"Foreign" wagons - How many would you see?

[Nearholmer]

I live and learn.

 

Without wish to be unkind to the L&Y, they look rather crude for CCT, which most railways seem to have finished to look carriage-like.

[Compound2632]

10 minutes ago, Penlan said:

Well the first two and 6th could be L&Y bar the fact they don't have the destination chalk plate this side of the doors.
The next two look to be Midland, after that they all look like varieties if Ventilated vans similar or the same as the LNWR D445A's.
All E.& O.E. 

 

The third is a Midland CCT - a 25 ft vehicle, so probably D403; it's passenger-rated, whereas fourth is a goods-rated motor car van, D368. 

[Regularity]

The GWR Abingdon branch lasted until the early 1980s, taking away the products of the MY factory.

[richbrummitt]

16 hours ago, Compound2632 said:

Thinking about Great Western motor car factory traffic, the Warwickshire Railways page clearly deals with the Austin plant at Longbridge, to which the Great Western had access via the joint Halesowen branch; the only other major site would I think be Morris at Cowley, where substantial provision of for rail access seems to date from the early 30s, though the plant was opened just before the Great War.

Books on the Thame branch give the year of first car loaded to rail as 1919, at Littlemore. The Cowley plant and associated rail provision grew significantly over the following decade with Morris Cowley station being provided with proper buildings &c. in, iirc, 1928. 

[Penlan]

14 hours ago, Nearholmer said:

Without wish to be unkind to the L&Y, they look rather crude for CCT, which most railways seem to have finished to look carriage-like.

They don't waste money 'Up North' on fancy looks on something that nobody will notice 
 

[CKPR]

 

Wagon = thar knows wot wagon is, soft lad

Van = big wagon wit roof on top

CCT = big van wit doors on t'end

Edited September 21, 2021 by CKPR

[bill-lobb]

On 27/10/2020 at 20:57, Nick Holliday said:

I see Penlan beat me to it.  I was just about to re-post the 1920 Bristol Docks sheet, as it is an important part of the available information. Despite that, I'll repeat it to try to get everything in one place.

In an attempt to make things clearer, I have consolidated the figures, shown in the first two columns of figures, and added some overall figures to try to put things in context.

If we accept that the GWR and the Midland are the home teams, then they have 50% of the wagons, with 50% being "foreign".  From various sources I have obtained values for the total number of wagons the main companies owned around the same time, together with the track mileages for each. Although there is no direct relationship between mileage and wagons, per se, there is a surprising degree of correlation between them, if you take certain factors into account.  For many of the lines in central England, the two percentages are very similar, and it is only the mainly non-industrial, passenger orientated, areas in the south, the Southern constituents, GWR and GER, where the mileage percentage is higher than, being almost double. There are four anomalies.  The North Eastern is well known for having very few private trader wagons on the system, supplying coal for domestic and industrial purposes in its own wagons, but to a lesser extent that applies to the Midland, Caledonian and North British too, who, for various reasons, bought large numbers of old PO wagons and provided new railway owned wagons to replace them. I'm sure @Compound2632 will have something to say about the Midland's activities, and I hope to cover the Scottish approach too.

 

One minor surprise in the above is the extent of LNWR wagons involved. As far as I can see the nearest North Western metals are at either Abergavenny or Hereford, coming down the Central Wales line from Shrewsbury.  The figures for the NER are also relatively high, but given the amount of stock they owned, perhaps to be expected.

 

One thing to be careful of here. The date is 1920, which is after common user rules were introduced during WW1. Prior to WW1 a wagon had to be returned empty to the owning company. Under Common User they could be used as wished by the company  on whose rails they were unloaded. This would have led to a greater mixture of wagons than would have been the case prior to that. There is a photograph in (I think) Midland Record of the Midland Railway's Avonmouth  docks near Bristol. In it every wagon is Midland, except for a couple of Somerset & Dorset.

