Bremen
1929 · Express Steamer with Bulbous Bow · Work 188 of 1,871
The Norddeutscher Lloyd liner Bremen at sea, bulbous bow throwing spray, two low squat funnels, a mail seaplane sitting on its catapult between them, signal mast and rigging aft.
- What it was used for
- Express liner of the Norddeutscher Lloyd, built by Deschimag AG "Weser" for the Bremerhaven–New York run. The ship description by Rudolf Brenke for the Deutsches Schifffahrtsmuseum Bremerhaven gives 811 first-class, 500 second-class, 300 tourist-class and 617 third-class passengers, 2,228 in all, with a crew of about 990. The owners fixed a service speed of a little over 26 knots, because only that would hold the six-day schedule between Bremerhaven and New York. The brief was to win back a leading position in the fast North Atlantic trade.
- What was new
- The slender hull ended forward in a teardrop-shaped bulbous bow, and the boiler plant was split into two widely separated groups, so that Bremen and Europa needed only two funnels where pre-war express liners needed four (Brenke, DSM). Continuous output 105,000 shaft horsepower, 135,000 maximum; the westbound record run of July 1929 took four days, 17 hours and 42 minutes at 27.83 knots. New, too, was that the mail arrived before the ship: on 22 July 1929 a Heinkel He 12 was catapulted off some 400 kilometres short of New York and landed 2.5 hours later; on later flights urgent mail arrived up to 36 hours ahead of the liner. The barb: in 1935 the catapult was removed and replaced by a garage for passengers' cars.