Coal yards

[russ p]

Roughly how many traders would have coal cells within a reasonably large coal yard? 

Also would all the cells be the same, I envisage mineral wagons would drop doors onto a sleeper wall and coal would be shovelled into pens

[Compound2632]

Quite possibly none. Coal cells are by and large a piece of modelling convention rather than prototype practice. Each coal merchant would probably have his own stacking area, though some might be loading direct into carts (later lorries) for storage at their own premises rather than renting railway company space. The small town of Stroud, Glos. had around ten coal merchants between its Midland and Great Western stations c. 1900 - 1914 - the number is fluid since they moved in and out of partnership with each other down the years - but no sign of any cell-like structures in either yard, on the OS 25" maps [I. Pope, Private Owner Wagons of Gloucestershire (Lightmoor Press, 2006)].

Edited December 11, 2019 by Compound2632

[Compound2632]

... but a coal merchant based based at a goods station could have had offices of some sort. Of those Stroud coal merchants, only two, Lambert and Ward, have station yard addresses in Kelly's Directory, along with town addresses.

[russ p]

Thanks for the replies,  think I may be getting confused between cells which I think are for hoppers , I'm actually talking about the sleeper construction 'pens' which 16 tonnes were discharged into 

[Compound2632]

9 minutes ago, russ p said:

I'm actually talking about the sleeper construction 'pens' which 16 tonnes were discharged into 

 

That's what I was writing about. Coal drops are a whole 'nother matter.

Edited December 11, 2019 by Compound2632

[russ p]

31 minutes ago, Compound2632 said:

 

That's what I was writing about. Coal drops are a whole 'nother matter.

 

Ah this is more complicated than I first thought. 

So a yard would have quite a few pens that were communal and wagons would discharge into these and stacked and bagged in separate areas by merchants? 

[Compound2632]

26 minutes ago, russ p said:

 

Ah this is more complicated than I first thought. 

So a yard would have quite a few pens that were communal and wagons would discharge into these and stacked and bagged in separate areas by merchants? 

 

My point was that coal pens of any sort are by and large a modeller's fiction. 

 

Photos seem hard to come by but Mike Musson's Warwickshire Railways has some photos of unloading coal wagons at Claverdon, GWR - slightly unusual in that unloading is onto a loading bank rather than the ground, but otherwise illustrating how coal merchants dealt with unloading and, in some cases, bagging:

 

https://www.warwickshirerailways.com/gwr/gwrc12b.htm

https://www.warwickshirerailways.com/gwr/gwrc4.htm

https://www.warwickshirerailways.com/gwr/gwrc3.htm

 

There's more discussion in this topic:

 

 

... although it's mostly about coal drops, larger coal facilities, and mechanised handling.

 

A 1911 example at a station with a single goods siding:

 

https://hmrs.org.uk/photographs/belton-station-goods-and-coal-yard-1911-s-westward-from-down-starting-signal-towards-london-wagons-being-unloaded-in-goods-yard-station-beyond.html

 

In case I'm thought to have a pre-grouping bias, here's an example with 16 tonners - Edinburgh Scotland Street yard:

 

http://www.edinphoto.org.uk/0_edin_t/0_edinburgh_transport_railways_dy_scotland_street_coal_yard_1024.htm#picture

 

 

 

 

 

 

Edited December 11, 2019 by Compound2632

[russ p]

This is a interesting subject,  I'm sure I've seen an aerial view of sheringham and there were coal pens in what is now the car park . This is something I'm going to have to get my books out for .

It will be easier to model a few huts and coal piles 

[Fat Controller]

And whatever else they might be, they're not 'staithes'.

I had a brief glance at the first forty or so pages of R H Clark's 'An Historical Survey of Selected GWR Stations, and not one plan showed any sort of coal storage facilities, even when present in photos of the station. This leads me to wonder whether storage for merchants was done on what might be termed an 'informal' basis.

[Nick Holliday]

1 hour ago, russ p said:

 

Ah this is more complicated than I first thought. 

So a yard would have quite a few pens that were communal and wagons would discharge into these and stacked and bagged in separate areas by merchants? 

Exactly the opposite, if anything. Any coal pens would be the sole preserve of the trader. As others have noted, bagging was often carried out directly from wagons, as it minimised manual handling. Storing in pens usually meant wasteful double handling. The rarity regarding coal bins is mainly regarding those positioned close to the tracks, as these would severely limit access for other traders, and could be a safety hazard. The idea of having the end of a bin supporting the drop down door is largely fictional, as it was technically forbidden by the railway companies, as being dangerous, but no doubt examples of the practice can be found. Coal pens remote from the tracks were relatively common. 

