what can be used as pre grouping wagon loads

[Compound2632]

There always seems to be more empty wagons than full wagons in old photos ?

[Compound2632]

Failing to get the hang of my son's smartphone. Empty wagons - many photos taken in goods yards - wagons unloaded quickly then standing around empty waiting for next load. So, not representative of trains in motion which is what most of us modellers want.

[sjrixon]

A lot do apear sheeted, there are still plenty that are not. But then you can't generally see in while the train is in motion, so I question how many of them are in fact empty.

[Andy Hayter]

Before common user arrangements, quite a number of "foreign" wagons might well have been returned to their owners as empty.

Mineral wagons also would generally be one way trip working and returned empty.   Ditto, non-mineral private owner wagons.

I do not think it unreasonable that there would have been quite a number of wagons running empty - however quite a number would be much less than half.  

[Ian Smeeton]

Surely more than half would be empty?

 

Wagons loaded awaiting unloading would be replaced during the working day with empty wagons.

 

In a yard, the proprtion would change through the day

 

In transit would be:

 

Loaded wagons

 

Wagons just emptied and returning to a (marshalling) yard

 

Empty wagons from marshalling yard in transit to next load

 

Possibly up to two thirds of wagons could be empty.

 

Regards

 

Ian

[Andy Hayter]

What this overlooks is that once empty, a wagon would be reloaded asap.  So if a goods yard receiving wagons had goods going out the wagon would essentially remain full - albeit that the cargo would have changed.  This would be especially true for those foreign wagons, which IIRC had to be returned within a couple of days of unloading under RCH rules.  If there was any possibility of a back load it would be put on board pdq.   Empties from small yards might well have been shuttled back empty to bigger yards where they could be filled rapidly.  

 

In the days of the paper leger and the telegraph, I suspect that efficient traffic management looked a lot like black magic.  Any company that held 2/3rds of its freight capital assets as unused at any point in time would, I suggest, have rapidly ended up at the Chancery filing for bankruptcy - which is indeed what happened to smaller companies who through lack of scale could not effectively and efficiently organise freight movement.  

[DonB]

Can't comment on the Railway's yards, but private sidings were keen to unload as soon as possible and not have charges imposed for keeping wagons once unloaded, if the organised way that the yard alongside where I worked is any guide. I spoke to many of the work's pensioners who told of the speed of unloading the "yard gang" were expected to maintain.  

Unfortunately I can't back up this claim with hard proof, -  whilst undertaking a history of the sidings, I visited the sidings weighbridge office where I discovered hard bound books (ledgers?) with hand written records of the wagons entering and leaving the yard dating back to the 1880s !

 I approached the Management for permission to remove them (the yard having been redundant for about 8 or 10 years) - permission granted a couple of days later but the books had gone, along with the mahogany cased wall clock! -- Kicked myself ever since for not removing them and then asking, but they had been there untouched for years judging by the depth of dust on them! !

[DonB]

Following on from my post above, The OP asked what could be wagon loads Pre-Grouping.

 

In the case of the foundry mentioned, in the 1890s and up to WW1, they were expanding and replacing worn-out furnace linings. A modest expansion of the sidings also occured.

So, Steel rails and sleepers, Refractory bricks for furnace linings, ordinary bricks (and Lime- Cement? ) for new buildings, sand for moulds, Pig-Iron ingots for re-melting, and huge amounts of coal to fire the furnaces, and wood for the casting patterns,would all feature on their inward traffic.

Leaving would be Iron castings for motor cars etc., I don't know what they did with the copious amount of used sand, slag and spent refractory bricks produced daily.

 

Railway works like Swindon or Derby (to name but two!) would receive large amounts of steel and parts for locos, wagons etc. and wood for wagons and coaches.   

[Guy Rixon]

What this overlooks is that once empty, a wagon would be reloaded asap.  So if a goods yard receiving wagons had goods going out the wagon would essentially remain full - albeit that the cargo would have changed.  This would be especially true for those foreign wagons, which IIRC had to be returned within a couple of days of unloading under RCH rules.  If there was any possibility of a back load it would be put on board pdq.   Empties from small yards might well have been shuttled back empty to bigger yards where they could be filled rapidly.  

 

In the days of the paper leger and the telegraph, I suspect that efficient traffic management looked a lot like black magic.  Any company that held 2/3rds of its freight capital assets as unused at any point in time would, I suggest, have rapidly ended up at the Chancery filing for bankruptcy - which is indeed what happened to smaller companies who through lack of scale could not effectively and efficiently organise freight movement.  

