I would say I'm sorry for that blog entry title, but I'm not - this jetty has proven to be a real pain in the proverbial because of the lack of photos for me to work from.

This drawing took me 2 days, and it still isn't correct (especially after I gave up trying to draw the ropeway section on the far left). Also perspective and drawing things large are not my strong points!

Still, I hope this goes someway to showing you all how the ropeway station will hopefully look when I've made it. It's going to require a LOT of Plastruct. Probably going to cost me a lot of money to build, too.

I could carry on with my drawing, but I'm not going to - I've wasted enough time as it is, and run out of space on my paper as usual!

Hopefully the drawing helped to explain how the ropeway may have worked. As mentioned, information on this (let alone photos!) is scarce so I am doing my best with what little I have to come up with an accurate account of what I think it looked like. Whether it looked like this or not, I can't be 100% sure unless a few reference photos appear out of thin air! Here is a run down of how I imagine it to function:

The ropeway receptacles come in from the left on the far rope. These than are guided onto a rail where they roll under their own momentum to the first crane. Depending on what side the ship is on, it will either have its lever pulled down to empty its contents onto the first crane's sling conveyor, or it will be manually pulled around (unless there is enough momentum) to the second crane. If it hasn't deposited its load already, it will do so here. The cranes' conveyor will lift the barrels of asphalt up across the jib and lower it into the waiting ship. Barrels will then be dropped automatically when the conveyor reaches the bottom, and the barrels then are stacked by hand presumably.

Now the question is - do I want to try and make it work on the model, or just have it as a static model. If the former, things are going to get even trickier!