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Deliberately Old-Fashioned 0 Scale - Chapter 1


Nearholmer
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Getting back to the topic of wheel and track standards, one of the readers of this thread has pointed out this interesting document to me. Thank you!

 

https://www.gauge0guild.com/manual/01_D1_1_1_1.pdf

 

The specific point(!) under discussion was the G0G ‘universal’ wheel standard, which combines a wide tyre with a very thin flange, and appears to be compatible with G0G coarse and fine pointwork.

 

Does anyone have experience of this wheel-set, set-up exactly as described in the document? Does it do what is claimed in practice? And, if the pointwork is perfectly to G0G coarse, which seems necessary for the universal wheel, rather than the slight compromise that many adopt to be compatible with old BL and Hornby, which historical models are happy with it?

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No direct experience. I think you might be out of luck from what was said at the time I think the guilds aim was to provide a wheel standard that could run on both Fine and coase guild standards rather than to cover the extra coarse standards of all historical models. I don't remember any discusssion on how well it would work with track set for such models. I suspect an easier approach is to make turnouts with moving wing rails so all wheels can negotiate them. If I wanted to investigate further Ken Sheale might remember who did the work on that. 

Don

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Don

 

its really no more than idle curiosity from me, because I’m very happy that the points I use, set as I have them set, will accept everything “coarse” made after BL’s move to a slightly finer wheel in the mid-1930s onwards, right up to things made yesterday.

 

I do have a few older, coarser-wheeled things, but am content that I can run them on ‘point free’ or tinplate tracks at meetings.

 

Kevin

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On 30/07/2019 at 21:32, Nearholmer said:

Chris

 

In another thread, RMWeb resident milk train expert, Karhedron, cites milk depots served by The GWR as follows:

 

Express Dairies: South Acton, Frome, St Helier 

Milk Marketing Board: Felin Fach, Pont Llanio

United Dairies: Lostwithiel, Yetminster, Ealing Bwy, Mitre Bridge, Wootton Bassett, Shepherds Bush, Carmarthen, Whitland, Buckingham, Hemyock, St Earth

Nestle: Lostwithiel, Martock, Holt Junc

CWS Dairies: Melksham, Wallingford, Llangadog

Dried Milk Products: Lostwithiel, Wincanton

London Co-operative: West Ealing

 

None of which look good for the Abbotsbury branch to me,  so it is possible that, even in the 1930s, traffic was going all the way to destination (wherever that was) in churns, or was worked to a dairy in Dorset, but which was served by SR in respect of onward tanker traffic.

 

My interest in 1930s milk traffic in East Sussex has identified some significant churn traffic up to at least WW2, going all the way into London ......... OK, much shorter distances, but I was surprised that it hadn't all been "tankerised" by then.

 

Kevin

Hi Kevin

I've always had a bit of a soft spot for milk transport by rail as my first footplate ride as a very young child was on a milk train running from Highbridge to Basonbridge and back on the S&DJR.

However, there was a rather sinister aspect to the move from churns to tankers. Before pasteurisation became common (during the 1930s?) combining the milk from many more cattle in tank wagons greatly increased the risk of Bovine TB in humans. In 1945 testing found Mycobacterium Bovis in 8% of milk tranported in churns but in a majority of the milk transported in tankers. So, while tanker tranport may have been more efficient and seen as more "modern" and even hygenic than having porters trundling churns around , that may have come at a price. 

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3 hours ago, Nearholmer said:

I seem to remember that the big fear was brucellosis, at least that was the ‘bogeyman’ cited by my dad when we had to wash everything, cows included, twice, then twice again.

I'm guessing (correctly?) that, by the time of the 1945 tests, pasterurisation was normal so the milk tested would have been transported but not yet pasteurised  That would have made the main danger to humans the period between the move from churn to tanker transport and the widesprwad adoption of pasteurisation.

On the importance of hygiene, I once made a film about a company in Cherbourg that had speclaiised in manufacturing dairy equipment (mainly stainless steel) and had found the skillset involved made it a natural transition to progress from that to the nuclear industry. 

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59 minutes ago, Pacific231G said:

On the importance of hygiene, I once made a film about a company in Cherbourg that had speclaiised in manufacturing dairy equipment (mainly stainless steel) and had found the skillset involved made it a natural transition to progress from that to the nuclear industry. 

Similarly for the potable spirit distilling business.

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The bit I’m foxed by is where in the logistics chain pasteurisation took place. In the case  of bigger rural dairies/creameries, I’m pretty sure it was there, which put it between farm-churn and rail- tanker, but the East Sussex operation at Horam was pretty basic from what I can work out, and I’m not at all sure the milk was pasteurised before going into a rail tanker.

 

Milk is usually kept below 5 degrees C if it is stored for any length of time, to stop the bugs multiplying, so maybe the more basic rural loading facility incorporated cooled tanks. There was a cool storage tank at the farm at my father’s school in the 1960s, and the road tanker came to collect from it twice a week ....... my vague recollection is that the milk was trickled across a sort of “cold radiator” (fridge technology presumably) as it went into the tank, and the tank then had “trickle cooling”, but this is all 50+ years ago!

 

Rural bottling plants incorporated pasteurising systems, so presumably urban ones did too, but even in the 1960s there was quite a high proportion of sales of unpasteurised milk - green topped bottles, or was it red?

