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1 hour ago, 1ngram said:

How big do you think those are? 4'x2'x2' ?

They look wider than they are high... 5x3x2 perhaps?

Mind you this is metric France so probably 1524mm x 914mm x 607mm. Does that help you in 4mm:1 ft scale?

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In LTC Rolts autobiography* he describes being sent on a riper-binder course at the begining of the second world war. Here he was expecting to learn about the binder part of the machine, only to find that basically the delegates were used to assemble the parts shipped in from the states, and that they only had to bolt the binder mechanism in place. He felt that he learnt nothing about this bit, and his 'expert' status locally was not deserved. He did, however, usually manage to fix the faults with it (which iirc ranged from bloated stooks, to thin stooks, to just spitting the bits of wheat out with a bit of string as if to say 'tie them yourself')

 

 Andy G

 

*Landscape with Machines... also describes working at Kerr Stuart's, developing the first diesel lorry, playing about on the Shropshire and Mongomery, and generally life in the 20's and early 30's. This and the following volumes (Landscape with Canals and Landscape with Figures) are highly recommended reading, but make sure you buy the three individual volumes, as you get more photos in them than in the combine trilogy volume)

Edited by uax6
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19 hours ago, Nearholmer said:


Yes, my working assumption was that the bales I found in photos were from fairly nearby farms. I wonder whether any farmers were selling to all combatants simultaneously. I can’t imagine that farmers in territory captured by the Germans weren’t selling to the Germans, because the alternative would have been to let crops rot, and have no money to buy seed for the next lot.

My wife's grandparents were farmers in territory invaded by the Germans in WW2, and I can assure you that they didn't sell anything to them - it was all taken by force.

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23 hours ago, uax6 said:

In LTC Rolts autobiography* he describes being sent on a riper-binder course at the begining of the second world war. Here he was expecting to learn about the binder part of the machine, only to find that basically the delegates were used to assemble the parts shipped in from the states, and that they only had to bolt the binder mechanism in place. He felt that he learnt nothing about this bit, and his 'expert' status locally was not deserved. He did, however, usually manage to fix the faults with it (which iirc ranged from bloated stooks, to thin stooks, to just spitting the bits of wheat out with a bit of string as if to say 'tie them yourself')

 

 Andy G

 

*Landscape with Machines... also describes working at Kerr Stuart's, developing the first diesel lorry, playing about on the Shropshire and Mongomery, and generally life in the 20's and early 30's. This and the following volumes (Landscape with Canals and Landscape with Figures) are highly recommended reading, but make sure you buy the three individual volumes, as you get more photos in them than in the combine trilogy volume)

Thank you for mentioning LTC Rolt's autobiography. Its a staggeringly wonderful read. Of course he moved in middle class circles and his experiences rarely comment on the working class but his overall view of engineering in rural middle England in the 1930s is very evocative. He somewhat lost his way during his campaign to save and support the traditional boat people of England's working canals in the 1940s and 50s but as a writer who can convey a clear image and wonderful emotion he is well worth reading.

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Coming a bit late to the bale discussion, here's a Midland official, DY 10921, taken on 23 May 1918:

88-GV:119-01.jpg

 

[Embedded link to Midland Railway Study Centre Item No. 88-GV/119-01.]

 

This is one of a series. The first shows "not roped, gap top of bales"; this shows "roped, unsheeted"; finally there's "roped, sheeted". Unfortunately I don't have access to those other two photos.

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3 minutes ago, 1ngram said:

Putting in that reference number just gives me a not known.  I've tried a couple of times with the same result.  It's a great photo.  Do they sell copies?

 

I think that happens with some recently-added photos. Try putting "bales" as the search term with "Photograph" as the category in the catalogue search.

 

Photos with a Kidderminster Railway Museum reference can be obtained from thence, though they're a bit short-handed at the moment. I believe they can provide prints or scans. For photos held directly by the Study Centre, enquire via the contact email given, but they're not set up to provide prints. For most of these photos, if negatives exist they're held elsewhere - NRM for the Derby officials. (So I think you can probably buy a print via the Science & Society Picture Library.)

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On 05/08/2021 at 15:58, Compound2632 said:

Coming a bit late to the bale discussion, here's a Midland official, DY 10921, taken on 23 May 1918:

88-GV:119-01.jpg


Great photograph. Now we know for sure that bales (most likely hand-bound, rather than machine-bound) were a thing around the time of the Great War. I'm making an assumption here but presuming this photograph is for loading and securing techniques for railway staff and doesn't show the condition in which a wagon would travel in a train. I would hope that a sheet would be over the bales otherwise there would be a risk of the hay arriving either rained-on, soggy and starting to rot, or burned to nothing by airborne cinders.

I say this because my mind always looks at historical evidence in terms of what it means for my modelling hobby and what this photo shows, to my mind, is just another sheeted wagon with a high-humped but anonymous load.

