This was exactly what I expected would happen....
The amount of apparent incompetence and ineptitude boggles the mind,
From the beginning, you have good intentions, sure....but what were they thinking? If you truly want to "preserve" the ship, you don't waste all your funds on a $60k per month dock...
They should have moved her to a cheaper site, perhaps placed with stored ships in Norfolk, etc....
The $10 million gift they were given would have gone quite a long way toward moving the ship and storing her, as well as paying for a small crew to do maintenance and basics like painting....
They seem to have a serious problem with management having their heads inserted into certain body parts....

She needed to be a shell inside, regardless.

First, her 1950's interior designs just aren't very stylish these days or what people think of when they imagine the glory years of trans-Atlantic travel by seas. Secondly, asbestos was heavily utilized on her and any reuse would've required that to be taken care of.

So it's not only beneficial that that issue has been abated, the loss for any reuse of most of her interior design is relatively minor since her interior had to be overhauled and redesigned anyways to make her marketable.

I wish people would stop talking as if this is a negative. It was a deliberate and necessary step done years ago for her potential revival and still would've had to be done today for any rebirth if it hadn't. That it's already accomplished is a good thing and an asset, not a negative.

Never say never. They're talking about enlarging them to 1050', at least the ones between the Atlantic and Lake Ontario. Enlarging the Welland Canal (Erie-Ontario) is probably out of the question.

An enlarged St. Lawrence Seaway doesn't mean much if the Welland Canal also wasn't enlarged, so it's both or neither. But the environmental hurdles are so great, I very much doubt it.

But if the Welland Canal and St. Lawrence Seaway ever did get enlarged, I imagine they'd be built to match the Poe Lock at Sault Saint Marie. And that's 1,200 feet long, 110 feet wide, and 32 feet. With a beam of 101.5 Feet, it's going to be a tight squeeze since she's actually wider than her beam thanks to her fine lines.

But what seals the deal are the vertical limitations. She's approximately about 175' high, which is much higher than the cargo ships like the Great Lakes 1000' freighters that an expanded system would be build to accommodate. Assuming that's a dimension in an empty state and not under service conditions with her bunker tanks full, over a thousand people aboard, furniture, provisions, and so on, she's still way too tall.

For an example of an obstacle, the Garden City Skyway at the Welland Canal at its highest point is only 131'. Even removing her stacks for storage isn't going to do it I bet and that's far from the only obstacle. You'd have to remove and replace most bridges along both waterways just to accommodate her, and potentially even more the further up the lakes she had to go, like the Sault Ste. Marie International Bridge at the Soo with clearances of just 124' per Wikipedia (High enough to accommodate cargo ships like the 1013.5' Paul R. Tregurtha, but much too short for the SS United States).

I just saw 150' given as her approximate height above the waterline, with 175' actually the height from her keel to her forward funnel. But even at ~150', it presents obvious issues with entering the Great Lakes.

The major structural issue with SSUS and other liners is the design aspects of camber, sheer, and tumblehome. Together they mean there are few level and square spaces on board, making a traditional interior renovation very difficult.



Wesley