Four Funnel Liner - Unfinished Four-funnel Liners

Unfinished Four-funnel Liners

In the late 1920s the worlds main shipping lines were Britain's Cunard Line and White Star Line and France's Compagnie Générale Transatlantique. Each of these three were operating ageing vessels and required new larger and more modern 1000 ft long superliners to remain competitive. CGT began construction of the SS Normandie while Cunard placed an order for the RMS Queen Mary. The weakest company of the three, White Star, placed an order to their shipbuilders Harland and Wolff for the Oceanic, a successor to the line's inaugural 1870 liner, the RMS Oceanic. The exact intended design of the Oceanic III is unknown, although company concept renderings show it to be a three-funnelled 1000-foot liner. However, plans from Harland and Wolff's archives show a design drawn in 1927 for a four funnelled liner almost identical to the Olympic-class design except sporting a more modern cruiser stern.

With the onset of the great depression the shipping lines were crippled. The completion of Cunard's Queen Mary was delayed for four years and in order to raise the funds to complete her the British government gave Cunard a loan on the condition that Cunard merge with White Star into a single British shipping line. Upon the merger into the Cunard-White Star Line the Oceanic, with only her keel laid, was abandoned. Had this 1927 design been realized she would have been the White Star Line's crowning achievement, a fourth Olympic-class liner over 1000 ft long and the last ocean liner to date to sport four funnels.