Karhedron

Just got my order in for an NSE liveried one. Not sure what is was doing on a western branchline in 1950s Somerset but I will figure something out.

Just giving this a quick bump in case any kind member has stumbled over a photo during lockdown. I have tried the Co-op Society's archives, local libraries, even Facebook groups and am really stumped. I just can't seem to find a photo of the dairy at all which is strange when it was on the edge of such a popular trainspotting location.

I have been scratching my head over that picture as well. I wonder if it not tanks coming from North Pole junction at all. I wonder if it is actually empties from the Express Dairy at South Ruislip. South Ruislip to West Ealing is a short and easy trip to the get the empties in position to be worked back west for refilling.

I have been looking for a cut-off date to no avail. Most churn traffic ceased in the mid-60s with the implementation of the "Western Agreement". This was the agreement between BR and the Milk Marketing Board to concentrate milk flows into London on the South Wales and West Country routes. The LMS and LNER milk flows stopped around this time. Churn traffic had been in steady decline since the ASLEF strike in 1955 as churns were much more vulnerable to perishing if delayed than milk in tankers. The last report I have read of churn traffic into London was 1961. If it lasted beyond this date, I feel certain it would have finished with the implementation of the Western Agreement. And because railway history has to have an exception to every rule, here is one for churns. Most milk traffic was bound for London but there were other flows. One was a flow of cream for cakes and the like in the Isle of Thanet resorts. This flow was dispatched from from the CWS dairy at Stewarts Lane (which I have still not managed to find a decent photo of) and was conveyed in churns carried in the brake compartments of EMUs. This churn flow was still running in 1966. CWS Stewarts Lane closed later in the 60s so I guess the flow finished then but that is the absolute last record of churns on the rails that I can find.

1993 for the NSE area fits my recollections pretty well. The old 117s operating out of Paddington had smoking sections but I think the 165/166 Turbos were non-smoking throughout when they were introduced around this time.

The HE&S bottling plant on Hoffland Road can be seen quite well in this 1938 aerial photo. You can see the KennyO station to the left and although they are close, the road and terraced houses in between means it is unlikely milk could be directly discharged from the station area or sidings to the dairy.

The same caption also claims that milk tanks were discharged at an MMB depot at Kensington Olympia which I am pretty sure is incorrect. I have a full list of MMB facilities from 1948 and it doesn't mention Kensington. I have also looked at old maps and photos and there is nothing resembling a bottling plant at the trackside in any of them. The only rail-served dairy in the area I have been able to find was the Henry Edwards and Son bottling plant on Hoffland Road near the junction with Sinclair Road. This was a short distance from the railway and I think the company used Rotanks which were dismounted at KO and driven the short distance to the dairy rather than being discharged at the station itself. The area has now been redeveloped but the gate the milk floats used was still there up until about 10 years ago. HE&S was taken over by Express Dairies at some point so I don't know how long the Rotank service lasted. As far as I have been able to work out, Kensington Olympia was used as a marshalling point for milk trains rather than a location for discharging the tanks. Trains would come in from the GWML and SWML and be concentrated at KO. They would then be split up and shorter rakes would be tripped to the various bottling plants that ringed the capital. Apart from the aforementioned Rotanks, I don't think any unloading of milk took place at KennyO, especially not to an MMB plant. If anyone has information to the contrary, I would certainly be interested to see it. An MMB plant in London would not make a great deal of sense in any case. The MMB was concerned with ensuring stable supplies and prices for milk. Their plants tended to be at the country end to serve farmers and either get milk to London or process excess supply into longer lived products. London was the biggest market for milk and was well served by many major dairies so there was no need for the MMB to get involved there.

I do not. Possibly it is because the tanks were owned by the dairy companies while the underframes were owned by the railways.

I thought that milk from Uttoxeter was worked to Derby and then down the MML. I could be wrong on that as the MML was handy for the Express Dairy at Cricklewood but somewhat less so for United Dairies who would have been dispatching to Mitre Bridge and Wood Lane. The train could have empties for Congleton which had both a Nestle and CWS dairy at this time. Or it could indeed be loaded and bound for GWR metals via Market Drayton. After nationalisation, I have a record of empty tankers being worked from Liverpool Street to Uttoxeter. Possibly these were empties from the United Dairies bottling plant at Ilford but that is just a guess. Whether full tanks were worked back the same way I do not know. Milk train routes were frequently surprisingly complicated.

I don't have a definite answer but I suspect they would not have been freight brown as milk tanks were not classed as freight vehicles. They were classed as Non Passenger Carrying Coaching Stock (NPCCS) so I would have expected the sole-bars to match coaching stock. As you say thought, getting a definite answer could be tricky. Much to my surprise, milk tanks were known to wander off, even in the early days. This page has a lovely shot of Uttoxeter in 1935 at the bottom and you can clearly see a GWR milk tank in the United Dairies siding, despite being in the depths of LMS territory. I have also seen photos of an Express Dairy tank at a DMP creamery in the 1930s. This means that even before the MMB pooling, you could find tankers built by one company on another's rails and tankers built for one dairy at a creamery belonging to another. https://lightmoor.co.uk/books/the-north-staffordshire-railway-in-lms-days-volume-2/l9655

Thanks for the tip. I had been planning to pick up a copy and your reminder was the final nudge I needed to actually order it.

