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8 hours ago, Edwardian said:

 

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!

Sir, by means of this most profound observation you may have just been communally elected to the chairmanship of the Worshipful Guild of 4mm Bale Scalers. It sounds like a most proper and august body that will oversee all forms of 4mm hay bale scratch-building (binding?) and kitbale modifying to the correct dimensions. I am not sure the modelling world is yet ready for RTR (ready to roll) pre-grouping hay bales but we should push our agenda with most assured robustness. However caution is advised, I do not think we need be distracted by the discussion of the merits of P4 vs 00 haybales.

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20 hours ago, Martin S-C said:

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.

(Source: Challenger-Group/Wikipedia)

The farming industry has really benefitted from the introduction of baling machines which came into use at the end of the 19th century.  Prior to this making hay bales was an extremely time consuming and heavy job.  Farmers used to have to cut the hay and form it into haystacks by hand. Haystacks were a good way to store hay because they kept the hay off the ground allowing it to breathe and drain any liquid.  It was important to make the haystacks the right size otherwise the hay would rot.

Farmers originally used lathes and rakes to cut and gather the hay.  In 1872 Charles Withington devised the first reaper with a knotting device to create hay bales.  The machinery was improved to make it more reliable and useable by the wider farming population. These days baling machines are amazing pieces of machinery that gather the hay, form into bales and wraps them in protective material.  Modern-day hay bales are easy to transport and store in locations most beneficial for the farmer.

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That Wikipedia entry is a bit of a muddle, in that Withington’s reaper-binder doesn’t make bales, they make sheaves/bundles. The baling machine was a separate animal, driven by an engine, at the dates we’re interested in, and Edwardian provided a good illustration of one back up thread. And, they didn’t tie the bale, that had to be done by hand as the bale was extruded from the press, which is why the twine on these old bales only went round, not along as well.

 

Automatic balers, driven by a tractor with a PTO, didn’t come in until the late 1930s, didn’t really take-off in the US until post-WW2, and took a long while to become common in Britain.

 

4D64F25F-E5E2-46E2-94E3-038EFC84E0EC.jpeg
 

Now, this website seems to have the history well described - just add five or ten years to all “firsts” to allow them to get from the USA to GB. https://www.farmcollector.com/equipment/implements/hay-press-zmhz12fzbea/

 

 

Edited by Nearholmer
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The introduction of technology does not mean that it came into common use - or even uncommon use at that time. I recall Roye England's writings of his travels in the White Horse Vale in the 1930s when he observed how much of the farming was still entirely done by the muscles of man and horse with mechanical assistance of any sort being very rare indeed.

We've seen a Midland Railway wagon loading photograph using bound hay bales dated 1918. That does not mean that every hay load would be baled at that time. It doesn't suggest any proportion of baled hay loads at all, merely that baled hay existed. The photograph for the education of goods loading staff was necessary in case they encountered baled hay and needed to know how to load it but many of them might never have. We don't know, and that's the problem.

I've commented often in this thread about this and I use the same reasoning in my military wargame hobby that mention of something does not mean it was usual, in fact it can mean the opposite; that it was very unusual and thus merited comment. Wargamers like to assert, for example that such-and-such a type of troops or a unit of men could do so-and-so because it gets mentioned at some battle. But writers of those days rarely reference the mundane because their audience knows all about the mundane and familiar and mentioning it would not make an interesting read. So writers tended to highlight the unusual, the brave, the spectacular and other rare and unexpected circumstances to give their written piece - or letter home - more edge. In my wargaming hobby if a single account says that the British Light Brigade of infantry marched very fast and very hard from Lisbon to Talavera in 1809 demonstrating an incredible pace and stamina I make sure that their wargame counterparts specifically cannot do this as a matter of course. It was a unique event famous in British military history but it was famous chiefly because it was unique. You should not have wargame rules that allow British light infantry to use that marching pace all the time.

