SS United States
While not the last liner built, when the SS United States was constructed in 1955 the end of transatlantic liner trade was already in sight.
Naval Architect William Francis Gibbs, the head of Gibbs & Cox, had been dreaming of building a Blue Riband transatlantic liner ever since he was a very young man. The Blue Riband was awarded to the fastest vessel in the North Atlantic Liner trade. In general, the Blue Riband passed between English, French, German and Italian flag vessels, and the United States had not held the Blue Ribband since 1854.
In his long career Francis Gibbs, had converted the 1913 SS Vaterland, a German larger contemporary of the Titanic, into the SS Leviathan, a US flag transatlantic liner. While after the conversion in 1923 he claimed it to be the largest and fastest liner, Cunard quickly pointed out their SS Mauretania was quicker. He also designed the 1939 liner SS America. After that he was in charge of the conversion of the SS Normandie to a troopship during World War II, but this effort failed when the ship went on fire during the conversion and capsized at her pier in Manhattan.
After World War II, the SS America started sailing as a transatlantic liner but with a top speed of 22.5 knots she was not sufficiently fast with Blue Riband holders sailing at over 30 knots.
After World War II Francis Gibbs started to promote the idea of a US flag Blue Riband winner. There were a number of obstacles in his way, because it was clear that airliners, and soon jet liners, would be able to cross the Atlantic much faster. This removed the need for speed on a ship, since ships could never compete against airplanes in speed. Furthermore, in general, the United States had not been particularly successful in the transatlantic passenger trade because crew wages were so much higher than European crew wages and US flag vessels had to be crewed with US citizens.
Maybe Francis Gibbs was not the world’s greatest naval architect (even though he certainly liked to promote that image), but he certainly was a brilliant promoter and had close ties with US lines, the primary transatlantic liner operator, and the US government.
Eventually a deal was struck where the US Government would foot the majority of the tab to build the world’s fastest liner with the ability to quickly convert it to a troopship, and, for a much lower contribution, US lines would operate the vessel as a transatlantic liner.
The vessel was designed by Gibbs & Cox and built by Newport News Shipyard, a shipyard famous for building aircraft carriers that at that time had top speeds in the 32 knot range and were of similar size. By designing a more extreme vessel with a lightweight aluminum superstructure, a top speed of 35 knots was not difficult to achieve with the state of the art at that time.
Commissioned in 1952, she was popular with passengers for the excitement of sailing on the fastest transatlantic vessel, but suffered from a number of issues. The interior had a very high level of fire resistance (although aluminum superstructures are much less fire resistant than steel superstructures), which many passengers described as cold and somewhat uninviting. At that time, it also became common to put liners in cruising service in the winter season, but United States never became popular as a cruise vessel. Traditionally liners would run in pairs with one liner leaving Europe while the other would leave America, but the much slower SS America was not a suitable running mate.
The vessel simply never made any money, even though national pride kept her running until all the European transatlantic liner traffic had been shut down, after which she was laid up in 1969.
In theory she was laid up as a troop vessel, but never served as such since by 1969 a few airplanes could move the same number of troops much more quickly than the SS United States.
After she was sold to private Owners in 1978, there have been a number of efforts to revive her in a different service, but while millions of dollars have been spent in studies, nothing has ever come of it. Today she is mostly stripped and tied up at a pier in Philadelphia, where a charitable organization still hopes to find a use for her.
While the SS United States was the fastest ocean liner to cross the Atlantic, on ships that size speed is simply a factor of installed horsepower. When one considers that today there are sailboats that have crossed the Atlantic in less time than the SS United States, it is not a particularly impressive technical achievement by itself. In the end, SS United States is a strange contradiction of post war optimism and commercial hubris. Only ships that win wars, or make money for their owners really are successful designs
The model
Henry Scheafer reported this model was completed in 1963 from parts supplied through a Popular Mechanics kit, where parts would be shipped to the model builder by Popular Mechanics on a monthly basis.
There are internet references to 1953 Popular Mechanics issues that discuss the construction of a SS Unites Statesmodel to this scale, and it is unclear why Henry built this model so much later. The model does have a lot of white metal cast parts, and certainly was not entirely scratch built.