Pre-Grouping Wagon Loading

[webbcompound]

To confuse things further the drinking song "Good luck to the Barley Mow" lists the sizes of drinking vessels, measures, and containers including the barrel and the half barrel. Clearly beer was not transported in stave built tubs so in this case the half barrel is actually an alternative name for the kilderkin.

[Compound2632]

Indeed. I linked previously to the Wikipedia article on wine cask units, here's the one on beer casks. We have to distinguish between the half barrel as a unit and as a physical container. The latter was impractical for storing liquids but evidently widely used for solids such as butter and margarine. Going back to Mikkel's photo at Paddington, it looks like the half barrels have round lids nailed (?) on.

 

But I still want to know the dimensions (not capacity) of a Burton beer barrel.

Edited September 11, 2019 by Compound2632

[Dave John]

Excellent pics there Compound. I note the little rope cradles the casks are lying on to stop them rolling. Thats going in the reference file. 

 

An odd point though. The photo of the Rhondda & Swansea Bay Railway wagon, is it just me or is the brake lever to the left and the horse shunting loop to the right? I thought they were standardised at the rh end early on, or maybe its a very early wagon? 

 

( or perhaps they did as I have done in the past and made the wagon upside down on the bench and got it wrong ........ ) 

[billbedford]

5 minutes ago, Dave John said:

An odd point though. The photo of the Rhondda & Swansea Bay Railway wagon, is it just me or is the brake lever to the left and the horse shunting loop to the right? I thought they were standardised at the rh end early on, or maybe its a very early wagon? 

1

 

I suspect it is a wagon with brake levers both sides, but both at the same end. These were not uncommon in the early years of the 20th cf the L&Y van in the background of the next photo.

[billbedford]

1 hour ago, Compound2632 said:

Do the boxes contain wrapped block margarine, do we suppose?

 

 

I suspect the boxes contained a single block of margarine, which would have cut up as required by shop workers. 

[Compound2632]

17 minutes ago, billbedford said:

 

I suspect the boxes contained a single block of margarine, which would have cut up as required by shop workers. 

 

There is so much from the relatively recent past - say, pre-decimalisation - that was taken for granted and is now being rapidly lost without record. 

[billbedford]

I remember butter being sold loose, but not margarine. I suspect that this was because margarine was branded from, I guess,  the 1920's. The giveaway with the boxes in the photo is that there are no brand names visible on any of the boxes.

Edited September 11, 2019 by billbedford

[Andy Hayter]

1 hour ago, Compound2632 said:

 

 

But I still want to know the dimensions (not capacity) of a Burton beer barrel.

 

 

Not sure if this statement helps

 

Advertised price is for 3 barrels of nominal size 40 gallons. Approximate height: 35" (88 cm). Approximate diameter at middle: 25" (63 cm).

 

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/383130298880

 

Best guess is a capacity of 50 gallons each or so.  

 

Edit:  Thinking about it that is the external volume.  Internally it is probably 45 gallons or so.

 

 

Edited September 11, 2019 by Andy Hayter

[Andy Hayter]

Another and more informative site:

 

http://www.beerbarrels.co.uk/small_barrels/index.html

 

Sizes and dimensions for a wide range of barrels and casks

[Mikkel]

11 hours ago, Compound2632 said:

Superb. Barrels, half barrels (per the Danish butter coming onto the L&Y at Goole) and boxes. Do the boxes contain wrapped block margarine, do we suppose?

 

I'd tend to agree with Bill that they contained a single block of margarine. The margarine in the Paddington photo might well have been from Otto Monsted's factory at Southall. There's a frustratingly unclear photo of packing in boxes at the factory here, not sure about the date but the boxes are again not branded.

 

https://photobucket.com/gallery/user/hydonian/media/bWVkaWFJZDo1MjY3NzgyMw

 

As for how the barrels were loaded, in an earlier thread Castle provided the photo of Monsted's factory below. Two wagons (with smaller barrels?) seem to show the barrels tilted?

 

 

On 02/02/2018 at 13:29, Castle said:

 

 

 

Edited September 12, 2019 by Mikkel

[maridunian]

Apologies if someone's already made this point, but the Neyland wagon  photo at the start of this thread includes a sack. This would have contained shellfish - whelks, cockles, mussels, etc, literally alive, alive-oh - so not salted or iced. 