[Compound2632]

On 21/09/2021 at 14:12, bill-lobb said:

One thing to be careful of here. The date is 1920, which is after common user rules were introduced during WW1. Prior to WW1 a wagon had to be returned empty to the owning company. Under Common User they could be used as wished by the company  on whose rails they were unloaded. This would have led to a greater mixture of wagons than would have been the case prior to that. There is a photograph in (I think) Midland Record of the Midland Railway's Avonmouth  docks near Bristol. In it every wagon is Midland, except for a couple of Somerset & Dorset.

 

Absolutely the nub of the question; a point that can't be repeated too often. I think this is the photo you had in mind:

 

 

Bristol Avon Wharf from the railway bridge into Temple Meads, June 1898. [DY 1024, released under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike (CC BY-NC-SA 3.0) licence by the National Railway Museum.]

 

Here's a couple of companion photos, taken from the other side of the river, the second one looking towards the main line bridge:

 

 

 

[DY 1022 and DY 1027, released under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike (CC BY-NC-SA 3.0) licence by the National Railway Museum.]

 

In the first of those there's (from L to R) that S&DJR open again, a line of Midland covered goods wagons - the early lower-roofed type, D353, and a line of four LSWR opens - presumably arrived via the S&DJR. But otherwise it's all standard Midland 5-plank opens, D299, apart from two or three 3-plank dropsides, D305. 

 

An exercise for those who obsess about these things (i.e. me) is to count the proportion of D299s with the extra vertical washer plate on the end. I make it about 50% of those where the end is clearly visible but I could do with getting hold of higher-resolution copies!

Edited April 16, 2022 by Compound2632
images re-inserted

[bill-lobb]

4 hours ago, Compound2632 said:

 

Absolutely the nub of the question; a point that can't be repeated too often. I think this is the photo you had in mind:

 

 

Bristol Avon Wharf from the railway bridge into Temple Meads, June 1898. [DY 1024, released under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike (CC BY-NC-SA 3.0) licence by the National Railway Museum.]

 

Here's a couple of companion photos, taken from the other side of the river, the second one looking towards the main line bridge:

 

 

 

[DY 1022 and DY 1027, released under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike (CC BY-NC-SA 3.0) licence by the National Railway Museum.]

 

In the first of those there's (from L to R) that S&DJR open again, a line of Midland covered goods wagons - the early lower-roofed type, D353, and a line of four LSWR opens - presumably arrived via the S&DJR. But otherwise it's all standard Midland 5-plank opens, D299, apart from two or three 3-plank dropsides, D305. 

 

An exercise for those who obsess about these things (i.e. me) is to count the proportion of D299s with the extra vertical washer plate on the end. I make it about 50% of those where the end is clearly visible but I could do with getting hold of higher-resolution copies!

 

Yep, I'm pretty sure that is the one. I really like those cranes. Now I'm going to have to start thinking about checking the 2mm Scale Association D299 kits for those washer plates.

[Dungrange]

On 30/10/2020 at 09:32, richbrummitt said:

In the directors report (GWR) for the year ended Dec 1920 the numbers were: 

 

 

that doesn’t show what was NCU within a category though. 

 

Could you post that image again - it's a pity some of the useful posts in this thread now have missing images.

[Dungrange]

On 08/11/2020 at 10:50, Nick Holliday said:

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.

 

Can you clarify the source of these numbers?  I'd like a breakdown of the circa 650,000 PO wagons across all of the pre-grouping companies, but don't know where to find this information.

[Compound2632]

41 minutes ago, Dungrange said:

Can you clarify the source of these numbers?  I'd like a breakdown of the circa 650,000 PO wagons across all of the pre-grouping companies, but don't know where to find this information.

 

It's rather patchy. From 1887 PO wagons had to be registered with one of the main line railway companies. By and large registration was with the company over whose lines the wagon principally ran but of course many ran over the lines of several companies - consider Thomas Moy, whose wagons ran from collieries served by the Midland, Great Central, and Great Northern to numerous destinations in Great Eastern territory. Many of his wagons were registered with the Midland, but certainly not all. The RCH arrangement was that a wagon registered with one company, as meeting the RCH specification and having been inspected by a representative of that company, was deemed to be acceptable to all the main line companies. 

