GENERAL CARGO or REEFERS

[Chris Howell]

I have uploaded numerous photographs of ships of

Blue Star Line
Federal SN
NZ Shipping
Shaw Savill and Albion

Most I have put in the General Cargo Category, but many for example Melbourne Star/Imperial Star etc were primarily reefers, so what category should they be in ?

Or what percentage of refrigerated spaces makes a reefer ?

To complicate things, all the ships of these companies carried general cargo outward bound to Australasia, so basically the ships with freezers were only reefers on the return trip to the UK.

Thoughts please.

[Captain Ted]

hi chris

I sailed some reefers (pure reefers)  Glacier Bay/Hudson Bay/Neerlandic and some others. My personal feeling was always if they are primarily build as reefers, than they should be under reefers. Nowadays, those reefers which carry more frozen/chilled goods in container should not be anymore under reefers. General cargo is usually also carried on reefers, but in my time to a lesser extent.
As mentioned above, a reefer build as pure reefer should be under that cathegory and not general cargo ship with some reefer spaces and rest gen cargo.
brgds
capt ted

[Phil English]

Hi Chris,

We touched on this a week or so ago when you posted one of your photos. By introducing a rule which says a ship must have a certain percentage of reefer space to make it a reefer runs the risk of over complicating a site such as this. Most people (and this is not a criticism) will probably not know the ship's capacity detail when uploading a photo, so I'm in favour of trying to keep it as simple as possible. I said at the time that only pure reefers should be in the reefer category, until you pointed out that the Patricia U had some non-refrigerated cargo capacity. In reality, Patricia U was primarily a reefer and was operated by a company specialising in such trades (at least in her later life). I stand by that really and say that ships which are PRIMARILY reefers should go in the reefer categories and general cargo ships with part-reefer capacity should go in the general cargo category. For some of these old ships, if you have access to old Lloyds Registers, they are pretty good at distinguishing between the two types and that would be a good rule of thumb to use.

Brgds
Phil

[Captain Ted]

hi phil

I agree with you on that definition, more or less same as I wrote above. Only ships builded as reefers should be there,, and not half and half.
I sailed as young sailor on a general cargo vessel, with almost 30% of her space (under the winchdecks) for products and oils, but that did not make her a tanker. Same as here with the reefers, older reefers almost always had also of course place for general cargo (container did not fit) but that did not make them general cargo ships

brgds
capt ted

[Chris Howell]

Thanks

I will go through the ships and change where appropriate.

Regards

Chris