Wagons for Hire?

[Andy Kirkham]

I have been watching the excellent British Transport film Every Valley https://player.bfi.org.uk/free/film/watch-every-valley-1957-online and was intrigued by the oval plate on the wagon visible in this shot.

 

It says "Lancashire & Yorkshire Waggon Co Ltd Owner".

 

I would infer that the business of this company would have been to hire out wagons. Did such companies exist? If so how numerous were these businesses and did they continue after nationalisation?

[eastglosmog]

Many wagon building firms had a wagon hire business as well.  Many private owners wagons were only hired, not owned, by the company with the name painted on the side. 

[Wickham Green too]

During WWII the majority of privately owner wagons - basically the coal fleet - were pooled under government control with the intention ( presumably ) of returning them to their rightful owners once peace broke out ....... peace did break out but the wagons were never returned as they became part of the nationalised railway. I theory, the owners - whether owner/operators or hiring companies - received some sort of payment but the hiring companies had little to do unless they were involved with other types of wagonry so most went out of business. Other hiring companies emerged later with the resurgence of railfreight.

[Compound2632]

Those oval owners plates were a standard fitting - there was, I believe, an RCH requirement for them. For many of the large and not-so large  wagon firms, wagon hire and maintenance was as big a business as wagon building. Some of the larger PO fleets were owned by the collieries or factors - Stephenson Clarke were an example; they were big enough to be able to stipulate wagons built to their designs rather than the builders. Some coal factors branched out into the wagon building and hiring business themselves.

 

Many smaller coal merchants wouldn't have been able to afford to buy wagons outright; many industrial customers chose not to. Hire terms were, I have been told, typically 7 years with re-painting at mid term - so a PO wagon would get repainted every 3.5 years whereas a railway company-owned wagon could go much longer without seeing a paintbrush. The hire agreement would include a maintenance contract; even if the wagon had been purchased, the owner might still look to the wagon company for that.

 

That's how it worked in the good old days, certainly from 1887, but the system broke down with wartime pooling from 1939.

 

Here are a couple of models of mine of wagons operated by coal merchants:

 

 

Dickenson's wagon has a Gloucester Rly C&W Co. builder's plate on the solebar and their "For Repairs advise" plate on the body side (transfers by POWSides); the photo on which this is based shows an oval owners's plate at the centre of the solebar:

 

J DICKENSON

    OWNER

   STROUD

 

so he owned this wagon outright but had a repair contract with the builder. Pates has just the Gloucester builder's plate but it's possible that the Gloucester Co's photographer took the picture before all the plates were fixed on the wagon - in the photos of both wagons, the railway company registration plates have yet to be fixed to the solebar.

 

Here's a photo of a wagon that has the full set of Gloucester Co. plates - built by, owned by, and under repair contract with the Gloucester Rly C&W Co. It also has the registration plate (which also states the capacity of the wagon in tons) above the LH axlebox - this wagon is registered with the GWR. The GWR's PO wagon registers survive in TNA so one could, Covid permitting, go along and look up the details.

 

[corneliuslundie]

From reading numerous books on PO wagons I get the impression that probably at times more wagons were hired from builders and hire companies by collieries, coal factors and coal merchants than were owned. And many of those that were purchased were bought  with payments over a seven year period. For this time presumably the wagon would have continued to carry the builder's "owned by" plate.

And there are also examples where the livery on the wagon does not represent the company which bought the wagon. I don't understand the arrangements but there were certainly examples where smaller coal merchants etc had wagons supplied by larger companies.

Just read 14 volumes by Keith Turton, five by Bill Hudson and a half a dozen others and you will begin to get the hang of it, though there still seem to be many unanswered questions.

Jonathan

[Pandora]

A colliery company  may own a wagon fleet sized for summer needs, low demand for coal, and hire in more for winter when coal demand high.

As Keith Turton writes in one of his later books,  there were over a million PO wagons  with a book value of about £100 million,   that they were privately owned and maintained meant the railways did not have the worry and risk of building and maintaining their own fleets of wagons, in effect  the railways therefore had access to £100 million of capital gratis, only supplying the locomotives to haul the wagons  from source to destination for payment.  This attractive financial situation  changed when almost the entire fleet of PO wagons were requisitioned by statute of parliament in the 1930s for WW2 needs, and when BR was formed,  BR had by statute to buy those wagons,  many worn out and of obsolete carrying capacity,  and the ratio of coal wagons to  vans was wrong for post WW2 traffic needs. BR, then had the situation of  having to pay the former builders/owners  to repair and overhaul  them,  simply too many for BR workshops to deal with.

