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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.

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.

Will be going DCC but not sure if turnouts will be DC or DCC

Don't get me wrong, he (Thomas) served a purpose but it wasn't long before he was out grown and time to move on to the real stuff that we see out and about.