John makes waves with model ships

A model making enthusiast from Peterborough has said he feels a “great deal of pride and satisfaction” after building two scale model tugs which took several years to complete.

John Gardner, from Orton, posed proudly for pictures earlier this month with his now completed twin vessels, ‘Yorkshireman’ and ‘Envoy’.

The models are exact 1:48 scale replicas of two real-life tugs, both of which were built by Cochrane & Sons Shipbuilders of Hull.

A huge fan of engineering history and a model maker since his late teens, 72-yearold John told the Peterborough Telegraph why he wanted to build a replica of the Yorkshireman.

“If you recall the Falklands War, that was the tug that went down to pull the SS

Atlantic Conveyor back after it was hit by an Exocet [missile].”

John opted to build Envoy – a similar sized vessel built by Cochrane’s two generations before – after he had completed Yorkshireman, as the engineer within him wanted to do a “fair comparison of how tugs had changed over a 40 year period.”

Though both models were built from commercially available kits, John has modified them to meet his own requirements. “I’ve brought in figures from train sets,” he said, “and chucked a good few bits away to create my representation of the model.”

While John admits building models to such detail takes a “certain degree of dedication,” he is keen to point out that the reason he has taken so long to complete his models is because he has so many other hobbies, like cycling and caravaning and wood-turning, to distract him.