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Pasteurisation involved steam and boilers and stuff, so was done at the concentration points, not the farm. Harry Powell’s farm over the road from us had a milk cooler of the type you describe, but this must have been done following milking to cool the milk straight out of the cows dangly bits. It was then put in a couple of churns and picked up by lorry daily.

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16 minutes ago, Nearholmer said:

The bit I’m foxed by is where in the logistics chain pasteurisation took place. In the case  of bigger rural dairies/creameries, I’m pretty sure it was there, which put it between farm-churn and rail- tanker, but the East Sussex operation at Horam was pretty basic from what I can work out, and I’m not at all sure the milk was pasteurised before going into a rail tanker.

 

Milk is usually kept below 5 degrees C if it is stored for any length of time, to stop the bugs multiplying, so maybe the more basic rural loading facility incorporated cooled tanks. There was a cool storage tank at the farm at my father’s school in the 1960s, and the road tanker came to collect from it twice a week ....... my vague recollection is that the milk was trickled across a sort of “cold radiator” (fridge technology presumably) as it went into the tank, and the tank then had “trickle cooling”, but this is all 50+ years ago!

 

Rural bottling plants incorporated pasteurising systems, so presumably urban ones did too, but even in the 1960s there was quite a high proportion of sales of unpasteurised milk - green topped bottles, or was it red?

Green, IIRC.

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1 minute ago, Nearholmer said:

I think so too, but hesitated, because that somehow seemed wrong in context with green now meaning semi-skimmed (pasteurised).

You're right for modern times, but in the past semi-skimmed was red/silver stripes. I think that red was full cream (with the cream on top - mmm...), silver was homogenised and gold was milk from Jersey or Guernsey herds.

 

Don't mention sterilised milk, in the tall bottles with crown corks!

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2 minutes ago, Nearholmer said:

Full cream (not homogenised) was silver where we lived, and the sterilised stuff was so utterly disgusting that even cats wouldn’t drink it!

Perhaps I've got them the wrong way round then. I do recall that we always had silver but my Nan had red.

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We’ve gone back to traditional doorstep delivery in the past couple of years, semi-skimmed, homogenised, and I have an ingrained habit that, before opening a foil-topped bottle, I automatically invert it, holding by the neck/lid, and give it a good shake ...... what you learn aged five sticks with you!

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1 hour ago, Nearholmer said:

what you learn aged five sticks with you!

... but no more having some 'top of the milk' on your pudding, as you did when you were five :-(   David

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In our area Reading when I were a lad normal milk was silver topped with a layer of cream on the top. Nearly all the milk was silver topped.  I remember it being frozen in winter at the infants school it would be brought in and placed by a radiator to thaw but by break it would be definitely warm not the best. Although if we ran out at the weekend I would be sent to walk up the the farm with a bottle which would be filled from a churn in the milking palour quite warm. Perhaps the freezing and then warming spoilt the school milk.

Don

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Oh yes!

 

Despite all this interest in milk production and transport, I actually don’t like milk much at all, and can’t abide ‘creamy’ milk, precisely because I was put-off for life by school milk.

 

The two boys on milk rota had to lug the crate from the stack by the gate, knees buckling, arms pulled from sockets, and stand it by the radiator (why!??!!) until morning break, by when it was a foul brew of warm, thick cream (about 1/3 of the bottle was cream) that could barely be sucked through a straw. 

 

Was there a Ministry Instruction that the stuff had to be stood by the radiator in every school in the country???

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22 hours ago, Pacific231G said:

I'm guessing (correctly?) that, by the time of the 1945 tests, pasterurisation was normal so the milk tested would have been transported but not yet pasteurised  That would have made the main danger to humans the period between the move from churn to tanker transport and the widesprwad adoption of pasteurisation.

On the importance of hygiene, I once made a film about a company in Cherbourg that had speclaiised in manufacturing dairy equipment (mainly stainless steel) and had found the skillset involved made it a natural transition to progress from that to the nuclear industry. 

I updated this yesterday but the update seems to have disappeared. I found several parliamentary debates about milk pasteurisation and its general safety,particularly from the 1940s.  These ranged from 1940 concerns that children from large cities, where milk generally was pasteurised, evacuated to rural areas would be at risk from diseases carried in untreated milk. This does suggest that pasteurisation was taking place in the major distiribution centres rather than locally and in 1947 it was said that only about two thirds of milk was being treated with bovine tuberculosis killing about 1600 people in Britain each year and that smaller towns were far more likely to be supplied with untreated milk from untested herds. There was argument about whether compulsory pasteurisation would lead to Tuberculin Testing being ignored.

 

This does sound rather like today's arguments about US chicken being chlorine washed rather than being farmed in a healthy way rather than our current "farm to fork" approach ( worth noting that, according to government figures, levels of salmonella infection per head in the US are about 20 times that of the UK and about 40 times higher for campylobacter) 

 

In the post war 1940s there were also concerns that there simply wasn'e enough pasteurising equipment being produced- with much of what was being exported. 

 

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I too have a horror of warm milk from my school days. We are on the verge of stopping our doorstep deliveries, as the keeping qualities of glass bottled milk don't seem as good as the supermarket product. Regarding top colours, apart from some like gold top and possibly green, I think it's only in the last 25 years that a standard has arrived, though I might be confusing the foil bottle tops with plastic lid colour standards.

I can't offer much information regarding milk processing, in spite of having visited the Job's plant in Didcot, as a child in the 1950s.

 

Dave

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