As general traffic to goods yards reduced, after nationalisation, it became easier for coal merchants to claim space in the yard, and bins proximate to the tracks began to be more common, but always with a clear space between the wagons and the rear wall of the bin. But there were examples of them in the south east prior to grouping, on the GER, LBSCR and SECR at least.

[Nearholmer]

Yes, I've looked at a worryingly large number of photos of railway coal yards and the coal-unloading parts of goods yards in the southern half of England, and can remember a few when they still existed, and many (not all) did indeed have pens, often a very great number of pens. Often the pens were not adjacent the siding, , but were effectively stockpiles, located on spare land at the edge of the yard.

 

But, what is very noticeable is that most of the pens, and the associated huts for storing sacks and tools, and sheltering from the weather, were decidedly "home made", often very ramshackle, things. Certainly the few that I can remember clearly were very untidy things, cobbled together from any old bit of timber that was to hand, sagging and rusting corrugated iron, old doors. Sunningdale sticks in my mind particularly, because I watched a Q1 shunting there, and that yard looked as if someone had dropped vast amounts of coal, old timber, and scrap iron into it from a great height.

 

I doubt that a railway surveyor would have regarded most of the pens or hutments as permanent structures, which is probably why they got omitted from plans. Some do show on OS maps, but that could well have been based on the surveyors' judgements ......... I'd bet that some were omitted too.

[Compound2632]

Interesting. Maybe its a regional thing and / or the various railway companies had different attitudes to permitting them?

[Brassey]

Coal was left stored in the wagon(s) until needed.  10 tons of coal would have lasted a small village quite some time.

 

I read somewhere that the LNWR coal depots in South London serving populations of around 100,000 had about 3 coal trains a week.  You easily see that amount shunted in and out on BLTs at exhibitions in less than a day.

[Nearholmer]

There are a few very rough methods for calculating domestic coal demand for a town/village, and one that isn't too far out is to use 1cwt/week for each household.

 

This averages out about right, taking into account large households (big house, servants etc) and small (the lone widow eking out on what she could barely afford), and covers summer troughs and winter peaks.

 

So, for a small town of 5000 souls, inhabiting perhaps 2000 houses, that gives 100 tons, or about ten wagons, each week (probably fewer in summer and more in winter, but remember the merchants stockpiling).

 

Brassey's one wagon would probably cover a small village (say 600 people in 240 homes) for a couple of weeks in summer, but they might need three wagons a fortnight in winter.

 

I've been delving deeply into the historical railway traffic at Buckingham (c5500 people) and the next station up the line, Padbury (600 people), recently, and the numbers above fit very neatly with siding accommodation available for coal wagons at the two places.

 

Buckingham seems to have had one long siding for coal, and had three merchants, one of whom had accommodation at both the railway yard and the canal wharf, which was the previous coal importing point for the town. The town also had two big coal users with private sidings, plus a good amount of small industry that must have used yet more coal, a tiny gas works, and an even tinier electricity generating station, both of which must have carted away from the sidings.

 

Padbury had one siding for everything, which was effectively in the station forecourt in public space, with no coal storage from what I can work out, so there I surmise that the merchant, William Sear (Senior) in 1907, carted-off to his own yard somewhere nearby, perhaps on the farm run by his son William Sear (Junior). I imagine 'senior' to have been a semi-retired farmer himself.

 

Another method is to assume 1cwt/week for each chimney stack, which might contain the flues for two or three fires, which again works, but is harder to apply to a model railway serving a non-existent place!

 

So, guess how much coal my parents used to order for a small three-bedroomed semi containing a family of five, when I was a boy: 1cwt each week! In the summer this would stack up until the bunker (maybe 15cwt) was full, and in the winter they'd run that down part-way, then order more. We usually had only one fire going in the house, the other one was only lit when my brothers were new-borns, and if anyone was poorly and in bed for a while.

 

Edited December 11, 2019 by Nearholmer

[GeoffAlan]

Castleton, on the Esk valley line to Whitby, had coal drops into 5 or 6 separate storage areas. Back in the 1950s and 1960s I remember a coal merchant having a little shed and signs on two of the drops. Wagons would be shunted over the appropriate drop and unloaded. The coal merchant bagged and delivered to among others, my Grandparents. They got there coal by the ton or half ton as they lived in Commondale and the roads were liable to becoming impassible in winter. I do remember a couple of years where we could only visit them by train, this entailed a very long walk in the snow from the station to their house.

