New freighter underpins growth

Growth in its unaccompanied freight traffic has led P&O Ferries to charter a new and highly-efficient cargo ship from the Finnish ferry company Bore Ltd.

P&O Ferries has enjoyed a long commercial partnership with Bore Ltd and currently charters four of its ships for freight-only North Sea and Thames services. They are the Norking and Norqueen (Tilbury-Zeebrugge) and the Norsky and Norstream (Teesport - Zeebrugge and Europoort).

The new mv Bore Song, a Bore RoFlex class ship to be used on the Teesport - Zeebrugge service from September, represents the latest generation of "ro-ro" vessels due to its flexible carrying capacity and the fuel efficiency and reduced emissions of its single common rail engine.

The vessel has total lane metres of 2863m available.  The main deck has a height of 7.4m which means a high proportion of containers can be double-stacked.  There are fixed decks and hoistable car decks which have the capacity to carry a mix of c250 freight units double-stacked plus 200 cars.  Overall this ship has significantly more carrying capacity than the Norstream, the ship it is replacing at Teesport.

The Norstream will then move to the Thames, providing a capacity uplift of some 10,000 ro-ro units per year on the rapidly growing Tilbury-Zeebrugge route,  replacing the Norqueen which will be returned to Bore Ltd.

P&O Ferries chief executive Helen Deeble said: "This is very good news for our business. The Bore Song is ideally suited to our Teesport - Zeebrugge operation and allows us to accept the complex mix of container and ro-ro traffic with ease. We believe our customers will find that highly attractive. This in turn allows us to boost capacity on the Thames service where we are currently capacity constrained.”

Contacts:
Chris Laming, Brian Rees, Natalie Hardy, Michelle Ulyatt
Tel: +44(0)1304 863833 (24 hours)
E-mail: communications@POferries.com