Sold for a pound. Still in steam.

Caledonian MacBrayne offered her to the Paddle Steamer Preservation Society, and on August 8, 1974, at James Watt Dock in Greenock, she was handed over to Douglas McGowan of the society for one pound.

A pound was a fair price for a ship nobody could afford to run. The society raised the money anyway, and on May 22, 1975, she carried passengers again.

It has not been a quiet retirement. In July 1977 she ran onto the Gantocks, a reef off Dunoon, and lost six weeks of the season. She was given a new boiler in 1981, and rebuilt between 2000 and 2003 with seven million pounds of lottery money, which put her back in her 1947 colours.

In May 2019 both boilers were condemned and the whole season was cancelled. More than 8,500 people gave 2.3 million pounds to replace them. She returned in August 2020 and, twelve days later, hit the pier at Brodick hard enough to injure 24 people and end that season too.

She has carried more than six million passengers since 1975. In 2025 she recorded 161,950 passenger journeys, her best year since 1996.

Most ships hide the engine. Waverley puts hers in the middle of the main deck behind a rail, and a good share of the passengers spend the voyage standing there watching it.

It is a triple-expansion steam engine built by Rankin and Blackmore of Greenock, 2,100 horsepower, with three great cranks turning in the open. It drives both paddle wheels through a single shaft. On her trials in 1947 she made just over 18 knots. These days she cruises at about 14.

The single shaft is the catch. The wheels cannot be turned separately, so she cannot spin on the spot the way a modern ferry does. She steers with a small rudder and a lot of forethought, and needs a few hundred metres to turn round. This goes some way to explaining the piers.

She is also expensive. In 2026 her operators put the cost of keeping her in steam at almost fifteen pounds a minute, and added a fuel surcharge to every ticket.

Elsewhere on board there is a dining saloon, a lounge bar, a tea room and, on a good day, somebody with an accordion.

She does not stay on the Clyde. A season starts there in May, moves to Oban and the Inner Hebrides, then works its way round the coast. The Bristol Channel, the south coast of England, and in late September the Thames, where Tower Bridge is raised to let her through. In October she comes home for two last sailings.

The 2026 season was planned as her longest in more than a decade, ending on October 18 with a trip round the island of Bute. On October 2, eighty years to the day after her launch, she was booked to sail from Tower Pier in London with a band on board.

She is owned by a Scottish charity and run without profit, which is just as well, given what steam costs. The refit before the 2026 season came to a million and a half pounds, and an appeal for two new masts and thirteen dining saloon windows raised more than a hundred thousand.

Timetables for the next season come out from February.