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LBSCR & GWR at Battersea Wharf


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Wandering off-topic in another direction (Mikkel, cry "foul" if needs be, because I have bad habits!) .......

 

The Deptford Wharf branch would be a cracking thing to model, because it brings the possibility of getting elegant Victorian steam locos alongside the latest high-teckery, in the form of internal combustion locomotives. The local horse tramway had an oil-engined loco on trial for several years in the late 1890s, and the London Corporation meat market had a steeple-cab petrol loco, with tram skirts, from c1903. The latter interchanged directly with the LBSCRy.

 

K

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Wandering off-topic in another direction (Mikkel, cry "foul" if needs be, because I have bad habits!) .......

 

The Deptford Wharf branch would be a cracking thing to model, because it brings the possibility of getting elegant Victorian steam locos alongside the latest high-teckery, in the form of internal combustion locomotives. The local horse tramway had an oil-engined loco on trial for several years in the late 1890s, and the London Corporation meat market had a steeple-cab petrol loco, with tram skirts, from c1903. The latter interchanged directly with the LBSCRy.

 

K

 

Tell us more.

 

... with pictures

 

(If Mikkel does not mind)

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OK, London Corporation loco below.

 

I've always had it up my sleeve as a scratch-build, because it is about as near to a box on wheels as one can get, and because nobody would believe it in a pre-grouping context!

 

The tramway loco is described in a very muddled/confusing/erroneous article in The Engineer, but I'd need my notes to be able to point to it. It looked like a slightly heavily built single-deck horse-tram car, and it started life as a battery-electric, to a patent by Mr Eliosson (sp?). It was then fitted out with an internal combustion engine and transmission to the patent of The Connelly Brothers of New Jersey, but their (very clever, scavenged two-stroke) engine was too weedy for the application, and it was fitted with a new engine, effectively an upright Otto (two cylinder, IIRC) by Weyman of Guildford, which was very successful. It ran for several years in Southwark, and was also tried on the Croydon- Thornton Heath route. There was a twin of the loco, or possibly the same loco exported, used as a depot shunter by the street railway in New York. (Photo below is a thumbnail from the LT museum website; I've got a full-res scan of the picture somewhere, but not on my iPad, which allows a lot of detail to be seen. There is a drawing in The Engineer article, too.)

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OK, London Corporation loco below.

 

I've always had it up my sleeve as a scratch-build, because it is about as near to a box on wheels as one can get, and because nobody would believe it in a pre-grouping context!

 

The tramway loco is described in a very muddled/confusing/erroneous article in The Engineer, but I'd need my notes to be able to point to it. It looked like a slightly heavily built single-deck horse-tram car, and it started life as a battery-electric, to a patent by Mr Eliosson (sp?). It was then fitted out with an internal combustion engine and transmission to the patent of The Connelly Brothers of New Jersey, but their (very clever, scavenged two-stroke) engine was too weedy for the application, and it was fitted with a met engine, effectively an upright Otto (two cylinder, IIRC) by Weyman of Guildford, which was very successful. It ran for several years in Southwark, and was also tried on the Croydon- Thornton Heath route. There was a twin of the loco, or possibly the same loco exported, used as a depot shunter by the street railway in New York. (Photo to follow)

We need a drawing! That's got to be modelled, and just the sort of thing I'd like on Cheapside Yard. I like the cowcatcher thing for scooping up rather than pushing out of the way.

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That scooping thing is a patent life preserver, designed to scoop-up small boys, who previously perished under the wheels of trams in large numbers, while playing hoops, spinning-tops, and football in the streets. It has a sort of spring-trigger, so that it lifts any small boys clear of the road surface.

 

Additional photo added, being the one I was intending to make a drawing from - you are welcome to do it, because, as is now publicly known, I have a lot of DIY to do next week, and the week after, and the week after that .......

 

The loco was pretty capable: 80hp, capable of drawing a 50 ton load, starting and stopping the same on 1:36 gradient. In a sense, it had about the same 'oomph' as the much later Ruston 88DS, but I think it was a "one off". Motor car makers, in GB and France, built a few locos at this period, and they nearly all failed, because they couldn't get the transmission right for the application. McEwan-Pratt did, eventually, sort out the transmission, and made good locos, but they bankrupted themselves in the process; their intellectual property went to Baguley Cars, who then carried on making and developing the locos.

 

K

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If you want to be put off your breakfast, read the history of the Southwark & Vauxhall Water Company https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southwark_and_Vauxhall_Waterworks_Company look out especially for the mention of "moving organisms" in the sample of their water looked at by an analyst!

 

Something they did need, as well as coal, was filter-sand, but I still can't make the later bits of railway on their property work in my mind.

