Over the years I have seen several harbour layouts featuring excellent model ships: small coasters, full-rigged sailing vessels, a seagoing ship in low relief and a modern ferry which was complete down to its self-tensioning mooring winches. These are exceptions however as many otherwise quite good layouts are marred by unrealistic ship models and errors which are obvious to anyone familiar with the industry. I once spotted a ship made fast alongside the quay with its anchor cable, which makes me wonder whether the modeller in question has ever tried to pull a heavy object like an anchor cable by hand from the hawsehole to a bollard ashore and tie it into a knot!

Therefore, contrary to the rest of this website where I refrained from writing too much about construction detail, I decided to do just that in describing the ships for Dunalistair, and in the process tell you something of ships in general, as this is where my 'roots' are.

A major problem in finding suitable model ships for your railway is the difference between model railway scales and ship modelling scales. Finding a ship close to 4mm scale (1:76) is virtually impossible. For N scale or 2mm scale the situation is slightly less problematical. The larger scales like 7mm or 10mm are closer to established model ship scales, but on the other hand the sheer size of these limits the scope of harbours and waterways on such a layout. In the smaller scales, instead of scratchbuilding the easiest approach to model shipbuilding for your layout is using a convenient model kit or even a suitable toy boat for scaling up or down to the appropriate model size. A fair margin can be dealt with, i.e. a ship to 3mm scale can often be scaled up to 4mm scale, and a ship to 1/200th scale will often do for an N gauge railway.

Similarly, there is an extensive market for model ship parts like lifeboats, ventilators, winches, anchors and blocks (known as pulleys to landlubbers). Again these are usually meant for large scales, but by judicious selection many can be utilized to detail a smaller scale model.

Having worked at sea for some years may qualify me to some extent to write about ship modelling. Instead of giving you a cooking recipe for ship modelling, I think many points can best be clarified referring to the model ships I built for Dunalistair, the harbour area of my Craigcorrie & Dunalistair Railway. Inevitably this narrows down the prototypes to those appropriate to my chosen period and location, i.e. the West of Scotland about a century ago.

A suitable vessel to occupy the slipway at MacQuarie's is a small steam tug of perhaps about 40 tons deadweight. Effectively tugs are nothing but an engine room with bow and stern attached: there is nothing straight about their hull. During a sailing holiday many years ago I saw a toy fishing boat in the window of a village shop which looked a likely candidate to rebuild. This was a plastic boat made by the German firm of Schuco, incorporating a battery driven power unit that could be attached to the hull for use in the bathtub (no I didn't!). I repositioned the superstructure and set to work fitting all the typical attributes of a tug. Some of these are apparent from the photos, but I'd like to enlighten you on a few do's and dont's. This is especially useful because a tug and one or two cargo lighters don't take up much space and would be a good choice for any small harbour scene.

First, a classic propeller-driven tug is supposed to manoeuvre around its towing hook or post, which is positioned amidships to allow the propeller and rudder to turn the ship so it can sheer away on the hawser. So a tug has its bridge structure forward with a post or a hook on a pivot immediately astern of it, then a low engine room toplight and after deck taking up half the ship's length. Two or three hawser guides should be fitted (the curved rails across the after deck). Bigger seagoing tugs in addition have hawser reels and winches below the bridge deck immediately forward of the towing hook. Note that modern harbour tugs have directional thrust rotors instead of a propeller and these often have the tow hook near the stern. Some older American tugs as portrayed by the well known Revell kit also have a stern-mounted hook or post, but how they manage to manoeuvre with propeller and rudder eludes me.

In an era when magnetic compasses were all you had to steer by, these were positioned as far away from the steel hull as possible and the wheelhouse was of timber construction enabling the compass to be placed inside. Often the compass was placed in a binnacle on top of the wheelhouse and could be viewed from below through a periscope. I still remember steering a cargo ship this way when the gyro broke down! The wheelhouse on 'Flora M' is clad in mahogany veneer to represent a wooden construction. I left the sketchy detail on the plastic superstructure in place, just employing creative painting to produce a convincing effect of a grimy white steel deckhouse. All the crew members of the tug by the way are H0 scale as the headroom in the gangways is under scale. The bridge ladder still lacks handrails. Note the navigation lights: red to port, green to starboard, two or three towing toplights in the mast, a steering light (to assist steering the towed vessel by night) behind the funnel and finally a stern light right aft.

The toy boat as obtained had a gold-coloured fitting which was supposed to represent an anchor windlass. This was converted into a steam-operated winch using plastic gears from scrapped locos and various odds and ends. A steam winch consists of a two-cylinder steam engine geared to a wire drum or (in the case of a windlass) to a drive shaft. They make a terrible racket: across a harbour where we were loading back in the '70s I remember a clapped-out Panamese freighter working its rattling steam winches for days on end. The anchor cables run from the chain locker below the fo'c'sle over grooved and notched sheaves in the windlass to the hawsehole. Between the sheaves and the drive shaft is a knuckle clutch, enabling the anchor to be dropped or hove in. The sheaves are fitted with brake bands and the cable can be locked by a ground stopper (a bar in a cast steel block fitted on deck over the hawsehole). The tug has one anchor which has been lowered (not dropped, mind!) on the slipway for safety reasons as people are supposed to work underneath. The anchor cable is a piece of cheap jewellery chain, painted black and rusty.