 

The registers for the Midland and the L&Y are at the National Archives - I have delved in the Midland ones myself. I am told that the registers for the Grouping companies and those for  the GCR, NER, H&BR, GER , Metropolitan, and M&GN are all at the NRM. Pregrouping GWR is, I am told, in various places, some, regrettably, in private hands. Registers for the LNWR, GNR, LSWR, LBSCR, and SECR have not survived, apart from one late LNWR volume. The Scottish Record Office has the NBR registers. [My thanks to Simon Turner for all this information.]

[Dungrange]

On 27/10/2020 at 16:50, Nick Holliday said:

To kick things off, I thought I'd repeat the information compiled by Jonathan Abson of the Brighton Circle, using the Sheffield Park Goods Registers for a four month period at the turn of the century.

 

Obviously the image in this post has been lost, but did this information contain any details of where the wagons were from or does it just record the owning company of the various wagons?  Ideally, I'd like to know what proportion of traffic had travelled more than 50 miles, 100 miles, 150 miles, etc to understand what a typical trip length distribution looked like, so a large sample size would be ideal.

 

On 28/10/2020 at 16:54, Nick Holliday said:

In one of the parallel threads, @Compound2632 wondered if there might be some formula or algorithm to predict the diffusion of wagons post-common-user. 

 

It's something I've been pondering myself, but the problem is that we don't know at what rate wagons wandered off their home turf and didn't return as they would have done prior to the introduction of pooling.  Unfortunately, any assumption makes a huge difference to predicting how much foreign stock may have been present at any point in the post-WW1 pre-grouping period.  The question I want to answer is firstly how much foreign stock was on the Wisbech and Upwell tramway pre-WW1 and to what extent that had changed by 1921 (the period I am currently looking to model).  The graph below, shows how things might have looked at various dates if we assume that 0.8% of pooled wagons wandered off turf each month (and were replaced by foreign wagons weighted by the size of their fleets and the relative proximity of these fleets).  At this rate, it would take around 10 years for the various company fleets to be be fully mixed.  If that assumption is correct, then the majority of my wagons in 1921 need to be home company wagons.

 

 

However, if say 4.2% of pooled wagons wandered off turf each month (and were replaced by foreign wagons weighted by the size of their fleets and the relative proximity of these fleets), then the picture would be radically different by grouping.  4.2% per month is equivalent to fully mixing pooled vehicles in around 24 months.  If the company fleets mixed this quickly, then by 1921 most of my fleet should be foreign wagons.  Unfortunately, I'm not sure how to derive a measure of how quickly the various company fleets were mixed.

 

 

I think all we're really left with is finding before and after photographs to make a comparison and we need accurate dates for the post-pooling photographs.  

 

On 27/10/2020 at 23:18, Compound2632 said:

We need to be very clear whether we're interested in the pre-Great War period, before the pooling of a high proportion of opens and vans and before the various inter-company working agreements - notably LNW / Midland of 1908 onwards and GN / GE / GC from (1913?) - or the post-Great war period. Things look very different:

Birmingham Central Goods Station mid-1890s

Birmingham Central Goods Station 1920

Somebody on Wright Writes some months back expressed a distaste for the boring uniformity of the pre-Grouping period - showing that they had grasped the fundamental principle!

 

In many respect the 1890s photograph isn't particularly relevant to answering a general question as to how many foreign wagons could be seen in the pre-pooling period.  I'd expect to see loads of GWR, LNWR and MR wagons in Birmingham around 1895, but since each company had their own freight depots, it's entirely unsurprising that there are no GWR or LNWR wagons in a depot owned by the Midland Railway.  As such, the only foreign wagons I'd expect to see in 1895 in a Midland depot would be wagons from distant companies with no presence in the Birmingham area such as the SECR or the G&SWR, but such long distance traffic would presumably be relatively rare, so would not detract from the MR uniformity.

