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

[Compound2632]

On 07/03/2021 at 15:05, wagonman said:

Ah yes, 'Thirling' was the word I was groping for. Thank you Stephen.

 

'Twas @Asterix2012 who first mentioned the word. It's a curious one. The primary meaning given is to bore a hole, from an Old English root meaning hole; a secondary meaning is to bind or enslave, from the same Old English root as the word thrall. It is presumably from this sense that the Scottish legal term is derived; it seems to have originally referred to the obligation of a feudal tenant to use his lord's mill and no other. One can see how this could be transferred to coal owners in vassalage to the North British or Caledonian being obliged to use the company's wagons and no other!

 

That's mineral wagons; back to goods wagons. The D77 3-plank was overhauled and repainted within the last year or two - 1901 - but with the D55 4-plank I'm aiming for the not-seen-the-paint-shop-since-Drummond's-day look:

 

 

The D77 is awaiting matt varnish, hence the uneven appearance as I only brushed gloss varnish where the transfers were to go (HMRS Pressfix Scottish pre-grouping sheet). I've been attacking the D55 with a fibre-glass pencil; fortuitously I had started out with Halfords white primer before getting a new can of Halfords grey primer, which I used over the white, then Precision NBR freight stock grey, after picking out the ironwork in black. More experimentation is needed here; one snag is that I am exposing some vertical grain in the printing. It may come down to a complete rub-down and re-paint.

 

 

Edited June 16, 2022 by Compound2632
image re-inserted

[kitpw]

Bandsawn softwood can show a distinct "grain" running counter to the length of the plank - the picture below is the cladding on my studio, now 25+ years old and only treated with Sadolin wood stain.  It shows the bandsawn marks.  I've no idea whether wagon planking was bandsawn or radial sawn (or even planed) but it's worth a try to save stripping the model right back!

Kit PW

[Compound2632]

Machine planed, I think. 

[wagonman]

 

1 hour ago, Compound2632 said:

 

'Twas @Asterix2012 who first mentioned the word. It's a curious one. The primary meaning given is to bore a hole, from an Old English root meaning hole; a secondary meaning is to bind or enslave, from the same Old English root as the word thrall. It is presumably from this sense that the Scottish legal term is derived; it seems to have originally referred to the obligation of a feudal tenant to use his lord's mill and no other. One can see how this could be transferred to coal owners in vassalage to the North British or Caledonian being obliged to use the company's wagons and no other!

 

 

I realised my error just as you were replying. So apologies to @Asterix2012 for my omission. It seems a form of feudalism was still rife in the Scottish coal industry in the C19 in that miners were in bond to the mine owners for a year at a time, and often involved their entire families in the work, even underground.

[Compound2632]

1 hour ago, Compound2632 said:

Machine planed, I think. 

 

Yes, the 1911 article by Fred Crocker of the Derby C&W drawing office, reproduced in Midland Wagons Vol. 1, after mentioning heavy circular saws and log frames, goes on to mention some machines that had been in continuous use since the works opened in 1877: "two notable veterans being the planning and moulding machines, which deal with an average of over six million feet run of timber per annum." He also says: "Each piece of timber is machined to a pattern or template, the object of which is to make all parts of a vehicle interchangeable, and this standardisation is so complete that a wagon repairer at far away Carlisle or Bristol can replace damaged parts of a twenty years-old vehicle, with the aid of such simple tools as a hammer and a spanner."

 

Maybe the carriage and wagon shops at Cowlairs were not as efficiently laid-out as those at Litchurch Lane* but I would imagine they had similar equipment, given the size of the NB's wagon fleet.

 

*I strongly suspect that the primary reason T.G. Clayton got the position of Carriage & Wagon Superintendent was that he had just overseen the construction of the Great Western's carriage & wagon works at Swindon; the Midland urgently needed to follow suit, the old works being far too small for the rapidly-growing company. 

Edited March 7, 2021 by Compound2632

[Asterix2012]

1 hour ago, wagonman said:

 

 

I realised my error just as you were replying. So apologies to @Asterix2012 for my omission. It seems a form of feudalism was still rife in the Scottish coal industry in the C19 in that miners were in bond to the mine owners for a year at a time, and often involved their entire families in the work, even underground.

