Parcel Office interior

[Job's Modelling]

Story telling
When I was busy making the multimedia presentation I realised I had to follow my story more to create a believable pictured story.
My story for Monday August 24, in 1959, starts with Arthur arriving at work. So I had to find a way to make this visible in a picture. Information on the internet was hard to find. So I decided to create the Parcel Office interior were Arthur is meeting his friend and colleague Maurice Cullum.
For inspiration I used this movie “Transporting Parcels by Trains - 1960 Educational Training Film” on You tube
I made some screen prints as a reference.

 

Parcels

The parcels: packages, boxes, trunk and suitcases are all made from paper. I used also a carpet texture, but I don’t know from which supplier. I used rescaled textures from dollhouse websites. Printerest was very useful for this. Also the tip from Frank Wright from Fine Scale Buildings Ltd to use ordinary inkjet A4 sticky labels. This worked out very well.

 

 

Office
For the interior I used templates and textures from Fine Scale Buildings and Scalescenes. This time I used for the furniture also the tip I mentioned above.
Details, such as an adding machine, time tables (not visible on the picture), notices and books were found on internet and re-sized

 

 

Total view:
In the total view you can see the three parts of my parcel office interior:

- Entrance for costumers

- Office part

- Parcel storage

And of course the two British Railways employees Arthur Page and Maurice Cullum.

And some additional information: the wall texture is from Clever Models, the floor is made from a wall texture from Scalescenes, posters from Internet and the figures from the Monty range of Dart Castings.

The weigh scale I made from card and paper from a picture from internet.

 

 

As always I like to read your comments and suggestions.

 

Kind regards,

 

Job

 

[Spitfire2865]

Totally inaccurate. There are multiple employees on duty and the packages are stacked somewhat neatly!

 

Otherwise, very nice work with paper. How did you make the chair?

[Job's Modelling]

Totally inaccurate. There are multiple employees on duty and the packages are stacked somewhat neatly!

 

Otherwise, very nice work with paper. How did you make the chair?

 

The time is at the beginning of a Monday morning before the office actually is open.

The chair is from Fine Scale Buildings. The have a nice furniture set for the 1950's / 1960's.

 

Bur other wise this kind of comments is very useful for me. It will help me to create "better" diorama's.

[darrel]

Many years ago in the days of red star parcels a parcel arrived at our local station, a case of whisky. Inside there was a broken bottle, there was whisky dripping out the corner. We put it so the corner was overhanging the desk and placed a mug on the floor underneath it. Cheers!

Nice modelling though. Looks the part.

[Job's Modelling]

Thanks for the comment.

 

Can you explain to me the difference between a parcel and a sundry?

I thought a case of whisky would be a sundry in stead of a parcel.

[darrel]

Not sure in those days they were all just parcels to me.

[PhilJ W]

Sundries were things that couldn't be put in a parcel. Prams, bicycles, car tyres for example.

[The Stationmaster]

Sundries were small consignments sent by freight train (any consignment under 1 ton - note, the 'proper' ton).

 

Passenger rated traffic was either parcels or specifically categorised (e.g. milk) but different charging scales applied depending on the nature of the traffic and they went into a different column on the daily accounts sheet (e.g. cut flowers - Ledger Label 6 - the one I always remember for some odd reason, even from almost 50 years ago   ).

 

Bicycles could be sent in various ways - either as accompanying a passenger - you bought the ticket at the booking office when you bought your own travel ticket; as passenger rated parcels traffic; or, individually or in limited numbers to a single consignee as freight sundries; or as - say - a container or wagon load at the relevant freight full loads rate.  None of the rates (prices) were the same!

 

As far as the model is concerned a few points - firstly the counter would be full length with a flap to get the parcels etc in & out to/from the public side.  

Most offices in my experience had a public section entrance completely separate from a door out onto the station platform although no doubt at smaller stations a single door to/from the platform would suffice.  

I never ever saw an adding machine in a parcels office (or indeed anywhere else at station level) - even the accounts work was all done by the simple process of adding up numbers and getting the balance across the double entry system (but maybe that was a Western way of doing things?).  

Similarly we didn't have filing cabinets - all the paperwork required for immediate access was put together in daily bundles and stored in cupboards - at a busy office it was far too bulky to put into a filing cabinet.  

The most important things to have immediately to hand - and they changed a  lot over the years - were the rate books which told you how much to charge - pale brown covers in my experience - plus the books and notices which defined the different categories of traffic, told the public what could or couldn't be accepted and so on.  

Also pads of consignment notes mostly black print on white but some were different colours such as Customs Declaration Forms for shipment traffic, a sort of yellowish/buff colour for Red Star Parcels and so on.

[34theletterbetweenB&D]

A good appearance, it all looks 'used and tatty'. The parcels offices of roughly that date that I have looked in had some wooden racking for the smaller parcels. I think you need a sack barrow and a four wheeled truck to aid Arfa to move the items around as required. (I hope his surname is 'Gross'; then he can be known to all as '72' or 'Sixdoz'.)

[Job's Modelling]

First of all I will thank The Stationmaster for his excellent explanation. Very useful. I wished I had it before.

The problem for me was that there wasn't enough photographic information available on the internet about a parcel office interior in the late 1950's.

The pictures I found were or to clean or just details.

 

So I tried to create a interior with the information I had and because I only use paper it is sometimes very difficult to create the interior details that are required.

I still have a picture in mind that I would try to build in the future. I would be very very happy as there was a OO-gauge road van were I could open the back door.

 

Question

Has any one forms that were used in a late 1950's Parcel Office?

[The Stationmaster]

 

 

Question

Has any one forms that were used in a late 1950's Parcel Office?

 

Most of the stuff I've got is much older but I'll check to see if I've got any 1930s documents as I doubt they'll be much different.  I know I've got a waybill from the 1880s or thereabouts somewhere and while very little parcels traffic was still waybilled by the late 1950s I'd place good money on the form being very similar apart from company name etc!  Quite a lot of pre-nationalisation stationery remained in use long after 1948 but consignment notes would have been changed for legal reasons.

[Edwardian]

Totally inaccurate. There are multiple employees on duty and the packages are stacked somewhat neatly!

 

Otherwise, very nice work with paper. How did you make the chair?

 

Actually, as neither of them are moving, I think that's fine.

 

Excellent work.