Titanic: From Belfast to Halifax

Belfast built her. Harland & Wolff laid Titanic's keel on 31 March 1909, in parallel with Olympic, and launched her at 12:15 pm on 31 May 1911 before 100,000 onlookers. Over three million rivets, weighing more than 1,200 tonnes, held the hull together, and eight men died building her. Those slipways and graving docks are listed and still stand; Titanic Belfast, which opened in 2012, now covers the site.

Visitor guidance: The Titanic slipway and graving dock are listed and open to visitors; the Titanic Belfast museum stands on the same site.

Wednesday 10 April 1912: the boat train from London Waterloo reached the Southampton quayside at 9:30 am, and 920 passengers boarded — 494 of them third class — before she sailed. Six days earlier she had been towed to Berth 44 after her delivery voyage from Belfast. Four in five of her crew, 497 men, were from Southampton, and about a third of all who died came from the city. None of Chief Engineer Joseph Bell's 24 engineers survived. Their memorial in East Park was unveiled on 22 April 1914 before 100,000 people.

Location precision: The berth she sailed from is gone; the pin marks the engineers' memorial of 1914 in East Park.

Visitor guidance: The memorial stands in East (Andrews) Park in the east of the city and is open at any time.

Cherbourg was the first stop, 77 nautical miles down the Channel. The port had no dock that could take a ship of Titanic's size, so two White Star Line tenders — Traffic and Nomadic, the only surviving White Star ship — ferried the passengers out to her. 274 climbed aboard, 24 cross-Channel passengers went ashore, and the whole business was finished inside 90 minutes. Titanic weighed anchor at 8 pm and ran west in a cold wind.

Location precision: Titanic never came alongside at Cherbourg; the tenders met her outside the docks, so the pin marks the commercial port.

Visitor guidance: Cherbourg is still a cruise and ferry port, and the quayside is where the White Star tenders loaded.

Queenstown — called Cobh since 1920 — was the last place Titanic touched. She reached Cork Harbour on the morning of Thursday 11 April, and the tenders America and Ireland carried 123 passengers out to her, along with the first-class luggage. Only 44 of them would survive. Local lore says a Cobh-born crew member, John Coffey, hid under the mail bags and simply stayed ashore. She weighed anchor at 1:30 pm, and the town has changed so little that the piers still look the same.

Location precision: She lay off the town while tenders ferried passengers; the pin marks the Cobh Heritage Centre at the harbour end of the waterfront.

Visitor guidance: The Cobh Heritage Centre stands beside the station at the head of the harbour; the Cobh Titanic Trail walks the waterfront from there.

At 11:40 pm on Sunday 14 April the lookout Frederick Fleet spotted an iceberg immediately ahead, and she struck. At 2:20 am on Monday the ship broke in two and foundered, 715 miles from Halifax. The wreck lies in two pieces about 2,000 feet apart at a depth of about 12,500 feet, the bow resting at an angle of roughly 45 degrees. Nobody saw her again until 1 September 1985, when debris appeared on a survey screen and a joint French–American expedition had found the Titanic.

Halifax is where the dead came ashore. White Star chartered the cable ship CS Mackay-Bennett out of the port to recover bodies from the water, and 333 victims were eventually recovered; the morgue was set up in the curling rink of the Mayflower Curling Club. 121 of them lie at Fairview Lawn, more than in any cemetery in the world. For a third of the graves the marker shows only a date and a number.

Visitor guidance: Fairview Lawn is a municipal cemetery a short drive from the centre; the panelling and an original deckchair recovered from the sea are in the Maritime Museum of the Atlantic on the harbour.