Barchester

Barchester has two canal basins. A small one for it's timber yard and a larger one for the Sand & Gravel Company and the General Warehousing complex. The smaller timber yard basin does all its barge loading and unloading from the side of the basin itself but the larger one needs it's own jetty to cope with the traffic in that area.

This first picture shows how simple the layout of the main jetty is. The planked top is all card stained with Colron wood stain and the supporting legs are made of stripwood, of the appropriate thickness for your model, stained with the same colour.

Here we see the same jetty but with most of the bits that are going to make up the completed model. There is a handrail (card strip)small nails which will support the handrail, posts for life belts (card strip), corkboard pins for rope bollards, lengths of different thickness of string for ropes.











Next we have all the bits and pieces assembled and stuck down on the jetty. The life belts are just painted washers of the appropriate size. It is fairly obvious looking at the two pictures how the hand rail was assembled. I use a 1mm drill held in a pin vice to drill holes in the card to take the pins and snip off the excess from underneath the model after the pins themselves are firmly glued in place. The coils of rope are easily made by squeezing some of the PVA glue onto your finger and then pulling the string through it to make sure the whole length is covered. This sticky length of string is then wrapped round the handle of a pencil or paintbrush handle of the size required for your coil of rope. When all the string is wrapped round then gently squeeze the coil together, top to bottom and at the same time whilst holding the coil rotate the former (pencil or paintbrush) so that the coil is prevented from sticking to it. After a minute or so the coil will slide off it's former and there you have it. This may sound a bit complicated in words but it is easy to do. It is well worth adding this technique to your armoury of skills as the result is good. Practice if needed as the materials are cheap and plentiful.











Finally I have added a crane to the jetty. This is a Slaters plastic model kit that someone bought me and I have assembled and weathered it. During assembly I noticed how simple the construction was and knew that the Barchester engineers could easily come up with a drawing for making more of them so there will be another project on how to make these typical goods cranes.

This last photograph shows the jetty installed in it's final position but with more detail to be added at a later date.








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