Indeed a form of feudalism continued in property until 2004 when the payment of feu duty on property to the feu superior by the vassal was finally abolished after 800 years.

[Mikkel]

 

3 hours ago, Compound2632 said:

The D77 3-plank was overhauled and repainted within the last year or two

 

Very nice. That livery on NB wagons always looks so well balanced. 

 

 

On 03/03/2021 at 18:07, Compound2632 said:

With wagons, there should at least be a paper trail, though I suppose from time to time that could go cold through error or omission. Ahrons has a tale about an engine that went missing that way - an 800 Class 2-4-0.

 

Tony Atkins and David Hyde write in GWR Goods Services, Vol 1 (p38): 

 

"It might be thought that the whereabouts of wagons would always be known; however, the GW officially condemned open goods wagons Nos. 6630, 30638 and 35735 because they 'had not been heard of for ten years'. Then, in 1917, the Chief Goods Manager offered a reward to anyone able to trace the whereabouts of five wagons on hire to the GW, having Nos. 0323, 01005, 01199, 02524 and 04607 marked. According to the Railway Magazine, the wagons might have been on or off the GWR system, and there was not the slightest clue as to where they we likely to be found."

 

[kitpw]

2 hours ago, Compound2632 said:

all parts of a vehicle interchangeable, and this standardisation is so complete that a wagon repairer at far away Carlisle or Bristol can replace damaged parts of a twenty years-old vehicle

Does this suggest that prepared (to size) timber was itself a wagon load, distributed for stock to repair shops?  On GWR wagons, there are several different widths of plank used for siding, including differences on a single wagon, but I guess the thickness was usually the same throughout the wagon fleet in any particular era - thus planed (planer probably = thicknesser) for standardisation.

Kit PW

[Compound2632]

On 07/03/2021 at 20:08, kitpw said:

Does this suggest that prepared (to size) timber was itself a wagon load, distributed for stock to repair shops?  On GWR wagons, there are several different widths of plank used for siding, including differences on a single wagon, but I guess the thickness was usually the same throughout the wagon fleet in any particular era - thus planed (planer probably = thicknesser) for standardisation.

Kit PW

 

That's a question. The Midland had a large number of wagon repair workshops - pretty much one at every major goods station or marshalling yard. These were all quite substantial establishments; here's the one at Wigston - by no means the largest - in a well-known 1905 photograph, to the right of and behind the coaling stage and dwarfing a row of huts belonging to the various wagon companies:

 

 

NRM DY 2810, released under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike (CC BY-NC-SA 3.0) licence by the National Railway Museum.

 

Some of these may well have been equipped to prepare timber components, using, I suppose, copies of the Derby templates - I don't know. Bromsgrove certainly built wagons at times of peak construction. They would all have forges and blacksmiths shops for repairs to ironwork. But I imagine most would hold stores replenished from Derby from time to time. Not just sheeting but underframe components - headstocks etc. With, c. 1905, around 90,000 wagons or 75% of the fleet having a common 9'0" wheelbase, 14'11" over headstocks underframe, the inventory would not be overwhelming. 

 

Repairs were also carried out "in the field"; here's an example of part of the paperwork for the repair of wagon No. 14975 at Rowsley on 6 Jan 1899 {MIRSC Item 23367-01]. This wagon had been en route from Birmingham to Stockport, this form being forwarded to the Goods Agent at the destination station. Was this work done by wagon repairers stationed at Rowsley (which I don't think had a wagon repair shop) using material they had in stock, or ordered up from Derby, or had they come out from Derby to do the repair? I suspect not the latter. The Study Centre also has copies of form G.F. 1235, "Repairs Requisition to General Stores Department, Derby" (G.F. denotes a Goods Department form).

 

There's much that could be learned on this topic by delving into the holdings of the Midland Railway Study Centre along with the committee minute books held at Kew. As a starting point, there's a c. 1905 document giving details of costs on wagon repair shops, prepared by the C&W Dept for the Accountant's Dept [MRSC Item 31320].