 

A quick scad through The Engineer suggests that S&VWCo was in the process of moving away from extraction from The Thames, to extraction from deep aquifers, and obtaining water from the new, clean, up-river extraction at Jampton/Sunbury by the 1890s, which would have rendered the filter beds, and probably the reservoirs, at Vauxhall redundant by the early 1900s.

 

(Apologies for this 'clean water obsession' ....... As readers of Castle Aching will know, I've got rather too 'into' this topic recently!)

 

K

Might the rail connection to the wharf from the pump house be to take used filter medium to lighters for dumping downstream?

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Intriguing! The isolated bit of track seems to change configuration over the years. The 1875 published map shows a rail connection from the wharf to the pumping station:

 

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In 1915 that track is gone, but now there is an (akward!) connection from a line along the wharf to the newly built GWR depot - including a wagon turntable. An opportunity for a small single track layout!

 

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This in turn connects to Edwardian's photos of the pumping station above. It took some time for me to work out how this photo fitted into the plan, but I see now that it must have been taken from the roof of the GWR goods depot, with the old filter beds on the left (where the power station would be built in 1931) and the river in the distance on the right:

 

 

Isn't this just the most interesting hobby in the world!

 

Fascinating.

 

 

I agree with your conclusions; happily the map and the photograph are both more or less orientated north-south. 

 

I imagine that the line from the pumping station to the river bank in the 1875 map must have been in order to bring coal. No doubt horse worked.

 

The 1915 map shows the link with the GW yard, and, if I relate it to the (frustratingly small) photograph, I see that the photographer is looking, more or less, north.  

 

So, behind the GW yard, on the extreme left we see the large reservoir, with the spit of land dividing the two pale areas of water clearly visible.  This, as you say, is the site of the future power station.

 

Next, to the left we have the rather domestic structure to the south of where the small reservoir should be on the map.  This I take to be the foreman's house.  This may be an underground or covered reservoir - no water is seen here in the photograph.

 

The centre of the composition is an end-on view of the pumping station main complex.

 

Next to it, on the right, is a chimney, corresponding to the square marked "Chy" on the 1915 map.  Thus, we know, that the railway spur runs right to left just behind this chimney before heading straight away from the camera towards the shore, and is it the parallel tracks we can see running between the main complex and the chimney, receding into the distance?

 

It is also interesting to note from the 1915 map that the various engineering works to the east of the pumping station seem to have their own, independent, short railway spurs leading from the shore, which, like the pumping station spur in 1875, must be manually or horse worked and have no connection with the railway system.  

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Edited by Edwardian
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Wandering further, and further OT ......

 

Edwardian,

 

These little foreshore-to-works tramways existed all along the river, and there are still bits of them visible in places, especially on the Isle of Dogs, where they had to cross roads and pavements en-route from river to works. Some of them were very extensive indeed inside the works concerned.

 

Even the IRS county book on London gets nowhere near cataloging them all.

 

If you want to get lost in maps forever, try the Lonodon 1:1056 series on nls.maps , and take a journey downriver, looking at the industries on each bank. It is a real eye-opener, in that we tend not to think of London as a manufacturing centre now, but, by golly, it certainly was in 1900.

 

Have you see the modern Sherlock Holmes films, the cinema ones released over the past c5 years? The first of them gets the riverside atmosphere pretty well - the researchers and designers for it held a fascinating exhibition in a gallery across the road from my office, where they showed a lot of their source material. You might imagine that my "quick pop out for a sandwich" became very elongated; I spent ages talking with them!

 

Kevin

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Washbourne infiltrated.

 

Apologies.  There has been a security breach.

Henceforth, and until such time as I can be confident that the 'heat is off' and the Memsahib is back in Horse-Heaven, where she belongs, I will end each post with the name of a Pre-Group CME, so you know it's me.

Massey Bromley

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Wandering further, and further OT ......

 

Edwardian,

 

These little foreshore-to-works tramways existed all along the river, and there are still bits of them visible in places, especially on the Isle of Dogs, where they had to cross roads and pavements en-route from river to works. Some of them were very extensive indeed inside the works concerned.

 

Even the IRS county book on London gets nowhere near cataloging them all.

 

If you want to get lost in maps forever, try the Lonodon 1:1056 series on nls.maps , and take a journey downriver, looking at the industries on each bank. It is a real eye-opener, in that we tend not to think of London as a manufacturing centre now, but, by golly, it certainly was in 1900.

 

Have you see the modern Sherlock Holmes films, the cinema ones released over the past c5 years? The first of them gets the riverside atmosphere pretty well - the researchers and designers for it held a fascinating exhibition in a gallery across the road from my office, where they showed a lot of their source material. You might imagine that my "quick pop out for a sandwich" became very elongated; I spent ages talking with them!