 

The post-pooling photograph is perhaps far more enlightening as presumably all the wagons on display were brought in on MR traffic flows and it shows MR wagons in the minority.  Unfortunately, the one linked to doesn't have a date, but this one https://www.warwickshirerailways.com/lms/mrcgy692.htm is stated as being 22 September 1922 and this seems to show foreign wagons outnumbering those of this Midland, but nonetheless MR wagons still look more common than any other company.  That would lead me to speculate that the fleets became quite mixed over a relatively short period - perhaps in the order of three or four years at most.  As @Compound2632 has stated we need to be clear as to whether we're referring to pre- or post-pooling, as there was a definite step change in foreign wagons post-WW1.

[1165Valour]

Of course, you can always make up a load of companies for PO wagons if you must.

[Andy Hayter]

I think you will get very different answers based on location, by which I mean the rate of wagon exchange in large busy locations will be very much higher than in isolated rural locations like the W&UT.  Looking at photos of big urban goods yards on major routes covered by several companies (which is what most of these pictures do) can give a picture very different to what happened on minor rural branch lines.  

 

It is an analogy I have used before but I make no apology for using it again.  22 years into the Euro and you would expect to have a very wide distribution of Euro coins from the various Euro countries; but here in very rural France, the majority of my Euro coins are still French.  There is a good smattering of German ones (largest producer of Euro coins), Spanish and Italian (closest neighbours) and some Belgian ones .  So essentially most are restricted to neighbouring countries.  Portuguese ones turn up regularly which is a bit of an outlier until you know that there is a Portuguese community not that far away.  As for the rest?  Conspicuous by their absence or only rare appearance.

 

If I go to the big cities and get coins there, the selection does seem to be wider but the 4 neighbours remain in the majority of foreigners and French coins cease to hold the absolute majority.  

 

So going to wagon loads and why there should be a difference between a branch line and a major city goods depot.   As a tradesman at the end of the branch, I need all sorts of goods but largely the quantity I need is smaller than a lot of producers are prepared to supply direct.  So I buy from a distributer who more than likely is going to be in a big city.  He gets deliveries from all over the country in whatever wagons are available.  The most likely wagons however are still likely to be fairly local if not the absolute home company to the producer.  So with lots of distributers we see a wide range of foreign company wagons.

 

When the distribution company  gets to send the goods on to our rural tradesman, statistically his home company is the most likely to have an available wagon so the rural tradesman and the branch line goods depot will more than likely receive goods from a local railway company.  

 

So expect to see different distributions of foreign wagons depending on whether it is rural or urban and then overlay specific traffic flows.  

 

 

[Nearholmer]

39 minutes ago, Andy Hayter said:

isolated rural locations like the W&UT

Except that, by virtue of sending fruit and veg all over the middle of England, possibly even further, and needing to draw-in empties in large numbers, it wasn’t really isolated. Remote from most of the population, yes; isolated, not so much.

[Andy Hayter]

Except that those replacement wagons did not come from the towns where the fruit and veg was sent:  They came from the local goods depot, where despite a good mix of wagons, statistically the most likely would still be a GER one.  

[Andy Hayter]

And a further thought on this.  How much of the agricultural crops went direct to customers off the GER?

 

Surely what was not consumed locally was likely to go to Covent Garden.  

[Nearholmer]

The number of wagons used for outward traffic from the W&U must have resulted in them being pulled from major sorting points, so post-pooling whatever mix existed there. 
 

But, I think it was a place that sent out quite a lot to go on fast, fitted goods trains, which may have resulted in almost captive diagramming.

 

All I’m suggesting is that maybe the unique nature of the W&U would have resulted in a faster dilution rate than would have been typical for a ‘non specialised’ branch.

 

Covent Garden? Yes, but not everyone lives in London, so it sent produce to the other major conurbations too.

