I went to a reenlistment on the Queen Mary when I was stationed Long Beach in the ‘80s. They brought us champagne afterwards.
Can’t see her being restored to sea-going condition either, nor United States. The best United States can hope for is to be put in the same kind of layup as Queen Mary, preferably as a National Monument.
thats true. But what city/state would do that? Philly?
When the Queen Mary was first brought to Long Beach, maybe 1986, I was doing a trade show at the local arena and had finished setting up the booth early and just decided to wander down to the QM to take a closer look (about 1 mile from the arena) There was a gangway to the pier and I just walked aboard. I wandered all over the ship and saw nobody. Not a soul. I am sure I was the only one on board, it was simply sitting there, wide open. I wandered around the thing for a couple of hours, which was pretty cool. But it was kind of like a Twilight Zone episode. The long galleries of passenger cabins were amazing, there must have been literal forests of the tightest birdseye maple ever seen in the paneling.
It would cost simply astronomical amounts of money to refurb these ships as tourist attractions, considering the types of ADA (elevators and aisle widths and wheelchair access and turnarounds in bathrooms) and fire and code requirements, not to mention the amounts of dockside parking that would be required to support economic feasibility for these things as attractions. It’s been tried half a dozen times, never successfully as I can recall; if Disney couldn’t make it work w/the QM, it’s hard to see who could make it work. It’s one thing to refurb a Jeremiah O’Brien liberty ship, that’s just grey steel and 1/3 as long. But to make a dilapidated QM into the kind of upscale attraction it would need to be would cost zillions.
The other thing is that many millions of people have been on huge ships because 3-4-5 day cruises are a pretty common thing to do, really, only costing as much as an upscale hotel for few-day cruises. So I don’t think the intrigue of being on a “giant ship” is all that big a deal any more.