Adventures In Thyme And Spates: Lego Cruise Liner

Early last year, I turned my Lego Police Boat into an Oil Tanker. Back in November, I used the same hull to create a cruise liner of my own design. Tonight I've been going through my Lego creations and dismantling them, sorting out the pieces before reassembling the original sets. I thought I'd already put the cruise liner pictures on my blog, but turns out I hadn't... so here they are.

The finished cruise ship.

The length-to-height scale is way off, but I was working with the longest hull I had, and wanted each deck to have standing room for minifigs.

I also wanted the following on board:

Bridge
Engine Room
Crew Quarters
First Class Cabin
Restaurant
Casino
Pool

I made the ship able to be separated into each deck for easy minifig access and placement, without destroying it. To do this, I borrowed a construction method used in many recent Lego City sets - the top layers of walls are created with a lot of flat bars, with only a few bumpy pieces to connect a roof to. This keeps the upper section in place, but at the same time makes detachment easy.

The roof of the bridge section.

A nice big window for the captain to look out at his ship.

Inside the bridge. Gear levers, steering wheel, computers and dials - and a fire extinguisher just in case.

Bridge section. Here you can see the flat panels which make it easy to detach sections from each other.

The Bridge sits above the First Class Cabin on the next deck, which also has the swimming pool, complete with diving board and lifeguard.

The First Class / Pool Deck, detached.

Passengers enjoying the pool.

The First Class cabin has a large window astern.

The First Class Cabin features a large bed (taken from a Medieval Town set), a sofa (two chairs put side by side on a raised base-plate), and a huge flat-screen TV (taken from the Police Station).

First Class passengers enjoy the comforts of their large cabin.

The next level down features the Restaurant and Casino. The restaurant has a lot of window panels (taken from passenger planes), while the casino has no windows at all.

The Restaurant / Casino Deck, detached.

Waitress and customer in the not-so-busy Restaurant.

The Casino features a green poker table on one side, and a roulette wheel on the other. The roulette wheel is made of small 1x1 roof tiles in black and red, angled inward on a red 2x2 turntable plate.

Poker players waiting for a dealer to show up.

On the lowest deck is the Engine Room, and a Not-First-Class Cabin - either for the regular passengers or the crew, it consists of double bunk beds and some single chairs. No fancy First Class sofas here!

The lowest section of the ship.

Every cruise ship needs to be fully equipped with lifeboats. Working out a way to store them neatly at the bow of the ship, and be able to "click" them in so they weren't moving around, took up quite a bit of time. Lots of trial and error resulted in the side-to-side bow storage, with the boats clicking into clasps on the wall.

Two lifeboats.

Lifeboat detached to reveal clasp on wall.

Bunk beds and single seating.

Arched doorway separating the cabin from the Engine Room. Just in shot is a fire extinguisher clipped to the wall.

Technicians keeping the ship going.

Pretty much every plane, office building or truck set I own comes with one or more coffee mugs for passengers / desks / dashboards. So of course I had to include coffee storage in the Engine Room of my cruise liner.