Suffolk PO wagons - Why aren't there any?

[Mike Storey]

This shows you what was produced by Dapol for 1E Promotions, including several in Suffolk, all based on a 7 plank wagon, inaccurate or not!

 

http://www.1epromotionals.co.uk/

 

My favourite is the Lowestoft Coaling Company Ltd. I was born there and didn't even know this firm had existed! (Dissolved in 1970 apparently).

[Dominion]

There have also been several commissioned by the Mid Suffolk Light Railway Company, and their Middy Trading Company.

All Dapol's some 7 plank, some 5 plank, some 4 plank. The more recent ones are shown on their website. I think 2 years worth currently available form them directly, with another coming soon. I think they have done 19 or 20 in all, some come up frequently on ebay, some don't.

[Jol Wilkinson]

This shows you what was produced by Dapol for 1E Promotions, including several in Suffolk, all based on a 7 plank wagon, inaccurate or not!

 

http://www.1epromotionals.co.uk/

 

My favourite is the Lowestoft Coaling Company Ltd. I was born there and didn't even know this firm had existed! (Dissolved in 1970 apparently).

All fairly simple liveries, so possible with POWsides lettering transfers, or is RTR the only the OP's option?

[NS Peak]

There have also been several commissioned by the Mid Suffolk Light Railway Company, and their Middy Trading Company.

All Dapol's some 7 plank, some 5 plank, some 4 plank. The more recent ones are shown on their website. I think 2 years worth currently available form them directly, with another coming soon. I think they have done 19 or 20 in all, some come up frequently on ebay, some don't.

Mid Suffolk Light Railway have also commissioned 192 MOY private owner wagon that looks like its currently available either at the museum shop or via mail order.

 

https://www.mslr.org.uk/middy-trading-company/

[Johann Marsbar]

Having done a search on here, I found this thread, which seems to be an appropriate place to ask this..........

Whilst having a sort out of some of my rolling stock, I found that I had accumulated 5 of the Mid-Suffolk Railway produced Ipswich area Coal Merchant wagons over the years, but there is an additional one that I thought was one of theirs, but isn't !

Its an Ipswich Co-Operative Society liveried one - using the usual Dapol 7 plank open wagon - but appears to be one of a limited edition of only 99 vehicles (the MSLR ones appear to all be runs of 250), produced in 2004 by someone calling themselves "The Old Wagon Works", but with no clue as to where they were from at all. Has anyone heard of this company before??

I can't remember where I bought it and all of these wagons were purchased at the time I was reactivating my interest in OO and planning my current layout - even though they are all a bit old for my late 1950's/early 60's theme.....

 

[Compound2632]

On 3/25/2018 at 1:05 PM, Caledonian said:

 

The short answer is no. There's always a precendent for everything of course but unless it was very local ex colliery traffic tended to travel in bulk directly to a large industrial user or to a coal factor like Moy, before either being trans-shipped by the factor to the customer, or by a coal merchant buying it from the factor. The sort of scenario you might therefore see is colliery traffic to Moy, and then a wagonload of coal to say Long Melford either in one of Moy's own wagons or in a local coal merchant's wagon.

.

Keeping it simple on a Suffolk themed layout, stick with Moy   

I'm curious to know the evidence for this, since you seem to be implying transhipment of the load at one or more points between the colliery and the customer's factory or coal merchant's goods yard facility. This seems to me unlikely.

There's plenty of evidence that local coal merchants operating (hiring or less often owning) their own wagons sent their wagons directly to the collieries from which they were regularly purchasing. To take a non-Suffolk example, from Ian Pope's Private Owner Wagons of Gloucestershire (Lightmoor Press, 2006), J. Dickenson and his partners and successors had wagons branded Empty to Birch Coppice Colly Kingsbury Junction. Apologies for my 4 mm scale signwriting!

Or for a commercial customer, another favourite example of mine, a coal delivery to Huntley & Palmer's factory in Reading, a train made up of the customer's wagons, some Midland Railway wagons, one from a Birmingham coal factor, and several from Stephenson Clarke - a national coal factor.

