August 23, 2006: Former coal miner builds scale cruise ship in his back yard

[Undertoad]

Many thanks to bargalunan, who noticed this item and remembered us!

Men build stuff; it's what we do. Somehow, it's a natural tendency; it's in our dreams. Sometimes one of us follows through on the dream.



François Zanella was a coal miner in Lorraine, France. He would sometimes build model boats.

Then he decided to build his own dream, a 1/8 scale replica of a Royal Caribbean liner, the Majesty Of The Seas. 33.50 meters long, 4.75 m broad, 6.60 m high.

He first conceived of the project and started drawing it in 1993; began construction in 1994; and finished it in 2005.



Much of the project is documented in French, and with very small pictures, on Zanella's own site; another related site thankfully offers an English version, which gets me more information than Babelfish translations.



Zanella got a lot of help from a lot of people who heard of the project - and he's now met a few of the real Royal Caribbean cruise ship captains too. As far as I'm concerned, he's the real Captain. Hats off to this gentleman and to all gentlemen everywhere who set off to build their dream.