| IMO | 9241061 |
|---|---|
| Gross tonnage | 148,528 GT |
| Length | 345.03 m |
| Beam | 41.0 m |
| Passenger capacity (double) | 2620 |
| Passenger capacity (max) | 3090 |
| Crew | 1253 |
| Service speed | 30.0 knots |
| Builder | Chantiers de l'Atlantique |
| Yard | Chantiers de l'Atlantique |
| Hull number | G32 |
| Launched | 2003 |
| Maiden voyage | 2004-01-12 |
| Operator | Cunard Line |
| Status | Active |
Overview
Queen Mary 2 — QM2 — is the last true ocean liner in service: a ship built, at a cost and to a specification no cruise ship requires, to cross the North Atlantic on a scheduled service in all weathers, and the flagship of Cunard Line. When she entered service in January 2004 she was the largest passenger ship in the world, the longest, the tallest and the most expensive ever built, and the first major ocean liner launched since her predecessor Queen Elizabeth 2 in 1967.
Everything about her answers a question the rest of the industry had stopped asking. Cruise ships maximise balconies and internal volume for sheltered itineraries; a liner needs a strong raked bow, deep draught, high freeboard, enormous power and a service speed near 30 knots to hold a transatlantic schedule. QM2 has all of it — and inside the liner hull, a full modern cruise ship, so she can earn her keep on cruises between crossings without ceasing to be a liner. That duality, engineered rather than marketed, is why she has no true competitor and no sister.
Key specifications
The dataset records 148,528 GT, 345.03 m in length, 41 m in beam, a maximum capacity of 2,620, Chantiers de l'Atlantique hull G32, launch in 2003, maiden voyage in 2004, and a service speed of 30 knots. Those are her as-built headline figures and they are the right ones to lead with. Wikipedia's detail fills them out: a waterline beam of 41 m widening to about 45 m over the bridge wings, a draught of about 10 m, a height of about 72 m from keel to funnel, and a combined diesel-electric and gas-turbine plant of about 117 MW driving four 21.5 MW podded propulsors — two fixed, two azimuthing — for a maximum speed of just over 30 knots. Her passenger capacity in later Cunard listings is higher (about 2,695 after her 2016 remastering added staterooms), and her tonnage is now commonly listed at 149,215 GT. Crew is about 1,250.
The dataset leaves her class blank, which is correct in substance: she is a class of one, designed under Carnival Corporation's in-house naval architect Stephen Payne as a successor in spirit to QE2, Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth, whose styling cues — including the black "hands" wrapping the bridge screen and the tiered stern decks of the original Queen Mary — she deliberately carries.
Design and construction
She was built by Chantiers de l'Atlantique at Saint-Nazaire, France — the yard that built the French Line's Normandie and France, Cunard's historic rivals — under a contract signed on 6 November 2000 after a design competition among Europe's major yards. Her keel was laid on 4 July 2002 in the construction dock, hull G32. About 300,000 pieces of steel were assembled into 94 blocks, then welded together into hull and superstructure; some 3,000 craftsmen spent roughly eight million working hours on her, and about 20,000 people were involved in her design, construction and fitting out.
She was floated out on 21 March 2003 — the dataset's launch year — and fitted out in the yard's great basin, the first ship to use it since the tanker era of the 1970s. Sea trials ran in September and November 2003. Structurally she is a liner in ways invisible to passengers: heavier scantlings, a long fine bow for North Atlantic seas, and the power margin to make 28–30 knots in conditions that slow ordinary cruise ships to half that. She also carries liner-scale public rooms — the largest library and ballroom at sea in her early publicity, a planetarium (the first at sea), and over 14,000 square metres of exterior deck space, screened against rough-sea winds.
Naming, launch and maiden voyage
She is named for the first Queen Mary (1936) — itself named for Mary of Teck, consort of George V — and carries the Royal Mail Ship prefix RMS in recognition of the Cunard mail tradition, a designation she holds when carrying Royal Mail. Delivered to Cunard at Southampton on 26 December 2003, she was named on 8 January 2004 by Queen Elizabeth II, granddaughter of her namesake — the first time a reigning British monarch had named a Cunard Queen since 1967, and an act of continuity the whole project was designed to embody.
