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Sturgeon wagons in an actual formation.


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A simple question really, but I don't seem to be able to find any examples to answer it.

I'm thinking of a train with 3 or 4 sturgeons carrying track panels.

When a sturgeon, or other track carrying wagon, is in a train, what else would be in the consist with them?

Would they be a standalone train just of Sturgeon wagons, or would the other wagons which took part in the possession/works be included with it and if so what would they be?

I can't find any pictures of whole trains,  just individual wagons.

Any guidance would be much appreciated.

 

Mike.

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While sturgeons could be used for track panels that was more normally a job for Salmon wagons. Although that might have varied from Division/Region to Division/Region or over time. A Sturgeon in my experience would more likely be used for rails or S&C components. Scrap S&C might be loaded in a sturgeon with sides (Later a Tench) because the sides made getting a safe load easier, with the old timbers going into open wagons.

 

I also seem to remember that there were two types of Sturgeon, Sturgeon and Sturgeon A one of which had gauging restrictions, and was only used to carry imported timber from docks to Ditton? depot.

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I only found two images with a Sturgeon in, both in BR Blue No.3 - Freight in the 80s dating from 1987 and 1990.

47210 with 3 x Dace loaded with new ballast, Sturgeon with what appears to be a lifting beam(s), then many more Dace and similar all loaded with ballast.

47117 with ZDA, ZCA, Sturgeon (no load), ZCA and 2 x ZDA, all loaded with new wooden sleepers.

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Mike

 

Having looked at this quite recently, for the blue period, a Salmon and Sturgeon mix is not uncommon based on pics and also found the odd Dolphin as well (with the ends cut down).  Brake van both ends typically.  Can't recall much in the way of other types but no reason a few Grampus or equivalent couldn't be included if its recovered track panels to collect miscellaneous bits.

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Thanks for your replies gents.

My period is late 60's early 70's.

Based on the foregoing, Sturgeons and a few Grampus/Tunny/Ling full of spent ballast for a track recovery train, with maybe a few empty Cat/Dogfish for track replacement, both with brake van at each end, seems a good little train.

 

Mike.

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21 hours ago, Enterprisingwestern said:

 

Thanks for your replies gents.

My period is late 60's early 70's.

Based on the foregoing, Sturgeons and a few Grampus/Tunny/Ling full of spent ballast for a track recovery train, with maybe a few empty Cat/Dogfish for track replacement, both with brake van at each end, seems a good little train.

 

Mike.

 

How are you going to load the spent ballast into the open wagons which are now off the end of the job and on the road you have taken the track out of and hence can not be moved nearer? Note that you will need enough opens to stand the job slightly more than twice to reballast, so if you have twelve panels on two sturgeons that would mean about 34 opens for spoil. You would then need a similar number of opens full of new bottom stone, and of hoppers for the boxing in and shoulder ballast. I would suggest marshalling the hoppers next to the loco as controlling them during unloading if they were at the back on an unfitted train of that length could be tricky.

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6 minutes ago, Trog said:

 

How are you going to load the spent ballast into the open wagons which are now off the end of the job and on the road you have taken the track out of and hence can not be moved nearer? Note that you will need enough opens to stand the job slightly more than twice to reballast, so if you have twelve panels on two sturgeons that would mean about 34 opens for spoil. You would then need a similar number of opens full of new bottom stone, and of hoppers for the boxing in and shoulder ballast. I would suggest marshalling the hoppers next to the loco as controlling them during unloading if they were at the back on an unfitted train of that length could be tricky.

 

This is very useful indeed, Trog.  The quantities of material that you allude to above - are these representative of practices in the sixties or more recently?  Like Mike I'm trying to recreate operations in '67-68, on a secondary main line that was probably given intermittent renewals in 1965 or so.

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8 hours ago, 'CHARD said:

 

This is very useful indeed, Trog.  The quantities of material that you allude to above - are these representative of practices in the sixties or more recently?  Like Mike I'm trying to recreate operations in '67-68, on a secondary main line that was probably given intermittent renewals in 1965 or so.

 

We are talking the relationship between volume and weight and wagon numbers and that is going to be reasonably constant for the whole BR period. The amount of spoil generated by reballasting is going to be a function of job length x depth of dig. To avoid moving the trains about too much you want your spoil train to be a multiple of just over the length of the job.

 

The reasons for this are that moving a train at night takes quite a bit of time, in that you will have to wake up the train crew, who will be asleep in their chairs with their feet up on the desk. With all the heaters and the cooking ring full on to give the sauna like heat they prefer. You will then have to stand there and politely explain to them why you regretfully cannot let them move the loco down to the nearest access point just in case their reliefs turn up an hour early. While standing in a spreading puddle of rain water that is dripping out of your clothes. You then have to get back out into the rain and position yourself somewhere suitable to control the movement, and send someone back to bang on the side of the loco below the side window and request that one of the crew sticks his head out so he can see your signal. You then make the move and then can run round telling everyone that it is safe to start loading again. So if you are wise you set things up so you have to do this the least number of times.

