I remember there being a post a month or so ago about some one looking to do a ship. I found this website that has HO and N scale ships. http://www.bearcomarine.com/resin.htm
Problems:
- THey are ships
- Detailing them to bring them up to the standards of most layouts, could cost as much as the layout. Think I’m joking, take a look at some of the models at the Mariners Museum in Newport News or the Manitowoc Maritime Museum of the Great Lakes.
- They will then out shine the rest of the layout, forcing you to upgrade that
- You’ve just morgaged your house for your layout.
Bright side:
- They are cool
- Resonably affordable.
Note that their resin kits are by Sylvan Scale
I would like to do at least part of one as part of an intermodal scene. My preference would be to have operating cranes be the centerpiece for such a scene.
Richard
Since you didn’t specify what scale you would be modeling in I will give (approximate) sizes in feet:
Base of movable dock crane, 80 X 100, runs on 100 foot gauge rails. Total length of bridge about 320 feet, of which the water end (about 150 feet) can be raised to clear a docking/undocking ship.
Width of Panamax ship - 108 feet, absolute maximum. Post-Panamax container ships are up to 136 feet wide. Length of the kind of ship that would use a rail served port is probably low - the monsters dock at places where all transportation at/near quayside is rubber-wheeled.
If your intermodal scene involves loading/unloading double stacks, the best place for the ship-to-land transfer is on a photomural backdrop. In the real world, the trains seldom come within a mile of the ships. The much smaller truck-to-train crane can be made operational, but controlling the trucks will get interesting. (I would expect that trying to operate the crane would get old in a hurry. The professional operators have exceptional hand-eye coordinatiion, they are in the optimum place for visibility and their targets are either 87 or 150 times as large.)
Chuck (Modeling Central Japan in September, 1964 - where standard JNR containers were handled with forklifts)
He could always have a truck trailer and well car spotted in the right place (i.e. permanently attached to the layout), and then just have the animated crane moving a container between the two things, though never letting go of the container.
- Pick up from railcar/truck trailer
- move to other transportation method
- wait n time (say 2 minutes?)
- goto 1.
A convincing port container scene can be achived in a rather small space. The scratch built boat in the link below is 6 feet long by 1 foot wide and the crane is a 1/87 diecast model of a Gottwald crane.
http://i220.photobucket.com/albums/dd297/jalajoie/067.jpg
A picture of the prototype crane