 

Mike

Edited September 12, 2019 by maridunian

[Compound2632]

13 hours ago, Dave John said:

Excellent pics there Compound. I note the little rope cradles the casks are lying on to stop them rolling. Thats going in the reference file. 

 

An odd point though. The photo of the Rhondda & Swansea Bay Railway wagon, is it just me or is the brake lever to the left and the horse shunting loop to the right? I thought they were standardised at the rh end early on, or maybe its a very early wagon? 

 

( or perhaps they did as I have done in the past and made the wagon upside down on the bench and got it wrong ........ ) 

 

@Dave John, the rope rings are exactly per the instructions - Section 26 A i c.

 

13 hours ago, billbedford said:

 

I suspect it is a wagon with brake levers both sides, but both at the same end. These were not uncommon in the early years of the 20th cf the L&Y van in the background of the next photo.

 

That R&SBR wagon is a curious beast. It's very a la mode for 1920 - oil axleboxes (looking very like the RCH 1923 pattern?) and steel frame - but with the offside brake lever facing left, an arrangement which the Board of Trade had prohibited for new construction in 1911. (The L&Y seems to have been particularly fond of this economical way of providing a both-side brake. There was an arrangement of cams so that either lever could be used to rotate the cross-shaft to apply the brake, without moving the lever on the other side; the brake could only be released from the side on which it was applied, meeting one of the BoT's requirements. The Morton cam was the eventual solution but I think this only became widespread in post-grouping days.)

 

The R&SBR was a dependency of the Great Western from 1906, so I'm surprised to find that it still had its own rolling stock - unless this wagon has simply gone unpainted for 14+ years - although maybe the axleboxes are a more recent upgrade?

Edited September 12, 2019 by Compound2632

[Marly51]

The posts about wagon loads of barrels being transported by rail reminded me of my early days working in the bank as a ‘foreign business’ clerkess in the late 1960s. We dealt with Exchange Control and Bills of Lading for the export and import of all kinds of Scottish goods including whisky - barrels full on the outward journey, empty on the way back. While this documentation was mainly for shipping, I began to wonder about earlier loaded wagons being transported by ferry to the Continent. Who knows what historic detail about the movement of goods is still hidden in old archives or lost? Found this interesting link https://www.igg.org.uk/rail/7-fops/fo-ferry.htm

Edited September 12, 2019 by Marly51

[Compound2632]

12 minutes ago, Marly51 said:

loaded wagons being transported by ferry to the Continent. 

 

Post grouping, and always a very small proportion of traffic. The tunnel has affected our perception, I'm sure. There were many routes to the continent from many ports - often vying for much the same traffic, e.g. Hull (two dock companies), Immingham, Goole. Plus there was the cheap labour for transhipment and the greater volume of goods that could be contained in the hold of a ship as opposed to in wagons on deck.

[Tom Burnham]

"The Cask" by Freeman Wills Crofts (sometime railway civil engineer in Northern Ireland), published in 1920,  deals with shipping a cask backwards and forwards between London and Paris.  The detectives have to trace exactly how the transport was carried out - by railway companies throughout, or by an independent coastal shipping company with horse and cart used to collect the item from the docks for different parts of the journey.  Opinions vary on whether it's a good detective story, but it's replete with detail of cross-Channel transport of small consignments of goods in the pre-Group era. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/544251.The_Cask

[Compound2632]

... right, that's on my Christmas list! I learn that Crofts was a Midland man too, at least by acquisition.

[Tricky]

I wonder if I might be permitted to pose a question or two on this thread of a prototype nature? I also posed these questions over on my thread ‘Midland in Tewkesbury’ but I thought it might well be worth picking your learned brains here too:

If you Google Tewkesbury brewery wagons and Tewkesbury flour mill wagons then a few photos come up of RTR wagons, for example a green body Brewery wagon, a red body Healings wagon and a brown body Healings van. My questions are: does anyone know if these are actually prototypical and if so would they have been around at the turn of the last century? 

[wagonman]

Some breweries had their own coal wagons – the Lamb in Frome had one, Flowers in Stratford had more than one I think – while a few had PO vans – Shepherd Neame in Kent and various permutations of Bass and Ind Coope had vans with their branding – but it was by no means universal, and I 've never come across one in Healings livery. Avoid.

 

 

Edited September 14, 2019 by wagonman

[RLWP]

On 11/09/2019 at 16:17, John-Miles said:

These were used for dog poo which was an essential material in the making of leather.

