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More Pre-Grouping Wagons in 4mm - the D299 appreciation thread.


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Perhaps we forget that after the first world war it was a lot of the surviving troops and some enterprising individuals that bought up the ex-army road vehicles for a song, not the railways.  The early trucking business was interested in offering direct door to door competition to the railway, not to pick up/deliver from/to a railway yard for the "last mile" as it is now known.  I am therefore not entirely surprised by the lack of motorised transport in railway yards, even into the start of the thirties.

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Not but what the Midland wasn't averse to experimenting with other forms of road traction than the horse, including this Austin at Lawley Street in May 1916:

 

2143220776_DY10459AustinsPetrolMotor3TonsOA4483Birmingham.jpg.53773237d863ef5b0c5dd055a75e2849.jpg

 

NRM DY 10459, released under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike (CC BY-NC-SA 3.0) licence by the National Railway Museum.

 

In some ways, the company was well ahead of the game. A path it would have been better to follow?

 

1976432384_DY10641MotorcarshowingmethodofchargingStPancrasGoods.jpg.feee8594c72c3dcd03534017df1d8f0f.jpg

 

St Pancras Goods, July 1917. NRM DY 10641, released under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike (CC BY-NC-SA 3.0) licence by the National Railway Museum.

Edited by Compound2632
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On 01/02/2020 at 14:27, Compound2632 said:

Too many interesting wagons to model! To compound matters, I've been gambling on Ebay - a vice I thought I'd put away since Slaters reintroduced their Midland wagon kits:

 

 

While I continue to try to sit on my hands re. Ebay, it may be of interest to those of a Great Westernish disposition to note that there is a bit of a glut of Coopercraft 4-plank wagons there right now, including a number at a "buy it now" price just a pound more than I paid. Also several of the other wagons in that range.

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20 hours ago, Mikkel said:

Ha ha, all of them - but I mean the Midland electric drays. Especially those in the last photo. I bet that hasn't been modelled before.

They have even got strings on the front for pulling them along...

 

I’ll get my coat.

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IMG_20200210_175734.jpg.64e36db0ea9f2999c1e5cb57c07baf70.jpg

 

Taking inspiration directly from this thread (and using @Compound2632

's very useful guide on page 16!), I spent this afternoon building a Slater' s D.299 kit that I picked up at the Doncaster show on Saturday. I must admit, I'm not usually one for kit building, but I have to say this was rather therapeutic and I'm pleased with my results so far! 

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35 minutes ago, jamesC37LG said:

IMG_20200210_175734.jpg.64e36db0ea9f2999c1e5cb57c07baf70.jpg

 

Taking inspiration directly from this thread (and using @Compound2632

's very useful guide on page 16!), I spent this afternoon building a Slater' s D.299 kit that I picked up at the Doncaster show on Saturday. I must admit, I'm not usually one for kit building, but I have to say this was rather therapeutic and I'm pleased with my results so far! 

 

It's addictive! 

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Thanks! Added to the list. Ellis 10A axleboxes - indicating 1890s rather than 1880s build date (though by 1920 they might have got swapped round, I suppose). This photo shows rather clearly the fixing lugs for the axlebox front cover plate and how they don't extend all the way back along the side of the box, unlike the Slaters molding. (Acknowledging that that's for perfectly understandable reasons to do with getting the injection molded parts out of the matrix!) The hooks for sheet tie ropes show up very clearly under the side rail but they seem to be duplicated by bobbin-like fittings on the solebar - e.g. in the middle of the crown plate. The door banger spring and banger plate on the door are 20th century additions - originally there would only have been a square banger plate on the brake side, banging against the end of the brake shaft, which can't have been too good for the brake gear. Split-spoke wheels, which is less usual.

 

60379 is what I'd consider a "classic" D299 number - right in the middle of the range. Midland wagon numbers had reached around 33,000 when the program of buying up and replacing PO wagons got underway in the early-mid 1880s; with 66,000 PO wagons bought up and scrapped and 62,000 D299s and 9,000 D351 end-door coal wagons built, numbers had reached in excess of 124,000 by 1902.

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I'm slightly hesitant in asking this question, as I've no doubt the definitive answer is somewhere within this thread, but are there anywhere drawings showing the position/size/layout of the bottom doors in the D299?

 

Essery Volume 1 states that all the D299s had bottom doors, but there isn't a drawing that I can see. Presumably the bottom doors would have been pretty much identical across the various Lots built between 1882 and 1905?

 

I seem to recall a link to a Derby Works drawing, but can't seem to find it.

 

Thanks for any info!

 

Cheers,

 

Mark

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6 hours ago, 2996 Victor said:

I seem to recall a link to a Derby Works drawing, but can't seem to find it.

 

The Midland Railway Study Centre has made available a copy of drawing 550. This is a late copy, marked up for the last few Lots - note the change to oil axleboxes.

The arrangement of the bottom doors was the same on the end-door version, D351, as seen here in drawing 790, which is a bit clearer. Hope that helps. Don't forget the RCH standard bottom door catch and release mechanism, rarely modelled, least of all by me!

