
The Titanic II project
The main lines of the project consist, neither more nor less, in recreating a ship of size equivalent to the Titanic of 1912, whose exterior and interior appearance will be very close to it, but whose technical infrastructures will be those of an ultra-modern liner. Among them are bulbous keel, stabilizers and all modern safety and emergency equipment.
Inside, the goal is to recreate an “art deco” atmosphere with interior architecture modeled on the original. Famous cabins and common areas will thus be recreated almost identically thanks to the intervention of specialized historians, some of whom took part in the discovery dives on the wreck of the Titanic.
A budget of over 450 M € is necessary for the construction. It will be a question of offering for sale luxury cruises of yesteryear, transatlantic and transpacific, benefiting from the advances and the safety of boarding current cruise ships. Which program !
Has the Titanic 2 ever sunk?
Since that date, and until 2018, several trials have opposed the various stakeholders. If no one knows the content, one thing is certain, the site has not started and things have remained at the draft stage, without tangible materialization.
The start of work, postponed to 2014 then 2015 and 2016, has had no effect.
Is the construction abandoned? Is the owner rowing?
The shipowner
Clive Palmer is an Australian entrepreneur who made his fortune in real estate during the boom of the Australian Gold Coast, then invested in the mining sector in the 1990s.
Regularly ranked in the top 5 of the most important Australian fortunes, Palmer operated Mineralogy, a steel mining company with Chinese partners, with whom he had bulk carriers built at CSC Jinling.
In the mid-2010s, there was a clash and a lawsuit with the Chinese.
At the same time, Palmer’s business collapsed and several million Australian dollars from his mines came to finance the Titanic project.
Simultaneously, these same mining companies filed for bankruptcy, exposing the horrified administrators to these transfers, against the backdrop of abysmal losses preventing the payment of a few hundred million Australian dollars in wages … In the meantime, Palmer entered the Australian Parliament.
Restarting
At the end of 2018, Clive Palmer announced the resumption of the project and the postponement of the launch of it to 2022. It was on this occasion that the reports, which illustrate this article, were made public. But it was also a little before this date that Palmer won a procedural round against his ex-Chinese partner ($ 200 million).
Would the Titanic II see the light of day?
A shipowner in a hurry to enter politics
Deeply stuck in various serious financial scandals, indicted in several cases, Palmer also chooses this year 2018 to (re) birth his own political party in Australia, against the backdrop of elections after spending nearly € 50 million on advertising for him and his party in various ballots.
Hazard ? Calendar effect?
Anyway, since that date, no more announcements about the Titanic II, neither from the Blue Star Line nor from Palmer.
Radio silence.
In January 2020, Deltamarin officially declared that no shipyard had yet been selected and that the project was at a standstill.
