Karhedron
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Posts posted by Karhedron
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On 26/02/2024 at 08:57, JohnR said:
Freight on the Bude line would have been handled by a ex-SR 2-6-0, either and N or U class, and was so almost right to the end.
Technically milk vehicles were not classed as freight but as NPCCS (Non Passenger Carrying Coaching Stock). This means they would have operated more like passenger trains and indeed were often tacked on to the end of passenger trains, particularly on branch lines.
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On 26/02/2024 at 11:01, KeithMacdonald said:
Just out of curiosity, where was West Park Dairy?
West Park Dairy operated just a single creamery at Market Lavington in Wiltshire. They were taken over by Express Dairies in 1937 so would no longer be operating in 1947/48, although the tanks were still in existence and may have still been in their original livery.
Assuming there was a dispatching creamery somewhere on the Bude branch, I can see the tanks being tripped to Oakhampton and then worked through to Exeter. The following dairies were in operation around nationalisation and making use of rail tanks:
United Dairies
Cow and Gate
CWS
Express Dairies
Ambrosia
MMB
There was still some churn traffic at this date so it would not be out of the question to see GWR Siphons full of churns (or even a mix of both types of vehicles).
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17 hours ago, Michael Hodgson said:
Certainly sounds excessive. Given the location, I'm assuming you mean rejection of a load at the bottling plant, rather than rejection of empty wagon for loading.
on what grounds? cleanliness of tank, contamination of load, curdled on arrival?
Would that be down to poor controls at the despatching station (perhaps not properly washed out after previous run or mixing contaminated milk in with good milk from another farm) or bad handling by BR ?
Yes, rejected at the bottling plant. Usually the reason was that the milk has started to spoil. Whether this was due to inadequate cleaning from the previous load or slow transit from the dispatching dairy I am not sure. The tanks were pretty old by this point (I am talking 1970s here) which probably did not help.
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15 hours ago, Damo666 said:
What did they mean by 'Glass Lined'?
It's a question I often meant to ask. Do they mean enamelled?
Yes, vitreous enamel like an old steel bathtub. There were instructions that milk tanks were not to be loose shunted as rough handling could crack the enamel.
Some tanks were lined with Staybright Steel (what we call stainless steel today). I do not know what proportion of tanks had which lining as the tanks stopped carrying descriptions like that after nationalisation.
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10 minutes ago, Wickham Green too said:
Was it through an open manhole as suggested in the picture or was that just for inspection - with the filling through a hose connection ?
The manhole was for inspection and washing out. There was a separate small inlet which was used for filling as shown below (although since it is a demo, they are actually using water :D ).
The basic design of the tanks is almost 100 years old and it has to be remembered that they were introduced to replace churns. It was a big step forwards in terms of hygiene compared to what had gone before but definitely not what we would consider ideal by modern standards.
I have seen several photos from the 60s and 70s (including the one in my previous post) which suggest that filling via manhole may have occurred as an expediency. I have also spoken to the former manager of the Express Dairy in South Morden who recalls that up to 1-in-3 tanks were rejected on arrival. Possibly another reason that the traffic shifted to road.
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I have been chatting with Keith Sweetland who used to work at Express Dairy Seaton Junction. He has confirmed that tanks were always filled from the top.
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On 30/01/2024 at 16:31, Wickham Green too said:
The use of a MICA for churns of liquid milk would have been worse than a four-wheeled MILTA and would have resulted in butter + buttermilk ................. could it have been delivering solid milk products - from elsewhere - for local distribution ?
It is possible but Lostwithiel was not involved in local distribution until 1960 when a bottling line was installed. When first opened, Lostwithiel's job was simply to collect milk from the surrounding areas and cool it for dispatch to London.
Even more puzzling is that one of the MICAs appears to be parked by the boiler room, you can even see the mound of coal behind it suggesting this is where coal wagons were normally unloaded. That seems to be to be a very odd place to load or unload food products.
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I am afraid I don't know what the MICA was doing at Lostwithiel, I haven't really seen much about MICAs used for dairy traffic at all. The GWR favoured Siphons for churn traffic and these were phased out by the introduction of milk tanks (MILTAs). Possibly the MICAs could have been used for butter or cheese but I have not heard of this in practice I think Lostwithiel just dispatched fresh milk to London at this date rather than processing it.
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On 08/12/2022 at 10:03, Pete Haitch said:
Has anyone been to Chippenham and searched the UD archives to see if there are livery records?
Pete.
