"Foreign" wagons - How many would you see?

[Compound2632]

From the point of view of the current discussion, I would suggest that there are broadly three periods:

1. From the establishment of the RCH in 1842 (or at least the point at which it became responsible for accounting for inter-company goods traffic) to the establishment of REC control in the Great War. This is what I call the "pre-pooling" period; my real interest lies in what I would call the "golden age" of the pre-grouping period, roughly the quarter-century preceding the Great War or perhaps only the years c. 1889 - c. 1903. At the very end of this period, in the 7 or 8 years before the Great War, we see the major companies reaching working agreements for pooling traffic (but not the wagons carrying the traffic): LNWR/MR/L&Y, GN/GE/GC.
2. From the start of REC control in 1914 through to the outbreak of the Second World War, a period which saw the pooling of ordinary company-owned wagons. This is what I call the "pooling" period.
3. From the outbreak of the Second World War, with PO mineral wagons adding to the pool, to the decline of "traditional" wagonload freight in the 1960s.

Pace @Nick Holliday, I think these do represent step changes. The first pooling arrangement was of GN, GC, and GE open wagons in Dec 1915; by June 1919 pooling had been extended to all unfitted open wagons 3 planks deep and upward and all unfitted covered vans [A.G. Atkins et al., GWR Goods Wagons (3e, Tourret Publishing, 1998) Appendix 2].

[Regularity]

Just to tease, I make that five periods of roughly 38 years, 47 years, 14 years, 11 years, then 25 years, but really in terms of operational practices, the 11 years that might be described as “late Edwardian plus” is a transition as the railways belatedly caught up with the benefits of standardised components for running repairs (arguably, the RCH was ahead of them) and of pooling.

That final period roughly coincides with”Epoch II” in European use (renamed “Eras” by Bachmann to make it look like they invented it). Four very distinct periods - maybe the third and fourth could be combined, but it shows the nonsense of the “guidance” provided by the Eras/Epochs, as Era/Epoch I covers a greater period than the rest put together.

 

But in terms of the general look and feel, something pre 1842 (which is pre the mid-40s railway mania) would look positively strange in 1889 (which is when railways were becoming more settled, and had already got past their peak for return on capital, with a few exceptions): underpowered, no crew protection, inadequate or no brakes, and tiny to the point of delicate. 
 

My point is that although I can see where you are coming from, even a five year window in modelling period can lead to historical anachronisms, and any attempt to create arbitrary divisions is ultimately futile and artificial, and whilst better than Epoch I, by comparison a 47 year time window takes us from, say 1919 and the restoration of operation to the railway companies to 1966, by which time steam was fast becoming a distant memory in many parts of the country. Visually, very, very different: but operationally, still similar as the changes to operating practices were yet to really bite - the legacy of the recently abolished common carrier status was still evident.
 

Although we use the term “pre-grouping”, I suspect that most modellers actually are thinking of “pre-Great War”, and generally that perceived heyday of the first dozen or so years at the beginning of the 20th century.

 

Regardless, we can use the umbrella term to bring us all together in intelligent (and very, very, very digressing) conversation, but when talking individually about our own modelling, the discussion only becomes meaningful and useful as the focus narrows, but as that happens, we lose generalisability. (As a digression, this is the biggest problem with “machine learning”/AI. It’s not that the algorithms are wrong, but in trying to get “more accuracy”, the models become more and more specific to the provided set of circumstances. As ever, it’s a poor workman who blames his tools.*)

 

* Apologies for not using gender neutral language there: just quoting an old saying.

 

Once we start creating artificial boundaries, where do you stop? I mean, humanity at one end, and nearly 8bn individuals at the other end, of which maybe a few million are interested in “pre-grouping model railways”.

[Compound2632]

All very reasonable Simon. I couldn't agree more with 

 

1 hour ago, Regularity said:

even a five year window in modelling period can lead to historical anachronisms

 

I was thinking not so much in terms of the visual appearance of the railway as the principles governing its operation, at least as far as goods wagon usage goes. Purely from that point of view, I think my divisions stand. I would go so far as to say that de facto the "grouping" era began in 1914 and the "British Railways" era in 1939, even if in each case a further eight and a half years were to elapse before they became de jure. 

