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SR Milk Tanks Horam to Mottingham


Nearholmer
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Folks,

 

I'm aware of the thread about road/rail tankers and wagons in general, but am wondering whether anyone can point me towards more info about the SR vehicles used in East Sussex during the 1930s.

 

There was an Express Dairies depot at Horam, which evidence seems to suggest was used to load road tankers to rail, and there are accounts of both London and Eastbourne direction passenger trains being used to convey two or three at a time onwards; and, the Bluebell Railway website suggests that the SR had both four and six wheeled variants of the carrying wagons, but only in small quantities.

 

Mayfield is also said in some accounts to have had a milk depot which despatched tanks by rail, although if it did I can't work out where it was. Other accounts talk of milk from Mayfield going out by rail in vans, so churn traffic, until the late 1930s.

 

Are they, for instance, described in the relevant volume of the OPC books on SR wagons? I only have the LBSCR volume.

 

Thanks in advance, Kevin

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Hello Kevin

 

I contacted fellow 00 Wishlist Poll Team member and 'milk researcher', Glen Woods. His reply is below.

 

Regards

 

Brian

 

Express Dairy loaded 6-Wheel milk tankers for Mottingham from Horam in the 1930s the workings were:

 

Loaded.

 

7 31 p.m.  Eastbourne to Tonbridge two tanks, plus van or vans churns if required, attached to the rear at Horam, detached at Groombridge.

 

Attached at Groombridge to the 9 .0 p.m. Tunbridge Wells West to Victoria.

1 30 a.m. Victoria to Strood, tanks detached at Mottingham.

 

Empties

 

SX

 

6 37 p.m. Mottingham to Victoria.

Attached to 9 10 p.m. Victoria to East Grinstead, detached at East Croydon.

 

Attached to the 10 40 p.m.  London Bridge to Brighton and Eastbourne, detached at Haywards Heath for the:

 

12 20 a.m. Haywards Heath to Eastbourne.

5 43 a.m. Eastbourne to Waldron.

 

SO

 

6 20 p.m. Mottingham to Victoria.

Attached to 8 2 p.m. Victoria to Uckfield (if vans passing these to be in front of the tanks). Eridge to detach and transfer to the:

 

9 30 p.m. Tunbridge Wells West to Eastbourne and detached at Waldron.

 

Source documentation:

Working Timetable supplements held by the Bluebell Railway Museum Archive

 

I have not come across any workings or details of tank loading facilities at Mayfield. It was likely that Mayfield, like nearly every other rural station, did load milk in churns.

 

Glen Woods

 

 

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Brian

 

that really is most excellent information; please pass huge thanks on to Glen.

 

If he is able to tell, and if it isn’t too much trouble, i’d Be interested to understand whether the “6-wheel tanks” were road tanks loaded on carrying wagons, or the more typical tank wagon like the one preserved at Horsted Keynes.

 

many thanks, Kevin

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Details of the vehicles are in Mike King's Passenger Coaches bible and Gould's Passenger Vans book - not in the wagon books as they weren't ! .......... technically - pedant hat on - the SR had four wheeled then six wheeled variants as the former were found inappropriate for milk traffic ( converting the liquid into butter ) so the tanks were re-mounted on six-wheel chassis. 

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Hello Kevin

 

More from Glen below.

 

Brian

 

The milk was transported in 6-wheeled milk tankers. Express Dairies did not have any milk tank trucks for carrying Dyson Trailers (United Dairies and Co-operative Wholesale Society operated these on the SR). The original SR 4-wheeled milk tankers were operated by United Dairies and were rebuilt in 1937/8. Between 1932 and 1938 the SR operated both 4-wheeled and 6-wheeled milk tankers.

 

Glen Woods

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I will add this snippet from the biography of a local man, which I found on line. 

 

Not sure of the date, 1940s possibly, but it suggests an evening ‘up’ service of loaded tankers, which might have matched the morning one, to give a 12 hourly milking cycle if there was no cooled storage at Horam.