There have been some posts here showing mechanical farm machinery reported in engineering periodicals at a certain date but such articles do not mean the machinery was in use on your average farm at that date. Or even in use at all. There were more horse-delivery-miles than lorry-delivery-miles in London in the 1960s. That fact gives you some idea of how slow the universal spread of mechanisation was.

Edited by Martin S-C
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I think the Midland wagon picture merely illustrates:

 

(a) The carriage of baled hay in wartime, quite probably destined to go overseas;

 

(b) The size and proportions of bales produced at that period; and,

 

(c) How they appeared loaded in a 5-plank wagon typical of the day, save that I would expect the load to have been sheeted.

 

If one is modelling wartime fodder traffic, the picture is very useful.

 

It becomes less useful the further from that context we go, and I would be sceptical that it was representative of hay loads much before 1918 or in relation to civilian traffic.  

 

As I thought the context was military fodder traffic - and as we have unearthed a couple of pictures showing British army fodder on the Western Front in bales - the picture was very much on point. 

 

Outside the wartime context, I suspect that the vast majority of hay, however, was cut and stored as winter fodder on the same farm that cut the grass. It would be carted loose to a home field near the farmyard and built into a haystack, with the base raised for ventilation and against rodents, and with the roof thatched (so using straw) against the rain. Similarly, root crops would be 'clamped' on site. 

 

I would imagine that, where hay had to travel by rail, e.g. to an urban livery yard or to railway company stables. it was also forked in loose, hence the height of the railways' open provender wagons; high like the road carts that employed "ladders" to contain a load that was relatively voluminous for its weight. 

 

That said, returning to the context of wartime fodder to the front from British farms, clearly a degree of mechanisation would have been required to produce baled fodder. I venture a guess that neither bales, nor, therefore, the machinery to produce them, were at all common before the Great War. They were not necessarily even that common afterward, but I posit that a degree of mechanisation for baling, probably on lowland English farms, would have been necessary in order to allow the export of significant quantities of baled  hay. Of course, that machinery would then be available post war and, perhaps, the modern practice of stacking hay bales in a Dutch barn or similar grew, probably quite slowly, from there?

 

The illustration I posted showed that the machinery necessary for baling existed in the late Nineteenth Century. I think it likely that the needs of the the Great War must have significantly have accelerated the adoption of such machinery. Given the scenario of farms producing their own fodder and storing on site, I'm not convinced that there would have been a great enough need for hay bales to warrant the widespread adoption of baling equipment until the need to export significant quantities of hay in a more compact and easily transportable form arose due to the war. 

 

EDIT:

 

A few thoughts on Martin's post.

 

Yes, the existence of a thing does not always lead to its immediate widespread adoption - the point I am trying to make above re baling machines of British farms - any more than the exceptional should be taken as the typical.

 

It is also the case that the available technology did not always evolve at the pace that it could have done. It depended on need and it depended on the money to invest.

 

The Stowmarket rural life museum contains a threshing machine - for all I know the very one the Langley model is based on - that in all its essentials is indistinguishable from those first introduced in the 1850s.  The process and technology is the same, the wooden construction is unchanged, as are all the cast iron fitments and moving parts that were clearly still being produced to Victorian patterns by a Victorian process.

 

It was built in the 1940s. The Supermarine Spitfire, with its light alloy monocoque fuselage, single spar wing, stressed metal skin, and Merlin engine, had been in production for several years by then. 

 

The threshing machine was designed to be belt driven by another Victorian design, a steam traction or portable engine. Steam traction engines were built into the 1930s. These technologies persisted despite the existence of internal combustion tractors and combine harvesters (see below). 

 

Thus, when a new machine or technology is invented, it is not necessarily adopted universally or quickly; Martin's point, I think. A farm machine that makes sense on the vast American plains in the 1870s might still not make a lot of sense for a British farmer in the 1910s.  

