Charleston tends to handle pretty big ships. They’re planning on starting barge service to a satellite terminal in the next couple of years. But, right now, they’re mainly fairly large to extremely large ships.
Hi,
Love the fact that other people are modeling small harbors. I’ve had a good experience using the cardstock models from scalescenes.com. The site has a fishing trawler, an older coastal cargo freighter and a newer cargo “container” ship that you can detail very well. The site is actually for the British HO (1:76) BUT since the parts are designed for European A4 paper, printing them out on our American paper makes the scale roughly 1:84. That’s close enough for me! This is a cheap alternative to the high-priced resin/styrene/wood kits out there and once you detail a ship to the hilt, you’ve spent maybe $35-$40. Also, all you have to do if you want more ships, is plug in the files to Paint or Adobe Photoshop and change the color, names, etc. Additionally, the site has docks, an office building, parking garages, factories, churches, houses, etc. Sorry this sounds like an ad but I really love the model kits put out by this site. Good Luck with your harbor!
Scalescenes of England offeres two small ocean going ships in OO Scale. They are cardmodels. Download, print and build. The OO (4mm=1ft) models can be printed in HO (3.5mm=1ft) which is shightly smaller. They are inexpensive, very well designed models with excellent instructions.
https://scalescenes.com/dockscenes/
Don’t overlook their other models, many of which although British prototypes, could be useful on an US layout.
HairBear (love the name!), and [#welcome] to the Model Railroader magazine discussion forums. We are glad you have found us. Your first few posts will be delayed by moderation, but this will ends soon enough, usually after just a few posts. Please stick around through the delays and become part of the crowd.
-Kevin
If you’re looking for small container ships, an image search turns up several.
This one is about 360 feet long, or 4’ in HO:
https://thumbs.dreamstime.com/z/container-ship-small-boat-big-blue-ocean-161399989.jpg
Here’s one a bit smaller:
If you don’t need a self-loader:
https://thumbs.dreamstime.com/b/small-container-ship-28999960.jpg
And if you REALLY don’t have a lot of room:
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/ab/9f/71/ab9f7175f6f188d2f031d66fce53fce9.jpg
If you want to build your own, I’m sure there’s plenty to choose from to model.
Ed
Just a clarification about the largest bulk carriers on the Great Lakes. I believe that anything traveling on the Great Lakes is designed to fit through the locks at Sault St. Marie or it wouldn’t be able to get into Lake Superior. So there is a size limit even to the largest of the lake boats.
Scott Sonntag
The largest ship on the Great Lakes is the Paul R Tregurtha. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MV_Paul_R._Tregurtha
1013’ long and 105’ wide. One of 13 “thousand footers” on the lakes.
Of course the OP is talking about ocean ships calling along the Carolina coast, and these big “lakers” are restricted to Lakes Superior, Huron and Michigan, as the locks on the Welland Canal and the St. Lawrence River restrict passing ships (either domestic lake boats or international “salties”) to a maximum size of 740’. Large international container ships cannot come any further than Montreal. There is no container traffic on the lakes, even in smaller vessels. Just bulk cargo ships.
Everyone seems pretty focuses on container shipping in this thread, when a smaller bulk ship would probably be more ideal that could handle grains, ores, etc. at an appropriate port facility, or a heavy-left ship with cranes that can unload heavy industrial cargoes at an open dock for transfer to flatbed truck or railcar.
“Break-bulk” cargo shipping from ship to truck/boxcar/etc. isn’t much of a thing anymore, but if you’re modeling an earlier era before standardized containerization, it would very much be a thing at active harbours, with goods being transferred to warehouses.
Bernard Kempinski’s article on backdrops in the 2021 issue of Model Railroad Planning makes a good case for a backdrop with something like an ocean going freighter – perhaps a photo backdrop and reduced in size to represent distance from the modeled portion of the layout.
In N scale Monroe Stewart has including some marvelous ships on his enormous layout - scratchbuilt.
Dave Nelson
Hey Dave -
Do you have photos or a link to photos of these scratch-built ships? I’d be curious to take a look see.
Thanks.
Robert
I got curious as well.
https://potomac-nmra.org/PDnewsite/LayoutTours_Prior/MonroeStewart/album/index.html
Cheers, the Bear.[:)]
Holy Cow!! What a great layout! Great photo gallery. Thanks for the link, Bear.
Forgetting about all the other stuff for a moment, I have a good idea how long it takes to scratch-build even one of those ships, and he has a dozen or more. Dang! I only need three. But still . . . I have my work cut out for me.
Robert