I'm trying to get my head around the coal trade. So much depends not only on the location you are modelling but what type of coal your local industries need, e.g. anthracite for brewing, and the routes from the relevant coalfields to your location. So as wagonman suggests, for East Anglia in general, one might expect to see plenty of South Yorkshire colliery wagons.

[Caledonian]

Google is your friend and will tell a lot about Thomas Moy, but this link pretty well answers your question:  https://www.mslr.org.uk/rolling-stock/freight/

 

Basically Thomas Moy [and Bachman do one of his wagons from time to time] was based in Colchester, but had local depots all over Suffolk and I assume Essex and other bits of East Anglia, but rather than sending his wagons to individual collieries or getting them to deliver, he dealt with the transshipment yards at Toton. As you note there were different types of coal* and it will have been easier to get it all from there rather than scatter his wagons broadcast across the landscape.

 

* this wasn't even as simple as distinguishing between household coal and anthracite and so on. As late as the 1960s I can remember my mother haggling with the coal merchant, who had a blackboard quoting prices for different household coals. My mother as I recall set great store by Shilbottle coal.

 

Edited February 5, 2019 by Caledonian

[Compound2632]

2 hours ago, Caledonian said:

but rather than sending his wagons to individual collieries or getting them to deliver, he dealt with the transshipment yards at Toton.

 

Now that is interesting - an aspect of operations at Toton of which, as a Midland enthusiast, I was unaware.

 

What turns up with just a little bit of googling is that Moy also had a wagon building and repair business based in Peterborough - his operation was evidently large enough to justify building his own fleet of wagons rather than buying in from one of the wagon companies; it would then be worthwhile to diversify into wagon building and presumably hiring for other users. This is in contrast to Stephenson Clarke, another big firm of coal factors. Although they had their own network of wagon repair outstations, they didn't build their own wagons but ordered from the wagon companies wagons built to their standard design rather than the builders' designs - their orders were large enough to make this economic - e.g. 500 in one order from the Gloucester RC&W Co around the turn of the century. But in both cases the outcome was the same - a standardised fleet operating over a wide area but easy to maintain.

Edited February 5, 2019 by Compound2632

[Nick Holliday]

13 hours ago, Caledonian said:

Google is your friend and will tell a lot about Thomas Moy, but this link pretty well answers your question:  https://www.mslr.org.uk/rolling-stock/freight/

 

Basically Thomas Moy [and Bachman do one of his wagons from time to time] was based in Colchester, but had local depots all over Suffolk and I assume Essex and other bits of East Anglia, but rather than sending his wagons to individual collieries or getting them to deliver, he dealt with the transshipment yards at Toton. As you note there were different types of coal* and it will have been easier to get it all from there rather than scatter his wagons broadcast across the landscape.

 

* this wasn't even as simple as distinguishing between household coal and anthracite and so on. As late as the 1960s I can remember my mother haggling with the coal merchant, who had a blackboard quoting prices for different household coals. My mother as I recall set great store by Shilbottle coal.

 

I'm afraid I think the good folks on the MSLR have added two and two and made five. Certainly many Moy wagons were labelled Return to Toton but there would be no transshipment of coal there, as that would be a total waste of effort and coal, requiring lots of space and manpower as well. As Turton in his Fifth Collection explains, empty wagons were concentrated at Toton, from whence a local Moy agent would dispatch wagons as required to the various collieries in the nearby Nottingham and Derbyshire coalfields. 

When you consider that Moy had over thirty depots scattered over East Anglia, and considering the complexity of GER and M&GNJR lines that served them, it would be chaotic and uneconomic if each depot sent wagons on an individual basis to the ten or more collieries they regularly dealt with. Using Toton as a base meant that most if not all of the wagons would be taken by the GER to Peterborough, and the Midland would take them to Toton, rather than having them routed by various routes, involving other lines such as the LNWR or GNR. The dispatcher at Toton could then consolidate orders so that collieries would receive a batch of wagons, which presumably would receive better rates and service than having to deal with one wagon at a time. The system would probably work in reverse, but perhaps with the work of breaking down to individual destinations occurring at Peterborough. 