 

This is helped by having a train that is either as long as or twice as long as the job plus two or three wagons. As you can set your digging machines up so they each have an equal amount to dig, with as few places where one machine takes over from another as

possible. This is important as different machine drivers work in different ways, and you can end up with a pile of ballast at the join and no empty wagon to put it in. Giving the machines equal amounts of work is also efficient as you are not waiting for the machine with the most work to finish, and the machine drivers can see that you are being fair with them. So you position the train load the front half, draw it forward by the length of the job and dig the lower half of the hole into the back half. The few extra wagons if needed are to tidy up the ends and any humps at points where two machines work joins.

 

What you must avoid at all costs is ending up with a train of randomly loaded and unloaded wagons, as you will then end up with one machine working while the rest sit idle as the areas needing digging and the empty wagons will never coincide.

 

You can then get rid of the spoil train, myself if the train crew had been particularly unhelpful, I might leave them sitting at the job site marker boards for quite a while before I had the free time to pass them over to the PIC to get them out of the possession.  This needs doing so that you leave them enough of their shift to put the train away in it destination siding at the end of their shift, But no early finish or excuse to bail out and leave the train for somebody else to deal with. Although train crew that irritating were rare, and some particularly the older drivers could be very helpful.

 

Enough wagons to stand the job once would do for a shallow skim dig and scarify, which was sometimes done in the sixties, when they were trying to install a lot of concrete sleepers and CWR, needless to say such a job would not last and you would soon be back to reballast properly. A single stand of reasonably high sided opens would also be enough for a drain, I liked to use Coalfish for that myself. Enough wagons to stand the job twice would suit a 12" reballast, and three times a formation dig, But by then you were probably talking more than one spoil train. The old ZKV iron ore tipplers were an ideal spoil wagon having a high capacity per unit length and were tall enough that the guard had no idea what you had put in them. Conversely sea urchins were a really useless wagon being long in length and low in capacity, they also had loads of ledges that all had to be cleaned off before the train could be despatched from site,  in fact the ledges probably had more carrying capacity than the inside of the wagon body.

 

For bottom stone you need 10 tons of ballast per rail length for every 3" of depth, a single stand of open wagons would usually do this for a 12" dig, although you would need more if using long low capacity wagons like the Sea Urchin. Usually you would unload about the right amount from a train standing the job, then have one machine working through with the laser dozer adding or removing stone, so his blade was kept about half full. Before laser control you would go through the job setting the height with a sprit level on a long lath, and the drivers would then smooth out the top surface by back blading. When putting in bottom stone it is always wise to make the top surface of the stone an inch low, as tampers seem to work a bit better when doing reasonable lifts, rather than small ones, and while lifting track is easy lowering it is not,

 

The other thing to think of is where you are going to put your crane or TRM that is going to lift out the panels. This can be tricky as you need that vehicle before the first spoil wagon and after the last bottom stone wagon. Normally you would put it on the bottom stone train, bring the spoil trains over the site split the bottom stone train loco over the site wagons clear before the site and remove the track onto Salmon or possibly Sturgeon wagons standing split either side of the job on the road you are working on.

You then reassemble the train and set it back clear so you can load and then dispatch the spoil trains. You then unload the bottom stone before again splitting the train to release the TRM to put the new track back in. Once the new track is in the now empty bottom stone train and TRM can leave, and once the new track has had a quick hand pack where needed the panel train can be rejoined and also despatched.

 

Then it is just a matter of unloading the top stone from hoppers ploughing it, and bringing in the tamper. When working with a plough brake you will tend to find the more experienced staff wedged into the corners of the balcony. As during the unloading of hoppers it was usual for the drivers just to use the loco brake, and you could get a very rough ride at the back of thirty loose coupled wagons. It was also very important when unloading hoppers to ensure that there was no reason for the driver to stop the train unexpectedly. As once you open the doors on a Dog or Catfish, there was no way of shutting them until the wagon was empty. If you opened the doors on such a wagon and the driver stopped the stone would pour out and eventually lift the wagon off the rails, or at the very least completely bury the wheels. You would then not be able to continue until all the ballast under the wagon had been shovelled clear. 

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Many thanks to Trog for the view from the other side of the railway fence, along with such contributors as The Johnster, Stationmaster and others, he provides a lot of information not readily available and understood by non railwaymen.

 

 

 

This film was one of the sources I used for information, but it doesn't show anything of the ballasting operations and it only shows the train of rails as a standalone, my hazy memory suggests seeing mixed rail and ballast wagons, hence my original query. In such a job as that one, I would imagine only a couple of full and empty ballast/spoil wagons would be needed, and they would be in a separate train which had the PWM and crane in.

