Would anyone have any comments on the Glencoe model of the S.S. United States? Is this the only model of this size?
Do youu mean the 1/400 scale shiplike in this picture if so yes i do beleve its the only kit on the market but i could be wrong a friend of mine is restoring an origanel kit and the owner had to purchase this kit for parts.
I haven’t seen it outside the box, but I’ve read some comments on it - and I’m afraid they’re pretty discouraging. It seems that the hull and just about all the other major features of the kit are badly out of proportion. Some people have suggested that it resembles the *United States’*s smaller - and much older - near-sister, the America, more closely - but it doesn’t really look much like that ship either.
The Glencoe kit is, of course, a reissue of an extremely old kit that originated with ITC (Ideal Toy Corporation) back in the early fifties. I suspect part of the problem is that no good plans of the real ship were available at that time. She was built under a Navy subsidy (with the understanding that she’d be turned into a high-speed troop transport in wartime), and her hull lines remained classified for a long time.
To my knowledge only one other plastic United States kit has ever been produced: the 1/602-scale Revell one, originally issued in 1955. (The scale and date are from Dr. Graham’s fine book, Remembering Revell Model Kits.) Revell obviously had the same problem with sources; the real ship was brand new at that time. (I’ve often wondered whether the odd, semi-waterline configuration of several first-generation Revell ship kits can be explained by the fact that the designers didn’t know what the underwater hulls looked like.) By 1955 standards that Revell kit represented the state of the art, but it’s difficult to take seriously as a scale model by modern standards.
The ocean liner is one of the most grievously neglected of subjects in the world of plastic modeling. The entire range of decent plastic ocean liner kits can almost be counted on one’s fingers and toes.
Does anybody out there happen to know what the current status of, and plans for, the poor old United States are? I saw her, looking extremely dilapidated and rusty, as my wife and I were passing through Philadelphia last summer.
Thanks for the comments. If the hull isn’t correct, I don’t think I’ll try to find a kit.
Hello all,
Regarding the current status and future plans for the SS United States, I caught the tail end of a special on PBS dealing with her. Norweigian cruise lines is her current owner, and there is serious talk about renovating her, rebuilding her from the inside, and reviving her as a viable cruise liner. The cabins would have to be modifed, since all the rage in today’s cruise ships is private balconies, and they would likely put in modern engines (strangely enough, that would end up slowing her down compared to her original configuration) but they would also try to preserve some of the feel of the post WWII cruise liners.
The producers of the show interviewed many historians, former passengers, and crewmen. Of great interest to me were the engineers who spoke of her current state. They said that while the interior had long ago been stripped of all her amenities, the structure of the ship had held up extremely well. Beneath the chipped paint and surface rust, over 90% of her hull’s sheet metal outside was intact, and when some inspectors took a look at her internal riveting, they said the rivets looked like they could have been installed just 6 months ago. She was certainly built to last!
Of course, all of this has yet to occur, but the various interviewees and preservationists sounded pretty hopeful. Many of the crewmen and passengers said they’d be first in line when the reborn ship takes her first cruise.
Jose Gonzales
I wish I’d caught that PBS show. I’ll see if I can find a copy.
I had the good fortune to spend an afternoon on board the U.S. when I was working at the Mariners’ Museum. At that time she was tied up to a pier in Norfolk, and her current owners were getting ready (allegedly) to turn her into a cruise ship, with the idea of operating her in either the Caribbean or the Mediterranean. They were talking about gutting her of all her fifties-vintage furniture, decorations, etc., and were going to make some of that stuff available to museums. Our guide that day was Commodore Roy Alexanderson (I do hope my Halfzeimer-s-afflicted brain hasn’t twisted that fine gentleman’s name around), who had been captain of the ship for some years during her glory days. We found a stack of postcards lying around in one of the compartments off the navigating bridge, and I got him to sign one of them for me. I still have it.
It was a weird experience. The ship was almost completely sealed up; we got on board through one of the access doors into the engineering spaces, and couldn’t get out onto any of the weather decks. She felt almost haunted. One of my clearest memories is of the sickly grey-green paint on most of the bulkheads and overheads. The paint was supposedly extremely fireproof; William Francis Gibbs, the designer, was obsessed with fire-proofing.