[Compound2632]

Nick, thanks for this explanation - I was seriously perturbed by the idea of transhipment at Toton. 

 

When googling Thomas Moy, I saw that his advertised list of country depots included many M&GN stations as well as GER ones, so presumably some of his traffic eastbound from Peterborough would be by the Joint as well as by the Great Eastern?

[Edwardian]

1 hour ago, Compound2632 said:

Nick, thanks for this explanation - I was seriously perturbed by the idea of transhipment at Toton. 

 

When googling Thomas Moy, I saw that his advertised list of country depots included many M&GN stations as well as GER ones, so presumably some of his traffic eastbound from Peterborough would be by the Joint as well as by the Great Eastern?

 

Or MGN via Spalding to Midland?

 

If anyone has sufficient info for modelling a pre-1905 Moy wagon I'd be grateful

[Compound2632]

On 06/02/2019 at 09:31, Nick Holliday said:

I'm afraid I think the good folks on the MSLR have added two and two and made five. Certainly many Moy wagons were labelled Return to Toton but there would be no transshipment of coal there, as that would be a total waste of effort and coal, requiring lots of space and manpower as well. As Turton in his Fifth Collection explains, empty wagons were concentrated at Toton, from whence a local Moy agent would dispatch wagons as required to the various collieries in the nearby Nottingham and Derbyshire coalfields. 

When you consider that Moy had over thirty depots scattered over East Anglia, and considering the complexity of GER and M&GNJR lines that served them, it would be chaotic and uneconomic if each depot sent wagons on an individual basis to the ten or more collieries they regularly dealt with. Using Toton as a base meant that most if not all of the wagons would be taken by the GER to Peterborough, and the Midland would take them to Toton, rather than having them routed by various routes, involving other lines such as the LNWR or GNR. The dispatcher at Toton could then consolidate orders so that collieries would receive a batch of wagons, which presumably would receive better rates and service than having to deal with one wagon at a time. The system would probably work in reverse, but perhaps with the work of breaking down to individual destinations occurring at Peterborough. 

 

On 06/02/2019 at 22:06, Compound2632 said:

Nick, thanks for this explanation - I was seriously perturbed by the idea of transhipment at Toton. 

 

When googling Thomas Moy, I saw that his advertised list of country depots included many M&GN stations as well as GER ones, so presumably some of his traffic eastbound from Peterborough would be by the Joint as well as by the Great Eastern?

 

I had been happy with @Nick Holliday's statement that there was no transhipment of coal at Toton, untill I saw NRM DY 11430, 6 July 1927, reproduced as Image 1 (p. 56) in this thesis.  This clearly shows some coal stacking at Toton. Perhaps someone with more knowledge of Toton can comment. Having looked at the OS 25" map, I can't work out where the photographer is standing though from the shadows, I think we're looking south, in the afternoon.

 

Thanks to @Nearholmer for drawing attention to this thesis on a current thread on PO merchandise wagons:

 

 

[DaveF]

29 minutes ago, Compound2632 said:

 

 

I had been happy with @Nick Holliday's statement that there was no transhipment of coal at Toton, untill I saw NRM DY 11430, 6 July 1927, reproduced as Image 1 (p. 56) in this thesis.  This clearly shows some coal stacking at Toton. Perhaps someone with more knowledge of Toton can comment. Having looked at the OS 25" map, I can't work out where the photographer is standing though from the shadows, I think we're looking south, in the afternoon.

 

Thanks to @Nearholmer for drawing attention to this thesis on a current thread on PO merchandise wagons:

 

 

 

The coal is very neatly stacked, with large pieces forming neat walls.

 

It was common for railway companies to stockpile coal for their own use in such  a way.