I have but alas there are not. Most of the records are fairly dry financial matters. Where they pertain to the railways at all, they tend to be things like invoices for laying sidings to new creameries and the like. There is also not much in the way of operational details either, I guess these reside in the GWR's archives rather than UD's if they still exist.
There are some nice photos in the archives but they are patchy. For example there are lots of great photos of Whitland but not many others.
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On 15/01/2024 at 16:27, WillCav said:
What's the title etc? And the author (I assume it won't be by Karhedron).
Milk on the Rails. By Matthew Pinto
Wild Swan Publishing
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On 06/01/2024 at 16:54, DaveF said:
The Midland at Trowell Junction around 1952 in black and white. Once again Dad was taking advantage of his track permit.
Trowell Junction is just south of the site of Trowell station on the line from Trent Junction through Toton and on to the north. It is the junction for the line to Nottingham for trains from the north.
Trowell Junction Jubilee up ex pass c1952 JVol2223
On 08/01/2024 at 09:10, Chris116 said:I suspect they are milk tankers but others may know better.
I think you are very probably right. Hard to tell for sure but they look like 6-wheelers and milk tanks were NPCCS so could be included in express passenger trains. Probably bound for one of the bottling plants in London. If there are any more details of the service, I could even hazard a guess which one.
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1 hour ago, Wickham Green too said:
Of course you could check how it's done in a more enlightened part of the world where milk is STILL carried by rail : -
The same problem occurs as with modern road tankers in that they may not work in the same way as British rail tanks.. I have heard several people observe that road tanks are bottom-filled and I have no reason to doubt them but I have plenty of photos showing that this was not the case with rail tanks.
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6 hours ago, Wickham Green too said:
Was the filler point actually a pipe that led near to the base of the tank ? - there might have been a little foaming until that outlet was flooded but not thereafter.
( Of course a pipe that led near to the base of the tank was exactly what Class A fuel tanks had for siphoning off the product ! )
A pipe leading to the bottom of the tank is a very possible option. I must try and look at a preserved one. Whether the owners would let me open the manhole cover to look inside is another question.
Whether I would fit through the manhole is a question I would rather not speculate on. ;)
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8 hours ago, LBRJ said:
So, if it was top loaded ( and I have no doubt it could well have been) how did they prevent the milk from foaming in the tank? Also, unless there was an airtight seal between the hose and filler cap there would also be access to the milk for whatever airborne "things" happened to be floating about in the atmosphere.
How foaming was prevented is a good question. One thing on my to-do list is to try and inspect one of the preserved milk tanks as a quick look inside would probably solve the mystery. It may be as simple as a 90-degree turn in the inlet valve would be enough to cause the milk to flow down around the inside of the tank rather than pouring straight down and foaming.
When milk tanks were first introduced, much fanfare was made about how hygienic they were compared to milk carried in churns. However it was still 1920s technology and I am not certain how well the seals and hygiene would compare to modern standards. The manager of the Express Dairy at South Morden mentioned to me that in the summer months in the 1970s, up to one third of incoming milk was rejected due to bacterial levels.
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Railway milk tanks were most definitely filled from the top but not from the large manhole cover. Milk tanks had a small inlet valve on the top on the top which was used for filling. I have multiple shots of tanks being filled and they always used the top valve. I think confusion arises from people who are more familiar with road tankers and assume they were filled the same way. Below are some shots of milk tanks being filled at various dairies.
United Dairies Wootton Bassett
Express Dairy Rowsley
United Dairy Moreton-in-Marsh
United Dairy Ecton
I cannot state 100% that rail tanks were never filled from the bottom but standard practice was definitely top-fill.
For more information as well as much better photos, please keep an eye out for my book on railway milk traffic which should be coming out in the Spring courtesy of Wild Swan.
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Interesting question. I don't have a definite answer unfortunately but I have some bits that may be related. Pont Llanio was an MMB creamery south of Aberystwyth, most of its output went to London via Carmarthen and the GWML. However spotters notes from the 60s reported that some tanks were worked north to Aberystwyth in the 1960s during the summer. They might have been worked via Machynlleth and Ellesmere although why it would have gone that way is another question.
Is the photo you found dated? Although there was a steady flow of fresh milk to London at all times of the year, there were also a lot of more seasonal movements. In early summer, when cows were in "full flood", a lot of milk was worked to creameries where facilities existed to process the excess milk into more long lived products including cheese, yoghurt and powdered milk. MMB Four Crosses used to produce a lot of cheese and Express Dairy at Minsterly used to produce yoghurt (although I don't know if the latter received milk in by rail).