[Dave John]

I did a bit of research into the subject for my own layout, though the focus was on pre grouping Caledonian. I came to the conclusion that the yard I was modelling would be at least 60 - 80 wagons a week based on 10 rather than 16 tons average. Handleing would be wagons into bags or straight into carts, storage would be piles. 

 

 

from which it ended up looking like;

 

 

 

[DCB]

11 minutes ago, Brassey said:

Coal was left stored in the wagon(s) until needed.  10 tons of coal would have lasted a small village quite some time.

 

I read somewhere that the LNWR coal depots in South London serving populations of around 100,000 had about 3 coal trains a week.  You easily see that amount shunted in and out on BLTs at exhibitions in less than a day.

That sounds good, but the train lengths were nothing like the 6 wagons and a van of the typical model BLT.

   We use 50 to 75KG of smokeless anthracite per week in winter, one to one and a half hundredweight, less in summer in a hopper fed central heating system for a small 1920s house so a couple of tons PA.

100 000, presumably adults. couple of tons each house per year? 4 per house?  50 000 tons PA  1000 tons PW  100 X 10 ton wagons PW, 3 X 30 wagon trains PW.

The BLT coal trains could be lengthy beasts, most GW BLTs could cope with 40 wagon trains, A Pannier turning up with 3 coal wagons and a van was very much a death steam scenario.  Coal was often the final traffic to be withdrawn as branches closed and in the 1960s was still big business with virtually every household having coal delivered by the coal merchants by lorry.   It varied but usually the area next to the siding was kept clear for lorries and carts to manoeuvre. Horse drawn carts can turn in their own length but have trouble reversing, Lorries are the opposite.   Merchants were charged demurrage for Wagons  tied up, un emptied  so some emptied them ASAP and spirited the coal to the piles often modelled with wooden enclosures  within the yard but away from the tracks. Loading from wagon to enclosure almost certainly happened but  I have not seen any evidence.

To pick up on Nearholmer's point,( he posted after I started writing!,)  a coal yard would often serve more than one village, For instance Foss Cross,(MSWJR)  serving a hamlet of about 12 houses, also provided coal facilities for Chedworth 300 dwellings and the Coln Valley to Bibury, about another 500 dwellings. Probably 1000 dwellings in total plus a Lime Kiln.It may even have served Northleach 4 miles north with no railway, but Andoversford and Bourton were equally convenient.    Chedworth the next station North did not have goods facilities and Cirenceser Watermoor the next station south had limited coal traffic as Cirencester Town GWR had extensive yards and got in 30 years before the MSWJR!  Prior to the railways coal was a prohibitively expensive luxury for many ordinary country folk..  They went "Wooding" and burned anything that would burn basically.    

[russ p]

Thanks for all the replies,  so glad I posted this. 

I will have some piles next to wagons and others near huts

How it will work is trains will arrive at the main yard on an adjacent board from the rest of the world,  the train will be split and shunted and made into a train to be tripped to the main station of Cley and once here the pilot will sort the train , coal for the coal yard and other traffic to the goods yard or docks .

I'm hoping to have plenty of play value with plug in points for handsets around the room so multiple operators can make it a social time.

Some oldish pictures are on my layout thread,  just getting started again after summer and major surgery 

[Fat Controller]

Russ,

I realise that this isn't the sort of coal yard you were looking for, but it has some interesting features One of these is the front-loader and goose-necked tipping trailer, used to take deliveries from the under-track cells to some of the remoter parts of the yard. This yard remained active until the mid-1980s, shutting after the end of the Miners' Strike.

 

 

 https://www.flickr.com/photos/irishswissernie/27534316927/in/album-72157667452889327/

https://www.flickr.com/photos/irishswissernie/41681717374/in/album-72157667452889327/

 

[russ p]

I remember those, I wonder how they operated the door levers as there are no walkways on them 

[Nearholmer]

I just remembered this photo of Bechill West, taken in 1936.

 

The height of the stockpiling season???

 

[Compound2632]

If you are going to have coal bins of this sort in the goods yard, what I think that Bexhill (?) photo shows is that each merchant will have bins for different grades of coal.

[Nearholmer]

Yes. Where Bechill is I have no idea.

[Mikkel]

I have posted this before, but it's so modellable . Acton Mainline, 1947.

 

 

Source: Britian from Above: https://britainfromabove.org.uk/en/image/EAW006450

 

 

Edited December 11, 2019 by Mikkel

[russ p]

4 minutes ago, Mikkel said:

I have posted this before, but it's so modellable . Acton Mainline, 1947.

 

 

Source: Britian from Above: https://britainfromabove.org.uk/en/image/EAW006450

 

 

 

Oh wow , would those wagons be discharged over the sleeper wall into the pens?