 

To return to the topic, I was thinking of your interest in the E&WJR/SMJR. The larger railways, particularly the "big four" of LNWR, MR, GWR and NER but also, as we've seen, a company of the size of the LBSCR, most goods traffic was internal, with very few foreigners. I suspect that the situation will have been different on the smaller lines such as the SMJ or M&SWJ, with more of the locally-consumed goods needing to come in from places off the system. I'm also thinking of the M&GNJ which had a very small goods wagon fleet of its own - less than a wagon per route mile, by some accounts.

[Regularity]

Until 1904, EWJR wagons were forbidden from interchange, so the EWJR was primarily a receiver of traffic, with mostly other companies’ wagons plus PO wagons in its trains. After that, and into the SMJR, when took delivery of roughly 100 new wagons, plus some secondhand, which were of interchange standard. Even after then, I suspect that the trains were roughly 1:1:2 own:foreign:PO, with wagons from the GW, MR, GC and LNWR predominating. But that’s again a specific example, and following pooled unb(r)aked wagons, during WWI, largely irrelevant.

 

I wasn’t disagreeing with your eras from the perspective of how the railways operated, merely urging caution in case they were unthinkingly applied. (Not by you.)

[Nick Holliday]

8 hours ago, Edwardian said:

 

Oddly, at the same time,  like-minded crowd besieged the L&YR offices insisting that they carried on counting, convinced that they must be some bolster wagons.

It seems the L&YR considered bolster wagons as low opens, and in Noel Coates' book they are all counted together.

[kevinlms]

On 06/11/2020 at 20:48, Nick Holliday said:

Just to throw some more information into the fire, I have tried to compile the wagon statistics for most pre-grouping companies as of grouping. The information has been taken from a variety of sources, mostly the OPC, Lightmoor and Wild Swan company wagon books, with supplementary data from David Jenkinson's British Railway Carriages (I have appended coaching stock figures for comparison purposes). I had only three figures to play with concerning the Glasgow & South Western, (if anyone can supply more accurate data I would be grateful) and there is considerable variety in the way various companies compiled their statistics. For a few companies there was enough data to compare their fleets over time.

 

 

So what happened on the Caley for them to get rid of 6000 mineral wagons, or close to 10% of their total fleet within 3 years?

 

[Edwardian]

9 hours ago, Nick Holliday said:

It seems the L&YR considered bolster wagons as low opens, and in Noel Coates' book they are all counted together.

 

Clearly fraud

 

4 hours ago, kevinlms said:

So what happened on the Caley for them to get rid of 6000 mineral wagons, or close to 10% of their total fleet within 3 years?

 

 

Were the returns sent by post?

[Caley Jim]

6 hours ago, kevinlms said:

So what happened on the Caley for them to get rid of 6000 mineral wagons, or close to 10% of their total fleet within 3 years?

 

I would have to check Mike Williams" book to answer that definitively, but my initial reaction is that they were getting rid of old, low capacity {6-8ton} wagons and replacing them with higher capacity 16t ones, so the overall capacity of the mineral wagon fleet remained much the same. 

 

2 hours ago, Edwardian said:

 

Clearly fraud

 

 

Were the returns sent by post?

That is a scurrilous inference sir. I will see you on court! 

 

Jim 

[Nick Holliday]

41 minutes ago, Caley Jim said:

I would have to check Mike Williams" book to answer that definitively, but my initial reaction is that they were getting rid of old, low capacity {6-8ton} wagons and replacing them with higher capacity 16t ones, so the overall capacity of the mineral wagon fleet remained much the same. 

 

 

Jim 

As Jim says, Mike Williams has the answer. The Caledonian, and to a lesser extent the NBR, developed a large fleet of dumb-buffered short wheelbase open wagons of 6 and 7 ton capacity, generally referred to as "bogies". At least 20,000 were built up for the CR until 1882, perhaps nearer 30,000.  

Sample CR and NBR wagon models from the Invertrain catalogue.

