Belfast Announces Opening of Titanic Attraction

On Saturday, March 31, Belfast opened its Titanic visitor attraction in the city where the ship was built. After three years of construction -- the same time it took to build the ship -- the $155 million Titanic Belfast makes an iconic addition to the city's skyline.

Standing at the head of the very slipways down which the ship first glided into the waters of Belfast Lough, the angular, aluminum-clad building is the exact height of the original (93 feet).

A walk around the star-shaped perimeter of the six-story Titanic Belfast gives a sense of being dwarfed under the prow of a gigantic vessel and a reference also to the White Star Line, the company that owned her.

Titanic Belfast provides nine interactive galleries that tell the ship's fascinating story from her conception in Belfast's Harland & Wolff Shipyard, to her tragic sinking in 1912 and re-discovery led by ocean explorer Dr. Robert Ballard in 1985. It also has a 1,000-seat banqueting suite that includes a replica of the Grand Staircase from the ship's first-class section.

Visitors can take a journey through a simulated shipyard, hearing, feeling and even smelling what it was like to work on Titanic. Included is a ride in a metal elevator up the Arrol Gantry, an enormous steel structure built to facilitate the construction of Titanic and her sister ships, Olympic and Britannic.

Visitors can also experience the reality of the ship's interiors in a “3D cave” that recreates the engine rooms, third-class saloons, first-class corridors, Grand Staircase, a la carte restaurant and navigation bridge, and also a virtual walk of the ship's length, part of its five miles of decking.

There are full-scale reconstructions of first, second and third class cabins, and a replica of a Titanic lifeboat that interprets the aftermath of the sinking. Voices of survivors, recorded in the 1960s, recount that horrifying night. In the final gallery, Titanic Beneath, visitors have access to Ballard's high-definition footage from the wreckage.

An Ocean Exploration Centre gives visitors interactive engagement with 21st century technologies, including live links with Ballard's exploration vessel Nautilus and marine research departments around the world. At one of the windows in the building, which offer views over the city and Belfast Lough, visitors see archive footage of the Titanic's launch on May 31, 1911.