 

Kevin

 

Yes, there was a great boat yard scene in the first film. 

 

In the second there was a handsome 4-4-0 and a string of well-appointed corridor clerestories for the 'South England Railway's train to Brighton, as if the SER or LBSC ever had coaches of this type and standard in 1890!  The Directors of these companies would have wept at the expense! More like the pre-1914 ECJS Flying Scotsman!

 

Corridor trains are favoured for narrative purposes, as  people can move around trains. Film-makers tend to assume corridor trains occurred were earlier and more widespread than was the case. The Wrong Box (1890s) film adaptation has some wonderful LSW corridor coaches on the ill-fated Bournemouth express! 

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Edited by Edwardian
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Might the rail connection to the wharf from the pump house be to take used filter medium to lighters for dumping downstream?

 

I imagine that the line from the pumping station to the river bank in the 1875 map must have been in order to bring coal.

 
Or both?
 
 

 

Thus, we know, that the railway spur runs right to left just behind this chimney before heading straight away from the camera towards the shore, and is it the parallel tracks we can see running between the main complex and the chimney, receding into the distance?

 

Yes, looking closely at your photo the track seems to be curving behind the chimney exactly as per the 1915 map. The photo must have been taken between 1915 and 1929, when the depot was expanded with several new buildings, including one that stood right in front of the pump house, as seen in this 1938 photo looking North:

 

30002243485_1bb484d54e_o.jpg

 

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Additional photo added, being the one I was intending to make a drawing from - you are welcome to do it, because, as is now publicly known, I have a lot of DIY to do next week, and the week after, and the week after that .......

Don't tempt me, as I'm struggling to keep up with my existing projects, but it's very tempting! Have you got any dimensions?

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Have you see the modern Sherlock Holmes films, the cinema ones released over the past c5 years? The first of them gets the riverside atmosphere pretty well - the researchers and designers for it held a fascinating exhibition in a gallery across the road from my office, where they showed a lot of their source material. You might imagine that my "quick pop out for a sandwich" became very elongated; I spent ages talking with them!

 

 

 

Rather more on point than the Bournemouth Express.

 

John Audley Frederick Aspinall

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If you want to be put off your breakfast, read the history of the Southwark & Vauxhall Water Company https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southwark_and_Vauxhall_Waterworks_Company look out especially for the mention of "moving organisms" in the sample of their water looked at by an analyst!

 

Something they did need, as well as coal, was filter-sand, but I still can't make the later bits of railway on their property work in my mind.

 

A quick scad through The Engineer suggests that S&VWCo was in the process of moving away from extraction from The Thames, to extraction from deep aquifers, and obtaining water from the new, clean, up-river extraction at Jampton/Sunbury by the 1890s, which would have rendered the filter beds, and probably the reservoirs, at Vauxhall redundant by the early 1900s.

 

(Apologies for this 'clean water obsession' ....... As readers of Castle Aching will know, I've got rather too 'into' this topic recently!)

 

K

I read that yesterday, I was interested to learn that competing companies laid their own pipes along roads and you could get your plumber to change supplier for you.

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If you want to be put off your breakfast, read the history of the Southwark & Vauxhall Water Company https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southwark_and_Vauxhall_Waterworks_Company look out especially for the mention of "moving organisms" in the sample of their water looked at by an analyst!

 

Ugh! An 1854 cholera outbreak is mentioned on that page, caused by water from this company. That outbreak, in turn, seems to be what led to the discovery that water not air spread cholera: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1854_Broad_Street_cholera_outbreak

 

This bit of land is revealing itself as an epicenter of the industrial and medical revolution!

 

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BGJ

 

"Have you got any dimensions?".

 

Yes, I'm about two inches too big round the middle at present, so I'm told.

 

Oh, I see what you mean ......... The chap standing on the footplate was 5'9" tall; I looked-up his army record on-line.

 

Edwardian

 

I think that film might get watched again over the w/e, and I shall look out for the LSWR train crash one, which I haven't seen.

 

K

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At ten o'clock this morning I was happily going about my business as usual and here I am now with a new layout designed and my head full of ideas....I should have known better than to start reading this thread.

 

Well, here's my interpretation of an 0 gauge layout, 20' long by 2' 9" wide. One the left is a footbridge disguising the fact that the line stops, next to which is the Deptford lifting bridge.  I picture wharves along most of the length but on the right more of a muddy riverbank with the headshunt petering out amid the debris and the old buildings behind as in the wonderful photo's I should never have looked at.