The hobby needs more models of sheeted opens. You can justify almost any freight inside them.

Edited by Martin S-C
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39 minutes ago, Martin S-C said:


Great photograph. Now we know for sure that bales (most likely hand-bound, rather than machine-bound) were a thing around the time of the Great War. I'm making an assumption here but presuming this photograph is for loading and securing techniques for railway staff and doesn't show the condition in which a wagon would travel in a train. I would hope that a sheet would be over the bales otherwise there would be a risk of the hay arriving either rained-on, soggy and starting to rot, or burned to nothing by airborne cinders.

I say this because my mind always looks at historical evidence in terms of what it means for my modelling hobby and what this photo shows, to my mind, is just another sheeted wagon with a high-humped but anonymous load.

The hobby needs more models of sheeted opens. You can justify almost any freight inside them.

 

I think all sides of the bales are shown. Stephen will be able to tell you the D299 plank depth, thus allowing accurate scaling of bales!

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Here’s what the GWR had to say on the subject. No photo of this load in their General appendix, unfortunately.

 

In another thread (no, i can't remember!), we found a photo of a GER wagon containing a "Boris hairdo" style haystack in the process of being sheeted.

 

 

47A09526-76E1-4321-B969-EB216D3A7096.jpeg

Edited by Nearholmer
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2 hours ago, Martin S-C said:

 I'm making an assumption here but presuming this photograph is for loading and securing techniques for railway staff and doesn't show the condition in which a wagon would travel in a train. I would hope that a sheet would be over the bales otherwise there would be a risk of the hay arriving either rained-on, soggy and starting to rot, or burned to nothing by airborne cinders.

I seem to remember from another thread that there was a whole series of these photos by the MR showing the official ways to load and secure various types of goods.

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The GWR Appendix contains oodles of them, plus drawings, and it seems to me that the railway companies shared photos of good (and bad) practice, because not all the wagons shown are "home road".

 

One notable point is that there are photos showing how to load pit-wood in coal wagons, including PO steel, double-door LWB wagons, so there must have been some "back lading" of this traffic from forestry districts, which makes sense, but I've never seen represented in model form.

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I am not sure that would work in terms of traffic flows. Coal out of collieries is a constant flow, or a lot more constant than pit-props in. Quite a few photos of collieries I've seen show massive piles of round timber stacked or literally laying about the place so my feeling is that coal wagons were used solely for coal and always spent half their mileage empty, while pit props (and anything else inwards-colliery related) probably had their own wagons allocated and again would travel half their miles empty because meshing the needs of the traffic volumes and customers would be such a headache. Mr Smiths coal mine, might, say, three or four times a year allocate 50 of his wagons to be sent to some docks or another timber loading facility and bring in a big stock of pit props to be dumped on a spare parcel of land to be used up as and when needed but after that trip or two Mr Smiths coal wagons would return to carrying away his coal.

Its a traffic process I wish I knew more about but my gut feeling is that is probably how it worked.

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1 hour ago, Martin S-C said:

I am not sure that would work in terms of traffic flows. Coal out of collieries is a constant flow, or a lot more constant than pit-props in. 

Don't forget that a lot of coal went for export and for bunkering coal, most ships being coal fired.  There would therefore be regular return traffic from the docks which could carry imported Baltic pine for pit props.   I suspect, however, that the bulk of this traffic would be in company wagons rather than PO ones.

 

1 hour ago, Nearholmer said:

........ but I've never seen represented in model form.

876120819_Colinswagons.jpg.891103ebcc007c78aed2862a555d04bc.jpg

 

Jim

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37 minutes ago, Martin S-C said:

so my feeling is that coal wagons were used solely for coal and always spent half their mileage empty

 

My point is that the GWR was illustrating how to load them with pit-wood so that they didn't.

 

I can't imagine that more than a very small % of coal wagons came back filled with wood, but some clearly did.

 

Good point about imported timber coming back from the docks this way - my brain was tuned to one of my other interests, the home-grown timber campaign during WW1, when I know that all sorts of wagons got pressed into use carrying pit-props from unlikely places.

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Coming back to the stowage of hay bales, I've dug out my copy of the GCR's July 1920 rulebook. 

 

"Guards must not take on wagons loaded with goods liable to be set on fire by sparks or hot cinders, unless the wagons are properly sheeted.  Such wagons must be placed as far as possible from the engine."

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The CR 1875 'Instructions relating to Goods, Mineral and Live stock Traffic' have only one short paragraph on hay, basically stating the loads should be sheeted and well tied down.  No bales to consider in those days!  :nono:

 

BTW in my understanding 'stooks' are groups of sheaves of a cereal crop, made by a binder, set up, either in 6's or 8's, to allow the air to pass between them to dry the grain.  I've never heard the term applied to hay or straw, but perhaps that's a geographic thing.

 

Jim

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