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The Western Express

by Will Magnum 2017

The Western Express (Photo from the Will Magnum collection. )

The Western Express was built in 1943 as the USATS YMS–297 by Tacoma Boat Building Co. at Tacoma WA USA. She is 39.2m x 7.5m x 3.5m (128.6’ x 24.6’ x 11.6’) wooden hull 246.94gt 146.47rt and powered by a 1200hp engine (re-powered in 2004 by 2–455bhp diesel engines). She could also have been the USS YMS–431 or USS YMS–432. (From The Nauticapedia)

The Western Express (Photo from the Will Magnum collection. )

The Western Express (Photo from the Will Magnum collection. )

From speaking with the owner of the Western Express he did tell me that the ship had sunk once before in the Queensborough area. And he had it raised Apparently one of the fish holding tanks is ruptured. And he had been on vacation for some time. I’m assuming with all the bad weather that we had this winter that the pumps must have failed in the ship and had gone down due to instability.

The Western Express being removed from the shipping channel (Photo from the Will Magnum collection. )

To quote from this article please cite:

Magnum, Will (2017) The Western Express. Nauticapedia.ca 2017. http://nauticapedia.ca/Gallery/Western_Express.php

Site News: February 12, 2025

ANOTHER MILESTONE REACHED

The vessel database has been updated and is now holding 95,146 vessel histories (with 16,409 images and 14,064 records of ship wrecks and marine disasters).

The mariner and naval biography database has also been updated and now contains 58,599 entries (with 4000 images).

My thanks to Ray Warren who is beginning a long process of filling gaps in the photo record of the vessel histories in the vessel database. Ray has been documenting the ships of Vancouver Harbour for more than 60 years.

Thanks to contributor Mike Rydqvist McCammon for the hundreds of photos he continues to contribute to illustrate British Columbia’s floating heritage.

My very special thanks to our volunteer IT adviser, John Eyre, who (since 2021) has modernized, simplified and improved the update process for the databases into semi–automated processes. His participation has been vital to keeping the Nauticapedia available to our netizens.

Thanks to John Spivey who is beginning his 4th year of fact checking all of the entries in the vessel database.

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