 

29968979386_6a3db31623_c.jpg

 

It's the perfect layout for lots of Terriers of which I have four, just by coincidence. The period for me would be the late 1880's, full of atmosphere.

 

Peter

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I think that film might get watched again over the w/e, and I shall look out for the LSWR train crash one, which I haven't seen.

 

 

 

Apropos the late 1880s, there is the docks and grime of Sherlock Holmes's London ("never travel east of Aldgate without a loaded revolver"), but equally splendid is the contemporary comic muse.

 

The book, The Wrong Box, co-authored by Robert Louis Stevenson, would you believe, is a firm favourite of mine.  For me The Wrong Box (1889) forms a Late Nineteenth Century comic novel trinity with the contemporary Three Men in a Boat (1889) and Diary of a Nobody (serial 1888–89, novel 1892). 

 

Essential pre-Grouping reading!

 

Aside from its other virtues, the novel centres on a Tontine, which were real, if macabre, schemes that had a certain popularity in the Nineteenth Century.  Which student of the law relating to specific performance could forget the case of Ryan v. Mutual Tontine Association [1893] 1 Ch 116?

 

The film (1966), is a fairly free adaptation, but great fun.  The estranged brothers are played by Sir John Mills and Sir Ralph Richardson, Michael Caine and Nanette Newman are romantic leads, that's Pete and Dud you can see streaking past the wrecked carriages, Peter Sellers puts in a cameo as Dr Pratt (the "venal doctor" character does not actually appear in the book), and John Le Mesurier, Irene Handl and Tony Hancock also pop up!

 

The soundtrack by John Barry is well worth a listen (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mvrvcEmnRms). 

 

The full film is currently up on Youtube.   

 

John Behrens Adamson

 

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At ten o'clock this morning I was happily going about my business as usual and here I am now with a new layout designed and my head full of ideas....I should have known better than to start reading this thread.

 

Well, here's my interpretation of an 0 gauge layout, 20' long by 2' 9" wide. One the left is a footbridge disguising the fact that the line stops, next to which is the Deptford lifting bridge.  I picture wharves along most of the length but on the right more of a muddy riverbank with the headshunt petering out amid the debris and the old buildings behind as in the wonderful photo's I should never have looked at.

 

29968979386_6a3db31623_c.jpg

 

It's the perfect layout for lots of Terriers of which I have four, just by coincidence. The period for me would be the late 1880's, full of atmosphere.

 

Peter

 

Which scheme I now want to pinch and execute in 4mm!

 

Very good plan, can already picture it.  The warehouses modelled by you would be a sight worth seeing.

 

Go on, you know you want to!

 

Sir Vincent Raven

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BGJ

 

"Have you got any dimensions?".

 

Yes, I'm about two inches too big round the middle at present, so I'm told.

 

Oh, I see what you mean ......... The chap standing on the footplate was 5'9" tall; I looked-up his army record on-line.

 

Edwardian

 

I think that film might get watched again over the w/e, and I shall look out for the LSWR train crash one, which I haven't seen.

 

K

So that's no then! Just an assumption that the buffers are at the standard 3'5".

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I know we're in danger of going wharf in all directions, but I couldn't resist this one (now, these two).

 

The line down the middle of Grove Street linked Deptford Wharf LBSCRy yard to the Foreign Cattle Market, the very line that the Maudsley petrol loco was built for, but it looks as if tramway regulations were, one again, being flouted by the 1930s, and I think the sectional appendix bans SR locos from it. I don't think there were 'run rounds' on this link line, so I guess wagons were capstan shunted,to avoid the loco having to propel them up the road, but who knows!

 

More rich grime!

 

K

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It's the perfect layout for lots of Terriers of which I have four, just by coincidence. The period for me would be the late 1880's, full of atmosphere.

 

So I am correct in my assumption that Terriers would be prototypical for shunting in a London wharf setting? In my case, sometime in the 1910s. As mentioned in my OP, there are few photos of the actual Battersea wharf sidings, and although I have unearthed a few since then, none show locos shunting.

 

Of course, Battersea shed itself was huge, with lots of Terriers allocated:  http://www.semgonline.com/shed_allocations/lbsc-shed-alloc.html

 

In The Bennett Collection there is a nice photo of "Brighton" at Battersea, with the goods sidings and Victoria lines just visible in the background - but it is the usual loco study and so I can't make it out if is actually shunting, or just waiting to go off-shed.

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Aside from its other virtues, the novel centres on a Tontine, .......

There is still a Tontine Hotel in Peebles which was where the various meetings of the Promoters of the several proposals for the Peebles Railway were held.

 

John Farquharson M'Intosh

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