 

Best practice in respect of health & safety was not always observed at these outstations [MRSC Item 31390].

Edited June 16, 2022 by Compound2632
image re-inserted

[Compound2632]

Speaking, as we were, of Thomas Clayton and the Swindon carriage & wagon works, I've at last made some progress on my non-Swindon wagons. I was getting stuck on the wooden brake-blocks but have found a method that works, which involves step-by-step modification of a Ratio LNWR brake moulding - replacing bits stepwise until only the tumbler and push-rods are left, without the piece falling apart. I'll take some step-by-step photos of the next one but here's the end result of the first attempt:

 

 

 

I've also added the label box above he left hand axleguard, on both sides of all four wagons, though it doesn't show up very well here. It's just a length of styrene section scraped on one side to an angle, with a square of microstrip to represent the label clip.

 

I'm still mulling over the horse-hooks.

 

Edited June 16, 2022 by Compound2632
image re-inserted

[Mikkel]

Very nice brake blocks. Solid, sturdy look. It's all so stylish.

[Compound2632]

4 minutes ago, Mikkel said:

Very nice brake blocks. Solid, sturdy look. It's all so stylish.

 

None of this fancy business with 20 degree angle to match the coning of the tyres or double-ended mounting lugs. 

[Compound2632]

Here we go. As I said, no fancy business. 

 

The raw material - Ratio LNWR wagon double-brake moulding, left, on the sprue, right with the base trimmed to fit:

 

 

Also, the brake blocks marked / scored out on 0.040" plasticard - the curves are done using a drawing compass with a steel point in both arms; the centre hole is through so the plasticard can be scored from both sides, ensuring that the shape is kept when the piece is snapped off. The drawing is used as reference for the angle of the back of the block.

 

0.010" x 0.040" Evergreen section forms the support strut for the block. Each iron block is cut off the Ratio part, at about the right angle, leaving the representation of the safety loop to support the push rod, while everything sets. I got a little too slapdash with the Mek, on the right:

 

 

Note that I've discovered that the MJT axleguard units get in the way of where the brake block support straps should go, so things are a bit skewiff relative to the drawing.

 

Once everything's hardened, the safety loops are cut away. Their remnant passes for the lug that the push-rods bolt to on the real thing. (As far as I can see from the photos, the wooden brake gear of the 1870s didn't run to such refinements as safety loops, though these may have been fitted later.) The cross-shaft, 0.8 mm diameter brass rod, is cyano'd in place:

 

 

... and the gear is fitted to the wagon:

 

 

The block is a bit shy of the wheel on the right but I tell myself the brake lever will distract attention.

 

Next the vee - from the Ambis etch - is di-limonene'd to the solebar but left free on the cross-shaft, while a strut of 0.030" x 0.040" Evergreen section supports the inner end. This is undoubtedly well over scale thickness but as it's tucked away well under the wagon, I'll not worry. I think on the real thing it's attached to one of the middle longitudinals:

 

 

The brake lever ratchet from the 51L etch has been bent up and glued in place. This piece has a single fold line for the bottom, making it tricky to get a uniform gap all the way to the bottom. 

 

The brake lever - one of four curved together some time ago - is bent up to clear the axlebox, trimmed to length, and cyano'd in place at the pivot and where it passes through the ratchet. Once the glue has hardened, the cross-shaft is trimmed back:

 

 

For my first attempt, I soldered up the cross-shaft, vee, and lever into one unit before fitting to the wagon. It was tricky getting all the angles right - the above sequence, with glue, was much easier!

Edited June 16, 2022 by Compound2632
Images re-inserted

[airnimal]

I presume that Limonene stick nickel or brass components to plasticard. I have never tried it and was wondering if it is long lasting ?

[Compound2632]

1 hour ago, airnimal said:

I presume that Limonene stick nickel or brass components to plasticard. I have never tried it and was wondering if it is long lasting ?

 

It does seem to work, at least for small pieces such as the solebar ironwork. I think that whereas Mek forms a strong weld between pieces of plasticard, limonene works by softening the plasticard, so the brass piece can be sort of pushed in. It seems to work particularly well with Evergreen strip. The brake lever ratchet is cyano'd in place as I think that needs a stronger bond, being more vulnerable to knocks.