 

They were robust, if crude, wagons, and lasted a long time, one reason why the Scottish companies were given a longer time to eradicate dumb-buffers.  Their numbers are due to the Scottish railways initial reluctance to allow Private Traders to use their own wagons, the main line companies providing the bulk of the stock to move coal and other minerals. By 1900 they were getting a bit outmoded, and the CR began a purge, replacing them with more modern, larger capacity, wagons. By 1907 (the first date of the survey I presented) they had disposed of over a quarter of their bogies.  Over the next three years, they got rid of 7,500 bogies, replacing them with 1,300 16 ton Diagram 59 wagons. At the same time, the number of Private Trader wagons on the CR increased from around  23,500 to 31,952. (Article by E McKenna in Railway Archive 34), an increase of over 8,000 or 34%, helping to make the bogies redundant.  The NBR experienced a similar boom in PO wagons, from 22,294 in 1899, to 35,422 in 1916. It should be noted that overall in the UK there were around 650,000 Private Trader wagons, so Scottish examples represented only 10% of the total.

Mike Williams notes that, of the 10,000 still on the books in 1910, 8,000 were stored out of service, occupying over 20 miles of siding space!

[kevinlms]

1 hour ago, Nick Holliday said:

As Jim says, Mike Williams has the answer. The Caledonian, and to a lesser extent the NBR, developed a large fleet of dumb-buffered short wheelbase open wagons of 6 and 7 ton capacity, generally referred to as "bogies". At least 20,000 were built up for the CR until 1882, perhaps nearer 30,000.  

Sample CR and NBR wagon models from the Invertrain catalogue.

 

They were robust, if crude, wagons, and lasted a long time, one reason why the Scottish companies were given a longer time to eradicate dumb-buffers.  Their numbers are due to the Scottish railways initial reluctance to allow Private Traders to use their own wagons, the main line companies providing the bulk of the stock to move coal and other minerals. By 1900 they were getting a bit outmoded, and the CR began a purge, replacing them with more modern, larger capacity, wagons. By 1907 (the first date of the survey I presented) they had disposed of over a quarter of their bogies.  Over the next three years, they got rid of 7,500 bogies, replacing them with 1,300 16 ton Diagram 59 wagons. At the same time, the number of Private Trader wagons on the CR increased from around  23,500 to 31,952. (Article by E McKenna in Railway Archive 34), an increase of over 8,000 or 34%, helping to make the bogies redundant.  The NBR experienced a similar boom in PO wagons, from 22,294 in 1899, to 35,422 in 1916. It should be noted that overall in the UK there were around 650,000 Private Trader wagons, so Scottish examples represented only 10% of the total.

Mike Williams notes that, of the 10,000 still on the books in 1910, 8,000 were stored out of service, occupying over 20 miles of siding space!

Thanks for that.

 

But I did know that the Caley didn't replace them with a vast fleet of bogie wagons, such as the Ratio Iron Ore wagon, which despite only a small number ever existed, they seem to have been in continuous production by Ratio and now Peco, since the early 70s. No wonder so many layouts, show at least one.

[Caley Jim]

32 minutes ago, kevinlms said:

Thanks for that.

 

But I did know that the Caley didn't replace them with a vast fleet of bogie wagons, such as the Ratio Iron Ore wagon, which despite only a small number ever existed, they seem to have been in continuous production by Ratio and now Peco, since the early 70s. No wonder so many layouts, show at least one.

That wagon was a prototype of which were only ever was one, so any layout should only have one! The problem the Caley found with the 30t bogie coal wagons it introduced was that there wasn't the infrastructure to unload them. 

 

Jim

[kevinlms]

3 minutes ago, Caley Jim said:

That wagon was a prototype of which were only ever was one, so any layout should only have one! The problem the Caley found with the 30t bogie coal wagons it introduced was that there wasn't the infrastructure to unload them. 

 

Jim

Thanks for the reminder, I knew it was very low. I thought maybe 3 (I have 2!).

 

I wonder what Ratio were thinking to chose such an obscure prototype?