 

 

I understood that non-pooled wagons had to be returned empty, not with a back load. Back-loading was only possible with a special agreement between the companies. It was the amount of empty running that lead to the pooling arrangements of 1916 and later.

[Penlan]

Coal / Colliery wagons would be (approx.) 50 - 50 (Loaded / unloaded)..

Edited August 15, 2017 by Penlan

[Poggy1165]

I would suggest that if you are modelling the less industrialised areas of the country, empty wagons would be a greater proportion than in those with loads (sorry) of industry. Given the need to return other companies' wagons within a time limit, the stationmaster at Sleepytown-in-the-Wolds would be much less likely to have a suitable return load than the stationmaster at Coketown & Slagghepe. Indeed the need to return foreign wagons quickly was what made the pre-1917 arrangements less efficient than the post-1917 ones. 

[sjrixon]

I would imagine that was true of a lot of stations.. Much more in than out.. Productions centres would be distributing goods around the country, their certainly wouldn't be anywhere near the same level coming out.

[Fat Controller]

Following on from my post above, The OP asked what could be wagon loads Pre-Grouping.

 

In the case of the foundry mentioned, in the 1890s and up to WW1, they were expanding and replacing worn-out furnace linings. A modest expansion of the sidings also occured.

So, Steel rails and sleepers, Refractory bricks for furnace linings, ordinary bricks (and Lime- Cement? ) for new buildings, sand for moulds, Pig-Iron ingots for re-melting, and huge amounts of coal to fire the furnaces, and wood for the casting patterns,would all feature on their inward traffic.

Leaving would be Iron castings for motor cars etc., I don't know what they did with the copious amount of used sand, slag and spent refractory bricks produced daily.

 

Railway works like Swindon or Derby (to name but two!) would receive large amounts of steel and parts for locos, wagons etc. and wood for wagons and coaches.   

A foundry would receive coke , not coal, for remelting the pig-iron; the quantities would not be as large as those of the pig-iron (and also scrap). The one I worked at (albeit much later than the period under discussion) would receive ten or more 16t wagons of scrap daily, but only one or two wagons of coke.

Used sand would be sieved to remove large lumps, and re-used, mixed with new; in the 1970s, this was done by machine, but would obviously have been done manually in earlier times.

Scrap refractory bricks (mainly from ladle linings, not furnaces, which would not be relined anything like as frequently) would be tipped, or sold as hardcore locally.

Iron foundries would produce very little slag in comparison to an iron works; slag is mainly composed of a mixture of the impurities found in the iron-ore, together with the lime used as a flux, and would have be removed when the blast furnace was tapped. The furnace at the foundry I worked at (British Steel, Landore) used to melt 100t+ per day, but the amount of 'slag' removed (mainly paint and impurities from the scrap) would amount to a skip per week.

Both foundry sand and refractory bricks were produced in only a few locations. Sand came mainly from Chelford and Arclid, near Congleton; it is very much finer than building sand. Refractory products came from Kidwelly and the upper Neath Valley in South Wales, and were derived from particularly silica-rich deposits in the Millstone Grit underlaying the Coal Measures. The works at Kidwelly was owned by a firm called 'Stephens', and despatched product in their own wagons. One of the plants in the Neath Valley exported far and wide, and its name, Dinas, was used as the word for refractory brick in Russian.

[DonB]

Perhaps I need to clarify that "my" foundry used a Reverbatory furnace system fired by Pulverised coal. They were insistent on the coal being delivered in stacked lumps for (I was told) ease of manual unloading into their own Puveriser and storage towers, (circular and about 20 - 25 ft high ). The lump delivery minimised the fuel loss due to coal dust on the wagon floor forming a useless sludge.

 A bucket of the Pulverised coal seems almost liquid and shimmers as the bucket is moved!

The Puveriser system was prone to fires, and one of the company's brochures carried a picture of the in-house fire brigade following a fire, eight men as black with smoke and coal dust as any miner ever pictured! 

 

The coal was fired (in the same way as oil could be) over the molten iron from from alternate ends of a large bath-shaped furnace, the outgoing gases preheating the next incoming firing. This method was employed until about 1935 when a new foundry block was built. The iron was poured into hand held ladles probably of 1 Cwt capacity for transfer to the moulds.

You can see this method of molten iron transfer and pouring at the foundry at the Ironbridge museum. Check if they still do so and on which day of the week!

[John_Miles]

One minor correction to the sbove, the refractory products would not come from the Upper Neath Valley but the Upper Swansea Valley. The Neath & Brecon crossed from the Neath Valley to the Swansea Valley north of Onllwyn so that Coelbren was in the Swansea Valley (just). The refractory works were at Penwyllt (AKA Craigynos) and there are Hornby wagons available. I can't vouch for their accuracy but I suspect they should be Gloucester wagons.

