Heya guys,
I know this should probably go in the N scale section but I'm hoping I'll get more thoughts and comments here...
I've recently decided I'd like to model a small harbor scene near my refinery/fuel depot and downtown yard. I wasn't thinking anything large... 4"X12" or possibly as large as 6"X18" (in N scale, that would be 53'X160' or 80'X240'). I'm trying to stick to the transition era and I'll have a couple of tracks in near proximity to the waters edge.

Trouble is, I'm not finding much at all in the way of examples or pictures in the real world or the modeling world of what the shoreline would look like. I'm also finding just a scattering of mid sized vessels in the 1:160 range. I seem to remember that the Jerome and Southwestern had a small harbor scene but I can't find any references to it or pictures.

Ideally, I'd like to have a tug boat and maybe a small barge tied up at the waters edge with room for some future craft as I find them. My LHS said that Walthers had a company that offered some boats but I can't find them.

Any and all help, thoughts or ideas would be appreciated.

I'll go take a picture of the area and post it in a little bit.

Try <!-- m --><a class="postlink" href="http://www.searails.com">http://www.searails.com</a><!-- m -->

Bruce

Thank you for the link Bruce. I'll check it out here right quick.

Allrighty then, I took a couple quicky pictures for ya. The foam where the harbor may go is 3" deep so I could conceivably lower it by 2"... or a scale 26 feet. The track meandering around out in the open is temporary and has just been laid there for me to get an idea of how things may fit. I don't have any other buildings for this area so I will definitely be looking out for anything that may fit.

I always like rails and water connections. I don't know if these will be helpful but here is a harbor shot from Duluth. I liked the corrugated metal retaining wall and mimicked it with corrugated craft paper for my riverside scenes....







Do you have a purpose in mind for the track by the harbor?

Ralph

Ralph Wrote:I liked the corrugated metal retaining wall and mimicked it with corrugated craft paper for my riverside scenes....

That's neat! I could dissect cardboard vertically to kind of get the same effect except it's probably too big for N. Have to think on that one.

Ralph Wrote:Do you have a purpose in mind for the track by the harbor?

Not yet. :oops: I'm not real familiar with what happens between trains and boats in that era and I'm trying to learn how they went about getting the product (whatever it may be) from one to the other.
I'm NOT interested in any kind of coal transfer, a car ferry, or intermodal double stacks. With that said though, I kind of like the idea of intermodal transfer of era correct semi trailers. For the most part, I think I'd just like to park a tug there with a barge full of crates or something. I dunno... still learning... open to ideas. What kind of a ship did they used to use to transfer semi trailers?

Wow guys. Thanks for the ideas. I just learned a tremendous amount about Gantry cranes and the processes used to load/unload. Gave me lots of ideas.

This is another site that has alot of marine info <!-- m --><a class="postlink" href="http://www.boat-links.com">http://www.boat-links.com</a><!-- m -->, the searails site was mainly for more of a modern area than what you were looking for and was suggested for ideas.

Bruce

I could probably send you a detailed scaled ACAD file, with elevations, of a portion of Baltimore Harbor. You could either use it for ideas on what is in a harbor area, or desgin an exact copy, but it looks like you don't have much space there. Let me know if you want it and I can e-mail it. PM me your e-mail again if you want it beacuse I'm sure I won't be able to find it.

I'm going to try to present what I heard of the history of Sea-Land Service from fellow employees when I worked for them in the early 1980's. Malcolm Mclain was the commander of the "Red Ball Express" in Europe during WW2. His job was to command supply trucks to keep up with General Patton during the war making sure the his tank corp never ran out of supplies. After the war, I understand that he used his wartime experience to start Roadway Express. I think it was sometime between 1948 and 1950 that he got the idea for shipping cargo in trailers on ships in intermodal service as we know it today. At the time he bought some surplus "Liberty" ships and started loading them with freight in trailers. That was the start of Sea-Land Service. Sometime after the start of Sea Land, the government stepped in and told him that owning both a trucking company and a shipping company constituted a monopoly, so he was forced to divest of one or the other company. He sold Roadway and developed Sea Land. He started loading trailers on ships, and then got the idea of a container that could be detached from a chassis and stacked like boxes in a ship's hold, and thus began the modern concept of intermodal service as we know it. I'm not clear on the the chronology of the development of containers and the divestiture of Roadway.

The point is that during the transition era, containerization would have been in it's infancy, probably Sea Land was the only true intermodal operator in international trade. Like most new ideas, the rest of the shipping industry waited to see if Sea Land would work before they made the investment to switch over.

I know nothing about the iron ore shipping in the Great Lakes region, so I can''t say when they started to dump iron ore directly into ships from trains.

