COCOLI, Panama – It looks like a glorified amusement park ride. Small ships modeled after container vessels, bulk carriers and tugboats maneuver around a 35-acre lake complex, practicing docking and easing through narrow canal locks.

But these small ships and scale-model course, constructed at a 25th of the size of the real Panama Canal and the vessels that transit it, are anything but child's play. The course gives canal pilots a chance to practice under real life conditions before they're called upon to help guide megaships through the new locks of the Panama Canal.

The "Cosco Shipping Panama" made the first official transit through the canal expansion Sunday, and the new locks, which will allow bigger ships to transit the canal, open for commerce Monday.

When dealing with ships longer than two football fields carrying tens of thousands of cargo containers, there is no margin for miscalculation. Canal pilots and tugboat captains must be ready to guide today's shipping behemoths through the new locks with precision, preventing them from crashing into the gates or banging into walls.

Unlike the system in effect for most waterways, the captains of vessels traveling through the canal turn ­control of their ships over to canal pilots for the transit.

The new locks have many innovations, but one of the most important ones for canal pilots and tug captains is that the locomotives called mules and the guide wires that help ships navigate through the locks of the original canal won't be used on the expansion. Instead, tugboats will nudge towering ships into position and keep them in place as water levels are raised or lowered.

Even though it takes years of training for a canal pilot to navigate the currents, the changing weather conditions and the tricky curves of Culebra Cut and the docking angles along the route of the canal, navigating a huge ship potentially loaded with 13,000 containers through the expansion requires some extra hands-on training.

Since the opening of the Scale-Model Maneuvering Training Center in March, about one-third of canal pilots have trained at the facility and more pilots and tugboat captains are scheduled to be trained in coming months.

Pilots and tug captains also train at a computer simulation center, but the scale-model center gives them a better feel for wind and currents.