[Regularity]

1 hour ago, kevinlms said:

 

I wonder what Ratio were thinking to chose such an obscure prototype?

Probably the same customers as those who buy models of such as GT-3, or the Fell diesel? 

[Andy Hayter]

1 hour ago, kevinlms said:

Thanks for the reminder, I knew it was very low. I thought maybe 3 (I have 2!).

 

I wonder what Ratio were thinking to chose such an obscure prototype?

 

Ratio had a penchant for that.  After all the NB cask wagon originally had a single usage on about 12 miles of Scotland's railways.  

[Caley Jim]

1 hour ago, kevinlms said:

Thanks for the reminder, I knew it was very low. I thought maybe 3 (I have 2!).

 

I wonder what Ratio were thinking to chose such an obscure prototype?

I recall a certain Magazine editor, when reviewing it when it came out, commenting that a train of them would look nice!  I also saw a pair running on a layout once and when I drew the anomaly to an operator's attention he indicated, in no uncertain terms, that he thought I was talking rubbish!

 

Jim

Edited November 8, 2020 by Caley Jim

[Darryl Tooley]

2 hours ago, kevinlms said:

I wonder what Ratio were thinking to chose such an obscure prototype?

Possibly they were influenced by the existence of an easily available drawing.  Several of the more unusual wagons produced by various manufacturers back in the day are to be found in Roche's 'Historic Wagon Drawings in 4mm Scale' (1965).  The Caledonian wagon is on the cover.

 

D

[Compound2632]

18 minutes ago, Darryl Tooley said:

Roche

 

... has a lot to answer for.

[kevinlms]

1 hour ago, Darryl Tooley said:

Possibly they were influenced by the existence of an easily available drawing.  Several of the more unusual wagons produced by various manufacturers back in the day are to be found in Roche's 'Historic Wagon Drawings in 4mm Scale' (1965).  The Caledonian wagon is on the cover.

 

D

So it is.  I've had the book and my 2 wagons for decades and never linked them! The drawing doesn't make any mention of quantity or the number carried, so not surprising that people could easily be lead into thinking there was a fleet.

[Compound2632]

20 minutes ago, kevinlms said:

So it is.  I've had the book and my 2 wagons for decades and never linked them! The drawing doesn't make any mention of quantity or the number carried, so not surprising that people could easily be lead into thinking there was a fleet.

 

I forget the details but I think the story was that the Caledonian did order a batch of thirty all-steel bogie ore wagons and built a single wood-bodied example for comparison purposes but Roche and maybe others got their wires crossed and believed there were thirty of the wooden ones. The discussion was undoubtedly on RMWeb somewhere; it may have been that they were intended for carrying imported ore directly to steelworks.

 

Hopefully @Caley Jim will be along to provide chapter and verse.

Edited November 8, 2020 by Compound2632

[Caley Jim]

1 hour ago, Compound2632 said:

Hopefully @Caley Jim will be along to provide chapter and verse.

Quoting from Mike's book on the Diagram 50 bogie ore wagon:

 

In March 1899 the Board authorised the construction of 100 50-ton wagons, amended to a single wagon in the half year ending July 1899, and another in the period ending January 1900. In the event only one was built, numbered 72000.  This number was not in the mineral wagon series and was beyond the range applied to goods wagons.

........

The second wagon probably appeared as the prototype Diagram 51 wagon (16t ore wagon) No 64872, which was built for comparative purposes.

 

He then provides a table comparing the 50t wagon with three 16t wagons in terms of tare weight (20t 16cwt vs 21t 6cwt) and length (38ft 4ins vs 58ft 0ins).

 

The supplement to the book states that between 1907 and 1910 it was described as open goods wagon special class reverting to an ore wagon in 1915.  It is thought that more were not produced due the higher construction cost and tare weight compared to the Diagram 54 30t steel bogie mineral wagons.

 

Jim

[Regularity]

9 hours ago, Darryl Tooley said:

Roche

 

8 hours ago, Compound2632 said:

 

... has a lot to answer for.

Although he does have his limits...

[Ravenser]

I'm not really sure this is the right thread for this, but I'm not sure where would be better.