If all else fails I could just lump all the various Sturgeon, Salmon etc wagons together and run it as a recovered track train.

 

Mike.

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Very many thanks for that, Trog.  It fills in the gaps behind many of the captions of p-way work photos we encounter, and shines a spotlight onto an area seldom, if ever, recreated in model form.  At least the rakes I am progressively putting together will have a semblance of credibility now.  Brilliant, I will cut, paste and save, if that's alright!

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Thank you That's the best and most comprehensive and easily understood account of re-laying (and why it sometimes goes wrong) that I've ever read. As a signalman I confess that I didn't care what was going on the other side of the banner and dets as long as it all worked when you signed it back and whichever HSM turned up at the box didn't nick all the milk (although in fairness they did tend to turn up well provisioned with pies, crisps and if it was Kelvin, an electic selection of 'reading' material). Later as an Ops Supervisor I knew enough to check your protection arrangements but anything else going on in a complex possession still sometimes seemed to be a combination of organised chaos and witchcraft. All the PWay I met were stars, putting up with a lot of stupid questions and always happy to explain what they were doing (I don't think they got asked very often). Wilf's men at Appleby even gave me a shovel and attempted to show me how to do measured shovel packing ! (that'll teach me to ask). And how to remove Pandrol clips with a keying hammer...:nono:

 

As for traincrew...

 

Book on 05.30 Depart Beighton 06.00 with 10 empty Salmon, arrive Penistone 07.00. Work as directed by the PICOP until 11.30, relieved on site. 

 

At 5 to 8  they're knocking on the door. "Can we use the phone bobby, we want to check out relief's coming...". Unless they're walking from Tinsley they'll still be in bed !

 

 

 

 

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11 hours ago, Trog said:

 

The reasons for this are that moving a train at night takes quite a bit of time, in that you will have to wake up the train crew, who will be asleep in their chairs with their feet up on the desk. With all the heaters and the cooking ring full on to give the sauna like heat they prefer. You will then have to stand there and politely explain to them why you regretfully cannot let them move the loco down to the nearest access point just in case their reliefs turn up an hour early. While standing in a spreading puddle of rain water that is dripping out of your clothes. You then have to get back out into the rain and position yourself somewhere suitable to control the movement, and send someone back to bang on the side of the loco below the side window and request that one of the crew sticks his head out so he can see your signal. You then make the move and then can run round telling everyone that it is safe to start loading again. So if you are wise you set things up so you have to do this the least number of times.

 

Having sat in shirtsleeves with my feet in the window many times whilst looking at the P Way scowling back at me with rain running down their necks this made me laugh.

 

Thanks also for confirming what drivers often suspected -that we were  kept waiting at the marker boards for no reason! - though I would like to think i was one of the more helpful ones :)

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12 hours ago, Trog said:

When working with a plough brake you will tend to find the more experienced staff wedged into the corners of the balcony. As during the unloading of hoppers it was usual for the drivers just to use the loco brake, and you could get a very rough ride at the back of thirty loose coupled wagons. It was also very important when unloading hoppers to ensure that there was no reason for the driver to stop the train unexpectedly. As once you open the doors on a Dog or Catfish, there was no way of shutting them until the wagon was empty. If you opened the doors on such a wagon and the driver stopped the stone would pour out and eventually lift the wagon off the rails, or at the very least completely bury the wheels. You would then not be able to continue until all the ballast under the wagon had been shovelled clear. 

 

You've answered yourself here, the brake on dogfish and sealions - and most vacuum wagons- was pretty unpredictable and often just a touch of the brake handle was enough to bring you to a stand in a heap!

So the straight air brake was used, and as you said the worst thing on a ballast drop was to stop.

 

Edited to add Vacuum was a nice brake when working well and was good on coaching stock

 

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On 17/08/2020 at 21:46, Trog said:

While sturgeons could be used for track panels that was more normally a job for Salmon wagons. Although that might have varied from Division/Region to Division/Region or over time. A Sturgeon in my experience would more likely be used for rails or S&C components. Scrap S&C might be loaded in a sturgeon with sides (Later a Tench) because the sides made getting a safe load easier, with the old timbers going into open wagons.

 

I also seem to remember that there were two types of Sturgeon, Sturgeon and Sturgeon A one of which had gauging restrictions, and was only used to carry imported timber from docks to Ditton? depot.

Didn't the Sturgeon have to have longitudinal baulks of timber fitted to lift the bottom panel within gauge?

The 'Ditton' ones had permanently-fitted steel stanchions (in pairs, IIRC) along the sides to make stacking the sleepers easier. They used to work from Newport (S Wales) to Ditton with new hardwood sleepers, I believe.