 

It was call Pure, I think

 

Richard

[Compound2632]

1 hour ago, Tricky said:

If you Google Tewkesbury brewery wagons and Tewkesbury flour mill wagons then a few photos come up of RTR wagons, for example a green body Brewery wagon, a red body Healings wagon and a brown body Healings van. My questions are: does anyone know if these are actually prototypical and if so would they have been around at the turn of the last century? 

 

At least one of these liveries is authentic (but not the van). The prototype of the Dapol Healings wagon is illustrated in K. Montague, Private Owner Wagons from the Gloucester Railway Carriage & Wagon Company Ltd (OPC, 1981) Plate 270, and in I. Pope, Private Owner Wagons of Gloucestershire (Lightmoor Press, 2006) p. 113. This is a standard Gloucester 10 ton 7-plank wagon of the type represented in 7 mm/ft scale by Slater's kit 7058. According to Montague, this wagon was supplied in January 1900. Livery is chocolate with white lettering shaded black, and black ironwork. The small script reads: Empty to Netherseal Colliery, near Burton-on-Trent. The photo is also in the HMRS collection - close examination reveals the shading to the letters, which appears slightly lighter than the chocolate bodywork!

 

In 4 mm/ft scale, the Dapol model isn't so very far off - the wagon has the right basic dimensions, which is far from the norm for RTR PO wagons. I note that in addition to No. 5, they'e issued this livery but with No. 74; I know not upon what evidence. Pope lists various 8 and 10 ton wagons hired or purchased from the Gloucester RC&W Co. between 1869 and 1920 but mentions no other numbers apart from No. 5 and its twin No. 6. 

 

Reference to the Index of Private Owner Wagons on the Lightmoor Press website, this is the only published photo of a Healing wagon. Neither the index nor the HMRS photograph collection provide any evidence for the Tewkesbury Brewery wagon. That's not definitive proof that there was no such wagon, merely that no photo has been published in the books indexed or exists in the HMRS collection.

 

Pope's book has a photo of the Borough Flour Mills in which a couple of coal wagons can be seen. One is a Midland wagon which I think is a 12 ton wagon to D607, which dates the photo to after 1911. The other is one of James Smith of Stroud's extensive fleet, discussed and illustrated at pp. 152-157 of Pope, op. cit. Smith seems mostly to have dealt with Forest of Dean collieries.

 

The only other photo of a Tewkesbury PO wagon I am aware of is E.W.F. Edgwick, Coal Merchant, Tewkesbury No.5, a Gloucester 8 ton 5-plank wagon supplied in August 1900 - the type is represented by Slater's kit 7044, though this kit has the earlier style of Gloucester axleboxes - Montague, op. cit. Plate 187, and Pope, op. cit. p. 111. Pope surmises that Edgwick's depot was at the "new" station on the Malvern line. Pope mentions a couple of Cheltenham merchants known to have had Tewkesbury depots and whose wagons he illustrates, and one Tewkesbury coal merchant who probably had wagons but no evidence exists. 

 

The Healing and Edgwick wagons were registered with the Midland Railway. The MR's register books for PO wagons exist at the National Archives - I'm hoping to investigate them next time I go, though I have first to renew my ticket. 

 

@wagonman may be able to comment further. EDIT - has already done so.

 

 

 

Edited September 14, 2019 by Compound2632

[wagonman]

Ah the danger of relying on memory! So, Healings join the select list of breweries with their own coal wagon (or two). To that list can be added Bridger Gibbs, later Gibbs Mew, of Salisbury who had at least one wagon (no.10) but he also ran a coal dealing business on the side as did a surprising number of publicans, with or without their own brewery.

 

 

[Tricky]

10 hours ago, Compound2632 said:

 

At least one of these liveries is authentic (but not the van). The prototype of the Dapol Healings wagon is illustrated in K. Montague, Private Owner Wagons from the Gloucester Railway Carriage & Wagon Company Ltd (OPC, 1981) Plate 270, and in I. Pope, Private Owner Wagons of Gloucestershire (Lightmoor Press, 2006) p. 113. This is a standard Gloucester 10 ton 7-plank wagon of the type represented in 7 mm/ft scale by Slater's kit 7058. According to Montague, this wagon was supplied in January 1900. Livery is chocolate with white lettering shaded black, and black ironwork. The small script reads: Empty to Netherseal Colliery, near Burton-on-Trent. The photo is also in the HMRS collection - close examination reveals the shading to the letters, which appears slightly lighter than the chocolate bodywork!

