Miniature sailing ship

[Mike Watterson]

One long corridor had glass cases with models of almost all the ships they had made.

Did they include a model of the Titanic in their display?

I'm nearly sure it was ... "Other well known ships built by Harland & Wolff include Titanic's sister ships RMS Olympic and RMS Britannic" It might really have been a generic model with "Titanic" painted on later.
They only had one model for each class of ship, as part of the design process. The apprentices models would have be separate constructions.
" a custom that was long-since discontinued."
Certainly wasn't happening in 1970s!
When did they last have apprentices or build a ship? It's only a small bit of maintenance work. The bulk of the place on "the Queen's Island" is long gone.

These ones were not made by apprentices, but by the "design team", before the plans would be completed in the drafting / drawing office which had a monstrous slide rule inset in a bench. Other that that I don't remember much, it was 43 years ago!

EDIT:
I suspect the model was really the Olympic and repainted later:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RMS_Olympic
I have feeling I read an article about these models being sold in recent years (a search of the Belfast Telegraph might find it)