Meat traffic to London in the LNWR

[Guy Rixon]

Does anybody know where in London the LNWR handled its meat traffic?

 

I've found at photo showing cattle being unloaded at "LNWR depot, York Road", and the captions says that the beasts are going to Smithfield. The depot is presumably the LNWR facility in St Pancras district, off the NLR, marked on the old maps as LNWR Maiden Lane Branch

 

I suspect that that the animals are actually going to the Copenhagen Fields cattle-market (I'm assuming that this relates to York Road near King's Cross station, not York Road SE1) and will be slaughtered there, with the meat then going on to Smithfield.

 

But if meat was moved by the LNWR from Liverpool or Birkenhead not on the hoof, where did it go in London? Did the meat vans also go to Maiden Lane?

[Nearholmer]

No, direct to Smithfield. But LNWR traffic had to follow a very "shunty" route to get there, because the plan to link the LNWR to the City Widened Lines at Euston petered out just near where the British library now is.

 

Cattle were driven on the hoof from railway depots at several points to the huge Metropolitan market that is depicted on the horizon on the famous model of Copenhagen Fields, and there were lots of bye laws about exactly which roads could be followed, at what times of day, how beasts were to be supervised, prevention of excess cruelty etc.

 

From memory, at least three railway yards, possibly four (one LNWR, one Midland, and two GNR) including the one you've highlighted by map, were involved.

 

I never followed the tale in detail to find out exactly where animals were slaughtered and butchered, but the Wikipedia entry and 1:1000 street plans contain a lot of detail,which suggests that it was at/close to the market, maybe with onward transport of carcasses to Smithfield by road, although given that the latter was directly rail-served, by a "dead easy" route from the GNR yards, probably even that short hop was by rail.

 

This is interesting http://carolineld.blogspot.co.uk/2011/12/smithfield-market-trains.html

 

This even more so http://www.british-history.ac.uk/old-new-london/vol2/pp491-496

 

K

[MJC-31A]

Can I also recommend this article from London Reconnections.

 

http://www.londonreconnections.com/2012/london-terminals-fighting-over-farringdon-part-2/

 

They have done several covering the area from Kings Cross down through Farringdon and how it is changing for Thameslink. This article is probably the best for showing the details of the sidings below Smithfield.

 

Martin

[TheSignalEngineer]

The LNW had two platforms with cattle pens at Maiden Lane on the north side of the North London line. The site later became York Way Freightliner Depot.

[TheSignalEngineer]

The cattle yard entrance at Maiden Lane was only about 400 yards from the Metropolitan Meat Market.

 

In later years, I don't know about in LNWR times, trains of meat in containers came from Holyhead to Broad Street Goods Station. Now buried by the Broadgate complex, this covered an area at least as large as Liverpool St station

[Nearholmer]

Hmmm ....... You could be right that the LNWR used Broad Street, rather than direct to Smithfield, because, as I said earlier, their route to Smithfield wasn't good.

 

I checked on the goods stations with cattle pens in the area of the Metropolitan Cattle Market, and they were:

 

LNWR - Maiden Lane (off the York Road)

 

MR - Kentish Town

 

GNR - I get confused about names, but I think it was called Holloway, although it was next to The Caledonian Road.

 

The GNR yard that was actually called Caledonian Road was further south, next to the NLR, and it seems not to have pens, and had very convoluted access, so not ideal for the job, BUT I'm sure one of the bye-laws does the driving of cattle from it to the market, so maybe it was an "overspill".

 

For carcasses then going onward from the market to Smithfield, if they weren't carted by road all the way, and for chilled carcasses from further afield, both the MR and GNR had easy access via the City Widened Lines, as did the GWR and the LCDR, as a way in from the south.

 

Having previously swotted-up on coal and general goods flows into London c1900, I'm beginning to get a feel for how it all worked, and although it was astonishingly labour-intensive, and slow, by current standards, it was all an effective and intricate set of systems.

 

A pre-grouping London goods-focused layout would be a really interesting thing to create, but would need some serious thought about selective compression, because the goods and coal termini were blooming huge!

 

K

[TheSignalEngineer]

I have tracked a 1030am Sundays Holyhead - Broad St train in 1960-62. During the electrification works from about 1960, it ran from Crewe via Wellington passing Snow Hill about 5.30pm. It went via Greenford and Ealing to get to Acton Main Line and Acton Wells, arriving at Broad Street sometime around midnight.

 

By 1962 it was a Q train on the WR and often ran via Bescot. In March 1962 it was involved in a collision with a DMU at Stechford. The driver of the DMU was sitting in a Down train at Stechford when the fatal crash occured there in 1967 and was himself unfortunately killed in the collision at Monmore green two years later.