 

As the photo is said to have been taken in 1927 it may have been a response by the LMS to the 1926 miners (and general) strike so they could maintain services if there was another strike.

 

Rather as the CEGB in the 1980s before the miners strike when power stations had much larger coal stocks than normal.

 

David

[Compound2632]

It seems to me unlikely that the stacked coal would in this case be railway property. Note the row of huts that might be the offices of various coal factors?

 

The OS 25" maps I was looking at are on the NLS site - the latest that shows detail of the railway lines is 1913/4 - was there any development at Toton between then and 1927 that might be contributing to my inability to locate where in the Toto yards this coal stack was?

[Aire Head]

Not sure of the location of where I even found the photos, however it could be railway company property as it appears that all of rolling stock in the images is company stock.

[Compound2632]

For coal stacking at a customer's premises, here's a photo from the Huntley & Palmers collection.

[MarcD]

Fantastic photos.

Marc

[Johann Marsbar]

46 minutes ago, Aire Head said:

Not sure of the location of where I even found the photos, however it could be railway company property as it appears that all of rolling stock in the images is company stock.

 

 

Appears to be somewhere on the Great Eastern network, and certainly an interesting set of photos.  Don't know if it was a particular GER trait, but the Wild Swan(?) book on Great Eastern engine sheds has photos of similar coal stockpiles at Ipswich loco depot in GER days.

[Darryl Tooley]

Just now, Aire Head said:

Not sure of the location of where I even found the photos, however it could be railway company property as it appears that all of rolling stock in the images is company stock

The vantage point for the first two photographs is the back of March Old Shed.

 

D

[Aire Head]

2 hours ago, Johann Marsbar said:

 

Appears to be somewhere on the Great Eastern network, and certainly an interesting set of photos.  Don't know if it was a particular GER trait, but the Wild Swan(?) book on Great Eastern engine sheds has photos of similar coal stockpiles at Ipswich loco depot in GER days.

 

1 hour ago, Darryl Tooley said:

The vantage point for the first two photographs is the back of March Old Shed.

 

D

 

That makes sense on the scheme of things. Given the location of the first two pictures I'd say that the third is also at March Depot aswell.

 

Regarding lack of PO wagons it's not just limited to Suffolk. The overwhelming amount are Welsh or London factors. I suspect it's to do with what the popular areas to model.

[Caledonian]

On 27/10/2019 at 18:30, Darryl Tooley said:

The vantage point for the first two photographs is the back of March Old Shed.

 

D

 

It also appears to be a temporary expedient, perhaps as somebody suggested earlier, stockpiling during the General Strike. The stack on the right in the upper photie is clearly built on top of the tracks

[Johann Marsbar]

7 hours ago, Caledonian said:

 

It also appears to be a temporary expedient, perhaps as somebody suggested earlier, stockpiling during the General Strike. The stack on the right in the upper photie is clearly built on top of the tracks

 

Err..., the General Strike was 1926, the GER ceased to exist in 1923.

I checked my copy of the Wild Swan GER Engine Sheds book yesterday (Volume 2) and there are several official photos of Ipswich shed in it with coal stored in that style, the captions indicating it was "standard" procedure at that time. Rather amusingly, the shed turntable was completely surrounded by these (rather high) "walls" of stored coal, with just a space left for the single track leading to it!

[Compound2632]

4 minutes ago, Johann Marsbar said:

Rather amusingly, the shed turntable was completely surrounded by these (rather high) "walls" of stored coal, with just a space left for the single track leading to it!

 

Some protection from the elements? Perhaps they'd had a Hawes Junction-like incident...

[62613]

On 30/10/2019 at 05:59, Compound2632 said:

 

Some protection from the elements? Perhaps they'd had a Hawes Junction-like incident...

More likely a winter wind coming in from Poland!

 

[PaulG]

GER would stock pile coal when the price was low and of course access to coal supplies was a problem, hence various joint lines.

 

Paul