 

 

Edited January 4 by Nearholmer

[Dungrange]

56 minutes ago, Andy Hayter said:

How much of the agricultural crops went direct to customers off the GER?

 

Surely what was not consumed locally was likely to go to Covent Garden.  

 

I think most of it left the GER.  Yes, some fruit went to London, but I believe the majority went to northern English cities and both Glasgow and Edinburgh received fruit from Upwell at the height of the season.  I believe that quantities increased over time, so I can't be sure about traffic operation in the pre-grouping time period, but I have a copy of an LNER Traffic Notice for 1947, which gives a special timetable for the fruit season.  There were six weekday afternoon departures from Upwell at 3:15, 3:20, 3:30, 4:15, 4:45 and 4:50.  

 

The 3:15 departure was 'to convey traffic for Newcastle and Scotland'.  It connected with a Magdalen Road to Peterborough service, which was marked as only to convey 'Passenger rated traffic for Newcastle and Scotland'.

The 3:20 and 3:30 services were both marked as being 'to convey passenger traffic for Joint Line and Peterborough, also goods rated traffic (in vacuum fitted vehicles) for Newcastle (New Bridge Street) and Scotland'.

The 4:15 service was marked as 'To convey traffic for via Joint Line and Peterborough'

The 4:45 service was marked as 'To work Joint Line traffic except Newcastle (New Bridge Street) and Scotland'

The 4:50 service was marked as 'To work Peterborough and London traffic.  To connect with 7:35pm to Peterborough and 7:00pm (altered to 7:55pm) to Spitalfields.  To leave Upwell formed: - Engine, via London, via Peterborough, Brake'.

 

As only the final train of the day mentions London, and it is distinguished separately from Peterborough, I think it's fair to assume that produce was exported to most of the major cities in the UK in 1947.  Peterborough would have acted as hub for traffic to the west (ie towards Birmingham, Coventry, Leicester, Nottingham etc), while the GN&GE Joint Line would have been used to convey the traffic to Yorkshire and Newcastle / Scotland where so identified.

 

I believe that most of the agricultural produce travelled quite far and would have resulted in a lot of GER vehicles getting all over the country.  However, it's important to highlight that much of the fruit would have been conveyed in passenger rated vans or fitted covered goods wagons, which were obviously not pooled.  I don't know how wide the distribution was for say potatoes or other vegetables, which would have been conveyed in pooled vehicles was.

 

The Wisbech and Upwell Tramway wasn't really a rural backwater - just a relatively sparsely populated rural area that produced goods sent far and wide.  

[Dungrange]

2 hours ago, Andy Hayter said:

They came from the local goods depot, where despite a good mix of wagons, statistically the most likely would still be a GER one.  

 

I agree with that, but statistically the likelihood of a wagon being a GER one would have declined over time, because that was the outcome of pooling.  If the Midland Railway were sending out a wagon from Birmingham Central Goods Depot in 1895, then they would almost certainly have dispatched a MR wagon.  However, if they were to dispatch a wagon in 1922, the probability of them sending out a MR wagon would have been much lower (as we can see from looking at the photographs on warwickshirerailways.com).  What we don't really know is the speed at which the probability changed, but which is actually quite important if trying to replicate the immediate post-war period anywhere in the UK.

[Compound2632]

That c. 1895 photo of Birmingham Central:

https://www.warwickshirerailways.com/lms/mrcgy924.htm

includes two definite foreigners, a GNR low-sided wagon with sheet, and a covered goods wagon with X-framing on the left, which might be LSWR.

 

A couple of 1903 photos of the LNWR Windsor Street station:

https://www.warwickshirerailways.com/lms/lnwra3641.htm

https://www.warwickshirerailways.com/lms/lnwra3633.htm

show a few more foreigners, including several GWR wagons and, I think, one each from L&YR, NSR, NER, and MR - the inevitable 8-ton open, D299.