 

On these wagons, the buffers are limonene'd into place. The hole in the headstock needs to be almost an interference fit; the limonene softens the plastic and when it sets it's moulded to the irregularities in the whitemetal, forming a tight bond.

 

I wouldn't like to say how long-lasting! I discovered this property of limonene about six months ago. 

Edited March 9, 2021 by Compound2632

[Chas Levin]

3 hours ago, Compound2632 said:

Here we go. As I said, no fancy business. 

 

The raw material - Ratio LNWR wagon double-brake moulding, left, on the sprue, right with the base trimmed to fit:

 

 

Also, the brake blocks marked / scored out on 0.040" plasticard - the curves are done using a drawing compass with a steel point in both arms; the centre hole is through so the plasticard can be scored from both sides, ensuring that the shape is kept when the piece is snapped off. The drawing is used as reference for the angle of the back of the block.

 

0.010" x 0.040" Evergreen section forms the support strut for the block. Each iron block is cut off the Ratio part, at about the right angle, leaving the representation of the safety loop to support the push rod, while everything sets. I got a little too slapdash with the Mek, on the right:

 

 

Note that I've discovered that the MJT axleguard units get in the way of where the brake block support straps should go, so things are a bit skewiff relative to the drawing.

 

Once everything's hardened, the safety loops are cut away. Their remnant passes for the lug that the push-rods bolt to on the real thing. (As far as I can see from the photos, the wooden brake gear of the 1870s didn't run to such refinements as safety loops, though these may have been fitted later.) The cross-shaft, 0.8 mm diameter brass rod, is cyano'd in place:

 

 

... and the gear is fitted to the wagon:

 

 

The block is a bit shy of the wheel on the right but I tell myself the brake lever will distract attention.

 

Next the vee - from the Ambis etch - is di-limonene'd to the solebar but left free on the cross-shaft, while a strut of 0.030" x 0.040" Evergreen section supports the inner end. This is undoubtedly well over scale thickness but as it's tucked away well under the wagon, I'll not worry. I think on the real thing it's attached to one of the middle longotudinals:

 

 

The brake lever ratchet from the 51L etch has been bent up and glued in place. This piece has a single fold line for the bottom, making it tricky to get a uniform gap all the way to the bottom. 

 

The brake lever - one of four curved together some time ago - is bent up to clear the axlebox, trimmed to length, and cyano'd in place at the pivot and where it passes through the ratchet. Once the glue has hardened, the cross-shaft is trimmed back:

 

 

For my first attempt, I soldered up the cross-shaft, vee, and lever into one unit before fitting to the wagon. It was tricky getting all the angles right - the above sequence, with glue, was much easier!

Beautiful job

[Mikkel]

Yes, that's a neat solution and thanks for illustrating it. 

 

I agree about Limonene and Evergreen working well together. It always amazes me how different types of glue and styrene/plastikard/etc can interact in very different ways. Not that it's surprising, just chemistry.

[Compound2632]

In this and various other threads I have frequently made reference to material held by the Midland Railway Study Centre housed in the Silk Mill Museum, Derby. The Study Centre has brought together material from various collections, one of the principal components being the collection amassed by Roy Burrows. Roy formed a charitable trust, the Roy F. Burrows Midland Collection Trust, in 2000 to make his collection available for educational purposes. In 2004, the Trust in partnership with the Midland Railway Society and Derby Museums set up the Study Centre; in 2016 the Trust merged with the Midland Railway Society. It is estimated that the Trust element of the Study Centre collection comprises 42,000 items. This to my mind is an exemplar for how a private collection can be transferred to the care of a publicly-regulated body* rather than being broken up and sold, or worse, otherwise disposed of by executors and heirs with no interest in or knowledge of the value of the collection as a whole and being lost to researchers (vide the break-up and sale of the H.C. Casserley photographic collection).

 

*The Midland Railway Society is a charity registered with the Charity Commission. Its statement of public benefit ensures that the material it holds will remain available to interested researchers.

