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Building the RMS Mauretania, (1907-1935)

Mauretania was being depicted as a troop carrier - with a capacity of around 5000 soldiers I surmised that some degree of ‘hotbunking’ would have taken place—to this end I reckoned that placing around 2000 (!) figures would give a suitable impression of the ship in this role.






Painting, detailing and bending the arms and legs of figures in these epic quantities was an extraordinarily tedious task. I used the Eduard pre-painted Photoetched figures and repainted them all in khaki. Including losses and unsuitable poses I used 7 frets… at approx 440 figures per sheet(!). These were placed sitting and sheltering from the wind, sleeping, smoking and generally milling around all over the entire ship. I also placed numerous cut down figures into the open galleries on the promenade decks. A smattering of 80 Navy clad RN crew members added a bit of contrast.





The masts were installed before too many fragile fitting’s were installed; these were made of tapered stainless steel welding rod-spun in a drill and tapered with a sanding disc by Steve Foulkes. Being a hollow hull the masts had to extend to the baseboard to give rigidity; were I to do it again I would fill the areas in the mast-mounting areas with wooden blocks and autobodyfiller. In my instance however I had to get the masts mounted and installed. The end of a piece of similar diameter welding rod had and edge ground onto it so as to act in the manner of a drill bit.
I carefully-using a cordless drill/screwdriver- drilled a hole at approximately the correct angle through the deck and into the baseboard. The end of the masts proper were heated over a candle-flame and using pliers were pushed through the deck into the baseboard-the heated end allowing adjustment in the baseboard as well at deck level. Lastly, considerable quantities of CA glue were run down the masts through the enlarged deck holes and the masts supported in place using card jigs combined with eyeballing.
After the smoke had cleared (!) the deck was made good with some epoxy and lastly levelled off with white glue. A little thought and planning ahead on my part would have saved a lot of time and nerves….





The fore-mast lookout has a roof during wartime, as well as an upper lookout position, these were added using small washers, paper and Stainless steel folded to shape using tweezers, respectively.





The cranes as supplied in the kit were about the right outline-but oversize and under-detailed. The GMM PE set supples nice latticework as well as suggestionsas how to make better cranes; in my view however the latticework whilst correct, gave the crane jib too heavy an appearance, study of photos show the overall look to be lighter-so I adopted artistic licence and used alternative singlesided PE girder from the spares box for a more ‘scale’ appearance.