 

There are a couple of 1914 photos of the GWR Hockley station:

https://www.warwickshirerailways.com/gwr/gwrhd692.htm

https://www.warwickshirerailways.com/gwr/gwrhd691.htm

again overwhelmingly dominated by the home company's wagons but there are a couple of LNWR covered goods wagons present.

 

BoT accident reports, especially those that list damaged stock, can give a snapshot of the makeup (at least in part) of goods trains. Whitacre, 1903, is an interesting case in point:

https://www.railwaysarchive.co.uk/doclisting.php?location=3987&acctype=all&&event=6587

- a Midland long-distance goods train (Birmingham to Manchester) including L&Y and CLC wagons - which might in this instance be back-loaded. 

Also Gretna, 1901:

https://www.railwaysarchive.co.uk/doclisting.php?location=546&acctype=all&&event=728

- two Anglo-Scottish goods trains, the GSWR train including only GSW and Midland wagons among those damaged, but the CR train including wagons from various companies in the LNWR orbit - L&YR, NSR, GWR - along with several NER wagons, illustrating the Caledonian / North Eastern pact to cut the North British out of Tyneside - Clydeside goods traffic.

[Dungrange]

On 04/01/2024 at 21:40, Andy Hayter said:

I think you will get very different answers based on location, by which I mean the rate of wagon exchange in large busy locations will be very much higher than in isolated rural locations like the W&UT.  Looking at photos of big urban goods yards on major routes covered by several companies (which is what most of these pictures do) can give a picture very different to what happened on minor rural branch lines.  

 

It is an analogy I have used before but I make no apology for using it again.  22 years into the Euro and you would expect to have a very wide distribution of Euro coins from the various Euro countries; but here in very rural France, the majority of my Euro coins are still French.  There is a good smattering of German ones (largest producer of Euro coins), Spanish and Italian (closest neighbours) and some Belgian ones .  So essentially most are restricted to neighbouring countries.  Portuguese ones turn up regularly which is a bit of an outlier until you know that there is a Portuguese community not that far away.  As for the rest?  Conspicuous by their absence or only rare appearance.

 

If I go to the big cities and get coins there, the selection does seem to be wider but the 4 neighbours remain in the majority of foreigners and French coins cease to hold the absolute majority.  

 

So going to wagon loads and why there should be a difference between a branch line and a major city goods depot.   As a tradesman at the end of the branch, I need all sorts of goods but largely the quantity I need is smaller than a lot of producers are prepared to supply direct.  So I buy from a distributer who more than likely is going to be in a big city.  He gets deliveries from all over the country in whatever wagons are available.  The most likely wagons however are still likely to be fairly local if not the absolute home company to the producer.  So with lots of distributers we see a wide range of foreign company wagons.

 

When the distribution company  gets to send the goods on to our rural tradesman, statistically his home company is the most likely to have an available wagon so the rural tradesman and the branch line goods depot will more than likely receive goods from a local railway company.  

 

So expect to see different distributions of foreign wagons depending on whether it is rural or urban and then overlay specific traffic flows.  

 

Thanks Andy - I think you make a few very good points, some of which are quite subtle, but which highlight why it’s not possible to have an accurate ‘rule of thumb’ generalisation that applies everywhere (as some have already highlighted).

 

Since there are few photographs of freight traffic on the Wisbech and Upwell tramway in 1921 and my wagon spotting skills are well below the observational skills of some, like @Compound2632, my approach has been to try and ‘forecast’ what I’d expect to see, and I’ve been adopting a two-step approach to that.  The first is to try and forecast the pre-war situation (based on trip lengths to the nearest stations, company ownership of the nearest stations and both the breakdown and size of each company’s fleet) and then try to consider how that may have changed post-pooling as company fleets mixed.  What I had identified is that the variable that my 1921 forecast is most sensitive to is the question of how quickly the fleets mixed - it's the biggest uncertainty I have.