Her maiden voyage began on 12 January 2004, from Southampton to Fort Lauderdale — a transatlantic crossing, as a liner's maiden voyage should be. The dataset's maiden-voyage year of 2004 is correct; her scheduled transatlantic service between Southampton and New York, the trade for which she was built, began that spring and has defined her career ever since.
Career by operator
| Period | Name | Operator |
|---|---|---|
| 2004–present | Queen Mary 2 | Cunard Line |
One name, one operator, one flagship role: the dataset's operator history ("Cunard Line; Carnival Corporation") records her operator and its parent. She succeeded Queen Elizabeth 2 as Cunard's transatlantic ship and flagship; when QE2 retired in 2008, QM2 became the sole survivor of the liner trade. Her employment has two seasons: the scheduled Southampton–New York crossings that are her raison d'être, and the cruising programme, including world voyages, that fills the rest of her year. Few ships have so completely kept the job they were built for, unchanged, for over twenty years.
Onboard character
Her character is formality at sea, deliberately preserved. Cunard's class-structured dining — passengers dine in the restaurant assigned to their accommodation grade, from the Britannia Restaurant up through the Princess and Queens Grills — survives on QM2 as it survives nowhere else in mainstream cruising, as do gala evenings, ballroom dancing in the Queens Room, and a dress code that is policy rather than suggestion. The Grills' suites, with their own lounges and terraces, make her the fullest expression at sea of the ship-within-a-ship idea — inherited, in her case, not from marketing but from the first-class traditions of the liner era itself.
The counterweight spaces are equally distinctive: the Illuminations planetarium, the largest library at sea on her debut, five pools as built (four after 2016), and kennels — a famous QM2 institution, expanded in the remastering — for passengers crossing with their dogs and cats. No other ship afloat combines a planetarium, a ballroom and a kennel; the combination is the liner era, curated.
Major refits and incidents
Her construction was marred by the worst accident in her record. On 15 November 2003, a gangway to the ship collapsed under a visiting party of shipyard workers and their families, who fell about 15 metres into the dry dock: 16 people were killed and 32 injured. Construction was nevertheless completed on schedule.
In service, her best-documented early incident was the damage to one of her propulsion pods in January 2006, when a pod struck a channel wall leaving Port Everglades; the damaged unit was removed in a subsequent drydocking and she operated at reduced speed until its repair and refitting later that year.
Her major refit was the 2016 "remastering", a multi-week drydocking at Hamburg that added staterooms (including single cabins and the removal of the Deck 13 splash pool), redesigned the Kings Court buffet and the Grills' restaurants and suites, expanded the kennels, and refreshed the ship throughout — the refit behind her present, slightly increased tonnage and capacity figures. She remains, after it, fundamentally the ship of 2004: no lengthening, no rebuilding, no change of role.
Sister ships and class
She has no sister ship, and the dataset's blank class field is the correct entry. She is a one-off liner design; Cunard's other modern ships are cruise ships built to standard group platforms and share nothing structural with her. Her true class-mates are historical: Queen Elizabeth 2, whose transatlantic role she inherited, and the original Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth, whose design language Stephen Payne consciously echoed in her profile, her stern tiers and her bridge-screen "hands". Directories sometimes list her tonnage alongside cruise ships she happens to resemble in size; in kind, she is alone.
Fate and where she is now
The dataset records her status as active and her fate as "In service… Cruise service: Operating, ocean liner", and that remains exactly her position: in Cunard service as flagship and transatlantic liner, more than two decades after delivery, with no successor announced and no other ship built — or building — that could take the North Atlantic schedule from her. The original Queen Mary served for 31 years; QM2 has every prospect of a comparable reign.
Sources: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cruise_ships; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RMS_Queen_Mary_2