After his death his company and heirs made a big donation to the MM - including the great man’s drafting table and several important models, including the original hull plating model of the U.S. The donation including funds to build an addition, the William Francis Gibbs Gallery, onto the main museum building. One string tied to the donation: the museum had to agree to exhibit, in perpetuity, Mr. Gibbs’s favorite model. It’s a beautiful, highly detailed, large-scale model of a nineteenth-century fire engine. Several generations of MM docents have had to explain to thousands of visitors what on earth a model of a fire engine is doing in a maritime museum.
The MM did eventually get hold of quite a few artifacts from the ship, most notably the spun-glass sculpture called “Expressions of Freedom” that hung over the bar in the first-class dining room. (That was a bone of some contention. A member of the Museum’s board of trustees tried to veto the acquisition, on the grounds that “I’ve eaten many a meal under that thing and it always made me want to throw up and I’ll be d[censored]d if I’ll let you spend a dollar on it.” Getting that ignorant son of a [censored] to understand that neither his nor our personal aesthetic tastes were supposed to come into play in such a decision was quite a project, but eventually the curators won - some time after I left the place.) Others got auctioned off to the highest bidder, and still others wound up for sale in the MM gift shop. My financial means were such at that time that the best I could afford was a nice little shot glass, which is now proudly displayed alongside the postcard with Commodore Alexanderson’s signature on it.
So now yet another businessman claims he’s going to make her into a cruise ship. I’ll believe it when I see it. And if it does actually happen, I rather suspect the modifications will wreck that beautiful ship’s original, pretty stunning appearance. Oh, well…
I also had the opportunity to board the United States back in 1985 or there abouts, just prior to the auctioning off of her hardware and furniture. I was struck with the overall naval feel of her. The ship had a thin veneer of luxury appointments covering what seemed like a naval vessel (which, indeed, she basically was). The abundance of vinyl and aluminum was surprising, it reminded me of a floating cheap motel. Her true strength was in her engineering, the finest. I would still like to have seen her in her prime though, and any configuration that would keep her from the scrapyard would be a welcome one. (Her stacks are, to me, too fat!)
You said it, perfesser!
John, my wife and I love the old liners. She cruised trans-Atlantic on the old Sagafjord when she was a teenager and we always look for her in our ports of call. She is now called the Saga Rose.
Which brings about an interesting thought that the model makers may want to ponder: Many of the older ships led many lives and, with minor modification or just paint changes, could become a different ship or the same ship in a different livery. Some went throughout their working lives without notice and others like the Willem Rhys (Achille Lauro) gained unwanted notoriety .
Today’s cruise ships can be multi-marketed because there are so many ships built on the same blueprints. Carnival’s Spirit class ships are all the same outwardly except for the statues at the pools. Costa’s S-class ships are the same as the Spirit class except for the funnel and associated deck. Same goes for Holland America’s Westerdam and her sisters. The point is, Hasegawa (Or whoever) builds one 1:350 scale kit and the after-marketers have a field day with new detail sets and decals. GMM could make PE deck chairs by the thousands! Someone adapts a tiny LCD screen to become the Megatron movie screen! showing Titanic 24/7. The possibilities, I’m afraid, stretch farther than the imagination of the model manufacturers.
Oh. sorry for the diatribe… I wanted to let you know that the S.S. United States, after being towed to Turkey for asbestos removal and broiught to Philadelphia has pretty much languished. She was bought by Norweigen Cruise Lines in 2003 or 2004 with a lot of fanfare about how she would be one day running a trans-Panama canal route. But, NCL wants to put no more of their own money into her and is using the preservation society to maintain what is now private property. I fear she’ll be scrapped due to lack of funding.
Jack
Every time I look at a picture or model of her I find myself thinking, “are those stacks too big, or not?” My considered opinion is that they’re right on the razor’s edge of being out of scale with the rest of the ship - which, I suspect, is just about what old William Francis intended.
The earlier, smaller America may have been, in that respect, a better looking ship. One of the older members of the museum staff had seen some of the original plans for her; she apparently was originally supposed to have one stack. He thought she actually would have looked better that way; I’m not so sure.
The very first time I saw the U.S. was in, I think, 1966, when I was a freshman in high school. My parents and I were in New York on a vacation trip. We were taking a cab ride somewhere or other; the cab turned a corner down near the waterfront and there she was, in all her glory. The cab driver told us that she’d missed a sailing date (she was still on the North Atlantic run) because part of the crew was on strike. I didn’t know it then, but that was a foreshadowing of what was to come.