 

It’s surprising how heavily-engineered The Cuckoo Line was, with some high embankments and deep cuttings, but still pretty steep, and particularly around Mayfield and Rotherfield, very tight curves.

 

 

 

 

2A35E7EA-11DB-4F9A-AB40-6DAE6F118A4A.jpeg

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The location of the loading point at Horam is pretty clear: long siding to milk depot, curving away from S end of station to the east.

 

But, what form did the unloading point at Mottingham take?

 

From maps, the only possibility that I can identify is a large building at the London end of the station, on the Up side, served by a siding trailing from the Up line, but that has no road access, and I suspect that it might be the rotary convertor substation that existed from c1925-1958. Mottingham Express Dairies depot was quite a long way from the station, in the town/village, so I'm stumped!

 

Are there any Old Mottinghamians here present?

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Isn’t the cider place fairly new, by which one mean post 1960s? I vaguely remember my father and his brothers getting excited when it opened, or maybe it was when they discovered its special qualities!

 

Edit: having checked, it started earlier than I thought. Maybe it was the “factory” that opened c1970, production having been at the Manor up until then.Answer to your question: I’ve no real idea, but I rather doubt it, because I don’t think the brand really got going until after small goods on the railways had dwindled to virtually nothing.

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  • 5 months later...
On 29/07/2019 at 21:21, Nearholmer said:

The location of the loading point at Horam is pretty clear: long siding to milk depot, curving away from S end of station to the east.

 

But, what form did the unloading point at Mottingham take?

 

From maps, the only possibility that I can identify is a large building at the London end of the station, on the Up side, served by a siding trailing from the Up line, but that has no road access, and I suspect that it might be the rotary convertor substation that existed from c1925-1958. Mottingham Express Dairies depot was quite a long way from the station, in the town/village, so I'm stumped!

 

Are there any Old Mottinghamians here present?

Mrs SED Freightman grew up in Mottingham and remembers the Express Dairy, unfortunately she failed to take any interest in activities at the station goods yard !  The 1957 1:1,250 OS map shows a siding entering a long thin building adjacent to the Down Platform, as the building appears to be too narrow for a goods shed, perhaps it was a covered area for discharging the milk tanks.  The quantity of milk forwarded to Mottingham would seem to be too great for just local use so presumably it acted as a distribution point for other local Express Dairies such as Petts Wood. There is a photo on Flicker https://c1.staticflickr.com/9/8588/28536022601_4b545af6b7_b.jpg  showing an express dairy road tanker in the Petts Wood area. 

 

 

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Well spotted Mr SEDF ........ I'd looked at the 1935 map, but now notice that it was revised in 1914, so donkeys years out of date.

 

I've no doubt that what you've identified is the very thing, because its drawn as a canopy (dashed edges indicating open sides along W-N-E and a solid line indicating a wall on S against the platform).

 

I'd been mystified where the bottling plant was, and how milk got to it, wondering if it was near enough for pipes, as was done at Vauxhall, but a shuttle-service with tanker lorries to one, or as you suggest several, local dairy/bottling-plant sites makes perfect sense, and is a really good model railway dodge, making a suburban rail tank facility very compact.

 

All this probably explains why the rail milk flow seems to have ceased around WW2, in that the routes the rail wagons took were complicated, with lots of shunting, and the road tanker distribution must have been expensive to operate ......... I bet that as soon as they got lorries (early artics?) good enough to make the run from Sussex, which can't have been too bad once the A21 was reasonably upgraded, and once farms had cooled tanks installed, they went direct from farms to bottling plants by road.

 

Many thanks.

 

(Did Mrs SEDF fritter all her time skipping and playing hopscotch?)

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On 11/01/2020 at 20:51, Nearholmer said:

Well spotted Mr SEDF ........ I'd looked at the 1935 map, but now notice that it was revised in 1914, so donkeys years out of date.

 

I've no doubt that what you've identified is the very thing, because its drawn as a canopy (dashed edges indicating open sides along W-N-E and a solid line indicating a wall on S against the platform).

