Here is a container ship that would fit on a fairly good size HO layout. It appears to be about 300 feet long.
Interesting design. I wonder where the other end of the route is - and what (other than containers) they’re designed to carry. Notice that the unloaded ship doesn’t have the wells found on larger container carriers. It appears that the 80 containers are purely deck cargo. ‘Standard’ capacity would be stated as 160 8 x 8 x 20 containers, but the top layer would have to be 40 footers, just like loading well cars.
Chuck (Long-ago Merchant Marine cadet modeling Central Japan in September, 1964)
Container ships and tankers are similar designs. So you might look into taking a commercial kit of a tanker (like Revell’s offering of the T-2) and using the hull with new upper works and a revised main deck. It will be small in HO but it is 1/400 scale.
I am using the Revell T-2 as a container ship on the N-Trak module I am building since the module wil be devoted to intermodal service.
Irv
For a while there was somebody on eBay selling HO models of container ships similar to the one in the photo. They looked really nice, but I am not sure it they are still selling those or not. If I recall, they were scratchbuilt.
While on vacation in Hawaii, I noticed this container barge being unloaded. This is a small, inter-island vessel. The crane is mounted on the barge itself, not on the dock, so the containers can be unloaded at any general-purpose dock facility. This is a big advantage where the harbor is small and docking berths are premium real estate, so they must be shared between different types of ships.
I’d imagine that this vessel makes its way around the islands once a week or so, putting in once or twice in Honolulu to exchange local cargo for containers to/from Asia and the US mainland.
That is one small cntr ship! More like a barge. I looked at the ‘aerial’ view and counted slots for five ctnrs across and probably only two-high to maintain forward visability from the bridge. That would be 100x40’ ctnrs or 200 TEUs (twenty-foot equivalent units). I agree that the vessel in the photo is around 300’ L.O.A. Most ctnr ships are much larger. I worked in ctnr operations out of NY for sometime , but the ships I dealt with ranged from approx. 580’ long up to about 1300’. Above that the 40’ channel depth became a limiting factor to the vessel size.
This vessel is in Panama City, FL. It is probably a feeder going to one of the Carribean islands.
This ship probably calls port once a week, or once every two weeks. It is definately a low volume terminal, and I doubt there is much rail traffic generated. The rail traffic is probably combined into trains generated from larger ctnr terminals in the region.
Also, note the absence of a Gantry crane, they’re working this ship with a portable boom crane and use the yellow spreader-bar that you can see in the photo.
I know someone who made a barge similar in size to this by carving foam blocks (the kind used to do mountains & scenery). By using a commercially available model as a reference, you could scale up some of the on-deck detail to work on a vessel this size.
Interesting project! Good luck with it!
I used the Sylvan Great Lakes Freighter coal ship and converted it to a container ship. Here’s some pictures…chuck
Since I am modeling a small portion of the warehouse area in Miami, several of the container ships running out of the Miami River are headed to Haiti, Costa Rica and Dominican Republic. One company that currently is sailing to these locals is Antillean Marine. Below is the link to Antillian Lines that are based on the river. There are several good photos of their vessels and include sail schedules and costing. I have included a photo of their business on the river. The ship with the empty hold on the far bank sets in front of the home office. However, they do have remote storage locations around the greater Miami area. Because of this you can model container yards without having the water nearby.
Larry
Panama City is along the Intercoastal Waterway, which, in my experience, seems to feature a lot of barge traffic, so it is entirely possible that these containers are entirely interstate traffic… but I wouldn’t know. I’m just guessing. I would think, however, that for Caribbean traffic, that southern Florida would be preferred to the upper Gulf coast. But like I said, I don’t know, it just seems reasonable. Pensacola always got a lot of interstate barge traffic, with barges that look similar to this one.
-Jon