More MSC

 Following up on the May 19 post, MSC will still reach the 5 million TEU tally in the next few weeks, but perhaps not exactly as predicted. A recent report has one of its ships, MSC Pilar arriving at the Alang anchorages on May 20 (local time), in preparaiton for being beached and scrapped.

Well known on the St.Lawrence and in Halifax, it saw service in Canadian waters of and on for more than thirty years.

Built in 1990 by Odense Steel Shipyard in Denmark it started life as the Magleby Maersk. (The shipyard was owned by Maersk at the time). It was considered to be a large ship at 52,181 gt, 60,350 dwt and had a capacity of 4437 TEU including 500 reefers. It began calling in Halifax on Maersk's stand alone service when new and was a regular until at least 1997.

It was renamed Magleby for a time in 2010, then became MSC Pilar in 2011 and joined the Canada Express 2 service from Italy and Spain to Montreal. Starting in 2022 it began to call in Halifax to top up or decant cargo due to St.Lawrence River draft restrictions.

 The ship was in Halifax October 18, 2022.

MSC has grown from a 1 million TEU fleet in 2007 and is expected to level off at about 6 million in 2024 to 6.75 million in 2025 as new ships will be balanced somewhat by older ships going to scrap.  Ships of less than 6,000 TEU are the likely candidates for the scrapyards.

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