Part of that is due to who owned which facilities. CWS had bottling plants in the Capital but most of its dispatching creameries were further out. I think their closest one to London was Wallingford in Oxfordshire but that was a pretty small place that only dispatched one tank per day. There were 2 creameries in East Sussex that dispatched tankers, Billingshurst and Horam, both of which were owned by Express Dairies. They were so close to London that they were early candidates for switching to road. By the time rail tankers were introduced, most farms close to London were already dispatching their milk by road. Tje railways could only compete economically for creameries that were located beyond the effective range of lorries at the time. For example, Express Dairies at Cricklewood was a major destination for milk trains but also received milk in by road from around 120 farms in the London area. Of course as lorries and roads improved, that competitive range expanded which is why creameries closer to London often switched from rail to road transport such as Horam and Frome. By the 1960s, CWS seems to have made the strategic decision to abandon rail transport all together.

You are right, although I have not a manged to find decent photos of the dairy at either location or milk trains. I can help with destinations though. Ffairfach sent milk to the CWS creameries at Stewarts Lane and East Croydon. The latter was located away from the station, hence the need for Rotanks. Some also went to West Ealing where they were taken to the LCS creamery on Olive Road. Llangadog opened around 1957/58 and largely took over the traffic that had previously been handled by Ffairfach and Builth Wells (both of which closed around this time). Llangadog seems not have dispatched by rail for long and ceased around 1963. Most CWS creameries ceased to use rail around this time.

Now there's a great idea.....

If at first you don't succeed, cheat and use a screenshot. Carmarthen and Whitland were both United Dairies plants. United Dairies had a variety of liveries in the 1930s including the classic white livery and plain silver with UD lettering. Ffairfach was a Co-operative Wholesale Society dairy and their tanks were green with white lettering. There is a good chance some of these tanks would have been the demountable road-rail "Rotanks". By the end of the 1930s, MMB at Pont Llanio had opened and started dispatching milk south which would have joined this train at Carmarthen too. So if you are modelling 1939 it is quite possible you would have seen a train with white United Dairies, green CWS and blue MMB tanks in the rake along with a couple of Siphons and a pair of passenger brake vans. During the war the MMB took charge of milk distribution and pooled milk tanks meaning that mixed rakes became even more common. They were not totally randomised however as United Dairies and Express Dairies had pioneered different and incompatible standards of connectors on their milk tanks. This led to a VHS/Betamax situation and meant that there was still some pattern to which tanks were sent to which dairies. After nationalisation, the MMB began refurbishing milk tanks. The early tanks used cork insulation which had started to perish by this point so it was removed and replaced with glass wool insulation. The tanks were then reclad in plain aluminium. This was the origin of the dull silver appearance of milk tanks which became predominant for most of the rest of their lives. Some dairy companies did apply more colourful liveries after nationalisation such as the orange and white St Ivel livery of Unigate, MMB blue and a plain red/orange livery which may have been unigate (although I am not certain).

DId someone call my name? The simple answer is yes, milk trains did run with tanks from different dairy companies. The longer answer is that it is slightly more complicated and depends on when and where you were looking. The first milk tanks were introduced in 1927 and initially only a few creameries were equipped to handle them. The first two dispatching dairies were Wootton Bassett on the GWR and Calvely on the LMS. Both were owned by United Dairies and dispatched to their bottling plant at Mitre Bridge. Initially these milk tanks ran in dedicated trains because there were not enough dairies dispatching tanks to make up mixed trains. Here are some examples of dedicated milk trains. Caynham Court hauls the United Dairies Wootton Bassett - Mitre Bridge milk train through Sonning Cutting in the 1930s. 3442 Bullfinch hauls the Independent Milk Supplies Dorrington - Marylebone trains through Birmingham Snow Hill in 1937. It was only later in the 1930s when enough dispatching dairies were equipped to send tanks that mixed milk trains started to develop. One of the early examples was the Whitland to Kensington milk train. In 1938 this would have been a real modeller's delight with a mix of tanks from various dairies, all in colourful pre-nationalisation liveries and accompanied by a couple of Siphons to handle churn traffic. The 1938 WTT details the following makeup of the train. EDIT - I will post a summary of the WTT as soon as I can work out how to post tables.