 

The problem with inventing a better way to do something can often be that the benefits of the new technology do not warrant the scale of investment required for its adoption. A sector like British farming post the 1870s was one where neither the farmers, nor the machinery manufacturers (who would first have to develop. and. second re-tool for, new generation farm technology), were under the necessary pressure, or could afford the necessary investment, to make technological leaps. Things could continue in the way they'd been done for the last 80-90 years without needing to reinvent the wheel (or, in this case, invent the combine harvester).  The Second World War merely cemented the lack of progress due to the necessity of circumstances.

 

For the Grouping era modeller, I suggest the adoption of the internal combustion tractor was somewhat gradual.  It grew, perhaps, to mirror the gradual decline of steam ploughing, which took place over a long period (1919-1960, when the last contractor through in the towel)*.  At some point in that period, tractor ploughing becomes the norm and steam or horse ploughing ceases to become the norm.  Horse ploughing in fact gained a resurgence during the War, thus briefly arresting an otherwise inevitable trend toward the internal combustion tractor.

 

Likewise, between the wars, and during, the norm, I'm sure, would have remained the traditional threshing/thrashing sets powered by traction engines, with the processes of harvesting and of thrashing/threshing (separating the grain from the chaff and the straw) remaining separate.

 

The first combine harvesters, which, of course, combined the various processes, I suspect relatively small, tractor-hauled units like the one pictured below, did not appear in the UK until the 1930s, some 100 years after they were invented in the US.  I suspect that they remained very rare in the UK until post-War.

 

   1639838259_CombineHarvesterHampshire1930s.jpg.ac3e61ebcbfd0f4ca84d5d671ed85aa8.jpg

 

Most of the steam traction engines, ploughing engines and, indeed, steam road vehicles available as models effectively date from the 1918-1920s period, making them too 'modern' for the pre-Great War modeller.  Thus bringing home the fact that such technology remained the norm for the inter-war period. 

 

Likewise, as Martin suggests, horse-drawn traffic is more prevalent far later in the day than many of us might assume.  

 

The Light Division in the Peninsular was an exceptional formation, or, certainly progressively became so. 

 

* Some steam ploughing engines were converted to internal combustion, so, the method, cable ploughing. remained unchanged in such cases. 

Edited by Edwardian
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As I've mentioned before I spent much of my time in the mid 1950's helping on a farm. They had a 'wee grey Fergie' tractor and, for harvesting, a hay cutter, a binder/reaper and a rick lifter. The hay was ricked in the fields, ricks being built around a wooden tripod, and after a short time were then brought into the stackyard as described above.  Likewise corn (mainly oats at that time) was stooked in the fields before also being brought in to the stackyard. In the autumn contractors came in with a threshing machine, belt driven off a tractor. IRC, the grain was bagged out of the threshers used for cattle feed in the winter and the straw was put in a barn with open sides and used for bedding for the cattle. All of this was very labour intensive. Even when they got a baler (c1956) the bales were still loaded and unloaded by hand. 

 

Jim 

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This will take us off-topic in a decisive way, but a key issue in the speed of uptake of technology is the availability, or use, of financial credit.

 

A live example now is battery-electric cars. They are still ruddy expensive compared with i.c., and if no financial credit was involved the rate of take-up would be much slower, it would take ages to get to the critical mass that causes prices to drop, supporting infrastructure to be built etc. But, most near all of ‘em are leased by the user, with financial credit and time-guaranteed cash-flows in the background oiling the wheels of progress.

 

Relevance? The vast majority of British agriculturists at the dates we are talking about, and probably long after, weren’t generating enough surplus to save-up for labour-saving devices quickly, and had restricted, if any, access to credit.

 

A great deal of the acceleration of technological change is down to bankers, rather than engineers. Some of the smartest cookies realised this c1880, which is why the electrical power distribution revolution was such an insane money-fest, with key interests like Siemens binding banking and technical capabilities together.

 

All layouts, even those set deep in Ruralshire, probably need to include, as little white metal passengers, a travelling salesman or three, an off-duty merchant banker, a commercial lawyer, and (in a nearby hedgerow) a tramp, representing one of the many rooked investors of the age.

