Cutty Sark running lights

In the Revell inst. the location is Half wrong (I think). I want to say I've seen pictures of the locations of the port and starboard light on the toprail afore the shrouds on the foremast and ON the rail by the next to foremast shrouds. 

You CAN see them in some of the older B/W pics. Look at the base of the shrouds on the foremast. They of course were oil fired.

Jake

I'm having the same recollection as Jake:  I think I've seen pictures of the Cutty Sark with the lights mounted several feet up the lower foremast shrouds.  But I confess I'm not sure.

The Campbell plans don't show any sign of them, and I couldn't find any reference to running lights in his book, China Tea Clippers.  (Caveat:  I only spent a few minutes looking through it, and it doesn't have an index.  I may conceivably have missed something.)

I'm not sure just when running lights came on the scene, or when they became mandatory.  I think I've seen references to them right around the middle of the nineteenth century.  I seem to recall that the big, 1/2 scale - that's 1/2 scale, not 1/2"=1' - model of the whaler Lagoda, in the New Bedford Whaling Museum, has running lights mounted on its mizzen shrouds.  But I don't know just when the first national laws requiring them went into effect.  I suspect it was sometime after 1870, when the Cutty Sark made her maiden voyage.  The answer may lie in one of Harold Underhill's books, my copies of which are currently inaccessible because the contractors have torn the house up.

There's no question that she had running lights eventually; the question is when she got them.  If you're representing her in her glory days as a tea clipper, I think it would be safe to leave them off.

This is from good ol' Wikipedia:

[edit] Marine navigation lights

In 1838 the United States passed an act requiring steamboats running between sunset and sunrise to carry one or more signal lights; color, visibility and location were not specified. In 1848 the United Kingdom passed regulations that required steam vessels to display red and green sidelights as well as a white masthead light. In 1849 the U.S. Congress extended the light requirements to sailing vessels. In 1889 the United States convened the first International Maritime Conference to consider regulations for preventing collisions. The resulting Washington Conference Rules were adopted by the U.S in 1890 and became effective internationally in 1897. Within these rules was the requirement for steamships to carry a second mast head light. The international 1948 Safety of Life at Sea Conference recommended a mandatory second masthead light solely for power driven vessels over 150 feet in length and a fixed sternlight for almost all vessels. The regulations have changed little since then. ^[1]
Marine navigation Part C of the International Regulations for Preventing Collisions at Sea governs the navigation lights required on a vessel.

I think I might leave them off and fill the little slot wear they go. I have looked at alot of old pictures and couldnt spot them, but I was looking on the rail not up the shrouds. I will give it another look an see if I can spot them. Like I said before there seems to no mention of them in Longridges book. I will go through the book again also.

Thanks

Bill

Be careful if you look at pictures of Cutty Sark. I clicked on an image and I was told my computer was infected and it needed to run a scan which it stated to do but not with my Mcafee Antivirus. At the time this happened I was running a virus scan with Mcafee . Mcafee didnt pick nothing up so I am running Malwarebytes right now.

Bill

A lot of sites have that virus warning and actually infect your computer and deactivate the one you have installed.

Eric... 

something has to be done. I just reformated 4 months ago because of a virus.

Bill

Many thanks to subfixer; I should have thought of Wikipedia.

It looks like the Cutty Sark must have gotten her running lights no later than 1897; that she might have had them earlier.  There's no doubt about the red/port - green/starboard arrangement; that, so far as I know, has been universal since the whole concept of running lights was introduced.  I do recall reading, somewhere or other, that sailing ship masters got extremely nervous when operating at night in crowded waters.  Steamships showed white lights at their mastheads; sailing ships didn't.  It was all too easy for a lookout on board a steamer to miss the one colored light on a sailing vessel that would be visible to him.

My father claimed that the most scary moment of his (decidedly non-combatant) WWII naval career came when his ship, the U.S.S. Bollinger (APA-234), was steaming into San Diego at night right after VJ Day.  With the sole exception of the captain (who'd gone to bed early), none of the officers had ever handled a ship in a harbor that wasn't blacked out - and a blacked-out harbor looks completely different from one that has lights all over the place.  The officer of the deck got so nervous that he woke up the captain, who came up on the bridge in his bathrobe, took a look around, pronounced "everything looks all right," and went back to bed.  At one point a panic-stricken lookout yelled that a ship with no white lights - just a red one - was approaching.  Dad, who'd been through OCS recently, said "that must be a sailboat."   He was right. 

There is a close up photo of the port side running light in "Cutty Sark" by Noel Hackney.  The light is mounted atop the rail next to the fore shrouds.  The rear of the light is approximately in line with the fifth, or last shroud and the front of the light in line with the third or middle shroud.  I believe this location is slightly aft of where the Revell kit places them.  The book was published in 1974, and I assume that the photo was taken sometime shortly before publication.  This book was written as a guide for someone constructing the Airfix kit, but would be helpful to anyone building the ship and contains many excellent onboard detail photos.

I also looked in William Crowthers' "The American-Built Clipper Ship, 1850-1856" for information on running lights.  if Wikipedia is correct, then American sailing ships should have had running lights at this time, but this excellent and otherwise very complete book makes no reference to them that I could find.

By the way, the phrase "red, right,returning" refers to channel markers, not running lights.  When returning to port if the red markers are to your right and the green ones are to your left then you are safely in the channel.

The regulations on visibility of the lights also determines the position aboard. 

The lights are to be visible from directly abeam to directly ahead, for a total arc of 112.5º.  This is important, as observers are supposed to get a visual clue from the occlusion of the sidelights as the vessel's midline passes by.  The visibility of sailing vessels is supposed to be maintaind by intermittently displaying a light on the aftermost sail in use aboard.

So, if you saw a red light in front of you, and it vanishes, either it has passed beyond you course, or over the horizon.  The illumination of a spanker or mizzen staysail would then confim that.  If you see a green light join the red, it gets a lot more exciting, as that means the other vessel has just turned towards you--always exciting, and not in a good way in the full dark.

Now, I'me trying to remember the discussion from an old-enough copy of Knight's that the oil lamps were to be visible for a nautical mile; later, with higher ship speeds and electrical lamps, sidlelight visibility was increased to 3 nm, and mastheads to 5nm.  But, I could be misremembering very old discussions of RoR from very long ago.

And, for best appearance, it's good to paint the sideboards a slightly different red than the lamp body (which is finisky work even at 1/96, but it does help it not look like some odd reed and green dod-dads tacked on your ship, too.

This will give you an idea about placement

http://www.maritimequest.com/sailing_ships/cutty_sark_1869/cutty_sark_13.JPG 

The way I was taught Port from Starboard was an easy way to remember:

The Ship "LEFT Port"  and Port's  A RED Wine.