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Coal to Kingswear - why?


TomJ
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I hope this is the right place to post this. I've been reading some books about the line to Paignton and Kingswear, and was intrigued by the coal traffic at Kingswear for Torquay gasworks,

Why was it brought in this way? Presumably it went from pit (?South Wales) to rail - to be unloaded into a coaster, that then sailed round Lands End to unload back to a railway wagon for a few miles to Torquay. Wouldn't it have been move efficient and simpler to keep the coal in a railway wagon and take it by train all the way to Torquay?

Just wondering....

Mind you I think Kingswear is possibly the prototype many modellers dream of, beautiful single track branch, with big engines, passenger and freight and a cramped setting!

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Like a lot of the south west, the coal was indeed shipped from Cardiff across the Bristol Channel and unloaded at diverse ports.

Kingswear was much more of a proper port than Torquay, and the gas works was on the top of the cliffs so they couldn't have a private wharf/ quay there.

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14 minutes ago, LBRJ said:

Like a lot of the south west, the coal was indeed shipped from Cardiff across the Bristol Channel and unloaded at diverse ports.

Kingswear was much more of a proper port than Torquay, and the gas works was on the top of the cliffs so they couldn't have a private wharf/ quay there.

i wonder why this was. The voyage around Lands End was one to be avoided and one wonders why you would do that when there was a perfectly suited railway. was it the economics? Maybe it was cheaper for the mine owners to ship coal by sea rather than pay the GWR's rates?

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That's exactly what I can't work out. I can sort of see why it might work for the North Coast - but even then it involves transhipping coal from rail to boat, and potentially back again. And I could understand if coal was transferred straight from boat to where it was needed - but doing it this way seems a very long, labour intensive way, that I can't see how it would be easier (or cheaper) than rail?

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An interesting topic and judging by the different private owner wagons with Plymouth and Torquay addresses, very complicated too. I’ve definitely seen coal trains on Dainton so it wasn’t all delivered by coaster to ports.

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Not all the coal for the markets of the south west would come from South Wales; that from other coal fields may well have been cheaper to move directly by rail - most of the Midlands and Yorkshire coal fields were a long way from the sea in the first place.

 

More or less the whole system in South Wales was set up to funnel the coal down the valleys to Cardiff ; load onto colliers and off over the Ocean to where-ever.

 

I dont know what the pence per ton transportation rate differential between even a small collier and a long train was, but I can imagine it was huge.

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Atkins suggests that before 1914 coal was sent by rail from South Wales to Kingswear because Dartmouth/ Kingswear was the principal South Devon coaling port for merchant shipping.

 

After that date the story might be different.

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According to David Mitchell's book 'Devon & Cornwall Railfreight' the 'gas coal' for Torbay gas works came from Yorkshire, shipped out of Goole, so presumably through the English Channel to Kingswear. Rail was used during WWII to reduce the risk to shipping, but it also mentions that shipping re-commenced in 1951 and continued into the 60s, when the gas works were rebuilt to use different coal.

Welsh steam coal for WR depots in the West Country came from the Cardiff area by rail. The SR depots had deliveries from the Midlands, again by rail.

It all depended on the coal  grade being used, distance to travel and economics of the method used.

Edited by Ramblin Rich
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6 hours ago, TomJ said:

I hope this is the right place to post this. I've been reading some books about the line to Paignton and Kingswear, and was intrigued by the coal traffic at Kingswear for Torquay gasworks,

Why was it brought in this way? Presumably it went from pit (?South Wales) to rail - to be unloaded into a coaster, that then sailed round Lands End to unload back to a railway wagon for a few miles to Torquay. Wouldn't it have been move efficient and simpler to keep the coal in a railway wagon and take it by train all the way to Torquay?

Just wondering....

Mind you I think Kingswear is possibly the prototype many modellers dream of, beautiful single track branch, with big engines, passenger and freight and a cramped setting!

 

Coastal shipping is (was) much cheaper than rail for bulk cargoes (assuming that they are non-perishable).  I saw a picture not long ago (I forget where) of a ship registered in Goole discharging (so probably Yorkshire or East Midlands) coal at Kingswear.  Not just Kingswear, Poole used to have a coal discharging facility on the town quay, with a conveyor system linking it to the gas works.

 

Adrian

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Coal from Lydney in the Forest of Dean went surprisingly long distances by seas in surprisingly small ships to places with good rail connections including Cornwall - the port could not take big ones. So I imagine that shipping coal in larger vessels from major coal ports would be the cheaper option for many destinations.

