Titanic model lasting longer than original

TITANIC

- Built in Belfast

- Largest and most luxurious ship of time

- Left Southampton for New York April 10, 1912

- Sank mid-Atlantic on night of April 14-15

- Wreck found 1985

 

Ships and the sea have fascinated Fred Verschoor since his boyhood in the Netherlands port of Rotterdam, and he has made a scale model of the ill-fated Titanic.

This weekend is the 100-year anniversary of the Titanic sinking, and Mr Verschoor said he would be thinking about it.

It took him 2 years to build the model out of strips of plywood, plastic, veneer and metal. He finished it three years ago.

The Titanic was his first complete model, and he did a lot of research about the ship and its sinking - "who was the last survivor and who was in what boat and all that sort of thing".

He has even been to the library and researched the ship's present position, in two pieces on the floor of the Atlantic Ocean.

Mr Verschoor is fascinated by the claim it was unsinkable, and that it was the first ship with a double hull. It was because the bulkheads did not fully seal each of the hull's internal compartments that the ship sank, he said.

His model is built exactly as the Titanic was when it left its Belfast shipyard, right down to the fourth funnel which never worked and was just for show.

Mr Verschoor is now making a model of the German battleship Bismarck, sunk in 1941. After that he may return to making models of passenger ships, his favourites. He came to New Zealand in 1961 on the passenger liner Willem Ruys, which was later renamed Achille Lauro and sank off Africa in 1994.