 

I appear to have tripped over an eyewitness account of the working of our friend the "road van" . And it seems that this beastie offers the modeller a lot more operational interest than we guessed....

 

Road vans , LNER GE Section, 1933

 

The bit we want is the pdf file labelled Tow Rope , which contains an extract from one of Gerry Fiennes' books. Indeed the relevant section is "Tow Rope" (though the previous section reports that by 1933 GE brake vans were regarded as little better than an embarrassment by all grades on the LNER)

 

The intro reports the working of a pickup goods from March to Spalding via the Joint line . It seems that at each station down the line the "road van" was shunted out of the train into the goods shed, the relevant consignments unloaded by the station staff (with the guard helping out) and then the road van was shunted back into the train

 

At the next wayside station the whole performance was repeated....

 

That would certainly up the operational potential of shunting a pickup goods at a wayside station

 

Also I note that by 1933 this is firmly a "road van" and not a wagon

[Nick Holliday]

On 21/11/2020 at 13:54, Compound2632 said:

 

So, that got me thinking, what does a WNR cattle wagon look like? I went hunting for a postable photo of a cattle wagon from the neighbouring line - the M&GN - but came across this interesting topic instead:

Deep in there, @Penlan quoted the 1920 Bristol wagon survey, pointing out that all the cattle wagons were Great Western vehicles (which leads me to suppose the survey only covered Great Western yards, not Midland). Cattle wagons weren't pooled until August 1925 and even then the Great Western wouldn't play. The conclusion I draw is that at least on a large system like the Great Western, livestock traffic across company boundaries was rare. However, on a small system like the WNR, there probably was a fair amount of "foreign" traffic, especially for sheep moving between hill and lowland pasture - though that would be a highly seasonal traffic. 

 

Cattle wagons made up 20% of the M&GN's goods stock, so I would imagine the WNR had a similar proportion. On the Midland in 1905, the proportion of cattle wagons was much smaller, under 4%, which makes sense given the dominance of mineral traffic conveyed in the company's own wagons. I was surprised therefore to find that the figure for the Great Western at around the same date was only just over 4%; the Great Western didn't provide wagons for mineral traffic. So, was livestock less inclined to move around in Wales and the western counties, compared to Leicestershire etc.? Or was the Midland dominating Irish and Scottish cattle traffic?

 

On the Castle Aching thread, this topic arose again (having been touched on earlier in pages 326/327.

Just to put another perspective on cattle wagons, the LBSCR, in 1920, had this to say:

Care must be taken at Stations that this Company's (LBSCR) trucks received dirty from other Lines are thoroughly cleansed and disinfected before putting into use. There is then a list of cleansing locations for each potential route - Willow Walk, Red Hill Goods, Chichester, Polegate, Horsham, Portsmouth, East Croydon and Tunbridge Wells. Red Hill dealt with trucks arriving from Battersea, Old Oak Common, Willesden, Wimbledon, Norwood Junction and Red Hill Junction.

Cattle trucks returning Home Empty to Foreign Lines -

Foreign Cattle Trucks (not Cattle Vans) may be returned to the Parent Line uncleansed; an additional allowance is made by the Clearing House to the owning Company for the cost of cleaning.  Cattle Trucks belonging to Scotch Companies must be treated in precisely the same manner as trucks received with animals from any part of England, as it is no longer necessary to cleanse and disinfect Scotch Cattle Trucks previous to the return home.

This seems to indicate that trucks from the Scottish Companies were not unknown visitors.

The Goods Working Timetable for 1918 contains considerable detail regarding the various trains that would deal with incoming traffic from Foreign lines, covering all destinations on the Brighton system. From the GER via New Cross, L&NWR and GWR via Lillie Bridge, Midland and Great Northern Railways, via Battersea Yard, Metropolitan via Finchley Road, and GWR and SECR via Redhill Junction. Special mentions for Cheshire Lines stations via Garston, LNWR to Maiden Lane, GNR to Enfield and High Barnet, for some reason.

Special Cattle Trains - Special trains with Livestock can be arranged for not less than 8 loaded trucks on due notice being given.