 

Roy passed away yesterday. It seems appropriate to celebrate his contribution to our knowledge and understanding of the Midland Railway - and hence the railways of Great Britain and Ireland as a whole - by looking at some obscure 120-year-old scraps of paper that can enlarge our understanding of Midland wagons and how they were used. The collection includes a large number of such items: passenger tickets, luggage labels, and wagon labels. The latter tend to be chance survivals in groups from particular locations, and hence provide snapshots of the company's traffic.

 

One such is a group from Princes End, the next station to the north of Tipton on the Old Worse and Worse, all dating from the first few years of the 20th century. A number of these are for consignments to C. Lathe & Co. from Wellingborough [Items 14143, 14153, 14154, and 14155]. What can this firm be wanting from Wellingborough? A clue is provided by labels for other consignments to the firm: from Weldon & Corby station [Item 14165], Stanton Iron Works [Item 14140], Erewash Furnaces, Trowell [Item 14199], and Bennerley Furnaces, Ilkeston [Items 14200 and 14201]. The last three are stamped "Awsworth" Pig Iron, so that was presumably the load; likewise from Stanton. The Wellingborough and Corby consignments could be iron ore but I rather suspect the smelting was done in Northamptonshire so we're looking at more pig iron. Looking up C. Lathe & Co. in Grace's Guide, we find that by the 1930s they specialised in the manufacture of fire-grates and fireplaces, including the sort of hideous tiled fireplace surround my grandmother had. It would seem that before concentrating in fireplaces the firm had produced a wide range of castings, including  for railway use; furnace pans figure in their advertising. I'm unclear what a furnace pan is but here's a photo of some in the factory, c. 1920.

 

These wagons, whether travelling from Northamptonshire or Derbyshire, were routed for exchange with the Great Western at Bordesley. At first sight, this is curious: the nearest point to Princes End at which the Midland and Great Western met was at Wolverhampton, which would give not only a shorter route (with greater mileage over the Midland) but also a direct route over the Great Western: from Bordesley, the wagon would have to go to Wolverhampton and then back towards Tipton, or by some more convoluted route. However, there does not appear to have been much in the way of exchange sidings for traffic between the two companies at Wolverhampton, unlike the extensive facilities at Bordesley. Moreover, the routing may have been dictated by traffic agreements between the two companies, perhaps pre-dating the opening of the Wolverhampton, Walsall & Water Orton line - which may also explain the location of the exchange sidings. A topic for further research, probably in the Traffic Committee minute books held at Kew.

 

Princes End was also served by a LNWR branch from the South Staffordshire Line at Wednesbury to a triangular junction with the Stour Valley line. This would have provided a more direct route from Derbyshire but with a lower mileage over the Midland. No doubt the LNWR's goods agents would have canvassed for this traffic if they could, were their hands tied by traffic agreements, or by the customer's preference? I haven't located Lathe & Co's works on the map; the Great Western station may have been the more convenient of the two. From the OS 25" map it seems they would not have had a private siding, so pig iron must have been carted from the station.

 

The labels give the numbers of the wagons - as I'm a wagon number fetishist, that's grist to my mill. Given the nature of the traffic, these will all be open wagons. There's also the overwhelming statistical likelihood that they are high sided wagons to D299 but I do have some doubts. Pig iron has a density of around 7 g/cm³ (or a bit less if loosely packed), approximately 0.2 tons/cubic foot. Thus an 8 ton load has a volume of about 40 cubic feet and would fill a wagon of internal dimensions 14 ft x 7 ft to a depth of just 6 inches. So would a low-sided wagon, D305, be more likely for this traffic? Some of the wagon numbers - 11023, 13047, 15786, 22591, 24266 - are in the range that was reached well before the Midland's mass purchase of PO wagons and building of high-sided replacements from 1882, so they could potentially be early low-sided wagons or renewals of them but there is no guarantee that replacement was on a like-for-like basis and that these are not high sided wagons. But numbers such as 53915, 55766, or 87504 look very D299-ish to me. 

 

What did pig iron look like, loaded in a wagon? Presumably ingots or billets but neatly stacked or loose?

