SHIPS MAIL
REBUILDING CROSS-CHANNEL FERRIES IN THE 1980s
letter of the month
Your articles (January and February 2024) on the cross-Channel ferries in the second half of the last century made fascinating reading. It was surprising to learn that over 40 vessels were plying their trade on so many routes across the Channel in the early 1970s. I was also surprised that there was sufficient business all those years ago to keep them gainfully employed. However, they were quite small and, I guess, likely to have longer cycle times and be generally much less efficient than ships in the current fleets.
Another thing that struck me was that the naval architects seemed to have gone out of their way to make them look like small passenger liners, almost hiding the fact that they, mostly, also carried vehicles. When I was a newbuilding project engineer, we used to joke that naval