Cornwall is one location, I believe other sites in the US have shown similar potential. https://cornishlithium.com/projects/lithium-in-geothermal-waters/

Biomass is another example of a good idea spoiled by bad implementation. In theory you grow some sort of fast burning wood on low quality land and then burn it for energy which is carbon neutral. Drax power station uses pellets sourced from a variety of locations, many of them on the other side of the Atlantic. This means that we are adding transport costs (and carbon) to the process. There have been reports of some virgin forests being felled to meet demand for biomass which is damaging in different ways. If we could grow enough biomass in this country to fuel power stations like Drax, then it would be a positive contribution. The current situation however is not ideal and I don't think it should be expanded until the supply of sustainable biomass is established. https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/mar/23/green-groups-dispute-power-station-claim-biomass-carbon-neutral

Heat pumps are good in principle, the devil is in the detail. The heat differential they produce is not as high as a boiler so you need larger radiators and better insulation. Better insulation and cutting down on drafts tends to cause condensation and black mould in older properties which were not designed to be airtight. Air source heat pumps are the easiest but also the least efficient as air temperature drops in the winter when you need heat the most. Ground source heat pumps are better as the ground temperature is pretty stable but you need to dig to install it and finding any leaks becomes a pain. Water source heat pumps are a good compromise but most people don't live next to a large enough body of water. Hydrogen boilers seem like a good solution if the hydrogen is produced from electrolysis rather than fossil fuels (green hydrogen rather than blue hydrogen). This is not very efficient but it may not actually matter and here is why. In order to meet our electricity needs from renewables, we will need to install more generation capacity than we have currently from existing sources. The reason for this is that the wind and sun don't generate all the time so we will need to install excess capacity to ensure our baseload continues to be met. This means that on sunny and breezy days, we will have a lot of surplus electricity. So what do we do with it? One possibility is to use the surplus to produce green hydrogen by electrolysing water. It does not matter that the process is not particularly efficient as we are basically using "free" surplus electricity. It means we can produce and store hydrogen in the summer when we will have surplus energy and use it for heating in the winter. Or feed it into gas turbines to generate electricity when renewables are quiet. I think that as renewables continue to increase over the coming years, a lot of clever methods will be devised for storing and using surplus capacity.

Here is a depressing read. The current problems may not be so much a temporary glitch as a sign of things to come. https://eand.co/why-everything-is-suddenly-getting-more-expensive-and-why-it-wont-stop-cbf5a091f403

A single GWR siphon could carry over 100 churns and some dairies could fill multiple siphons. So probably no risk of putting too many churns on a layout.

Marlow was one of those rare stations that did actually have a bay platform at the terminus that was occasionally used for passenger trains. I am not certain but it may have been built to allow the shuttle to Bourne End to operate when the main platform was occupied by regatta specials. The only photo I have seen of it in use was during a railtour in 1954.

As far as I am aware, the inner tank of the early tankers was of metal construction, probably steel. The "glass lining" was not really glass in the conventional sense. Rather it was a coating of vitreous enamel applied to the inside of the tank to provide a smooth continuous surface that would be easy to clean and sterilise. The vitreous enamel was applied as a paste containing ground glass to the interior which was then heated until it fused to form a smooth coating. I haven't found details of how this was achieved. It would take a large kiln to fit a 3000 gallon vessel so maybe it was done with a blowtorch? I am just speculating here as I don't really know. Wikipedia states the fusing point of VE is 750-850 degrees-C which is hot but a lot lower than the melting point of steel. Although early tankers famously proclaimed they were "glass-lined", they were not popular with the railways. The VE was comparatively fragile and did not take kindly to be shunted roughly. Some time in the 1930s, it seems to have been phased out and tanks were instead lined with stainless steel. Express dairy tanks sometimes carried logos such as "Staybrite steel". The last record I can find for glass-lined tanks was the batch built for the IMS by the GWR in 1936. Later tanks may still have been glass-lined but I cannot find photos or records to indicate one way or the other.

The Culm valley light railway was delightful but definitely an oddball. It was an independently built light railway with very flimsy track and low line speed. This limited what locos and coaches could be run there, even thought it was operated by the GWR. If it had not been for the large dairy at Hemyock, it is doubtful it would have even survived until nationalisation. As such, it does not make a good example of a "typical" GWR branchline (if there even is such a thing). If you are looking at the 1930s then Autocoaches and B-sets were the staple rolling stock on most west-country branchlines. Are you looking for models that are available ready-to-run or are you looking into kit-building?

On the contrary, B-sets were designed very much with branchline use in mind and were less common in suburban settings where higher capacity was often called for. A small Prairie or (less frequently) Pannier hauling a B-set was a staple of west-country branchlines. Small Prairie’ 4569, in BR lined green brings a red ‘B’ set into Bodmin General in September 1958. In the early 1950s, a 45xx small Prairie drifts into Wadebridge with Bodmin Branch No 2 set with a service from Bodmin General. The coaches (6977 + 6778) are diagram E140 and are still in their last GWR livery. http://www.gwr.org.uk/venton/b-set-wadebridge.jpg 4582 leaving Avonwick A 4500 on a standard 'B set' approaches Nancegollan from Gwinear. It was even possible to see small diesels like NBL class 22s hauling B-sets http://www.cornwallrailwaysociety.org.uk/uploads/7/6/8/3/7683812/8719405_orig.jpg It was