Red Funnel appoints Cammell Laird to £10m ferry contract

Red Funnel has appointed Cammell Laird to build a £10m ferry which will be used to provide additional year-round freight capacity for its Southampton-East Cowes route.The service currently handles 53 per cent of all freight movements across the Solent. The new ship’s crossing time of 55-60 minutes will be identical to Red Funnel’s existing Raptor class ro-pax movements, and it will use the same berths in Southampton and East Cowes.At 74 metres in length, it will provide 265 lane metres of roll-on/roll-off freight capacity and carry up to 12 passengers. The hull shape has been designed specifically to reduce wash and a propulsion package has been selected to make it highly fuel efficient. The use of azimuth thrusters supplied by Rolls Royce are also set to make the ship very manoeuvrable.Cammell Laird will construct the ferry at its Birkenhead yard which built the White Star passenger liner Mauretania in 1938 and HMS Ark Royal in 1955. The same site is also building the advanced polar research ship Sir David Attenborough for the British Antarctic Survey.Red Funnel, which was the original Isle of Wight ferry operator, is scheduled to take delivery of its new ship in the spring of 2019.The order of the new ship, coupled with the major refurbishment of Red Eagle and the order of Red Jet 7, amounts to an investment of more than £20m in Red Funnel’s cross-Solent services since the business was acquired by the consortium of UK and Canadian pension funds in July 2017.