 

In addition, not about cattle though, some other snippets from the GWT:

LN&WR to East Dulwich - Beer Traffic - When this traffic is handed to this Company at Lillie Bridge , it must be sent forward by the 3.55 a.m. Lillie Bridge to New Cross Goods, which must detach same at Tulse Hill for the 3.50 a.m. from Norwood Junction to take forward.

Reading (GWR) to Hastings - Beer traffic - either by 11.55 p.m. Lillie Bridge to Brighton, dropping the wagons at Three Bridges for the Willow Walk to Hastings, or if by the 12.35 p.m. Brighton train, leaving the wagons at Haywards Heath for the 4.25 a.m. Willow Walk to Lewes train. How they get to Hastings from Lewes isn't specified! 

GER Fish Traffic to Brighton - Fish for Brighton &c., will be sent from Whitechapel to New Cross by the 11.47 midnight Train , and forward from New Cross by the 1.30 a.m. Willow Walk to Brighton.

Meat Traffic

Liverpool to Croydon - When this Traffic is handed to us at Battersea Wharf by the Midland Company in time to connect with the 12.30 p.m. Battersea to Horsham Goods, it must be sent by that Train, which must call at East Croydon to detach.

Liverpool to Chichester and Portsmouth - Whenever the 12.5 a.m. Battersea Wharf to Croydon Goods has Meat Traffic on the Chichester and Portsmouth .... the 12.30 midnight Willow Walk to Portsmouth to may be detained to make the connection.

L&NWR to LBSCR - Arrangements have been made for the L&NWR Co. to hand over to this Company at Kensington (Monday mornings only) Meat Traffic from Liverpool, and to secure a through service a message must be sent from Willesden not later than 10.0 p.m. Sunday via Victoria, and transmitted there to Battersea Yard Signal Box.  On receipt of such advice an Engine, Brake and Guard will leave Battersea Yard about 3.45 a.m. on Monday and return from Kensington with the Vans so as to be attached at Battersea Yard to the 4.10 a.m. Down Goods.

 

 

[phil_sutters]

I find the LNWR to East Dulwich - Beer traffic curious. Tulse Hill is a lot closer to Norwood Junction than it is to Lillie Bridge. Why didn't the 3.50 am get there from Norwood before the 3.55 from Lillie Bridge, I wonder? Did it do some shunting en-route perhaps.

Edited November 22, 2020 by phil_sutters

[Nick Holliday]

The 

21 hours ago, phil_sutters said:

I find the LNWR to East Dulwich - Beer traffic curious. Tulse Hill is a lot closer to Norwood Junction than it is to Lillie Bridge. Why didn't the 3.50 am get there from Norwood before the 3.55 from Lillie Bridge, I wonder? Did it do some shunting en-route perhaps.

The 3.50 a.m. from Lillie Bridge ran almost non-stop, pausing at Clapham Junction for just one minute, and due at Streatham Common by 4.20 a.m., so the additional halt at Tulse Hill to drop the beer off would have been at about 4.15 a.m. The train from Norwood Junction (New Cross working No. 28) left at 3.50 a.m., but conveyed wagons for Streatham Common and Streatham before arriving at Tulse Hill, then working via East Dulwich back to New Cross. I haven't been able to find the actual timetable for this working, but it seems likely that it arrived at Tulse Hill quite a bit after the beer had been left, and it arrived at New Cross as late as 6.18 a.m.

A little note on the working of the Norwood train, which touches on a topic being discussed elsewhere, re Road Vans - "On Week-days when more than 25 Vehicles from Streatham Common, will call at Streatham to leave Road Box Goods only, when this is done the Streatham Trucks will be taken there specially by 6.18 a.m. Norwood Junction to Battersea Wharf." Sadly, I cannot find any reference to "Road Box Goods" in the Appendix to the Service Timetable that explains their usage.

As an aside, regarding marshalling Midland and Great Northern wagons - "The wagons put off Trains at Norwood Junction must be marshalled (Midland and Great Northern Wagons together) at that Station before being despatched to Battersea Yard."