The tug's rudder appropriately is an old-fashioned plate rudder. I added bilge keels (which are meant to check the ship's rolling in a seaway) and draught marks all round the ship. Note the men painting the hull red lead and the propeller gland being inspected. The hull rests on a heavy wooden slip carriage with chocks to prevent her from falling over. Close inspection of the slipway cradle still reveals one glaring error. Originally the cradle had only four wheels, but its length was found to be insufficient, so I merely extended it and added a third pair, not realizing that in consequence the centre pair of wheels will be liable to derailment. Here really two sets of four wheels are required, one at each end, which follow the vertical curvature of the slipway rails.

For a long time I wondered what kind of ship would have been used to transport coal from a port like Dunalistair to the Clyde area in the early years of the century. Many years ago Dave and Shirley Rowe sent me a sketch of a puffer, which basically is a steam-powered barge of about 70 tons. On the basis of that I decided to build a similar vessel with some modifications. The book on the Campbeltown & Machrihanish Railway by Nigel MacMillan provides more information.

The advantage of modelling this type of ship is that it has a flat bottom and a box-like hull with full lines. This meant that the hull could be constructed on a balsa baseplate, with the hull, deck and superstructure built up using card. Part of the hull near bow and stern was packed on the inside and then carved away to produce slightly more rounded contours. The basic hull was now shellacked, which greatly increased its strength, and sanded smooth before applying microstrip rubbing strips. The basic puffer seems to have been flush-decked with built up bow plating instead of a fo'c'sle, and only a low poop like an inshore fisherman. Now this may be sufficient for a ship in relatively sheltered water, but part of the Dunalistair-Clyde run is on the unprotected Atlantic coast, so I decided to provide my 4mm scale puffer crew with a more seaworthy ship. The height of the poop deck was increased, incorporating the deckhouse, and a low fo'c'sle was added. On the poop deck a low structure includes the funnel, engine room toplight and wheelhouse.

Aluminium tube was used for the mast and derrick, blocks from the model ship trade fitted, a windlass was converted from a commercially obtained one and finally a scratchbuilt topping winch was added. There is only one derrick, the load being swung using the guys on the derrick. In bigger ships two derricks are used side by side, one over the hold and the other over the side, using separate winches with the runners shackled together. Note that in the puffer the windlass is also meant to work the derrick by taking a few turns of the runner wire around the turning capstan head for heaving up, and slipping the wire for lowering the load. This practice was once widely used but is forbidden today because of the risk involved. One patent anchor is hove home, the other is 'presented', i.e. lowered to water level; its head is canted as a real anchor's would when hanging free. The bulwarks were fitted with microstrip 'frames'.

The after section of the hold which is supposed to be full of coal is closed with beams, hatches and part of the tarpaulin in place. The forward part of the hold is still open with a pile of coal showing. On deck the remaining wooden hatch covers and a removable beam are blocking the gangway which is typical for the chaos on deck when a ship is in port. Note that the vessel is down by the stern because the forward part of the hold is still partly empty. The model was painted black, with a tarmac-coloured deck and ochre bulkheads and derricks. The antifouling paint below the waterline is represented by brick red, and finally I added draught marks all round and the ship's name and home port, calling her the 'Renfrew Lass' of Gourock.

8mm film of the last Clyde steamers in 1969: click on icon

No Scottish port would be complete without fishing boats. However, when Dave Rowe provided material describing a 'Zulu' sailing fishing boat typical for the area modelled, I found it would hardly fit in the harbour due to its size with bowsprit and impressive rigging. So I decided to content myself with a pair of open fishing boats which - detailed with nets, floats and casks - provide enough atmosphere to complete the picture. As a starting point I used small plastic lifeboat hulls which I changed to waterline models on a flat baseplate. The nets were cut out of an old nylon stocking, and the floats are small beads on a string glued along the edge of the nylon tissue.

Perhaps I made a number of shortcuts in these models, but I feel they are useful examples to show how a plastic kit or a toy boat can be converted into a perfectly suitable ship for your harbour layout. After all, this is the easiest way to get the job done. Building your own hull as in 'Renfrew Lass' is slightly more complex and should only be attempted with boxlike ships (which also applies to modern ferries). Although a model ship represents a major modelling job, it calls for no more work than a factory or a row of houses. In the case of Dunalistair the harbour theme dominates the entire scene, needing several ships to be built over the years. A simple jetty along one side of a layout however, with one ship or even a tug with a lighter alongside, will do in most cases. So I hope this account fires your imagination. But please do me a favour and, in future, refrain from using anchor cables to tie up a ship!