As far as can tell, the Working timetables only give the broad outlines of milk traffic and there were a lot of seasonal notes to cover the fluctuations in production that occurred throughout the year. Some creameries that normally dispatched milk to London could become receivers at certain times of year if they also supplied the local area and there was a shortfall. So it could have been that dedicated milk trains were laid on whenever the milk needed to go to places other than London and thus it would not have made sense to route them via Crewe. This is just speculation on my part though.
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Brilliant. Thank you so much. I had never heard of them before, I wonder if they were ever used?
Do you know what their tank capacity was? Based on the weight I am guessing about 6000 gallons.
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On closer inspection, that may be TTF which would be a 45 ton private tank wagon, vacuum braked with AFI. These were definitely a real thing but all the photos I can find show them with older style tanks. This is the only one I have seen showing this style of cladding and with MMB branding.
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After regular milk trains ceased on BR in 1980, the MMB refurbished a selection of milk tanks to keep as a reserve fleet in case of emergencies. The 6-wheeled tanks were designated TMVs and the 4-wheeled tanks TRVs. There were 40 TMVs and 26 TRVs.
On another thread, someone recently mentioned that there 5 larger tanks also constructed or refurbished at the same time. I had never heard of these before but I have just a photograph of a vehicle at Swindon that looks like an MMB tank but with a much larger barrel. It is a little hard to make out but the branding looks like TIF.
The 3 vehicles nearest the camera appear to be these TIFs, you can see the 4th vehicle looks like a TMV with a much smaller 3000 gallon tank. The TIFs look more like 4000 or 5000 gallons. There is a clearer photo of a TMV below so you see the differences.
Can anyone shed any light on these mysterious TIFs as I haven't heard of them before?
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Interesting, I was only aware of the 4-wheeled TRVs and 6-wheeled TMVs. If you can let me know where to found out about the 3rd version, I would be very interested.
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24 minutes ago, 009 micro modeller said:
I’m not familiar with the ‘Western agreement’ but would it have prevented milk traffic from Ecton to destinations outside of London?
The Western Agreement ended most milk flows apart from the the 3 primary flows from Cornwall, Devon and South Wales. There were occasional flows such as in the mid 70s, some milk was shipped from the south west to Cumbria to processed into cheese or powdered milk. This tended to be an irregular occurrence to deal with excess production rather than regular traffic. If Ecton had grown significantly and developed facilities such as cheese factory or spray dryer, there might have been occasional traffic inbound. I am not aware of any dairies on the MR or ER that continued to dispatch milk regularly by rail after the implementation of the Western Agreement.
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Just a thought, points 1 and 2 in your original list might be a bit hard to reconcile as the Ecton dairy was built in the buildings once used by the copper mines as a smeltery. If the mines had not closed, the Dairy might not have been built where it was.
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23 minutes ago, KNP said:
Many thanks for this info so it looks like I will run UD as 4 & 6 wheelers and ED as 6 wheelers only.
I assume a mixed train of these would also be seen with UD being the prominent one.
Yes, mixed trains were common although rakes from just one dairy were not unknown. Basically as soon as more than one dairy was open on a route, it was more efficient for the railway company to consolidate milk trains. The other thing that sometimes happened was milk tanks tacked on the rear of passenger trains. This was allowed as they were classified as non passenger carrying coaching stock (NPCCS) rather than freight vehicles. The Southern was a particular fan of mixed trains but they could be seen on other companies' lines too.
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On 03/11/2023 at 14:04, Nick C said:
Wikipedia says of Express Dairy:
QuoteWhile rival Express Dairies preferred the Great Western Railway, United Dairies preferred the Southern Railway.
Which suggests you can use either, but Express would be more likely.
I might have to go and edit Wikipedia as that is not really true. ;)
Dairies built their depots wherever there was adequate production to meet their needs and connected their depots to whichever railway company happened to be operating in the area. Since most parts of the UK were the domain of a single railway company, the dairies were obliged to do business with whoever owned the nearest lines in most cases. A few traffic flows changed hands over the years such as the IMS flow from Dorrington but this was very much the exception to the rule.
United Dairies was actually the biggest user of the GWR and also had more tanks constructed at Swindon than anywhere else (although don't ask me for exact numbers as I will have to trawl my notes for that ;) ).
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West Park Dairy In Bude
in Modelling real locations
Posted
I was following the OP's request for a GWR-ish light dairy train. I do agree that SR stock would seem more likely There is a nice shot here of milk churns being unloaded at Clapham Junction in 1926. Not quite sure what vans they are in. I know the SR often favoured Van Bs and Cs for milk churn traffic.