Edited by Compound2632
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40 minutes ago, Compound2632 said:

 

The Midland Railway Study Centre has made available a copy of drawing 550. This is a late copy, marked up for the last few Lots - note the change to oil axleboxes.

The arrangement of the bottom doors was the same on the end-door version, D351, as seen here in drawing 790, which is a bit clearer. Hope that helps. Don't forget the RCH standard bottom door catch and release mechanism, rarely modelled, least of all by me!

 

Hi Stephen,

 

thank you so much for the links - the D351 is certainly a bit clearer, and both show the flooring nicely. I recalled the mention of the floor edge strip, as well, which is clearly shown, and also the layout of the side and end washer plates, so there's no excuse for me not getting it right on an unloaded example. I've only got one kit on hand at the moment, but I think I might make a small batch of floors over the weekend in readiness. As for the bottom door catch and release mechanism.....well, we'll see!

 

Numbering is my next question (rhetorical!): as I understand it, although the Midland would batch-number new builds, it would also re-use previously-allocated numbers vacated by scrappings and the like. Midland Wagons Volume 1 seems to have only a very tiny representation of numbers - I realise photographs are our saviour here, so I'll soon be poring over all I can find!

 

Thanks again and very best regards,

 

Mark

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4 hours ago, 2996 Victor said:

Numbering is my next question (rhetorical!): as I understand it, although the Midland would batch-number new builds, it would also re-use previously-allocated numbers vacated by scrappings and the like. Midland Wagons Volume 1 seems to have only a very tiny representation of numbers - I realise photographs are our saviour here, so I'll soon be poring over all I can find!

 

I discussed numbering at tedious length last summer. My conclusion is that blocks of new numbers were only used for wagons that were additions to capital stock and of types not previously produced: refrigerator meat vans, tariff vans, and banana vans may be examples. The series used do however seem to be lower numbers than the total wagon stock at the time; also there are examples of numbers that are higher than the total stock. All other wagons just took the next available number following the withdrawal of an old wagon. This is particularly true of the c. 32xxx - c. 98xxx range, which I believe was overwhelmingly first populated by the 66,000 old PO wagons bought up from the mid-1880s.

 

On the face of it, given that D299 wagons represented getting on for half the Midland's wagon stock around the turn of the century, there's a one in two chance that any number picked at random will be a D299 number. That can improve if you exclude numbers known to have been carried by other vehicles. 

 

I have been doing exactly the mindless task you describe, scouring all sources of information for numbers. I have identified around 1,400 wagon numbers that can be reasonably positively identified with specific wagon diagrams, of which about 180 are definite or probable D299 numbers. (Special wagons are over-represented in the known number list as their numbers are recorded in surviving documents.) There are a further 1,000 or so numbers that I'm moderately confident of for the number series of additions to capital stock, as mentioned above. These are in the 114xxx, 116xxx, and 117xxx series. In total, that's just under 2% of Midland wagon numbers,

 

It's a work in progress - new numbers keep turning up, as in @Rail-Online's photo. Sometimes I think I've found a new number and it turns out all I've done is find the photo from which Bob Essery must have collected one of the numbers that are given in Midland Wagons.

 

Great Western enthusiasts don't know how good they have it - pretty much full number details survive, even going back to the 1880s - whereas the Midland and LMS records were destroyed (probably including LNWR and other LMS constituent records too).

Edited by Compound2632
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17 hours ago, Compound2632 said:

Great Western enthusiasts don't know how good they have it - pretty much full number details survive, even going back to the 1880s - whereas the Midland and LMS records were destroyed (probably including LNWR and other LMS constituent records too).

 

Hi Stephen,

 

yes, its true - its actually quite amazing how well the GWR records were preserved, as we found with the outside-framed wooden vans.

 

All the best,

 

Mark

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Linny's Billinton brake now has axleboxes and buffers, thanks to @5&9Models:

 

514707842_LBSCGoodsBrakeSRD1568Linnykitaxleboxes.JPG.eddc63f4a716967ab9add7aedbcfdbfe.JPG

 

I've realised my cunning plan of carving grooves for the stepboard supports was misguided - they need to go in front of, rather than behind, the springs...

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For standard gauge wagons, A. G. Atkins, W. Beard and R. Tourret, G W R Goods Wagons (Tourret Publishing, Abingdon, 1998) is a start, though as we've seen, incomplete in some areas e.g. the pre-Iron Mink wood Minks. That's the third and I believe most complete edition, which was reprinted in 2013 but nevertheless commands a hefty price second hand. I'm fortunate in that a fellow club member has a copy. The first edition was in 1975, I believe, in two smaller volumes. Usually referred to as "The Bible" on account not only of its size but also its perceived infallibility.

 

The number list I made is based on it: Atkins et al wagon numbers up to c1905.pdf

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The sources of most of the data used by A B & T are the official wagon registers, one of which is at Kew and the other at York – and I can never remember which is where. How far back the early one goes is another matter...

 

 

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