From Wikipedia I have deduced that this kit represents the 7th Steamboat to carry the name Natchez, and probably the most famous one after the race with the Robert E Lee.
The seventh Natchez was built in 1869. It was 301 feet (92 m) long, had eight boilers and a 5,500 cotton bale capacity. In its nine and a half year service, it made 401 trips without a single deadly accident. It became famous as the participant against another Mississippi paddle steamer, the Robert E. Lee, in a race from New Orleans to St. Louis in June 1870, immortalized in a lithograph by Currier and Ives. This Natchez had beaten the previous speed record, that of the J. M. White in 1844. Stripped down, carrying no cargo, steaming on through fog and making only one stop, the Robert E. Lee won the race in 3 days, 8 hours and 14 minutes. By contrast, the Natchez carried her normal load and stopped as normal, tying up overnight when fog was encountered. Despite this she berthed only six hours later. One way Leathers tried to speed up his boat was giving all of his workers whiskey. When Leathers finally dismantled the boat in Cincinnati in 1879, this particular Natchez had never flown the American flag
The kit is moulded in several different colours of plastic, has two small reels of rigging thread and paper printed "decals" for flags etc. The instructions are printed on both sides of a sheet roughly A3 and folded in four. The hull of the boat is 20.5 inches long. From another site I have taken them at their word when they say the kit is 1/160 scale.
The instructions:
There are no colour photos of the real ship available obviously, and the famous lithograph shows the two steamships both in similar white liveries so I will basically attempt to reproduce the livery as per the box art, whether it be ficticious or not - lime green and brown will certainly be eye-catching.
The kit parts:
The Airfix Beaufighter body is shown to give an idea of scale of the boat.
I'm looking forward to building this one.
Cheers
Al.
) both the Pyro kits are around 1/160 and approximately 21" long are probably the same kit with some alt parts for the name. So the Revell kit is probably different - 'Remembering Revell' might have the answer.
