After reviewing the ‘Community Search’ feature on MR Forums, there seems to be a level of interest in Shipping Containers, and their lives after they have fulfilled their normal functional lives.
Many have heard of the "Katrina Cabins’ which were used down in the Gulf Coast to provide residences to those who lost their homes. There were also architectural projects utilizing those same shipping containers. So when the following link came to my attention as a post from a member of another Forum I monitor. It seemed a natural fit to post it here on the Model Railroader site:
Pretty interesting article, with photographs, and another use for those old shipping containers, not to mention a potential structure to model, current to the times. Seems like a fairly easy project to model.
There’s a field south of Leesville, Louisiana that’s padked with old cargo containers. I haven’t stopped to take a close look at it but I think somebody bought them and placed them there as a ‘U Store It’ site. That could be a point of interest on a layout.
If you google the phrase Homes Made From Containers and click the Images tab, you’ll see all sorts of houses made from them. It would be interesting to model something like that. But it seems like it would be easier to design pre-fab home sections from scratch, rather than using containers. Shred the containers for their raw materials and design something better suited for habitation.
Actually there was an article in the Philadelphia Inquirer recently about a guy who recycles former shipping containers into refrigerators for the military, among other things. Here is a link to the article: http://www.seabox.com/v3/media/news/insidethebox.htm
Here is an example of shipping containers re-purposed in my central Texas town as a storage unit facility. I have used them and they are indeed water tight and a good use of old containers. A upper row of them is even air conditioned.