As we know BR then went on to develop a replacement  fleet of wagons such as the famous 16T mineral wagon. 

Finally the Directors who ran those  PO wagon companies  were very ahead of their time,  the bigger players were in effect private merchant banks. Banks who branched out into loans to businesses such as motor car dealers, and even the High Street,  loans to consumers for goods such as furniture retailers.  They vanished as bigger banks took them  over no doubt attracted by the value of the wagon company loan books

Edited September 30, 2020 by Pandora

[The Stationmaster]

The British railway wagon building industry came up with what at the time was a unique idea.  They charged a hire fee over an extended period in such a way that if the wagon user finally wished to have ownership of a vehicle that was what the fee would allow for;  it was called hire-purchase. 

[wagonman]

The wagon builders would typically offer hire purchase (often called 'deferred terms') and simple hire options in addition to cash purchase. Some firms like the Bristol & South Wales Wagon Co were purely finance houses who would subconttact any building work to others. A repair contract was an optional extra as some big fleet operators had their own repair facilities. Those finance houses, along with the finance side of the wagon builders that survived the '30s, usually moved into other areas of finance becoming in effect part of the banking industry. That is why the records of the Lincoln Wagon & Engine Co are to be found in the Royal Bank of Scotland Archive in Edinburgh.

 

Keith Turton's figure of 1 million PO wagons is presumably the all time total. At any one time there were no more than 600,000 in service – roughly the same as the total number of railway company wagons.

[Darryl Tooley]

On 30/09/2020 at 04:59, Pandora said:

, in effect  the railways therefore had access to £100 million of capital gratis, only supplying the locomotives to haul the wagons 

This may have been the way the coal trade looked at it; it was emphatically not the view of the railways.  See, for example, the Report of the Royal Commission on the Coal Industry (1925), Chapter IX, and in particular the comments on substituting railway ownership for private ownership on pp100-101

 

http://filestore.nationalarchives.gov.uk/pdfs/small/cab-24-179-CP-109.pdf

 

The private owner wagon was a thorn in the side of the railway companies for a number of reasons, not the least of which was the considerable amount of time and money expended in sorting out the empties for return to their rightful owners; the railways would not have been at all sorry when the PO wagons were pooled.

 

D

[Compound2632]

3 hours ago, Darryl Tooley said:

the Report of the Royal Commission on the Coal Industry (1925), Chapter IX, and in particular the comments on substituting railway ownership for private ownership on pp100-101

 

http://filestore.nationalarchives.gov.uk/pdfs/small/cab-24-179-CP-109.pdf

 

 

I've only yet read Chapter IX but that is a fascinating document.

 

I was curious about the statement that the Midland's 1880s policy of buying up PO wagons was considered to have not been a success. I wonder by what criteria? It certainly didn't succeed in ridding the Midland of PO wagons as 24,000 new ones were registered by the company between 1887 and 1898 - many no doubt funded by the Midland's purchase money - though that's still only just over a third of the number it bought up. What it did succeed in doing, though, was ridding its system of many sub-standard wagons that were an impediment to efficient working, if not a safety hazard. The Midland was also a driving force behind the RCH standard specifications and registration scheme introduced in 1887 - or at least, so I infer from T.G. Clayton, the Midland C&W Superintendent, being the chair of the RCH wagon committee.

[wagonman]

I ploughed through most of the Samuel Report back in the 1980s when Kew was my home-from-home. It was interesting reading at a time when a major strike in the coal industry was looming...

 

 

[Pandora]

I think this is covered in one of the Keith Turton books,  the Midland purchased the PO wagons from their customers hoping to charge for the use of the wagons, but the customers used the money from the Midland to buy their own wagons preserving the staus quo but with the Midland stuck with surplus wagons

[Compound2632]

33 minutes ago, Pandora said:

I think this is covered in one of the Keith Turton books,  the Midland purchased the PO wagons from their customers hoping to charge for the use of the wagons, but the customers used the money from the Midland to buy their own wagons preserving the staus quo but with the Midland stuck with surplus wagons

 

But what was also going on at the same time was a continued increase in the Midland's mineral traffic, so that buy, scrap, and replace didn't keep up with the demand. So 66,000 PO wagons bought up in the 1880s became by 1898 60,000 replacement company-design wagons plus 24,000 new PO wagon registrations.

[Compound2632]

1 hour ago, Pandora said:

Midland stuck with surplus wagons

 

Certainly not a surfeit of wagons, given that the company was building on average 3,000 a year over 20 years to keep up with demand.