It was while I was working for Sea Land that the first stack trains were introduced. It was also at that time, although I don't remember if it was during the 2 years I worked for Sea Land or the following 10 years that I worked for Overseas Shipping Terminal that ITS became the first terminal company in the Long Beach/Los Angeles Harbors to put tracks directly into the terminal to load trains from ships. When ITS started to load trains directly from the ship, the train did not go to the waterfront side of the terminal. Rather the tracks were on the other side of the terminal and the trucks and "bomb cats" would go under the "hammer head" crane, be loaded, and then drive across the terminal to a "transtainer" to have the container loaded onto the train. I think that is the same method used today in the harbor, at least on the West Coast. The railroad drops a cut of cars at the yard on the terminal just before the ship is due in. The containers to go on the train are transferred by truck from the ship to the cars, and if there are containers to go from the train to the ship, those containers transferred from the train to the terminal to be later loaded onto the ship.

The point of all of this is that during the transition era, virtually all of the international shipping would be break bulk. Most shipping terminals would have a crane that unloaded ships with cargo nets. Long shoremen aboard ship would load up the cargo nets, and then other long shoremen on the dock would transfer the cargo from the nets to carts to transfer the cargo into the shore side warehouse. There would be a loading dock with railroad tracks alongside the off shore side of the warehouse, and trucks or boxcars would be loaded by hand or forklift from the warehouse to the trucks or boxcars.

When I first went to work for Overseas Shipping Terminal, they had a slip on one end of the terminal with a warehouse next to the slip. There was an unusual crane that had the front track close to the waterfront. The rear rail for the crane was actually above the roof of the warehouse, and there was room for a truck to drive next to the warehouse on the dock between the warehouse and the ship. We handled small combination ships at the slip where they would have a dozen or two dozen containers on deck and break bulk like lumber or steel loaded below deck in the hold.

This post has gotten kind of long, but I hope it will help you figure out what your waterfront should look like in the era that you are modeling.

This photo, shows an NtraK 2' X 4' module. The ship in the drydock, is the Lindberg "Bobtail Cruiser" kit (close to 1/160)
The white hull is the Lindberg "Russian Spy Trawler" kit (also close to 1/160) The structure behind the white hull, is a traveling crane I scratched primarily as a "shipbuilding" crane, but could be built for unloading a small freighter.[attachment=4703]
This photo is of a Bachmann N scale 200 ton railroad crane, sitting on a scratch built tower. I have two of these for the drydock.[attachment=4702]
The sailing vessel in both shots, is a plastic "Clipper"ship kit. I believe it was the "Cutty Sark" the hull is 103' inN scale. It's presently waiting rebuild into a three mast schooner.

For the space you have, a long low one story building, set on a pier, with track running inside the length of it, could represent a warehouse. Multiple sliding doors in the waterfront side would allow moving goods to the pier, and the vessel would load using its own boom, and tackle.

Wow Russ! LOADS of great information there backed up by personal experience! I can already see several things that you have pointed out that I was thinking about all wrong. I was almost ready to give in and go a little more modern with double stacks and a Mi-Jack Translift Intermodal Crane. HOWEVER, I kinda like the idea of some sort of an older gantry crane offloading cargo in nets to a warehouse and then onto a train on the other side. As you've also pointed out, I've not got a lot of room so this will have to be well thought out.
Again, thank for taking the time to explain all of that. Great stuff.

Thanks Sumpter.
I have two of those cranes (still part of a worktrain though) and one of them could be donated to the cause very easily. Neat ideas. Looking at your ships makes me wonder... I want to offload cargo but I don't think I've got anywhere near enough room for the kind of ship that would be related to that function. Maybe I should think smaller/simpler. OR, instead of dropping the tracks down so far, I could extend the harbor further left by twice the distance or more making room for a bigger ship. Six to one and half a dozen ta'other.

The overall length of the three mast schooner will be 11"...the hull is 7-3/4". during transition, I'm sure there were still a few coastal schooners working. A small "Tramp Steamer" could probably be bashed from some "plastic kit" hull.

I'm not sure if I remember correctly, but instead to using the shoreside crane, at Overseas Shipping Terminal, they sometimes used the ship's crane as Sumpter mentioned. I had forgotten about that.

If I'm remembering correctly many of the ships that came into the terminal with break bulk were small, and called on ports in the South Pacific, the Indian Ocean and Africa where they would not have had the modern facilities of American or European ports. It seems to me none of the ships hauling break bulk were bigger than 200 feet, and some may have been only 100-125 feet long.

You might take a look at <!-- w --><a class="postlink" href="http://www.frenchmanriver.com">www.frenchmanriver.com</a><!-- w -->

Their kits are ho scale and larger, but a 68 foot steam freighter Hull and two piece deck kit might be a good start for an N-scale tramp steamer.

Back to the corrugated cardboard: At least I have come across it in different sizes - the type you typically come across is indeed probably too rough for N gauge, but some more finely corrugated cardboard might work (only come across it at random when mrr goodies were sent in such boxes...)