Back to Titanic · In progress
From Southampton at noon on 10 April 1912 to Carpathia's arrival at four in the morning on the 15th. We are rebuilding RMS Titanic as a place you can walk through, deck by deck, room by room, and telling those five days from inside it.
The timeline
Times are ship's time, about two hours fifty-eight minutes behind Greenwich. Figures follow the 1912 British Board of Trade inquiry and the wreck surveys since 1985. Four days of crossing, then one hundred and sixty minutes told beat by beat.
Titanic leaves berth 44 for New York. Her wash snaps the moorings of the liner New York, and the two ships close to within a metre before Titanic stops and the tugs pull them apart. The maiden voyage begins an hour late.
Cherbourg is too shallow for her, so she anchors in the roads and the tenders Nomadic and Traffic ferry 274 passengers out and 24 off. At 20:10 she weighs anchor and crosses the Channel overnight.
The final 123 passengers come aboard off Queenstown, most of them Irish emigrants bound for America. At 13:30 she turns west. None of the 2,224 people on board will see land from her decks again.
Caronia, Baltic, Amerika, Californian and Mesaba all wire ice ahead. Several messages never reach the bridge. The night is windless and the sea is flat, which means no breaking water at the foot of any berg to give it away.
Lookout Frederick Fleet sees a dark shape ahead, rings the bell three times and picks up the phone: iceberg, right ahead. About 37 seconds later the berg scrapes down the starboard side below the waterline and opens the first six compartments to the sea.
Thomas Andrews, who built her, tells Captain Smith she has an hour, perhaps two. At 00:45 the first distress rocket goes up and boat 7 is lowered. It can hold 65 people. It leaves with 28.
The bow is under and the stern lifts clear of the water, propellers in the air. Between the third and fourth funnels the hull can no longer carry its own weight and tears from the top down. The lights go out.
Two hours and forty minutes after the collision. The two halves fall at around forty kilometres an hour and reach the bottom, 3,800 metres down, some fifteen minutes later, about 600 metres apart. The water is −2 °C.
Cunard's Carpathia turns around on receiving the distress call, shuts off her heating to put every pound of steam into the engines, and threads the ice field for nearly four hours. She arrives at 04:00 and takes up every survivor there is.
Walk the ship
The first complete route runs about five minutes: along the boat deck, into the bridge, down the Grand Staircase, through a B-deck cabin, on to the D-deck reception room and the first-class dining saloon, and back up to the boats. Doors, thresholds and furniture collide the way they should, so you walk it, not fly it.
How it is built
Scale and outline before any cabin. Every pass covers the whole ship and keeps the main build walkable. Where the record is thin, a space is marked provisional rather than invented, and known conflicts between sources are settled before they get copied into the model. Unreal Engine 5.8 is the delivery target; the browser build is the reference.
Build log
Progress is posted as it happens: an overview and a close-up from the same position as last time, so the change is visible rather than claimed.
One set of ship dimensions now serves both the exterior presentation and the walkable interior, and the waterline matches between them. The first continuous route from the boat deck to the dining saloon has been walked end to end in about five minutes.
Follow
A short note whenever there is something new to see, and first word when the ship opens for a walk.
Follow the build