P&O Ferries is offering two vessels of the Zeebrugge-Hull Line for sale. Prides of Bruges and Pride of York was spotted at a German ship broker show. The sister ships date back to 1987 and sail daily between Zeebrugge and Hull from 2002 to 2020.
The last funeral ships dates back some time © RJ
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It is unlikely that P&O Ferries will re-launch the Zeebrugge-Hull line, a passenger and truck service that closed at the end of December 2020. After all, the sister ships Pride of Bruges and Pride of Hull have featured in the shipbroker Global Ferry & Cruise Shipbrokers sales show Hamburg, Germany. Prices not mentioned. Departure every evening in the sales photos the logo of the P&O Ferries shipping company was erased as usual on the commercial images. But the appearance and technical data fully correspond to the so-called “ropaxes”, which are mixed ro-ro and passenger ships. There is currently little international demand for ships of this type. There is a chance that the scrap dealer with the best width of 6,400 tons will win one or two times. The Pride of Bruges and Pride of York is 179 meters long, 25 meters wide and can sleep a thousand passengers. The warehouse area is 2.6 kilometers, which is equivalent to 850 passenger cars. The ships were built in 1987 and sailed daily between Zeebrugge and Hull from 2002 until the end of 2020. Every evening one ship left Zeebrugge, the other ship left in Hull. With breakfast, the passengers arrived. The Pride of Bruges is currently located at the ferry terminal in Zeebrugge, and the Pride of York is located in Rotterdam. Final end In 2017, the British shipping company P&O Ferries – part of DP World – invested another 10 million euros in an overall renovation. At its peak, 300,000 passengers took advantage of this service every year. Despite good use of transportation places, passenger service suffered from competition from cheap flights. The uncertainty created by Brexit and the Coronavirus pandemic has given the final blow. The Zeebrugge-Hull ro-ro / passenger service was discontinued at the end of December. P&O Ferries still sail by container to Hull and unaccompanied truckloads to Tilbury (London) and Teesport (Middlesbrough). This week, Zeebrugge CEO Tom Hautekiet confirmed that there is intense search for a new player for British directed freight and passenger traffic if possible. “We are talking to distributors of goods to the United Kingdom about their shipping needs on the one hand, and to shipping companies on the other hand about how much freight they need to be able to sail profitably,” he said. (RJ)