Jonathan

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Welsh steam coal was shipped across to Hayle in Cornwall.  Some of the poorer stuff went for domestic use (legitimately or otherwise) but the best was for the power station on the quayside there which was also served by rail.  Both ends of the journey were GWR so why ship by water?  Because it was cheaper and the amount required could be shipped twice weekly rather than requiring a couple of trains daily.  

 

I suspect Kingswear was in the same sort of position.  It would have been feasible to serve by rail end to end but may well have been cheaper for the volume required to ship by sea.  If it was Yorkshire coal and came south via the North Sea and English Channel then the perilous waters of Lands End could be avoided.  

 

Coal trains on Dainton may well have been bound for a locomotive depot or bringing domestic supplies for which wagonload traffic dropping off as required was better suited than marine shipments.  

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An earlier post referred to transhipping being a "labour-intensive" operation and thus, by implication, one that the companies would seek to avoid. 

 

We are used now to the fact that the cost of people is the most expensive component in many industrial processes.  One of the biggest societal changes of the last century and a half is that, certainly prior to the second world war, labour was incredibly cheap and machinery relatively expensive.  When you could get labourers to do grunt work for pennies there wasn't much incentive to invest in expensive machinery: labour-intensive is preferable to capital-intensive.  Hence the persistence in the traditional steam-age transport systems of what look to us now like incredibly inefficient methods of working - hand-operated machinery, multiple manual handling of goods, masses of porters on stations, locomotives which require armies of back-up staff to operate, manually operated signalling from closely-spaced boxes each of which has to be staffed. 

 

After the second world war, when the price of labour rose exponentially, the incentive to mechanise and simplify also rose.   The labour-intensive nature of the steam-era railway is what gives models of that railway their enhanced play-value (sorry, "operational potential"), but in real life that came at the price of mass exploitation of working people on poverty wages.  

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That's true, but in the specific case of loading coal at the docks wouldn't some sort of staithe or tippler have been in use during the first half of the 20th century (as it certainly was later)?  So that would in fact be pretty efficient, although unloading could be another matter - unless someone finds a way of lifting the ship out of the water and tipping it over...

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11 hours ago, Edwin_m said:

Ironically enough I caught one of those steam railway programmes recently when they were taking a wagon of coal from the stockpile at Paignton to Kingswear, and using it to fuel up the paddle steamer.  

They started offering brake van rides on their weekly one coal wagon train which Railwayrod and I took advantage of two or three years ago. I don't know if they're still doing them

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  • 2 weeks later...

As has been previously mentioned it depends on the type of coal required.  Coal for gas production is different than coal used for heating or steam locomotives.  The coal was shipped from the North east coast for the Torquay Gas works.  Lots of useful information in the book, Newton Abbot to Kingswear Railway (Oakwood Library of Railway History) by C R Potts.

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Much of the loco coal for the LSWR in the south west was shipped to Fremington Quay, just outside Barnstaple, and a fleet of suitably branded mineral wagons was maintained there, including some ex-LBSC opens in SR days.

This piece from the National-Preservation website makes some interesting comments:-

image.png.ee7411ca404207e004be265de019a80c.png

Archive Magazine has carried several articles regarding shipping around Cornwall and Devon, including a long piece on Hayle, which showed how far these ships were prepared to travel in these sometimes treacherous waters, and the descriptions of how captains attempted to enter harbours in storms are suitably hair-raising.

On a lighter note, a piece on Combe Martin notes that it was economic to send strawberries by boat directly to Cardiff, as it was quicker and, presumably, cheaper than using rail transport, and it was only the Second World War and the mining of the Bristol Channel that brought these trades to a halt, although a Fremington website notes that 80,000 tons of coal were brought into Fremington during that conflict.

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  • 4 weeks later...

Bit late to the party on this one, sorry, but I've been doing a little digging into coals to Kingswear today and came across this thread. Thought I'd share my thoughts and a couple of sources that might be of relevance.

 

On 22/01/2020 at 15:45, TomJ said:

Why was it brought in this way?

Simply, it was cheaper to bring coal from the North-East to Hollicombe (not really Torquay, nor Paignton) by the combination of ship and rail than rail alone. Several thousand tons of coal could be best brought by collier to the nearest decent harbour (Dartmouth) and best brought from Dartmouth to the works by rail.

 

In a little more depth: Dartmouth had been a coaling station since about the time, largely co-incidentally, the railway arrived in Kingswear (and the gasworks was constructed at Hollicombe) in the 1860s. It had always been the case that colliers arrived to discharge into hulks or ashore for steam ships to take bunkers (typically to top up at the start and end of a voyage, Dartmouth being a relatively minor detour and, crucially, usuable in all states of tide and weather). The railway offered an alternative means of having coal delivered (whence it needed moved from wagon to barge to steam ship, still plenty of handling required), but it wasn't until the opening of Severn Tunnel and access to the South Wales coal fields that it offered any particular value.