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6 hours ago, Wheatley said:

 anything else going on in a complex possession still sometimes seemed to be a combination of organised chaos and witchcraft. 

 

And how to remove Pandrol clips with a keying hammer...:nono:

 

 

The art with track relaying is to think ahead, you always want to have a couple of men preparing the next task, so the main force of your manpower on finishing one task can gulp down some tea and go straight onto the next. I was once involved in checking some small track relaying jobs that were being done by the track maintenance organisation, and they did not at least at first understand this. At the end of each task the whole job would stop for quarter of an hour while they sorted themselves out and restarted. This probably reduced the amount of work they could achieve by 50%. It also gives the appearance of chaos that has been remarked on, as in a well run job there are two or three different things being done in the same place and time.

 

 

Put your foot on it first. Then the clip is trapped under your foot and does not go flying off down the job. :good_mini:

 

Interestingly in the 1980s one of the selling points of Pandrol clips was the fact that they could be easily inserted and removed using a keying hammer.  Then the health and safety (Persons of parental marital status -ve) turned up and we had to start mucking about with all sorts of special Pan pullers instead. Which as the hooks were often worn were more dangerous than using a hammer.

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On the Western in the early 1970s track panels were almost invariably loaded on Salmons. which were the source of considerable 'entertainment' should they happen to derail while loaded.

 

And you alwayd want ballast wagons, various, under the best possible control while unloading on the move because if not you can get hoppers leaving humps of ballast which can turn out to be above axle height which then has the iniquitous habit of derailing any empty wagons following behind them.  Do not ask how I know that, please!!

 

The key to it all was to do it properly at the planning meeting and for that you needed an operating man who understood how engineering trains could be worked and a civil engineer who knew exactly what he was at.  If you got it right at that stage it usually went well on the night unless the fresh ballast froze solid in the wagons or some one took the relief traincrew to the wrong place or what was being dug out wasn't quite what was being expected and time was lost at that stage which upset everything later.  We usually seemed to in with two Traxcavators and about 50-60 empty Grampus for the spoil dig and on bigger jobs there would be two spoil trains formed like that.

 

Doing a ballast drop at the end of a job it was always best to use traincrew who liked lots of money and had no turn to catch the next day - this required the operating planner to have a word in the ear of the roster clerk and if it did the trick you'd hear nothing more until you got a call From Control about one of your Drivers asking for relief somewhere miles away because he'd already been on duty for 16 hours and thought it was time he was relieved (yes, that actually happened with one of my Drivers - who was about 60 miles away when he called Control to seek relief).

 

Back in the 1970s a friend of mine worked on the advertising account for Pandrol - hence one of my photos graced an advert for Pandrol clips.  However the man from Pandrol when approving the ad said I hope you realise there isn't a single Pandrol clip anywhere on the track in that photo (but the way it was lit meant you couldn't see that much detail) but he added that he doubted if most people who saw the ad wouldn't have a clue where it was so he was happy with it.  That was at about the time the first attempt at a clip puller made its appearance from Pandrol and they couldn't understand why BR was asking for such a device as no other railway anywhere in the world had ever asked for such a thing.

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3 hours ago, The Stationmaster said:

..............................

 

And you alwayd want ballast wagons, various, under the best possible control while unloading on the move because if not you can get hoppers leaving humps of ballast which can turn out to be above axle height which then has the iniquitous habit of derailing any empty wagons following behind them.  Do not ask how I know that, please!!

 

................

 

Doing a ballast drop at the end of a job it was always best to use traincrew who liked lots of money and had no turn to catch the next day - this required the operating planner to have a word in the ear of the roster clerk and if it did the trick you'd hear nothing more until you got a call From Control about one of your Drivers asking for relief somewhere miles away because he'd already been on duty for 16 hours and thought it was time he was relieved (yes, that actually happened with one of my Drivers - who was about 60 miles away when he called Control to seek relief).

 

Which is why if you had a very small job where it was possible to merge the hoppers into another train it was always wise to have the hoppers next to the engine. You could also then uncouple the rest of the train and leave it out of harms way while you unloaded the stone. Should a hopper derail you would put a Duff jack (12 ton hand jack) under each axle box and jack it up into the air, you would then push the hopper off the jacks in the direction of the rails, and repeat until it landed back on them.

 

Over time was the holy grail of the P-Way man, back in BR days (BR = Before Railtrack) we would work until the management sent us home. Should a job over run the day supervisor would ring the man he had relived and the Saturday Night shift would come back and do Sunday night as well. If you were of a grade where there were not many spares you just kept working, this happened enough that there was a standard box on the timesheet we used that you ticked to indicated to the Pay bills section that a shift was of over 24hrs duration and that they should not just take the start time from the finish.

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