Queen Mary 2, the flagship of the Cunard fleet, recently notched up her 200th transatlantic crossing having been in service for just under ten years. That’s no mean feat for a ship that weighs in at over 150,000 tonnes and is longer than the Empire State Building is tall. Taking into account that a typical crossing takes roughly a week, this equates to one every two and a half weeks with little downtime. A salty old sea dog indeed!
The company estimates that she has carried over half a million passengers safely across the Atlantic and notched up around 600,000 miles thus far. That’s further than the distance to the moon and back. Speaking of our lunar neighbour, the Queen Mary 2 will have notched up enough nautical miles for a whopping twelve trips to the moon and home again by the time she is decommissioned in around 30 years’ time.
If you’re struggling to get your head around the sheer scale of the numbers involved, here are a few more tasty stats. At 30 knots, her top speed is three times faster than that of a blue whale, itself no snail of the sea by any stretch of the imagination. Her three anchors weigh an incredible 25 tonnes each, twice the weight of a double decker London bus.
To date, 980,000 scones, 8.4 million cups of tea and 481,000 bottles of Champagne have been consumed on board the ship, and even our furry friends have been getting in on the act, with nearly 700 dogs and over 100 cats having been accommodated within her steel hull. Around 2kg of gourmet treats are cooked up for the pets on each voyage, ensuring that not a living thing aboard Queen Mary 2 misses out on a good pampering.
Read more about the ship here and check out the infographic below, which was created to celebrate the QM2’s 200th Transatlantic crossing.