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1 hour ago, Nearholmer said:

This will take us off-topic in a decisive way, but a key issue in the speed of uptake of technology is the availability, or use, of financial credit.

 

A live example now is battery-electric cars. They are still ruddy expensive compared with i.c., and if no financial credit was involved the rate of take-up would be much slower, it would take ages to get to the critical mass that causes prices to drop, supporting infrastructure to be built etc. But, most near all of ‘em are leased by the user, with financial credit and time-guaranteed cash-flows in the background oiling the wheels of progress.

 

Relevance? The vast majority of British agriculturists at the dates we are talking about, and probably long after, weren’t generating enough surplus to save-up for labour-saving devices quickly, and had restricted, if any, access to credit.

 

A great deal of the acceleration of technological change is down to bankers, rather than engineers. Some of the smartest cookies realised this c1880, which is why the electrical power distribution revolution was such an insane money-fest, with key interests like Siemens binding banking and technical capabilities together.

 

All layouts, even those set deep in Ruralshire, probably need to include, as little white metal passengers, a travelling salesman or three, an off-duty merchant banker, a commercial lawyer, and (in a nearby hedgerow) a tramp, representing one of the many rooked investors of the age.

 

Dead right. That is the reason for the inability to invest I described. 

 

EVs is an apposite example.  An EV is not a solution for me until I can buy the equivalent of what I have now at a price that is not an order of magnitude greater than my budget.  That requires not only for EVs to be more capable than they are now, but cheaper to buy. How long until the EV market can deliver me a second-hand equivalent at a similar price to my current Disco - 15, 20 years from now?

 

Then there is, as you say, the terrific investment needed for chargepoint infrastructure, which I have been thinking about

 

Then there is how to generate all the power it would need .....

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17 minutes ago, Edwardian said:

 

Dead right. That is the reason for the inability to invest I described. 

 

EVs is an apposite example.  An EV is not a solution for me until I can buy the equivalent of what I have now at a price that is not an order of magnitude greater than my budget.  That requires not only for EVs to be more capable than they are now, but cheaper to buy. How long until the EV market can deliver me a second-hand equivalent at a similar price to my current Disco - 15, 20 years from now?

 

Then there is, as you say, the terrific investment needed for chargepoint infrastructure, which I have been thinking about

 

Then there is how to generate all the power it would need .....

Ideally, an EV would cost the same as a fossil-fuel vehicle, but the payback is in lower running costs and better second-hand value due to the recoverability of components, so you have the same price, but better value for money.

 

At the moment, we are being told that the total package is cheaper, but that doesn’t work. It also ignores the subsidies involved - not saying that these subsidies are bad, just acknowledging that they are are.

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20 minutes ago, Edwardian said:

EVs is an apposite example.  An EV is not a solution for me until I can buy the equivalent of what I have now at a price that is not an order of magnitude greater than my budget.  That requires not only for EVs to be more capable than they are now, but cheaper to buy. How long until the EV market can deliver me a second-hand equivalent at a similar price to my current Disco - 15, 20 years from now?

 

Yes - one of the things that annoys me about much of the current EV marketing is the assertion that while they are more expensive to buy, they're cheaper in the long run as you save on fuel - that's all very well, but only if you've got the cash in hand to pay that upfront cost (or are willing to get yourself locked into a hugely expensive lease deal)

 

I saw one online a couple of weeks ago - "work out how much you can save by driving an EV" - except of course it didn't include any of the capital cost in it's calculation, so it's claim that I would save £30-odd per month on fuel and servicing would be predicated on my paying £300-odd per month on lease payments...

 

That and the fact there is still, after around a decade of serious EV development, still only one estate on the market, and that's not a true estate as it doesn't have a flat loadbay...

