1920s

EARLY CRUISING The earliest ocean-going vessels were not primarily concerned with passengers, but rather with the cargo that they could carry. Black Ball Line in New York, in 1818, was the first shipping company to offer regularly scheduled service from the United States to England and to be concerned with ... Read More »

The Cap Arcona was considered one of the most beautiful ships of the time, launched in 1927, was the largest German ship on the South American run. In 1940, the Cap Arcona was taken over by the Kriegsmarine (the German Navy), painted overall gray and used in the Baltic Sea as ... Read More »

As the RMS Titanic was sinking beneath the surface of the North Atlantic Ocean on April 15, 1912, and survivors were thrashing about in the iceberg-clotted waters, what books might they have turned to with which to fashion a homemade life preserver or, in the case of some sturdy Theodore ... Read More »

Even the sinking of the Titanic has truthers… The sinking of the RMS Titanic on Apr. 15, 1912, was one of the most traumatic events of the pre-World War I Western world. It involved a ship that nobody believed could go down sinking on its first voyage after an incident ... Read More »

The Cunard Line celebrates Christmas with a long and fascinating history. The company was created in 1839 when Samuel Cunard won the Admiralty’s tender to provide a transatlantic mail service to be carried by steamships between Great Britain and North America. The service was inaugurated in 1840 when the steamship ... Read More »

The German shipping magnate was responsible for turning Germany into a world leader in ocean travel prior to World War I. With 25,000 employees, Hapag was the largest shipping line in the world for both freight and people (464,000 passengers in 1913). It was Albert Ballin who also invented the ... Read More »

The SS Yale and SS Harvard became known as “white Flyers of the Pacific”! The sister ships each made four sailings a week, carrying 565 First Class passengers at an average speed of 23 knots between the two major California cities. The fast coastal ships provided an overnight cruise on ... Read More »

Known as the “Queen of Sea,” the Merchants and Miners Transportation Company Steamship Line operated one of the finest fleets of passenger steamers on the Atlantic Coast and ranked foremost as one of America’s top tourist routes. It was said to be the only line plying between Baltimore, Savannah, and ... Read More »

The Pittsburgher was a premiere passenger train operated between New York City and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania over the Pennsylvania Railroad’s Main Line. The PPR’s overnight all Pullman service-connected the Steel City with New York via the railroad’s mainline. It was initially launched during the mid-1920s, for many years the train pampered ... Read More »