 

Dinas is the Welsh word for city. Interesting that the Russians use it for refractory brick. There are other examples of words being used to bamboozle the foreign hordes, for example Merthyr was used to signify quality steam coal when often the colliery was nowhere near Merthyr.

Edited August 15, 2017 by John_Miles

[Guy Rixon]

Where an ironworks was producing significant slag, there could be a plant to turn it into tarred roadstone. There was one such associated with the Appleby-Fordingham complex. (I think there's some more information on this plant in another thread of RMWeb.)

 

Wikipedia notes pre-mixed tarmacadam as starting from a patent in 1902, following E. P. Hooley's observation of impromptu tarred-slag in 1901. I don't know when it started to be commonly distributed.

 

There were PO wagons to carry tarmacadam (a railway company would not want it in their goods opens) and I think they were typically 5-plank wagons, stone being denser than coal. I can look them up in the Turton PO-wagon books if anybody's interested.

Edited August 15, 2017 by Guy Rixon

[Fat Controller]

Perhaps I need to clarify that "my" foundry used a Reverbatory furnace system fired by Pulverised coal. They were insistent on the coal being delivered in stacked lumps for (I was told) ease of manual unloading into their own Puveriser and storage towers, (circular and about 20 - 25 ft high ). The lump delivery minimised the fuel loss due to coal dust on the wagon floor forming a useless sludge.

 A bucket of the Pulverised coal seems almost liquid and shimmers as the bucket is moved!

The Puveriser system was prone to fires, and one of the company's brochures carried a picture of the in-house fire brigade following a fire, eight men as black with smoke and coal dust as any miner ever pictured! 

 

The coal was fired (in the same way as oil could be) over the molten iron from from alternate ends of a large bath-shaped furnace, the outgoing gases preheating the next incoming firing. This method was employed until about 1935 when a new foundry block was built. The iron was poured into hand held ladles probably of 1 Cwt capacity for transfer to the moulds.

You can see this method of molten iron transfer and pouring at the foundry at the Ironbridge museum. Check if they still do so and on which day of the week!

I'd heard of coal (anthracite) being used for smelting at a works in the Burry Port area, but not anywhere else; I'd always been taught that it was superceded by coke, which burnt hotter, and contained fewer impurities. I must see what I can find out about this method.

[Fat Controller]

One minor correction to the sbove, the refractory products would not come from the Upper Neath Valley but the Upper Swansea Valley. The Neath & Brecon crossed from the Neath Valley to the Swansea Valley north of Onllwyn so that Coelbren was in the Swansea Valley (just). The refractory works were at Penwyllt (AKA Craigynos) and there are Hornby wagons available. I can't vouch for their accuracy but I suspect they should be Gloucester wagons.

 

Dinas is the Welsh word for city. Interesting that the Russians use it for refractory brick. There are other examples of words being used to bamboozle the foreign hordes, for example Merthyr was used to signify quality steam coal when often the colliery was nowhere near Merthyr.

I hadn't been aware of silica brick being made around the Craig-yr-Nos area- when I was doing field work around the area, there was only a limestone quarry in operation (Hobb's?). At the time, there was still rail traffic, mainly large boulders for the breakwater for the Deep Water Berth at Port Talbot.

There were large-scale silica mines around the Pont Nedd Fechan area, some latterly owned by Richard Thomas and Baldwins; my father was involved in some modernisation work there around the time I was born. Unlike the Craig-yr-Nos and Mynydd-y-Garreg quarries, the Neath Valley ones were drift mines. Here is a link to some information about the workings:-

http://www.fforestfawrgeopark.org.uk/understanding/archaeology-and-industrial-heritage/legacies-of-the-industrial-age/silica-mines/silica-mines-at-pontneddfechan/

RTB didn't have a brickworks in the area, but sent the stone to one at their Landore plant, the former Siemens steelworks. Part of the brickworks was still in use (as a Pattern Stores) when I worked there in my summer vacation in 1974.

One of the Pont-Nedd-Fechan works used ' Dinas' as their trademark; they exported the bricks far and wide, with the name stamped in one face, which is how the name became a generic term for refractory bricks.

[John_Miles]

I hadn't been aware of silica brick being made around the Craig-yr-Nos area- when I was doing field work around the area, there was only a limestone quarry in operation (Hobb's?). At the time, there was still rail traffic, mainly large boulders for the breakwater for the Deep Water Berth at Port Talbot.