 

In 4 mm/ft scale, the Dapol model isn't so very far off - the wagon has the right basic dimensions, which is far from the norm for RTR PO wagons. I note that in addition to No. 5, they'e issued this livery but with No. 74; I know not upon what evidence. Pope lists various 8 and 10 ton wagons hired or purchased from the Gloucester RC&W Co. between 1869 and 1920 but mentions no other numbers apart from No. 5 and its twin No. 6. 

 

Reference to the Index of Private Owner Wagons on the Lightmoor Press website, this is the only published photo of a Healing wagon. Neither the index nor the HMRS photograph collection provide any evidence for the Tewkesbury Brewery wagon. That's not definitive proof that there was no such wagon, merely that no photo has been published in the books indexed or exists in the HMRS collection.

 

Pope's book has a photo of the Borough Flour Mills in which a couple of coal wagons can be seen. One is a Midland wagon which I think is a 12 ton wagon to D607, which dates the photo to after 1911. The other is one of James Smith of Stroud's extensive fleet, discussed and illustrated at pp. 152-157 of Pope, op. cit. Smith seems mostly to have dealt with Forest of Dean collieries.

 

The only other photo of a Tewkesbury PO wagon I am aware of is E.W.F. Edgwick, Coal Merchant, Tewkesbury No.5, a Gloucester 8 ton 5-plank wagon supplied in August 1900 - the type is represented by Slater's kit 7044, though this kit has the earlier style of Gloucester axleboxes - Montague, op. cit. Plate 187, and Pope, op. cit. p. 111. Pope surmises that Edgwick's depot was at the "new" station on the Malvern line. Pope mentions a couple of Cheltenham merchants known to have had Tewkesbury depots and whose wagons he illustrates, and one Tewkesbury coal merchant who probably had wagons but no evidence exists. 

 

The Healing and Edgwick wagons were registered with the Midland Railway. The MR's register books for PO wagons exist at the National Archives - I'm hoping to investigate them next time I go, though I have first to renew my ticket. 

 

@wagonman may be able to comment further. EDIT - has already done so.

 

 

 

Thank you Stephen - so to summarise I’m ok to reproduce a version of the Healings coal wagon (albeit with a possible question mark over chocolate?) but unfortunately not the Brewery wagon, which is a shame as the green would bring some colour to the scene. 

Do you have a reproducible photo of the Edgwick wagon by any chance?

[Compound2632]

4 hours ago, Tricky said:

Thank you Stephen - so to summarise I’m ok to reproduce a version of the Healings coal wagon (albeit with a possible question mark over chocolate?) but unfortunately not the Brewery wagon, which is a shame as the green would bring some colour to the scene. 

Do you have a reproducible photo of the Edgwick wagon by any chance?

 

Agree. Green is a bit of an esoteric colour for wagons, though it seems to be well-documented for Kingsbury Colliery wagons, though from what date, I have been unable as yet to discover. Chocolate is what it says on the caption board that the Gloucester RC&W Co. included in their photo. I'll PM you.

 

I was a bit surprised to find that POWSides don't list the Healing wagon - it's possible that Slaters may previously have done it as a pre-printed kit. It's on my list in 4 mm scale as that "Return to Netherseal Colliery" puts it in my NE - SW Birmingham coal train.

Edited September 15, 2019 by Compound2632

[Mikkel]

For all those who lie awake at night wondering how vinegar was loaded: 

 

https://www.cfow.org.uk/picture.php?/4168

 

It's a tempting theme for a small layout (as was the whole Hill Evans works).

[Compound2632]

4 minutes ago, Mikkel said:

 

https://www.cfow.org.uk/picture.php?/4168

 

 

1900 eh? That 2-plank wagon... self-contained buffers, rather a deep curb rail. Compare the 2-plank wagon at the left here (at Huntley & Palmers factory, Reading, also said to be c. 1900). The Worcester wagon has G.W.R at the LH end, which we're told went out c. 1893 but looks quite fresh here. On both wagons the script To Carry 8 Tons is written on the top of the lower plank, above the number / G.W.R lettering. Around 4,900 2-plank wagons were built between 1871 and 1878, according to Atkins, it's not clear if conversions from broad gauge wagons are included in that. The one in the Reading photo, No. 25637, doesn't fit in any of the blocks of numbers recorded by Atkins. 

 

Now I'm off to look for photos of the Worcestershire Sauce manufactory in Midland Road.