ORDINARILY we don’t get too excited about a T-boat sailing out of Plymouth Harbour.

But (a) it’s a really nice picture (by LA(Phot) Vicki Benwell) and (b) the last time HMS Triumph was at sea, John Paul II was Pope, London was bidding – but had not yet been selected – to host the 2012 Olympics and the Royal Navy was gearing celebrating the bicentennial of Trafalgar. (The year was 2005 if you were wondering…)

That was the year that HMS Triumph was handed over to the team from DML in Devonport Royal Dockyard for the final refit and refuel of a Trafalgar-class submarine (the official jargon is Long Overhaul Period (Refuel)).

And on the fourth day of March 2010, the team at Devonport – now Babcock, who bought out DML – were done with Triumph and the boat put back to sea.

In between, aside from changing the name of their company, the engineers, technicians and shipwrights performed quite a lot of work on the 19-year-old T-boat.

Apart from refueling the reactor, they carried out some 30,000 jobs, overhauling,, revamping, tweaking or replacing some 75,000 items of equipment. A new command and control system was installed, so too the latest sonar 2076 bow, flank and towed array systems, there was an upgrade for the Tomahawk cruise missile control system, as well as Triumph’s comms and fire-fighting kit.

In all, it took 2,750,000 man hours to refit Triumph; the work will help carry the boat through to the end of her career – she’s due to be the final Trafalgar-class boat to pay off in 2022.

And while the Babcock/DML team were toiling away, so too her ship’s company. As deeps began to rejoin the boat in earnest last year, there was considerable training to undergo.

The control room team spent a lot of time on the Talisman trainer, which replicates a submarine’s operations centre, while their marine engineering counterparts were put through their paces on the manoeuvring room simulator.

And every man of Triumph was put through the damage control trainer to deal with the challenges of fire and flood.

The last tick in the box prior to returning to sea was a ‘fast cruise’, which is actually neither. The boat pretends to be at sea, but is actually alongside, and the taskmasters of FOST throw all manner of problems at the ship’s company to see how they cope.

There are now three months of sea trials for Triumph before she resumes her work with the Fleet in earnest.