Update, CSL Flexvik ex Ale

 The newly named CSL Flexvik formerly the Ale and before that the Raba is showing even more signs of progress today (September 27.) Repairs to its grounding damage (mostly below the waterline) including replacement of the tail shaft and controllable pitch propellor hub and prop blades appears to be completed. Its rudder has now been moved nearer to the ship, although there is still work to be done on it before it is re-hung.

Looking well above the waterline, crew members were repainting the funnel with the traditional CSL black, white and red colours.

Those colours date back to well before the founding of Canada Steamship Lines. They were used by the Montreal owned Allen Line (the Montreal Ocean Steamship Company) on its earliest steamships in the mid 1800s. The Allen's domestic shipping operation, the Canadian Navigation Company, also used the same colours and carried them into the Richelieu  +  Ontario Navigation Company formed in an 1875 merger with the Richelieu Navigation Company. Canada Steamship Lines was formed in 1913 in a giant merger of  several other shipping companies, including R+O, and it adopted the black / white / red funnel marking.

The current CSL Group continues the tradition, with a minor twist. Its offshore operations, such as CSL Europe - owner of the CSL Flexvik - use the colours in the conventional way (as bands on the sides of the funnels - but not necesarily on the after side.) Canadian flagged ships of Canada Steamship Lines have used a modified form of the bands since the late 1990s.

The (now scrapped) Atlantic Erie shows the then new pattern, with the black and white bands sloping down parallel to the trailing edge of the funnels. ( Even twin, side by side, funnels received the treatment on both sides.)

From the time of coal burning steamers, a black cap was a way of concealing the build up of soot on a funnel. Once diesel engines became the norm there was still some black sooty residue, often trailing down the after side of the funnel. so "cranking" the black cap downwards may have been a practical solution.

My 1959 photo of CSL's Elgin, taken in the Beauharnois Lock of the St.Lawrence Seaway in its first year of operation, shows (regrettably not in colour) that the coal burners carried a much wider black cap in proportion to the height of the funnel. Even so the white band became sooty.

It was on CSL's long gone "white ships" of the St.Lawrence and Saguenay River cruises that the bright red really stood out, giving an elegant touch. Even as late as 1965 when the ships were retired, there were still those who could remember the R+O and even the Allen Line.

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