Let’s suppose my distant Piper cousin who made billions in Silicone Valley croaks and leaves his billions to me.
I decide I want to re-create the Titanic experience. I want to re-build it and sail from Southampton to New York.
I’m willing to have some modern equivalents. Fuel oil instead of coal, to make fuelling easy. Non-brittle rivers and steel plates - no-brainer! Maybe even some night-time radar…
And, of course, enough life boats for everyone on board.
But all the hand-work, like the great staircase, has to be reproduced exactly, by hand.
So, how much would it cost to build Titanic II? How much of my inheritance do I have to spend?
And then, what would te operating cost be, for the trip to New York? What sort of rates would I have to charge to make a profit?
You might want to be careful. That 1st class parlor suite in the movie cost $4,350 in 1912. That is about $100,000 today. A simple berth in 1st class was about $3,500 in today’s dollars per person. It wasn’t cheap to travel on the Titanic or its sister ships.
ships in that weight range look to cost about $350 million. There is some variation based I expect on the luxury level of the ship. I’d assume 1/2 a billion or less should cover you.
As big as Titanic was, it’s 1/3 to 1/2 the tonnage of a lot of the cruise ships out there now.
There is another minor point that the people who could afford to pay for a cabin on a luxury liner, are not usually willing to take four or five days off to enjoy the amenities when they can fly over in as many hours.
I think you might be getting mixed up between tonnage and displacement - certainly the article you link to does. Tonnage is a measure of volume, and displacement is the weight of the ship. Confusingly, figures for both are colloquially given as ‘tons’, even thought they’re 2 completely different things - I think it might have been better if the former had continued to be spelled ‘tuns’.
That figure you give for the weight of the Titanic is correct in being the displacement. The Titanic was built at a time when the figure for the tonnage, or volume, was still a bit less than the figure for displacement. As technology moved on the 2 figures became co-incidentally similar (c. 80,000) for the super-liners of the 1930s such as the Queen Mary and the Normandie. By the end of the century, ships had inflated like balloons, so that now the figure for the volume (tonnage) of the QM2 is 150,000 gross tons while the figure for displacement is at 79,000 tons, actually less than that for the Queen Mary.
While a giant modern cruise ship will have a displacement twice or more that of the Titanic, its tonnage will be more like 4 or 5 times larger than the Titanic’s.
Lest you think that was a one-of-a-kind never to be repeated, here’s a whole page of very long cruises, World Cruises 2018 and 2019, with the high end on almost all of them in six figures.
Hmm, my old sailing ship is looking for folks for their next world voyage. I think they leave in the spring. It’s not what anyone would refer to as luxurious.
I wish someone had kept one of the originals. A museum in Ireland has built a non-flying replica (well, most of one, anyway).