 

I'd been mystified where the bottling plant was, and how milk got to it, wondering if it was near enough for pipes, as was done at Vauxhall, but a shuttle-service with tanker lorries to one, or as you suggest several, local dairy/bottling-plant sites makes perfect sense, and is a really good model railway dodge, making a suburban rail tank facility very compact.

 

All this probably explains why the rail milk flow seems to have ceased around WW2, in that the routes the rail wagons took were complicated, with lots of shunting, and the road tanker distribution must have been expensive to operate ......... I bet that as soon as they got lorries (early artics?) good enough to make the run from Sussex, which can't have been too bad once the A21 was reasonably upgraded, and once farms had cooled tanks installed, they went direct from farms to bottling plants by road.

 

Many thanks.

 

(Did Mrs SEDF fritter all her time skipping and playing hopscotch?)

An item in Commercial Motor magazine of 16/01/1923 (pg.10) mentions specifically that Express Dairies were contemplating the use of road transport from country depots to London due to high railway rates, so the rail traffic may have ceased well before WW2.  Additionally, Express Dairies look to have been concentrating bottling activities at larger sites as time passed, leaving the smaller sites as simply local distribution depots for bulk supplies of bottled milk arriving by road.  Another item in Commercial Motor edition of 12/05/1931 (pg.116) states that by this time Express Dairies only had bottling plants at Herne Hill, Eltham, Cricklewood, Chiswick, Finchley and Harrow Road, so possibly Eltham was also supplied via Mottingham at one time.

 

Re Mrs SEDF's out of school activities, I could not possibly comment.

Edited by SED Freightman
Page number corrected.
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I've never been able to tell where Mottingham starts and Eltham finishes, and I wonder if what Express Dairies called  "Eltham Bottling Plant" was actually the plant in Mottingham (the site is now a Harley-Davidson dealership!).

 

The station in question was called originally Eltham & Mottingham, and the present Eltham station is nearer what was called Well Hall, then later Eltham Well Hall station. EWH had sidings, so it would seem odd not to consign milk to there, if the bottling plant was truly in Eltham.

 

From small clues, I think the rail traffic was still going up to WW2, but I can find no reference to it in the 1950s.

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On 12/01/2020 at 22:11, Nearholmer said:

I've never been able to tell where Mottingham starts and Eltham finishes, and I wonder if what Express Dairies called  "Eltham Bottling Plant" was actually the plant in Mottingham (the site is now a Harley-Davidson dealership!).

 

That is possible but it is too far from the line to have been rail served. The 1952 OS map shows some sidings just west of Mottingham station but makes no mention of a Dairy. Other bottling plants such as Kensington were marked as such on OS maps of the period.

 

Tantalisingly, this photo 1970 of Mottingham station mentions milk traffic but there is nothing in the photo that looks like a dairy (even on the high resolution version). Of course it could have already been demolished by this date.

 

Mottingham station in 1970

 

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The dairy building in Mottingham was about half a mile from the station, in the centre of the village, next to a pub called The Porcupine - it’s marked on maps simply as “depot”.

 

Based on what has been identified by SEDF, my surmise is that:

 

-a) it was a bottling plant (it was certainly where all the milk rounds started from); and,

 

b) milk was ferried the short distance from the station by road tanker.

 

I have scoured maps looking for candidate sites in Eltham, NE of this railway and SW of the next across, and can find none.

 

I think your photo above is looking in the London Direction from the road over bridge, so the location of the (former by 1970) milk unloading facility is obscured by the footbridge; it was behind the down platform, sharing road access (and dust!) with the coal yard.

 

K

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There was nothing in Middleton about milk traffic although the sidings mentioned above are clearly on the 1914 map too

 

Mottingham, the place is between the Dartford Loop and the SER main line. The pub mentioned by Nearholmer was more or less equidistant between Mottingham and Grove Park (according to a google maps search for it) near Eltham College

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That is Eltham College, in Mottingham.

 

See why I get confused, and why I suspect that "Eltham Bottling Plant" was the depot in Mottingham?

