By MIKE SCHNEIDER
The Associated Press

Charles Mawrocki helps hoist a twenty-foot wide replica of the glass dome ceiling above the grand staircase of the infamous Titanic. (AP Photo/Travis Long)

ORLANDO, Fla. -- For those who didn't get enough of the movie, the musical, the museum exhibit, the books and Leonardo DiCaprio, there soon will be a permanent Titanic attraction in Orlando allowing tourists to relive the tragedy over and over again.

Opens in April

''Titanic -- Ship of Dreams'' is scheduled to debut April 10 in a 25,000-square-foot facility on International Drive, Orlando's busy tourist corridor.

The $7 million attraction will combine 200 genuine artifacts along with a costume worn by Mr. DiCaprio in the movie Titanic and memorabilia from the film A Night to Remember.

The artifacts, including a life jacket and a second-class passenger list, come from the Denis Cochrane Collection and the Peter Boyd-Smith Collection, two prominent collectors of Titanic artifacts. Both collections come from England.

''You can come in here and be entertained like at Disneyland, but at the same time you get a history lesson,'' says John Joslyn, a partner in the venture.

Orlando beat out Las Vegas and Branson, Mo., for the attraction, which is expected to attract 1 million people in its first year.

The attraction's partners bill it as an interactive experience that will allow visitors to feel what it was like to be a passenger on the ship, short of ending up on the bottom of the Atlantic. Visitors to the attraction will walk through several rooms that tell the story of the Titanic.

They start off at the shipbuilder, get their tickets and move to a faux harbor where they will encounter a 40-foot side of a ship and a stereo system recreating the sounds of horses' hooves, a fog horn and the shouts of well-wishers. The attraction also will recreate the ship's grand staircase and have actors roaming the rooms playing the roles of genuine passengers from the ship.

''Titanic'' is a joint venture with Magicworks Entertainment, which became a subsidiary of SFX Entertainment Inc. last year. It is Magicworks' first foray into the attractions business. The company is better known for producing Broadway musicals such as Cabaret and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and several David Copperfield shows. Mr. Joslyn and his business partner, G. Michael Harris, had been scouting out sites for a permanent Titanic attraction for five years, but it took the momentum generated by the hit film to get the project off the ground.

''The movie came about and suddenly people paid attention,'' Mr. Joslyn says. ''The movie helped give us more believability.''

Traveling exhibit

A museum exhibit on the Titanic that traveled to St. Petersburg and Memphis, Tenn., also proved that interest in the fateful journey would get people through the turnstiles.

Titanic has universal appeal that transcends class, nationality and sex, Mr. Joslyn says.

''Titanic itself has a real mystique,'' he says. ''People believed that whatever they did couldn't be stopped and suddenly God reached down and stopped it.''

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