Ocean Liner Leviathan, 1923

We are excited to offer these drawings of the USS Leviathan, showing the ship as she appeared after undergoing a complete refurbishment following her protracted layup after WWI. The Leviathan was originally built in 1914 as the Vaterland, the 2nd ship in the Imperator class of transatlantic ocean liners for the Hamburg America Line. When the United States entered WWI, it confiscated the Vaterland and converted the ship into a transport ship to ferry troops to the European theater. After the war, the ship languished for several years before being refurbished for the United States Lines to enter transatlantic service as the Leviathan.

To make these plans the most accurate and comprehensive set of Leviathan plans available to the public, we combined information from multiple drawing sources and reviewed literally hundreds of interior photos of the ship which enabled us to include specific details such as curtains, phones, wall clocks, heaters, and fans. These plans provide a glimpse into shipboard life for not only passengers, but also the unsung crewmen who worked behind the scenes to make the transatlantic voyage a pleasant experience for the passengers.

Deck Plans

The deck plans for the Steamship Leviathan are shown below. The Bridge deck and the Top of Officers deck are printed on a single sheet while all other decks are printed individually. Each plan includes a symbol and an abbreviation table.

Leviathan Profile (inner view)

Bridge and Top of Officers Decks

A Deck

B Deck

Preview

C Deck

D Deck

E Deck

F Deck

G Deck

H Deck

J Deck

K Deck

L Deck

Hold

Double Bottom

Lines Plans

These Leviathan lines plans will prove extremely helpful to modelers since the original Leviathan lines plans are not known to exist; we were able to recreate these plans by lofting each deck to create a 3D hull model of the Leviathan's hull from which we extracted the desired lines. Given that the Leviathan was originally designed using the metric system, we decided to model the hull using the same measuring system since this allowed us to exactly reproduce the ship's frame spacing, which is critical to capture correctly because the frames dictate where the portholes, deck stanchions, and in many cases room partitions fall within the ship. Each plan includes a metric (meters) and an imperial (feet) scale.

The sheer and half-breadth plans are scaled to the selected purchase scale (see below) whereas the body plan is normally printed in a slightly larger scale to assist the modeler: for 1:200 scaled plans, the body plan is printed at 1:100, and for 1:250 and 1:300 scaled plans, the body plan is printed at 1:200.

Body plan

The body plan includes the stations: -1, -0.5, 0, 0.5, 1, 1.5, 2, 2.5, 3, 4 through 26, 27, 27.5, 28, 28.5, 29, 29.5, 30.

Sheer plan

The sheer plan includes the buttock lines: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 10, 12, 14.

Half-breadth plan

The half-breadth plan includes the following waterlines: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20

Purchasing Plans

All orders include both the deck and lines plans with the file sizes for each scale rounded to the nearest 1/8" shown in the tables below. We offer three separate plan scales, plus an option for any desired plan size. The smallest plan at 1:300 scale may obscure some of the smallest features and requires keen eyesight to view the finest details but is an excellent display size; the largest plan at 1:200 scale is almost the minimum size to display some of the finer details, but does require a much larger viewing surface. The 1:250 scale is a nice, medium plan size.

Note that we only sell paper copies of our plans; no pdf files are offered.