 

Very many years ago, I remember going on a multi-day gricing expedition to London with a school pal, whose family first came to our small country town as evacuees during WW2 - his gran, know to all as Old Ma ........ was the Celebrity Cockney in the town, being known to everyone for her wit, wisdom and 'way with words' (=shameless effing and blinding). Our overnight billet was with his uncle and aunt who by then lived somewhere in the Mottingham/Eltham area, and we walked from Grove Park, through Mottingham to near Eltham well Hall ...... no distance at all, and to me at the time "all houses".

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I would agree that in the absence of any alternative information, the Eltham Bottling Plant was located in Mottingham, by the War Memorial and Porcupine PH, with milk being transferred by road from Mottingham Stn goods yard.

 

Further digging re Eltham itself has revealed that there was an Eltham Dairy at 82 High Street Eltham, adjacent to The Greyhound PH.  The Francis Frith website ( https://www.francisfrith.com/eltham/long-gone_memory-438721  ) contains the following memory of a Eltham resident :-

 "My dad worked at the Express Dairy bottling depot opposite side of the road to the church. I often went to watch and be treated to a drink in their canteen, as a child I found it fascinating watching the bottles being cleaned and refilled with milk. Unfortunately, it was closed and moved to Morden in Surrey so Dad had to travel there everyday on his motorbike!"

 

Photos of the original dairy and the building that replaced it appear on a website relating to the Greyhound PH ( http://www.dover-kent.com/2015-project/Greyhound-Eltham.html  ), interestingly the original dairy was replaced with a large building containing an Express Restaurant (part of Express Dairies) so presumably Express Dairies had taken over the original Eltham Dairy - was there still a bottling plant around the back ?

 

The formation of the Milk Marketing Board in 1933 resulted in changes to the arrengements for the supply of bulk milk, so this may have eventually brought about the end of milk by rail from Horam.

 

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The plot, if not the milk, thickens.

 

Maybe the bottling plant was at the Eltham site, not the Mottingham site.

 

Either way, unless there were pipes, which seems unlikely in either case, it must have gone by road from the station.

 

I know a long-retired guy (mega railway enthusiast and RMWeb member) who used to be the MMB’s logistics supremo, but whenever I’ve pestered him with similar location-specific questions before, he hasn’t been able to put his finger on things back beyond when he worked there - early ‘60s onwards, I think.

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  • 1 year later...

The Eltham Express Dairy Bottling Plant was located in Eltham diagonally opposite Eltham church. The front was a restaurant,  facing onto the High Street and the site ran ran for a substantial distance behind the shops of Court Yard.  Indeed vechile access was to and from Court Yard.    After lying derelict for some time,  a new Post Office sorting depot for SE9 was built on the site, with a new Post Office "shop" in the last shop of the Parade.

 

Mottingham, by the War Memorial and Porcupine PH,  was a domestic milk distribution depot with electric floats et al.

 

I agree with: 

Further digging re Eltham itself has revealed that there was an Eltham Dairy at 82 High Street Eltham, adjacent to The Greyhound PH.  The Francis Frith website ( https://www.francisfrith.com/eltham/long-gone_memory-438721  ) contains the following memory of a Eltham resident :-

 "My dad worked at the Express Dairy bottling depot opposite side of the road to the church. I often went to watch and be treated to a drink in their canteen, as a child I found it fascinating watching the bottles being cleaned and refilled with milk. Unfortunately, it was closed and moved to Morden in Surrey so Dad had to travel there everyday on his motorbike!"

 

Yes there was  still a bottling plant around the back !!!

 

How do I know? From  Aug 1952 to Aug 1959 I was a pupil at Greenacres school on the Coldharbour Estate. One day our class were taken on a trip to see the milk bottling plant at Eltham. We walked in "crocodile" to Mottingham  Station and took the 161 bus to Eltham. ( surely we split into small groups for the bus?) 

 

We were so well behaved that we were treated to afternoon tea upstairs in the Express Dairy Restaurant.

 

I would suggest that if defintive proof is required, then contact John Kennett, historian to the Eltham Society

 

regards Roger H

 

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