The Ship Model Forum

Straat Clarence is the next one in my fleet. Straat Clarence was build in 1960 as part of large series of cargo liners build specifically for cross trading. Most Royal Interocean Line ships never saw their home port of Amsterdam and traded between Asia, Africa and South America . RIL’s owners, Rotterdam Lloyd and the Nederland line, controlled the routes to Europe and the US. The massive post WW2 economic boom in East Asia and the Middle East saw RIL out-competing and outgrowing its owners and by the time most Dutch liner companies were consolidated to form Nedlloyd RIL brought in the largest fleet. This happened about 50 years ago but the memories of RIL are still strong. There was a certain romance to trading far away and in exotic places in the days before cheap air travel. The looks of the ships also helped. There is an excellent website called varenisfijner.nl which has lots of pictures and drawings to show what I mean.
Those drawings were not online yet when I started to build Straat Clarence so I had to make do with self made library copies of the GA drawings and lots of guesswork. The build took a long time and had a number of firsts for me. My first self made decals for the funnel, my first open windows, my first streamline superstructure and my first open laundry+ crew.
I will build more ships of this interesting company and it’s predecessors in the future.








The build thread can be found here viewtopic.php?f=13&t=120655

Beautiful work.

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We like our history sanitized and theme-parked and self-congratulatory, not bloody and angry and unflattering. - Jonathan Yardley

Great looking ship. Well done.

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Jim

Beautiful work. How did you do the white name decals?

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-- Scott

Thank you. The letters are white N scale railway letters from TL decals and placed individually as my printer does not print white decals. The trick to keeping them straight is to let each letter fully dry (24 hrs) before adding the next one. I had no deadline for this build so I could simply add one letter every day when I came home from work for a few weeks.

Hi, Pieter,

lovely work!

Grtz, Walter

Gee, Pieter,

Nice new scratchbuilt! Well done, and interesting to be drawn to these Nedlloyd predecessors.

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"I've heard there's a wicked war a-blazing, and the taste of war I know so very well
Even now I see the foreign flag a-raising, their guns on fire as we sail into hell"
Roger Whittaker +9/13/2023

Thanks Maarten en Walter. The next one will be of the Nederland line.