Ocean Liner

The Queen Mary 2 is by far the most beautiful ship at sea today, and I am proud to have been aboard her for a tour on the 13th of July, 2013 in Southampton and came all the way from Abu Dhabi, UAE to do so! I have always wondered, what ship's gave you the inspiration for her design? I know that the Normandie was a inspiration and the Queen Mary, but was there any other ships that inspired you like the Swedish America Liner Kungsholm or any modern Cruise Ship? I really love your design's and am so glad you made a Ocean Liner for us Ocean Liner fanatic's and hope to do a transatlantic crossing aboard her some day and maybe meet you in person!

Regards,
Liam Fjellstedt

Liam,

Thank you for your kind comments about Queen Mary 2. I am immensely proud of the way the ship looks -and well everything about her! She was an intense five year period of my life from drawing the first line on paper to represent "something" 345 metres long to the day I "handed over" the keys to Cunard.

I have a belief that before attempting anything new you have the best chance of success if you can appreciate what has been a success and failure in the past. I therefore studied the designs of many transatlantic liners and drew inspiration from Queen Mary, Normandie, Queen Elizabeth 2, Rotterdam, Canberra and the great Swedish America and Norwegian American liners. I also looked at what were were doing in the cruise industry to see how modern practices could help optimise the design -things like baggage loading and distribution, catering and stores arrangements etc. I was adamant that only those things that wouldn't detract from the transatlantic pedigree of the ship would be included in her design as this was after all the raison d'etre of the ship. I looked close and hard at Queen Elizabeth 2 and after that process Queen Mary 2 evolved! Easy really. Just a few headaches along the way!! This process took around two years to complete in total. I worked with a junior colleague Rick Moore on this until we were ready to involve some of the other trades such as marine engineering and electrical engineering for the specification writing.

All this process is detailed in my new book out in March published by Haynes Publishing.

I hope we meet one day on board. Many thanks for your question.

Stephen