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Concept
HMS Express (1896)
Summary
HMS Express was a B-class torpedo boat destroyer of the British Royal Navy. She was completed by Laird, Son & Company, Birkenhead, in 1896. Like many contemporary British destroyers, she was a "builder's special", designed to Admiralty specifications but built to the builder's own design.
The 1896–1897 shipbuilding programme of the British Admiralty included orders for 20 torpedo boat destroyers. Of these, 17 were "thirty-knotters", as ordered under the 1894–1895 and 1895–1896 programmes, which had a contract speed of . The remaining three destroyers, ordered from Laird (Express), J & G Thomson () and Thornycroft () were "specials", which were required to reach higher speeds. While Thomson's and Thornycroft's destroyers had contract speeds of , Laird's design was required to reach a speed of .
Express was long overall, with a beam of and a draught of . Displacement was light and full load. Four coal-fired Normand boilers fed steam at to two triple expansion engines rated at . Four evenly spaced funnels were fitted. Up to of coal were carried, sufficient to give an endurance of at .
Express carried the specified armament for the thirty-knotters of a QF 12 pounder 12 cwt ( calibre) gun on a platform on the ship's conning tower (in practice the platform was also used as the ship's bridge), with a secondary armament of five 6-pounder guns, and two 18-inch (450 mm) torpedo tubes. While the ship carried the same armament as normal thirty-knotter destroyers, the more powerful engines needed more coal and hence more stokers were needed to feed the coal to the engines, with Express crew being 73 officers and men, compared to 63 for standard Laird-built thirty-knotters.
Express was laid down on at Laird's Birkenhead shipyard on 1 December 1896 as Yard number 629, and was launched on 11 December 1897. Express was subject to an extensive series of trials over an 18-month period in an attempt to reach the contracted speed of 33 knots. Although Lairds managed to drive the ship's machinery to up to , well in excess of the rated , and experimented with different propellers, Express failed to reach the required speeds.
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