HMS Express (P163): The Ninth Ship Since 1695 to Carry the Name

Built by Vosper Thornycroft

HMS Express was built by Vosper Thornycroft and commissioned in 1988, an Archer-class patrol vessel displacing just 54 tonnes, measuring 20.8 metres in length with a beam of 5.8 metres, and powered by two Rolls-Royce diesel engines producing a combined 1,590 brake horsepower. Like several of her sister ships, she began her career operated by the Royal Naval Auxiliary Service, distinguished by a black hull rather than the standard naval grey, a livery she retained until 2005, some years after transferring fully into Royal Navy service.

She carries a name with genuine historical depth behind it. The current HMS Express is the ninth Royal Navy vessel to bear the name since 1695, a lineage stretching back well over three centuries, connecting this small modern patrol boat to a long line of predecessors that served across the entire span of British naval history, from the age of sail through to the missile age.

Training Wales's Naval Officers

HMS Express is attached to the Wales Universities Royal Naval Unit, providing seagoing training for officer cadets from Cardiff, Swansea and the wider South Wales university network. She can accommodate up to ten cadets alongside her permanent crew of five naval personnel, giving undergraduates genuine hands-on experience of navigation, seamanship and leadership at sea, the same essential purpose shared by every Archer-class vessel attached to a University Royal Naval Unit around the British coast.

Trials, NATO Exercises and the Baltic

Beyond her core training role, HMS Express also serves as a trials platform for advanced maritime technology, and supports the Fleet Operational Standards and Training organisation, work that puts her small hull to considerably more technically demanding use than routine coastal patrol duties alone would require. She has taken part in NATO exercises including Joint Warrior and Typhoon Warrior, and has deployed as far afield as the Baltic region and Norway, a genuinely broad operational footprint for a vessel originally conceived primarily as a coastal training tender.

HMS Express operates from HMNB Devonport as part of the Coastal Forces Squadron, and maintains affiliations with the destroyer HMS Dragon, the submarine HMS Trenchant, and a range of local cadet groups, connections that help tie her training role into the wider fabric of the Royal Navy's presence in Wales and the South West.

Continuing a Long Tradition

HMS Express remains in active service today, continuing a role that combines undergraduate training with genuine operational and trials work, a modest but genuinely useful vessel carrying forward a name that has represented the Royal Navy at sea, in one form or another, for well over three hundred years.