 

On 04/01/2024 at 21:40, Andy Hayter said:

the rate of wagon exchange in large busy locations will be very much higher than in isolated rural locations

 

I must admit that I hadn’t really considered that the speed at which the fleets mixed would vary across the country and be related to the intensity of freight traffic.  At a location that saw the arrival of 1,000 loaded wagons per day the impact of pooling would probably be obvious ten times quicker than a location that saw only 100 loaded wagons per day and 100 times quicker than at a location that saw just 10 loaded wagons per day.  It makes sense: I just hadn’t thought about it.  It doesn’t mean that comparisons at places like Birmingham Central aren’t useful, but means that when drawing conclusions about the impacts of pooling, one needs to be aware of the relative traffic levels and adjust accordingly, so as well as requiring fairly accurate dates for photographs post-1917, there is a need to understand the difference in freight intensity between the photographs being looked at and the location being modelled to fully understand the impact of pooling at a given date in the twilight years of the pre-grouping period.

 

On 04/01/2024 at 21:40, Andy Hayter said:

22 years into the Euro and you would expect to have a very wide distribution of Euro coins from the various Euro countries; but here in very rural France, the majority of my Euro coins are still French. 

 

I think this is also an interesting observation and I can see its relevance.  A lot has been written about pooling in the post-grouping period with an accepted general rule of thumb being that the number of LMS, LNER, GWR and SR wagons on a layout should be broadly in proportion with the size of each companies’ pooled fleet, so even a layout in the south of England should have more LMS than SR wagons.  However, whilst this might be true when considering just four companies, the same probably isn’t true when considering 20+ pre-grouping companies (in the same way as there are 20 countries that use the Euro).  I guess the question then becomes, what is the equilibrium point?  For my own forecasts I was assuming that I needed to weight each company’s fleet breakdown by the average distance to all stations on their network.  This means that I’m biasing the impact of pooling in favour of the local companies because whilst a Highland Railway wagon may have ended up in East Anglia, it would most likely get there having made dozens of shorter journeys, each of which present the opportunity for it to be sent back in the direction from which it came.  Therefore, even although pooling may have resulted in a HR wagon being spotted at Upwell, I think it would still have been rare (in the same way as certain Euro coins are still rare in rural France).  I guess that raises another question for me – should I be weighting the company fleets by distance (as I have done) or by something like the square of the distance, which would result in the expectation of fewer Scottish foreigners, with the foreign wagons being more heavily biased to the neighbouring companies?  That's a bit of a rhetorical question.

 

On 04/01/2024 at 21:40, Andy Hayter said:

As a tradesman at the end of the branch, I need all sorts of goods but largely the quantity I need is smaller than a lot of producers are prepared to supply direct.  So I buy from a distributer who more than likely is going to be in a big city.  He gets deliveries from all over the country in whatever wagons are available.  The most likely wagons however are still likely to be fairly local if not the absolute home company to the producer.  So with lots of distributers we see a wide range of foreign company wagons.

 

When the distribution company  gets to send the goods on to our rural tradesman, statistically his home company is the most likely to have an available wagon so the rural tradesman and the branch line goods depot will more than likely receive goods from a local railway company.  

 

Again, a subtle point that I hadn’t fully appreciated.

 

My approach to trying to derive a pre-WW1 forecast has been to start with an assumed deterrence function.  The local traffic (ie traffic travelling less than 10 miles) would be my baseline and the further away a station is, the less traffic it would dispatch.  For example, I was assuming that the average station 100 miles away may produce just 1% of the traffic that would be generated at Wisbech (which is just 6 miles away).  I then looked at counting how many stations are 10-20 miles distant, 20-30 miles distant etc.  I did this accurately for stations within 100 miles, and then very crudely after that because it's less important.  Combining these then gives me a trip length distribution.  I was hoping that I could find data to calibrate this (since it would be virtually impossible to calibrate the deterrence function directly).

