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SS '' Arcadia'' was a passenger liner built for P&O in 1953 to service the UK to Australia route. Towards the end of her life she operated as a cruise ship, based in Sydney, until scrapped in 1979. ==History== The ''Arcadia'' was built for P&O by John Brown & Company at Clydebank in Scotland, at an estimated cost of £5 million; her keel was laid in 1952 and she was launched on 14 May 1953, just a couple of hours after the ''Orsova'' of the associated Orient Line went down the ways at Barrow in Furness. Her maiden voyage commenced on 22 February 1954, sailing from Tilbury in the UK to Fremantle in Western Australia via the Suez Canal, Aden, Bombay and Colombo. ''Arcadia'' had a virtually identical sister in the Belfast-built SS ''Iberia''. Following the return trip to Australia, ''Arcadia'' made a series of cruises from Southampton before embarking for Australia again in October 1954. This mix of liner and cruise trade was expanded in 1959 when Arcadia made her first cruise voyage from an Australian port, sailing from Sydney on a short cruise in November and then to San Francisco in December. As the number of passengers travelling by ship to Australia declined due to growth in air travel, P&O was expanding its cruise network. In 1959, ''Arcadia'' was refitted (with refurbished cabins and air-conditioning extended to all the accommodation) and throughout the 1960s continued the pattern of line voyages interspersed with cruises from Britain and Australia, including trans-Pacific routes, some of which took her through the Panama Canal.〔Australian Migrant Ships 1946-1977, Peter Plowman, Rosenberg Publishing, Sydney, 2006〕 Following another refit in 1970, she became a full-time one-class cruise ship. For the next four years she worked the west coat of America, making a series of summer cruises to Alaska and winter cruises to Mexico. In 1975 ''Arcadia'' moved its base to Australia (replacing the ''Himalaya''), making a final return trip to Britain and then cruising Asia-Pacific routes until in February 1979 she was delivered to a firm in Taiwan to be scrapped. Unlike her sister, ''Arcadia'' was a reliable and popular ship and whereas ''Iberia'' was the first of the post war fleet to be scrapped (in 1972), ''Arcadia'' sailed on to be the last of these ships in service. In 1974, when ''Arcadia'' sailed up the Columbia and Willamette Rivers to reach Portland, Oregon in the United States, on the first leg of a cruise from Vancouver to Hawaii, she was the largest passenger ship ever to have visited Portland up to that time.〔Wohler, Milly (May 22, 1974). "'Largest' cruise ship visits Portland". ''The Oregonian'' (Portland, Oregon), p. 24.〕 From 1975 until scrapped in Taiwan in 1979, her cruising role out of Sydney was full-time. She was replaced by P&O's then newly acquired ''Sea Princess'', formerly the ''Kungsholm''. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「SS Arcadia (1953)」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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