 

The context matters because Renwick-Wilton (the former the manager of Cwm-Amman Coal Co. in Dartmouth, the latter a domestic coal merchant of Torquay), who landed the gas works contract in 1889 (the year the third crane was purchased for the quayside), had their own colliers for supplying the bunkering trade with coal from Wales and the North. An example would be the Mazeppa:

Mazeppa.jpg

Keeping transport in-house kept costs down. In fact, there were fairly regular threats by the merchants to cut the amount of Welsh coal brought in by rail to protest against GWR's charges...although little seems to have actually changed. Rail freight alone would've increased the costs of their coal, to the detriment of their profits.

 

However, building new facilities at Hollicombe to accomodate colliers would be difficult and expensive (if possible at all) as the photo demonstrates:

1090898_559917857398352_196787693_o.jpg?

 

On 23/01/2020 at 15:03, Edwin_m said:

...loading coal at the docks wouldn't some sort of staithe or tippler have been in use during the first half of the 20th century...

Spot on :)  In 1902 the sidings and end-tipping jetty at Hoodown were constructed to facilitate the wagon-to-barge transfers, and by this time there were three travelling steam cranes (broad gauge still, as their electric replacements would also be) for unloading the colliers at Kingswear quay into wagons.

 

It's also worth reiterating @RichardT's comment on the low cost of labour. To put some numbers on it:

"In 1913 the Dartmouth lumpers who numbered between 500 and 600 were being paid at the piecework rate of 2d per ton. To earn this tiny amount a gang of 6-8 men would have to transfer 200 tons of coal from the hulk to the vessel being coaled. Assuming that task took 4 hours, this was equivalent to daywork rate of 4/-, for at this rate of working it was not physically possible for a man to work a full 8hr day. In any case, there was not always the work available. There were extra payments such as for mooring the incoming ship amounting to perhaps 10d per man. In these circumstances a fit man might earn £1.7s.0d. (£1.35) per week. To be set against this there was the endemic disease of Arthritis was which shortened the working life of most lumpers, brought on either by standing about ‘on the stones’ or working in all weathers. " (a most helpful source, do follow the link)

 

Despite the decline of the bunkering trade through the 20th C, it did continue. The United States Bureau of Foreign and Domestic Commerce's Foreign Bunkering Stations lists Dartmouth as providing both Durham Unscreened and Welsh Steam coal in 1920s and '30s, and still in the 1950s:

"Every two weeks or so, a sea going coaling coaster would enter the river and tie up alongside the jetty ready to discharge it’s cargo of coal. The vessel (usually “MV Similarity”) had left Goole some three days earlier and sailed down the east coast to Devon. Two electrically operated grab cranes usually took three days to unload the ship.  The assembled coal train would then be taken to Torquay gasworks."

 

MV Similarity at Kingswear

Kingswear_-_Railway_Coal_The_Similarity_

 

Between the in-house savings, pre-existing infrastructure and precedent, really it would've been more strange for the Hollicombe gas works to have been supplied by rail alone!

 

Hopefully this has been of some use, sorry it wasn't more timely. Cheers,

 

Schooner

 

ps: 

On 22/01/2020 at 18:35, ikcdab said:

The voyage around Lands End was one to be avoided

 

On 23/01/2020 at 00:00, Gwiwer said:

the perilous waters of Lands End could be avoided.

 

Not sure where this view has crept in from...? Merchantmen have regularly worked around the Land for hundreds (if not thousands) of years under sail, steam and motor; likewise one of Britain's most diverse and numerous fishing fleets. Not to say for a moment it wasn't (isn't) dangerous, and the North Cornish coast

particularly lacking in sanctuary ("From Padstow Point to Lundy Light is a sailor's grave both day and night" as the rhyme has it), but I'm not sure it was avoided and in many ways it's less dangrous than large stetches of the East coast. 

Edited by Schooner
Syntax; softening the post-script. Apologies, didn't mean to sound quite so strident :)
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  • 1 month later...

This afternoons lockdown reading included the Bradford and Barton book 'Diesels on the Devon Main Line',

which includes a 1961 view of D826 on a passenger train at Kingswear with over 30 loaded 16t mins, some occupying the run-round road. Also a 1963 view of D7049 arriving with about 5 empty 16t mins.

 

cheers   

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