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There was an excellent analysis in the IET magazine last year, which I wish I’d kept, a properly serious ‘break even comparison’, including capital, depreciation, maintenance and fuel, between a medium-sized EV car and its i.c. equivalent. The key point that emerged was that the break even mileage depends hugely on the unit price of electricity, and it included two sets of figures, one for typical U.K. grid-mix tariff, and one for an EDF all-nuclear tariff.

 

The analysis also looked at emissions break-even, with the EV causing much more emissions during build than an i.c., and it’s lifetime emissions depending upon the source of electricity. Again, EDF nuclear came out ahead, overtaking the ic again at 30k miles, IIRC.

 

If charged only at night on the EDF nuclear economy 7 (8p/kWh at night, 20.3p/kWh daytime, I happened to check it yesterday!), breakeven was (going from memory here) 30k miles, while at grid-mix (roughly 16p/kWh now) it was 50k miles.

 

Now, I am a low mileage car user, and even at the EDF nuclear tariff, and always being careful only to charge at night), it would take  me at least five years to breakeven, and meanwhile I would be ‘down’ by the c£12k difference in first cost, which to me counts as an opportunity cost.

 

Somewhat counterintuitively, given an upbringing where the only EV was a milk float, EVs work out best for high-mileage drivers, especially on stop-start trips, which I guess is why mini cab drivers in urban areas like them.

 

I told you this would take us OT!

 

Getting back to retro-tech, one business that made its money by wedding credit to technology was Raleigh, as in bikes. It’s rather forgotten now, but alongside ironclad build quality, one of their key selling points was that you could walk into a bike shop, make a small down-payment, and pedal away, paying the rest on instalments. I don’t think a credit house was involved, I think Raleigh were effectively providing the dish by deferring collection of the cash, and there was no apparent interest charged, they spread the cost of deferral across everything they sold, but it was credit in all but name.

 

Here we see sex-appeal and buying ‘on tick’ in the same advert. Scandalous!

 

 

 

 

98B34B89-1222-455A-B722-C646CFE0BEE9.jpeg

Edited by Nearholmer
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26 minutes ago, Nearholmer said:

I don’t think a credit house was involved, I think Raleigh were effectively providing the dish by deferring collection of the cash, and there was no apparent interest charged, they spread the cost of deferral across everything they sold, but it was credit in all but name.

Technically, that’s a “hire purchase” agreement, but they are covered by an increasingly complicated set of regulations, and the difference is getting less and less…

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5 hours ago, Regularity said:

Technically, that’s a “hire purchase” agreement, but they are covered by an increasingly complicated set of regulations, and the difference is getting less and less…

Which is why, if you want to buy a budgie as "cheeply" as possible, you should buy the one nearest the bottom of the cage because the others are all on higher perches.

 

I thank you.

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10 minutes ago, St Enodoc said:

Which is why, if you want to buy a budgie as "cheeply" as possible, you should buy the one nearest the bottom of the cage because the others are all on higher perches.

But then you run the risk of getting an ex-budgie!

 

 

Jim

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48 minutes ago, Martin S-C said:

Meanwhile...

1951043872_GWR2-4-0saddletankNo2137PrinceatBrixhamin1891.jpg.f138f7d5b50fa38d70fa552aaa6c3833.jpg

I had some notes somewhere on that particular engine, but I can't darn well find them.  It was originally built for the Broad Gauge, but was converted to coal cart gauge standard gauge after that fateful weekend in 1892.

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  • 1 month later...

I am looking again at my signalling and one issue that's arisen is using platform 4 as a 4a and a 4b, so that a branch railcar or push-pull can terminate there while a main line train coming east can halt further down near the footbridge. I must confess to ignorance over signalling such moves. I imagine calling on arms would be used, both at the entrance and exit of the rearmost platform section. Is that correct? Or would main stop/start signals be used ... or a combination?

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On 08/08/2021 at 10:55, Martin S-C said:

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.

 

As I wrote there:

 

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

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.

 

Yes, its coal and other minerals or empty barrels or sheets over virtually anything else including live pigs but not pig iron.

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