Freight Routes Around London - 30s to 50s

[The Johnster]

The van is labelled to the final destination at the yard at which it is loaded, and depending on the traffic is forwarded on the next service going in the appropriate direction.  Assume the first stage to be  from the origin point in Cornwall, it probably goes on a pickup freight to be marshalled into a through train going upline at somewhere like Truro or Launceston, and is forwarded to Southall, Feltham, or perhaps Acton because the marshalling yard shunter reads the label and thus knows where to attach it, having had a consist of wagons on the pickup telegraphed from the origin yard to work from quoting the wagon number and position in the pickup.  At the London marshalling yard, it is remarshalled by the same process on to a cross London freight via either the North London line or New Cross and the 'widened lines' tunnels beneath the river, ending up at Temple Mills.  The process is then repeated to forward the van to Cambridge or Colchester, or wherever.  

 

When it's unloaded, matters can become more complex.  If it's a 'pool' wagon (the big 4 had pooling arrangements by the 1930s, and of course all BR vehicles were common user unless branded otherwise, then it is either loaded to another destination or taken empty to one for loading if no traffic is available here.  If it is not a common user pool van, however, it must be returned to it's owning company.  This will be indicated by branding on the van, 'return to ....' or, in the case of Southern and LMS, by an 'N' at each end of the body (for Non pool).  This would apply mostly to vacuum fitted wagons or vehicles for specific traffics (fruit, shelves, ventilated, shock absorbing etc) which the owners wanted back; if a load is available, fine, but otherwise the van is returned empty on the next available forwarding service.

 

The pooling and through working arrangements dated in various forms from very early days, and the only transhipping was between broad and standard gauge vehicles, a major hassle that was one of the things addressed by the Gauge Commission and the reason for early forms of containers, including for coal traffic!  It was arranged by the Railway Clearing House, which also managed the inter-railway billing and freight payments from customers where more than one railway was involved.  

 

Your Cornwall-Cambridge van would probably have taken between 36 and 48 hours to complete it's journey; road transport can do it in about 10, though 15 is more realistic but that's with the post 1960s benefit of motorways; rail was plenty competitive back in the day and express container traffic was much quicker than the ordinary freight service I've described.

[Oldddudders]

8 hours ago, Mike Storey said:

 

Ah, Cedric! Did the report go over his head?

 

He was then Divisional Freight Operating Assistant (MS3!) and my report seemed to find favour. After that he went to be something at the Board, before coming back as AM at London Bridge, when Jolly Jack Jennings went to be DMM at Croydon. 

[Tom Burnham]

Reading the "Inland Transport" volume of the official "History of the Second World War" a while ago (it's available from Amazon for Kindle), there was a lot of emphasis on how to improve wagon utilisation, and one way was to reduce remarshalling at interfaces between companies and have more through-running freight trains between major centres, even if they were served by different group companies.  Mainly this was a timetable exercise, but there were also some track alterations to facilitate it.

[TRAILRAGE]

Interesting stuff here. Regarding cross London Freight, I was watching earlier Diesels and Electrics on 35mm which had some footage of Trains on the Kensington Olympia line. One was a Class 16 on a Mixed Freight with MOD Lorries loaded on European wagons, one was a Class 22 with the Headcode 9A73 on a mixed Freight and another a Class 24 with Headcode 4A11 on Mixed Freight. This would all be late 60's

 

As I'm unsure which direction there are travelling in does anybody know what service the Headcodes  were for? It's something I would like to model but just can't get my head round it all!

 

Cheers Trailrage