 

The trip length distribution that I’ve derived is highly plausible (the most common trip length is circa 30-40 miles, approximately 2/3 of traffic is travelling less than 50 miles and about 95% of traffic is travelling less than 100 miles). However, what you’re highlighting is that the distribution of trip lengths will vary by location and whilst at some more urban locations perhaps 10% of traffic may have travelled more than 100 miles, in a sparsely populated areas there is probably a much lower proportion of long-distance traffic.  Again, the approach that I’m taking isn’t necessarily wrong, but I’ll need to give thought to calibrating the likelihood of the longer distance trips.  Whilst there was a lot of long-distance exports from Upwell, it doesn’t mean that there was a similar proportion of long-distance imports.

 

 

 

The resultant mix that I’ve derived as an annual pre-WW1 estimate for Upwell is as below, which overall, I think is plausible, although I’m still looking to make refinements.  Although that's an assumption that I would need about 21% of stock to be foreign, it's worth highlighting that the assumed likely foreign stock is very heavily biased to the local companies that were operating within 40 miles of Upwell.  I'd therefore expect a lower percentage of foreign stock at a location deep within one company's territory and a higher proportion of foreign stock at a yard on the periphery of a company's territory.

 

 

Unfortunately, it sometimes feels like this is an unanswerable question, but I suppose if none of us know the answer, there is no-one who can definitively tell us that we are wrong.  My next task is to look at the Private Owner wagon fleet!!!

 

On 03/01/2024 at 21:55, Compound2632 said:

It's rather patchy. From 1887 PO wagons had to be registered with one of the main line railway companies. By and large registration was with the company over whose lines the wagon principally ran but of course many ran over the lines of several companies - consider Thomas Moy, whose wagons ran from collieries served by the Midland, Great Central, and Great Northern to numerous destinations in Great Eastern territory. Many of his wagons were registered with the Midland, but certainly not all. The RCH arrangement was that a wagon registered with one company, as meeting the RCH specification and having been inspected by a representative of that company, was deemed to be acceptable to all the main line companies. 

 

The registers for the Midland and the L&Y are at the National Archives - I have delved in the Midland ones myself. I am told that the registers for the Grouping companies and those for  the GCR, NER, H&BR, GER , Metropolitan, and M&GN are all at the NRM. Pre-grouping GWR is, I am told, in various places, some, regrettably, in private hands. Registers for the LNWR, GNR, LSWR, LBSCR, and SECR have not survived, apart from one late LNWR volume. The Scottish Record Office has the NBR registers. [My thanks to Simon Turner for all this information.]

 

Unfortunately, that's the answer that I though you might give.  I'm aware that the L&Y Railway Society also have some details on their website of L&Y registered wagons - https://lyrs.org.uk/lyr-private-owner-wagon-register/.  I'm assuming that the registers for the other companies, where these are available, will convey similar information.  I was hoping that there may be some high level breakdown of the circa 650,000 wagons by geography and/or wagon type, because going through each companies registers would be a mammoth task, which would probably be of little real value.

 

On 04/01/2024 at 20:56, GWRSwindon said:

Of course, you can always make up a load of companies for PO wagons if you must.

 

That's very true, but with 650,000 prototypes to choose from, is there really a need for fictitious liveries?  My interest is really, of the PO coal wagons that turned up in Upwell, how may plausibly came from Scotland, South Wales, the North East etc (which would be related to the size of the PO wagon fleet in each area).

Edited January 7 by Dungrange

[burgundy]

19 minutes ago, Dungrange said:

My interest is really, of the PO coal wagons that turned up in Upwell, how may plausibly came from Scotland, South Wales, the North East etc (which would be related to the size of the PO wagon fleet in each area).

I am afraid that may introduce another rabbit hole for you to explore. 

The proportion of different PO wagon operators will have less to do with simple numbers and more with the types of coal for which there was a market in Upwell. Different uses required different types of coal and those generally came from particular areas. Len Tavender's book on Coal Trade Wagons offers an introduction to this.  

Best wishes 

Eric 

[hmrspaul]

Upwell is in an area that had glasshouses. They would be heated with anthracite - so from some of the South Wales field IIRC the western end. 

 

Paul