1/700 Adrastus

[Pieter]

From another thread: "The main reason for getting distracted is having this huge amount of information available on the internet, seeing a GA drawing of a ship while looking for a good picture of Ark Royals' height finder radars and thinking 'that will be a nice and quick scratchbuild'. Before you know it another year has gone by."
This is that model.
Adrastus was one of the famous A class liners designed by Harry Flett and build by Blue funnel after WW2 to replace its war losses. I had wanted to build one for a long time and as Blue funnel had a Dutch subsidiary, Stoomvaart Maatschappij Oceaan, it fits into my main scratchbuild theme of building dutch cargo liners. The GA drawings turned out not to be that brilliant though so I made my own.

The build process is similar to my earlier threads with styrene decks and styrene plating over a balsa core.
The main problem when drawing the plans and building the hull was that there is literally nothing straight on the A class, even the famous large straight Blue Funnel was placed under a slight angle.

But those curves and angles made her look very nice when underway.

And I did not have the usual cargo liner chore of having to build a large number of identical winches.
Adrastus had 22 winches of 14 different types as well as extensive use of different woods on decks and structures. And a large crew to maintain all of this.
My wood is evergreen 2020 for the decks and generic wooden deck stickers for the vertical panels.

All that variation and expensive wood is nice for this modeller but I am not surprised that the UK maritime industry collapsed very quickly after the end of the era of colonial subsidies and closed liner conferences. Still they were building very good looking ships and Adrastus fits in nicely with the rest of my fleet.
Over the coming weeks I will try to make gallery threads for the others.

[reigels]

Outstanding! Well done!

[Pieter]

Thank you.

[Neptune]

Nice job Pieter! Quite a complex subject. I'm thankful for modern vessels that they are at least a bit more simple (in a way) and have a whole lot less rigging.

Despite being distracted by these builds, you do complete them, so your collection keeps growing. It's not all that bad