Subfixer’s right about the spartan, navalized appearance of her interior spaces. Part of it was due to fifties kitsch, though. Highly simplified, plasticized furniture and decorations were supposed to be high-tech in those days. We briefly toyed with the idea of gathering up the entire contents of a passenger cabin and reassembling it at the museum, alongside a similar exhibit representing a cabin from a liner of an earlier period. (There was enough stuff from the old Leviathan, ex-Imperator, knocking around Tidewater that we figured we could just about reconstruct one of her cabins.) I guess nothing ever came of that idea.
When the U.S. was languishing at Norfolk (and later at Newport News) the museum got quite a few phone calls and letters urging us to acquire her (nobody suggested where we were to get the money), restore her, and tie her up in the James River near the museum building. Such people of course had no idea how utterly impractical such a scheme was. One of the big reasons for the decline of the great liners was the expense of paying the huge numbers of people necessary to maintain them. Even with no passengers on board, I suspect it would take literally hundreds of full-time employees to keep a ship like that presentable.
Lots of enthusiasts get upset about the way the Queen Mary has been treated. I’m out of date about this one; the last time I saw her was in 1984, when she was at Long Beach, functioning as a combination museum ship and luxury hotel. I just checked her website ( http://www.queenmary.com/ ). It looks like, though (if I remember right) she’s been moved someplace else and brought back (weren’t the Disney people talking about buying her for a while?), she’s operated about like she was then. [Later edit: here’s a Wikipedia article that straightens out the Disney connection: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R.M.S._QUEEN_MARY .]I’m a little less critical of the approach her owners have taken than some people are - for two reasons. In the first place, for such a ship to serve as a hotel is pretty consistent with her original purpose. (She was, after all, built to make money.) Second, it’s hard for me to imagine that, in this day and age, there’s any other practical means of preserving a great ocean liner.
I do hope something good happens to the United States, though I can’t be optimistic. People have thought she was on the verge of being turned into razor blades for at least thirty years now (i.e., more than half of her existence). The most encouraging part of the story seems to be the fact that she’s still there. Until the razor blade manufacturers actually take their first cut, we can at least hope. If they made her into a hotel and tied her up somewhere on the New York waterfront, I’d pay a fair amount of money to spend a few nights on board her.
The best model I’ve seen of the old Revell kit:
http://www.modelshipgallery.com/gallery/service/liners/us-600-pc/us-index.html
Patrick is a master.[bow]
Fred
One of the guys at work had this months (June) Popular Mechanics. I was thumbing through it and found a they 3 page article on the SS United Stated. They talk about how fast and beautiful the ship was and what is being done to try and preserve her. Very few pictures. You can go to the local news stand and check it out.
Ken
Here are some interesting sites about the S.S. United States.
http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/transportation/4263478.html
http://ssunitedstatesconservancy.org/SSUS/Home.html
http://www.planphilly.com/node/1559
http://www.ss-united-states.com/
I’m afraid it will be scraped like the Blue Lady, X Norway, X France. (At least they changed her name.)
http://www.maritimematters.com/norway.html
On the following site is a pohoto of the Blue Lady dated June 12, 2008. Very sad.
Hi Big Jim,
I just finished building the Glencoe kit, and I have to say I was disappointed. It is out of scale on many of its parts, poor fitting and seemed very toy-like compared to other 1/350 stuff on the market today. I built it for sentimental reasons - I sailed on her in 1964 from NY to Southampton, England. I have a sterling silver coffee pot that my folks bought at the auction, as well as some menus from the voyage we took. My Dad made a collage of the menu covers, which were etchings of major tourist sites in Europe.
The model is big and colorful though, and I have it displayed with the coffee pot. My wife likes it - it is so much prettier than the grey/blue naval stuff she sees most of the time!
Steve
Speaking of liner models, I understand there’s an outside chance that L’Arsenal from France may do a Normandie.
SS United States was FAST. I wonder that it wouldn’t have been cost effective to turn her into a fast military transport ( don’t need troopships these days).
It’s funny that I found this thread, I was just thinking about the United states. I’ve been looking for a model but they are few and far between. Every now and then I see one on eBay but the cost is kinda high for the quality. I was thinking maybe of scratchbuilding one.
