TRANSPORT: Trade In

Last week the United States Lines found itself in the happy position of a man who is about to be permitted to turn in a hopeless jalopy and get a new car for a quarter of the list price—the jalopy to be accepted as part payment. The U. S. Maritime Commission asked shipyards for bids on a new flagship of the U. S. Merchant Marine, to be built to the Commission’s specifications for U. S. Lines. The winning bid is expected to be about $16,000,000. Under the current arrangement, United States Lines will lay out 25%, the Government 75%.

Comfort and safety will take precedence in the new ship over size and speed. It will have a load-draft displacement of 34,000 tons, be 723 ft. long—considerably bigger than the United States Lines’ Washington and Manhattan. Normal cruising speed is expected to be 22 knots. The ship will accommodate 1,200 passengers in three classes, a crew of 630. As for safety, the Commission and its advisers could not think of anything they had overlooked. Fireproof materials are specified throughout. The hull is designed so that any three of the hull’s 15 compartments separated by bulkheads may be flooded without sinking the vessel. Every passenger and crew member will have a reserved seat in the lifeboats, and most lifeboats will be motor-propelled and radio-equipped. The Commission is going to credit U. S. Lines with $2,000,000 on the old Leviathan, which should put the new ship in the line’s hands in return for a cash outlay of not much more than $2,000,000.

The Leviathan was christened the Vaterland when she was launched 23 years ago by her German builders. The monster had made only two and one-half round trips when War broke out and she was interned in Hoboken. Splotched with camouflage paint, she performed distinguished service as a U. S. troop transport, on one trip ferried across 11,322 men. After the War the U. S. Government allowed Germany $12,000,000 for the ship and after years of idleness, during which she was an object of sarcastic merriment in the press and of wrath in Congress, $8,000,000 was appropriated for reconditioning her. The U. S. Lines, which acquired her from the Shipping Board in 1929, operated her intermittently, but with newer, sleeker competitors on the Atlantic she lost about $75,000 a trip and for three years past has been tied up in Hoboken.

What the commissioners will do with her remained uncertain. They have received proposals to turn her into a floating night club or gambling ship stationed off the Florida coast, into an advertising ship for promoting trade and good will in South America, into a training ship for apprentice seamen or CCC boys, into a floating hotel for Puerto Rico or the New York Exposition of 1939. Some sentimentalists, recalling luxurious voyages in the Leviathan’s heyday, snorted that this would be like turning an old race track champion into a milkwagon hack, insisted that the Leviathan merited a dignified finish in the scrapyard. As scrap she would bring about $1,000,000 at current prices. Last week a British purchasing agent arrived in the U. S. (on the Queen Mary) to dicker for the old ship as fodder for Britain’s rearmament program. If that deal goes through, she will cross the Atlantic under her own power for the last time, be broken up in Scotland.