i think its a hoax.
you would need a lot of capital and facilities to even think about building such a ship , and there would be a huge blaze of publicity to begin raising the capital for such a project .
in the article there is one statment that makes no sence as well , if modern construction laws prevent the ship fit out with wood then how can you bulid the interior from wood and coat/treat it with a fireproof material ? its still build of wood and therefore against regulations!!!!!!!
also you would have the slight impracticality of obtaining coal , and the nessesary support vessels/ loading facilities for coal , not like you can go down the local coal merchants and grab a couple of bags of it , your talking lorry loads and lorry loads of it , much easier to have a modern engines and disguse it as coal fired and have smoke generators for external effect.
the titanic also had one very major design flaw, the rudder was far too small to allow adequate steerage , how would this be overcome without changing the design?