The United States didn’t have the great history like some of the old liners like Olympc or the Mauritania. She also doesn’t have the a history of ships like Titanic, Britannic, Normandy, meaning she didn’t sink. But she was made here in the states and to this day still holds the trans Atlantic westbound speed record.
The sad truth is the ship will most likely be scrapped and lost to time. With each passing day it cost more to restore her. I didn’t hear that the plan was to return her to sea duty. I thought they wanted to make her into a hotel like the Queen Mary. I would expect the cost to be way to prohibitive to do.
For those of you looking for United States models the weirdly disproportionate Glencoe and small scale Revell kits are not the only games in town. If you want to take up the challenge of paper card modeling you can get the United States in 1/400 or 1/250 scale in card models. I have seen build ups of these and they are quite nice. In the US you can get them from Paper Models International. While you are there, check out all the other civilian and warships available in paper, I think you will be amazed.
WS
I recently was following a step-by-step card build on another site. it looked really cool. What it the cost range for card models and is there a difference between Card and paper models
I’ve built a handful of paper models - though not recently. The best of them are really fantastic pieces of engineering, and, in the hands of a careful modeler, can produce extremely impressive results. I’ve seen paper ship models that literally were indistinguishable from scratchbuilt wood ones.
Anybody thinking about breaking into this phase of modeling should, however, be aware of a few things. First - the best, most detailed of these kits are very challenging. Building them is not just a matter of cutting out pieces of paper and sticking them together. I remember in particular a paper model of the Bismarck, from the big German company Wilhelshaven. Each of the two Arado floatplanes was made up of twenty or thirty pieces. Each anti-aircraft gun barrel had to be produced by rolling up a tiny rectangle of paper. Each of the small boats contained fifteen or twenty parts. Etc., etc.
Second, get some good advice (better than I can offer) regarding adhesives. I had the brilliant idea of putting together my paper model of Lindbergh’s “Spirit of St. Louis” with what my architect father told me was the best, neatest paper-to-paper adhesive on the market: rubber cement. It worked great, and the model looked fine for about three months - after which the rubber cement simply dried up and fell off. (Seems that didn’t matter in the sort of work Dad was used to using the stuff for.)
It’s occurred to me that the modern desktop printer ought to open up all sorts of possibilities for paper modeling. I’ve bumped into a few firms that offer kits as downloads - some for free. My printer (an Epson Stylus Photo RX-580, which cost me about $125) also scans and copies, at specified enlargement/reduction rations ranging from 35% to 400%. Such a printer would make it possible to change the scale of a paper model (provided the parts fit on the glass), and make replacement parts in case of screwups. The modeler could also use any kind of paper that the printer would handle, changing the weight and/or texture to suit the requirements of the part. I’m not an attorney, but I think that would be perfectly legal as long as the modeler only made the reproductions for his/her personal use.
There’s a huge potential there, and the range of civilian ships available in paper form is indeed far, far greater than what can be had in resin or styrene. But go into paper modeling with eyes wide open. Those things aren’t as easy as one might think.
As far as expense goes, paper or more properly card models can be expensive or not. Some companies offer brass or stainless steel detail sets that double or triple the cost of the intial kit. You can build an injection molded kit with or without the detail sets too. But what you really can’t do (unless you just don’t care) is leave an injection molded kit unpainted. One of the plusses of the card model is that it is pre-colored, no complicated painting is involved. Some touchup with color pens is done but real painting is not required. For some builders painting a model is torture, not for me (its the part I like the best!), but for some. Card modeling is a great idea for them.
As to using your photocopier to make backups that is probably a good idea if it is not an ink jet. Ink jets, unless they are of the newest type with moisture fast ink will smear. Some modelers use the paper parts as templates to create plastic or wood kits.
As for glue you might want to take a trip to the craft store and pick up something like Aileen’s Tacky Glue rather than any of the other runny stuff that will just distort the paper.
While there are some simple kits in paper J Tilley is right, the better ones are indeed challenging to say the least but you just won’t find anything like them in plastic or resin. Paper is virtually the only place to go for merchant shipping in model form. WS
Re the SS United States- my dad had the ‘misfortune’ (his words, not mine) to travel on her once- reminded of it when I mentioned this thread- he thought the ‘cheap motel’ description was pretty much spot on.
That said he didnt like QE2 or Queen Elizabeth either so there may not be pleasing some people. Still, It’d be sad to see a ‘real’ liner lost though- modern cruise liners all look like floating office blocks to me.