My port area of my layout features a number of vessels that are close to but not 1/160. To adapt them was fairly simple in that I either enlarged things like portholes and hatchways or in some cases shrunk them and the results have been very satisfactory. In some cases I bought the kit just for the hull and severely modified the deck structures or built my own. Only one vessel was an actual 1/160 scale, the ocean research vessel while the tugs and most of the fishing fleet are Japanese 1/150 vessels. I recently bought a steam powered sailing vessel that is 1/124 and realized that that vessel would go very well as a medium sized merchant vessel for a civil war era layout or a layout set in the 1890s to about 1910 or even a little after. I bought the Revelle kit of the USS Harriet Lane, a revenue cutter that saw service from the 1830's to about 1880. The whole vessel on measures out to 19 inches long so would look good on a small wharf scene on a civil war ear layout or a later era. 000_0971-2 by John Moore posted Jul 8, 2019 at 12:07 PM The vessel can pretty much be used as is just place some N scale deckhands on the deck. It is a full hull but I handle that by cutting a shallow recess in the bench work and then casting water around it.
That had to be expensive! Beautiful model of a type of ship I've been looking for (side paddle wheeler). One may be in my future as well.
Kit was by Revelle and was about $28 if I remember. They list it as a blockade runner but it was a revenue cutter at first then during the Civil War it served in the Union Navy eventually being captured by the Confederates during a battle. After the war it saw service as a merchant vessel under two different names. So it spans an era of 1830 to around 1880 before being lost in a fire. Rigging and attaching the pulleys are the hardest parts of the assembly and I went further by constructing the optional ratlines and installing them. Rigging line and anchor chain are included in the kit along with three flags, 1 Union, 1 Confederate, and 1 for the Revenue Service the early forerunner of the Coast Guard.
John, the ship turned out beautiful! Well done and I enjoyed watching the build in your Cattle Car thread. I can see were it would be a good fit in a harbor on a layout such as the one you have. I agree that sometimes things out of scale work just as well. In the case of your ship there, unless you had a similar one that was actually 1/160th in the same scene, it would be extremely hard to tell it isn't N scale. Many folks have used different sized models to create a forced perspective. On my old layout, I had a 1/500th scale Delta 767 hanging over the city section. I didn't look out of place because the size actually made it appear it was much higher in the sky than it really was. Kind of neat how that worked.
Just for the heck of it I placed some of my TomyTec port workers on the vessel deck and they go fairly well with the kit. So again even though this is 1/124 scale it goes fairly well. 000_0974-1 by John Moore posted Jul 12, 2019 at 4:36 PM
I just found another sailing vessel that is 1:150 scale and would also work well on early era waterfront scenes. It is by Heller and its cost is under $20 for the kit. 41Hj2rhNY5L by John Moore posted Jul 20, 2019 at 1:12 PM
The thing is that these can be modeled with sails furled by tightly rolling up some thin white fabric and lashing it to the spars as it would be modeled dockside transferring a load to an old time boxcar.
