Luxury Liner SS United States Cannot Be Put Back In Service (miamiherald.com)

tomhath writes: Once the fastest ocean liner ever built, the SS United States has been mothballed for almost 50 years. An ambitious project to refurbish the SS United States as a luxury liner has been abandoned due to insurmountable technical and commercial obstacles. Plan B, to turn it into a floating hotel/convention center, might go forward. Miami Herald provides some history of the SS United States in its report: "The iconic 1950s vessel, which was bigger than the Titanic and once carried celebrities across the Atlantic Ocean, was set for a $700 million overhaul by the Los Angeles-based luxury line, which also has offices in Miami. The SS United States was decommissioned in 1969 and has been gutted and docked in Philadelphia for two decades on the Delaware River. On its maiden voyage in 1952, the ship traversed the Atlantic in three days, 10 hours and 42 minutes -- a record it held until 1990."

Comments

not all sub records are worth remembering

[sittingnut]

not everything is worth remembering and celebrating. records get broken all the time. and everything can be made into a record by slicing words.

usually if you don't know or care about the current record holder/prize winner/whatever, then there is not much reason to celebrate past winners of same.

if there was nothing very original, innovative, and special, about a particular time slice of a record, it is not worth celebrating after it gets broken. mere footnotes and a row in record book used by specialists interested in that, is all it deserves. to scrapheap with rest.

Actually, in this case...

[Ecuador]

Actually in this case this ship is still a record holder. It still holds the once very important "Blue Riband", which is the record for the fastest westbound (i.e. against the gulf stream) cross-atlantic passenger voyage. Only its eastbound records have been broken and even those not by regular passenger service. So this truly seems to be the fastest cross-atlantic passenger ship ever built (especially if you consider it held almost 2000 passengers) and it was retired quite early in its life, because cross-atlantic ship voyages were no longer required.
So, considering that, I do find it a shame nobody ever found another use for it...

Re:Actually, in this case...

[daremonai]

Also the above is not helpful at all: 32 knots is about 60 km/h. That's a quite low cruise speed for a car, for example.

But a lot faster than the average car's cruise speed on water, though.