There were large-scale silica mines around the Pont Nedd Fechan area, some latterly owned by Richard Thomas and Baldwins; my father was involved in some modernisation work there around the time I was born. Unlike the Craig-yr-Nos and Mynydd-y-Garreg quarries, the Neath Valley ones were drift mines. Here is a link to some information about the workings:-

http://www.fforestfawrgeopark.org.uk/understanding/archaeology-and-industrial-heritage/legacies-of-the-industrial-age/silica-mines/silica-mines-at-pontneddfechan/

RTB didn't have a brickworks in the area, but sent the stone to one at their Landore plant, the former Siemens steelworks. Part of the brickworks was still in use (as a Pattern Stores) when I worked there in my summer vacation in 1974.

One of the Pont-Nedd-Fechan works used ' Dinas' as their trademark; they exported the bricks far and wide, with the name stamped in one face, which is how the name became a generic term for refractory bricks.

 

The remnants of the Craigynos brickworks are still there. If you drive up the road to the remnants of the station and then head south, either along the trackbed or in front of a row of cottages, you find them about 500m south of the station. There are lots of bricks still lying around. The silica came from quarries high up on the hills to the east - there are the remnants of a rope worked incline and at the top of this there was an engine shed in which a narrow gauge loco was kept, when not in use. It's quite a walk but the views are stunning.

 

Referring to another post above, anthracite was used in iron production at Yniscedwyn (spelling is what was used at the time), Ystalyfera and Brynaman ironwork.

[Penlan]

Referring to another post above, anthracite was used in iron production at Yniscedwyn (spelling is what was used at the time), Ystalyfera and Brynaman ironwork.

Brynaman ?  Then or now, 2 m's, please.

 

BTW near-by there was also the Penwyllt Brick works,

The brick was 'rescued' some 35 years ago by Tudor Watkins and myself when walking the lines up there.

Tudor has some 4mm PO wagons of the Penwyllt Co., on his N&B layout, I believe John Miles (Midland Rly in South Wales) may also have some too.

 

 

 

Edited August 16, 2017 by Penlan

[Caley Jim]

The Union Fireclay Company of Glenboig was one of the best known producers of furnace bricks in the world https://sites.google.com/site/glenboigmemories/brick.

 

In fact a number of other companies, nowhere near there, used a Glenboig PO Box number in order to be associated with the name.

 

Jim

[Andy Hayter]

I understood that non-pooled wagons had to be returned empty, not with a back load. Back-loading was only possible with a special agreement between the companies. It was the amount of empty running that lead to the pooling arrangements of 1916 and later.

 

I think you are absolutely correct that non-pooled wagons had to be returned immediately on unloading and returned empty.  Non-pool wagons were only non-pool after pooling.

However I was referring to pre-pooling, and I have read somewhere I am sure that foreign wagons could be returned directly to their owning company with a load.

In other words if company A sent a wagon to a destination in company B.  On unloading company B could load the wagon for goods to be delivered to a company A yard - but not to company C even if this entailed the wagon running on company A's track.

 

I cannot now find the reference but I suspect it was somewhere buried in the letters section of the HMRS Journal.  I could of course have mis-remembered so if anyone has a definitive answer perhaps they could elucidate.

[Caley Jim]

I think you are absolutely correct that non-pooled wagons had to be returned immediately on unloading and returned empty.  Non-pool wagons were only non-pool after pooling.

However I was referring to pre-pooling, and I have read somewhere I am sure that foreign wagons could be returned directly to their owning company with a load.

In other words if company A sent a wagon to a destination in company B.  On unloading company B could load the wagon for goods to be delivered to a company A yard - but not to company C even if this entailed the wagon running on company A's track.

 

My understanding is that before a certain date (in the late 1880's?) a wagon from company A arriving at a station of company B had to be returned empty to the nearest station of company A.  After that date the wagon could be returned either empty or loaded to any station on company A.  Pooling came in during WWI when the railways came under the control of the Railway Executive and were brought in to reduce to a minimum empty wagon traffic.  Certain special wagons were exempt from this.

 

Jim

[ian@stenochs]

Special one off deliveries would bring one or more 'foreign wagons' onto a railway. Water improvement schemes were a case in point with lots of towns getting running water and new reservoirs. Glenfield and Kennedy in Kilmarnock were major contractors to the water industry and we're famous, still are, for their hydraulic valves.

My photo, from a poor original, shows a consignment being shunted by a G&SWR 221class 0-4-2 from the works. The view is circa 1900 and shows some large valves and boxes of fittings loaded on 10 ton open and gland wagons. The perfect excuse to run a small rake of one companies wagons loaded or empty on your railway!

 

Ian.

 

[Killian keane]

In the very early days horse drawn carriages were carried on flat trucks