Preparing Titanic's slipway

Workmen preparing new slipways for building Olympic and Titanic.

To accommodate the new liners, Olympic and Titanic, Harland & Wolff re-engineered three existing slipways into two larger ones that could accept the huge hulls.  Their enormous weight meant the slips had to be strengthened with reinforced concrete up to 4ft. 6in. thick.  Titanic’s keel was laid in Slip No. 3 on 31 March 1909, three months after work on her sister ship, Olympic, had started. 

This 1907 photograph shows the early stages of construction and the filthy working conditions endured by the workers.  It also illustrates how this advanced industrial shipyard was still dependent on hard physical labour and horse-drawn carts.