"If the river boats quietly faded away like a genteel lady in polite decline -- if the railroads sagged into shameless decay like a Bowery bum -- the Atlantic liner was taken from us like a good friend hit by a truck: swiftly, mercilessly, and leaving a sudden emptiness that is only beginning to be felt."

This introduction began my phase of reading about ocean liners that didn't hit icebergs on their maiden voyage.

Mr. Lord's A Night to Remember had been my constant companion for years in a slim paperback edition, and I bought Maxtone-Graham's indispensable book by mail order as soon as I heard of it.

In the citation above, Walter Lord spoke from a time when that sudden loss of regular liner voyages on the Atlantic and other oceans meant that an entire way of life was gone.

But now things seem different. Ships are still suffering cruel fates, magnificent hulls laid up in Eleusis or off the breaker beaches of Alang. The progressive imposition of stricter safety codes has endangered many a favorite, and cruise ships will never "replace" ocean liners.

But in turn we are witnessing a revival of liner style on board new ships today. Setting aside their radical differences in hull design and on-board ambience and very reason for existence, the vessels of today bear increasing evocations of the way we went.

With Queen Mary 2 abuilding, we are at the apogee of the greatest wave of passenger shipbuilding in history. The new Cunard flagship sets sail in late 2003, and is the culmination of a trend I intend to trace on these pages.

In fact, had Queen Mary kept sailing through the 1970s and 1980s, she might have looked like the postcard to the right.

TheWayWeWent.com is especially honored to include here some of the work of Henrik Ljungström, just one of the many thought-provoking images he has produced.

He is co-author of a great website on ocean liners, as well as a skilled artist of bit and byte. His images pose a set of witty and skillful observations about old and new as expressed in the exterior form of ocean-going passenger vessels.

This section of the site will feature symbolic links of old to new shipboard spaces, and I thank Henrik for his contributions.

... including (a special honor for me)

Reflections on Old/New/Old
- post-photo artistry by Henrik   Ljungström

what can we learn ... from this?

more elipses later...