[Mark Forrest]

2 hours ago, Compound2632 said:

What did pig iron look like, loaded in a wagon? Presumably ingots or billets but neatly stacked or loose?

A little later than your period of interest, but here's a view of pig iron loaded in Plate wagons, possibly heading for Pensnett...

Unit Models do/did a resin cast load that fits the Parkside Plate very nicely; no doubt it could be shortened to fit earlier/shorter wagons.

[Northroader]

My parents managed to put together enough to build a bungalow in the 30s, just before I arrived, and one of the rooms in the rear corner, was known as the back kitchen, with a small table and a sink, concrete type floor, and one of the things done in there was the wash. One corner of the room had a brick built square shaped cube, sides of around three feet. One of your “furnace pans” was let into the top of this, and there was a coal fire with a grate underneath, and a chimney at the back on an outside wall. Once a week, a fire was lit underneath, the pan part filled with buckets of water, then when near the boil, dirty clothes were put in with soap flakes, and agitated with  “dolly”, a short wood pole with a handle one end, and a round base with projecting pegs t’other. Then lifted out with wood tongs, passed through a mangle standing in the other corner, and pegged out on the line in the backyard. You will see it was such a palaver lighting the fire, etc., that one day a week, Monday, was “washday”, and all the effort saved for then, rather than the modern way of slinging clothes in a washing machine as and when.

 

edit, I suppose there’d be quite a thriving freight route from Bordesley by way of the Hawthorns and Old Hill? Otherwise, there was a bit of a yard at Wednesbury, then feed through Dudley?

Edited March 10, 2021 by Northroader

[Compound2632]

1 hour ago, Northroader said:

I suppose there’d be quite a thriving freight route from Bordesley by way of the Hawthorns and Old Hill? Otherwise, there was a bit of a yard at Wednesbury, then feed through Dudley?

 

The complexities of the LNWR and GWR lines in the Black Country continue to baffle me but as far as I can get my head round the GWR part, there was a triangle of main lines, with the Birmingham Wolverhampton & Dudley, which had originally been broad gauge, forming the north-eastern limit of Great Western territory, the Oxford Worcester and Wolverhampton on the west, and a line from Stourbridge Junction on the latter to Handsworth Junction on the former on the southern side. This triangle was crossed by the LNWR Stour Valley line from Birmingham to Wolverhampton and, orthogonal to that, the South Staffordshire from Winchnor Junction to a juntion with the OWW at Dudley. (Confusingly, the BW&D did not serve Dudley, passing through Tipton to the north.) The remaining space was filled in with various intersecting and conjoining loops of both companies.

[billbedford]

Here you go... Loading pig iron. This is on the Caly. I'm surprised the Midland didn't have dedicated wagons. 

 

[Penlan]

They must have had a double helping of porridge to be able to carry those slabs,
taking into account Compound2632's calc's.
Thankyou Bill, great photo.

 

[John-Miles]

Sorry to hear of the demise of Roy Burrows. He was a remarkable man and his collection is stupendous. I first saw it when most of it was kept in his house - fortunately it was a large house but every nook and cranny was full of the most amazing examples of railwayana. Thanks to him, a huge quantity of Midland Railway artefacts has survived and as Stephen says, the collection is available rather than being hiddena away. He also had the foresight to catalogue it to museum standards and he put a considerable amount of effort into looking at how best to preserve and store items. I catalogued most of the photographs (so any errors are my fault) and IIRC it was around 7000 items. Others chipped in, so for instance David Geldard did the tickets. It was a huge effort but the results are worth it. 

Edited March 10, 2021 by John-Miles
typo

[Compound2632]

50 minutes ago, billbedford said:

Here you go... Loading pig iron. This is on the Caly. I'm surprised the Midland didn't have dedicated wagons. 

 

Good photo. The Midland's approach seems to have been one size fits all - an 8 ton open suitable for goods or mineral traffic. (Or rather, two sizes, high sided and low sided.)

 

46 minutes ago, Penlan said:

They must have had a double helping of porridge to be able to carry those slabs

 

They're not wearing gloves but have what I take to be leather flaps to protect the palms of their hands.