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Container Ship (In Progress)


ScCa

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Started scratch building a container ship a couple of months ago. If an intermodal dock yard is to form the main focus of the layout I had to be sure I could build the container ship as there's no such thing as ready made for N gauge.

 

After scouring the web for images and dimensions I stumbled across a web page ( www.containershipping.nl ) which has loads of photos and dimensions. From this I made myself some plan drawings that I could work from. Unfortunately I don't have any pictures of early progress but here's what I have so far.

 

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The hull and deck is complete and I'm about to start work on the aft (back) of the ship. (accommodation / bridge etc). The first batch of 20ft Containers from Graham Farish arrived the other day.

 

Also arriving the other day... my first ever N gauge rolling stock...

 

Dapol DRS Class 66

blogentry-10214-076382800 1290024884_thumb.jpg

 

 

Malcolm Logistics Intermodals

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Not to rain on your parade, but I'd suggest that your ship needs to be about twice the size in each dimension This may help http://www.paulashob...ontainer/Detail. The real things are huge,even a model 30" long would be small, and if those are 20' containers yours only looks to scale about 210' long the bottom item here may be of interest http://www.tophobbyt...=3&SeriesID=363 and on here http://www.bizrate.c..._start--20.html along with http://www.all-model...ead.php?t=11027 and http://www.matts-pla...art1/links.html I also found this http://model-railroad-hobbyist.com/node/1853

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Looking at that site I guess the model is based on one of the Short-sea shipping lines (inter Europe) size vessels? The smallest seem to be about 100m in length (which in N is about 65cm) so I'd say the model looks pretty bob on those dimensions. In that case it's looking good and I'd love to hear how you built the hull and I look forward to seeing it develop as the accom/bridge section comes to life.

 

The stock looks like a fun set of purchases so far - what are the plans for a layout?

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Not to rain on your parade, but I'd suggest that your ship needs to be about twice the size in each dimension This may help http://www.paulashob...ontainer/Detail. The real things are huge,even a model 30" long would be small, and if those are 20' containers yours only looks to scale about 210' long the bottom item here may be of interest http://www.tophobbyt...=3&SeriesID=363 and on here http://www.bizrate.c..._start--20.html along with http://www.all-model...ead.php?t=11027 and http://www.matts-pla...art1/links.html I also found this http://model-railroa...t.com/node/1853

 

 

Hi Shortliner, Container ships come in all different sizes, yes there are the massive deep sea container ships, sailing round the globe of the sizes you mention and yes they are massive, even in 2mm. These massive ships can only dock in certain ports that are deep enough and have the infrastructure to handle these huge vessels and loads.

 

Other smaller ports (for example my local container port of Grangemouth ) receive smaller feeder container vessels from larger ports around Europe. These smaller vessels can be found on the web page I used (http://www.containershipping.nl/gallery.html See the Short Sea Shipping Lines section ).

 

In these class of vessels there are plenty under 100m in length but I purposely looked for the smallest vessel I could find which was around 93m in length (approx 300 ft)

 

At 2mm : 1ft this works out as 600mm. My vessel is slightly under this at 570mm in length.

 

Thanks for your comments.

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Looking at that site I guess the model is based on one of the Short-sea shipping lines (inter Europe) size vessels? The smallest seem to be about 100m in length (which in N is about 65cm) so I'd say the model looks pretty bob on those dimensions. In that case it's looking good and I'd love to hear how you built the hull and I look forward to seeing it develop as the accom/bridge section comes to life.

 

The stock looks like a fun set of purchases so far - what are the plans for a layout?

 

Hi James, yes your spot on regarding the vessel class. See last reply...

 

As for the building of the hull, the deck, bottom and internal frame are made from balsa wood cut to shape, this part was fairly straight forward. The hull skin is made from regular card glued to the frame, this part was a little more tricky. The superstructure will be built using plasticard. Hope to make a start on that this weekend and will post some more pictures then.

 

The overall layout design is in place (see other blog entry) but this may well change before layout building commences. This is unlikely to start for a few months while I wait to get some building work done in the house. In the meantime I intend making a small test baseboard on which I can have a practice build of the dock area, try my hand and modeling water and some other techniques.

 

Regarding the stock, the Malcolm containers won't be visiting the dock area itself, but will be handled in a dedicated yard away from the dock area. They were always going to be my first N purchase as I pass the Malcolm yard every day.

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I see these on the Dutch canals every day, carrying about 30 containers, There's a barge terminal a couple of miles away, but they don't welcome visitors.

 

FWIW http://www.scalescenes.com/ have announced a containership for 2011 (maybe)

 

Regards

 

Ian

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