375' Modern Feeder Container Ship Now Available

[pnolan48]

This class of feeder ship debuted in the early 1990s, and new ones are still being built. This ship has a capacity of about 540 TEUs, or 270 40' containers.

At just over 20" long, it will fit in small harbors. I've seen this class of ships all over the world, either in person or through Google Earth, from both large and small shipping companies. It has a side-launched rescue boat.

I'm showing it with a full load of containers—the container stacks are not included, and are available separately.The ship has custom photo-etched railings and stairways, and many custom details such as winches, masts, ventilators, davits and lifeboat.

A built-up model, custom painted and decaled, without containers, is $750.00 US, plus shipping and insurance.
An undecorated full load of containers (three high, not four as shown) is $100.00 US. A load of containers painted and decaled is a special order; ask for a quote.
A complete kit containing all details (but not the load of containers, and commodities like paint and glue) is $225 US, plus shipping.

[Scottl]

It looks great to me, but how does it compare in size to the typical ocean ships?  I spotted this YM  ship in Hamburg a few weeks back and it seems to be larger, say about 50%?  You model  might be a viable compromise for a layout as it looks convincingly large.  Are you planning an n-scale version?

[pnolan48]

The statistics on size are surprising, at least to me. Some 35% of shipping is handled by the big ships of 8,000 to 18,000 TEUs. The other 65% is handled by smaller ships that average about 2600 TEUs. So 540 TEUs is smallish, but plentiful. The big ships work on a regular schedule, say China to Long Beach once a week. The smaller ships might work on a schedule or might be tramps. The Yang Ming Unity is one of the bigger ships at 1100' long and 90,000 tons. Of course the trend is toward bigger ships, but only so many ports worldwide can handle them, leaving many ports for the smaller ships. This size ship is still being built for those ports. I once visited the port on St. Maartens, where a small container ship was being offloaded by a single forklift.

I do have a 614' 2200 TEU ship in the works.

I introduced the N scale version this summer.

[pnolan48]

Just learned the Unity is 8200 TEUs, so actually on the small side of the big ships.

[Scottl]

Thanks, that is all very helpful.  I'd love to do a container yard/port one day, this might be a kit for that possibility. 

[pnolan48]

What amazes me is that every container is placed according to weight, so the ship is balanced fore and aft and side to side (and top to bottom), and also by destination, so that containers going to a particular destination are grouped together. Now that is some logistics software when you're dealing with 4000 to 9000 containers--although I presume the program would run on my laptop or even iPhone today. Then I'm amazed at the dollar value of what these ships are carrying on each voyage!

[pnolan48]

Scotti,

If you look at how this is loaded, I suspect you can see they expect either a sea wind or sea swell from starboard on its journey. The Unity is definitely a liner, or port to port ship on a regular schedule, and expects light seas as it is not heavily ballasted in this photo, nor are the containers heavily lashed as far as I can determine. Loading these behemoths is quite a science these days.