Barry Railway Wagon Brakes

[2996 Victor]

Hi,

 

I've recently invested in the Mountford/Oakwood and WRRC Barry Railway drawings books.  The latter has yet to arrive, and the former's drawings show only limited brake gear detail.

 

I'm particularly interested in details of the vacuum brake arrangements, as used on the Diagram 57 cattle wagons etc, and wondered if anyone had experience of replicating this set-up?

 

Any thoughts/inspiration would be gratefully received!

Cheers,

 

Mark

[corneliuslundie]

I am afraid that Mike Lloyd's cattle wagon drawing is annotated "brake gear conjectural" so that will be no help. You could try posting your query to the WRRC.

Jonathan 

[andrewnummelin]

This drawing in the HMRS collection may be of use.

https://hmrs.org.uk/goods-brake-8ft-w-b-14ft-o-b.html

[2996 Victor]

On 18/10/2019 at 17:17, corneliuslundie said:

I am afraid that Mike Lloyd's cattle wagon drawing is annotated "brake gear conjectural" so that will be no help. You could try posting your query to the WRRC.

Jonathan 

 

Hi Jonathan,

many thanks for your message. My copy of the Welsh Railway Records Vol.2, Barry Railway Drawings arrived, but I've only had the opportunity to collect it from the sorting office this morning.

MML's drawing depicts the 1896 16ft over headstocks Brown, Marshall cattle wagons, which could be termed "medium cattle wagons". As you say, the drawing is annotated to warn that the brake gear is conjectural, although a vacuum pipe is shown.

The vehicles I am particularly interested in are the six 1904 18ft-6ins over headstocks Craven-built "large" wagons (Diagram No.57 in E.R. Mountford's book - Oakwood Press X47), which show a few details of a vacuum brake but with the shoe/pushrod arrangement omitted and the hand lever on the "wrong" side.

I'm a member of the WRRC, so will follow up that line of enquiry also.

With best regards,

Mark

[2996 Victor]

On 19/10/2019 at 09:52, andrewnummelin said:

This drawing in the HMRS collection may be of use.

https://hmrs.org.uk/goods-brake-8ft-w-b-14ft-o-b.html

 

Hi Andrew,

many thanks for your message and suggestion. I've looked at the drawing thumbnail on the HMRS' website, and it could indeed be a useful clue, so I shall be adding that to my drawing "request list"!

With best regards,

Mark

[2996 Victor]

This is becoming quite an interesting subject.

Having now got to hand both books referred to in my first post, it's intriguing to see how a smaller railway company such as the Barry used designs very much like the Great Western's, but of course built by contractors. The 1904 Craven-built cattle wagons are a particular case in point and, I thought, the subject for a fairly simple kit-bash. However, the brake gear is a bit of a question mark, as it seems almost to resemble the long lever GWR Armstrong vacuum brake, as used on the GWR W4 passenger cattle wagons, X2 Micas and Y1/Y2 Fruits. I suspect the actual layout may not be decipherable, so some conjectural modelling may be needed to give a reasonable approximation!

Good fun!

Cheers,

Mark

[corneliuslundie]

Cattle wagons were a minority interest for the Barry - and the Rhymney as well. See page 110 in the drawings book, extracts from company documents, 2 and later 6 more. So I suspect that the manufacturer had a big input into the detailed design. As the Barry was hiring in GWR cattle wagons regularly that may also have influenced the choice of things like brake gear.

18 ft 6 over headstocks and 11 ft wheelbase was certainly to a modern standard at the time, and was the same as the "special cattle wagon"

I wish I could be more help.

Jonathan

[2996 Victor]

1 hour ago, corneliuslundie said:

Cattle wagons were a minority interest for the Barry - and the Rhymney as well. See page 110 in the drawings book, extracts from company documents, 2 and later 6 more. So I suspect that the manufacturer had a big input into the detailed design. As the Barry was hiring in GWR cattle wagons regularly that may also have influenced the choice of things like brake gear.

18 ft 6 over headstocks and 11 ft wheelbase was certainly to a modern standard at the time, and was the same as the "special cattle wagon"

I wish I could be more help.

Jonathan

 

Hi Jonathan,

many thanks for your thoughts - I agree completely! This kind of traffic was definitely small beer for the Barry and doubtless for most if not all of the other South Wales companies.

Assuming that the E.R. Mountford drawing is at least reasonably accurate, and there is no obvious reason to suppose otherwise, one is led to wonder whether the design for the 1904 Craven wagons may have been the result of "someone" (a Barry employee, or perhaps a Craven's employee) measuring a GWR wagon.

The design of brake gear would likely not have been to a patent design, such as Dean-Churchward, as that would presumably have incurred additional costs. Whether the Armstrong vacuum I alluded to earlier was patented, I don't know, and I would imagine that Craven would have used their preferred "in-house" design, but the layout of the cylinder, vee-hanger and lever in Mountford's drawing is a bit of a look-alike.

A photograph would be the answer, of course, but the HMRS doesn't have anything (nor drawings). Whether a search through the library might yield anything is anyone's guess!

Best regards,

Mark

[NCB]

Certainly some of the stock built by outside contractors for some South Wales lines around 1905 used Dean Churchward brakes; for examples see the WRRC Rhymney drawings book. This may have been because of the new BoT requirements for either-side brakes, and the traditional one-lever-on-one-side arrangement was no longer acceptable. The GWR design was available and so was used. This might have applied to some of the Barry wagons. Don't think the cost of using patented brakes would have been a factor; Morton brakes were patented but became almost universal.

[2996 Victor]

Thanks to the offices of a fellow member of the Welsh Railways Research Circle, I've now obtained a scanned drawing of the Craven-built Barry Railway cattle wagon which shows full detail of the vacuum brakes, including the hand lever arrangement which appears on one side of the wagon only.

 

Interestingly, the drawing shows 3-link couplings rather than screw, which one suspects may be in error, and also shows the inclusion of the Wright-Marillier patent partition locking device.

 

The side diagonal bracing is drawn as flat section, in the same manner as the X-bracing on the ends. This is how the virtually identical GWR large cattle wagons (later W1/W5) were built, as shown in some of the photos in GWR Goods Wagons by Atkins et al. Side diagonals were discussed here GWR W1 and W3 Cattle Wagons, where Miss Prism confirms that the initial GWR Lots had flat section side diagonals which were updated to L-section; later Lots were built with L-section side diagonals. Given that the 1904 Craven-built Barry wagons were contemporary with later GWR lots of new-build W5s, it would seem probable that they too had L-section side diagonals from new rather than the flat section as drawn.

 

I can now make a start on yet another wagon project - its about time I actually finished one!

 

Regards,

 

Mark