| Perhaps the most noticeable thing about the Pride of Dover and her sister, Pride of (later P&OSL) Calais is the remarkable consistency and uneventfulness of their careers. Whilst many of their contemporaries on the Dover-Calais route have seen a wide variety of routes and purposes, the 'Dover' was built for the Calais service and has remained there ever since. Purpose-built in the final days of Townsend Thoresen, she entered service in 1987 with the trading name and orange hull of that company. But the real indication came in the logo painted on the funnel: the quartered flag of P&O, purchasers of the European Ferries group some months earlier. Not long afterwards came the dawn of P&O European Ferries, but little apart from a newly painted blue hull really changed. Internally, the twins are undoubtedly of high quality and are the bedrock upon which P&O established their market leadership prior to the Stena merger. The twins regained their original 'Pride' names after P&O bought out Stena's 40% share in the joint venture in 2002. Being so perfectly suited to the route for which they were built, replacement by P&O prior to their celebrating two decades service seems unlikely. |
