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Speed of transport of milk tanks' contents, 'from cow to Vauxhall'.


C126
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12 minutes ago, C126 said:

It is just a tank, and no van.

 

Because, if the 74 was used, the guard could ride in the back cab, whereas when a shunting loco was used (normally), there was no back cab, so a van was attached. I think this is why the train had such an assortment of vans at different times, because "anything" might be borrowed for a few hours from the extensive selection of suitable empty vans stabled at Clapham Junction between use in parcel trains - there were usually tens of them there in the day. The rest of the "milk diagram" was worked by locos that had a back cab, so no van needed.

 

 

Edited by Nearholmer
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3 hours ago, The Stationmaster said:

The last thing any driver wanted was anything swilling about in a train of milk tanks.  One hard brake application and loaded milk tanks would let a Driver forget about it for miles as the darned things alternately plucking and buffering up due to the milk swiling to & fro inside them.

I had assumed, perhaps incorrectly, that the tanks would contain baffles to prevent the undesirable movements you mention with the potential risk of lock buffering or derailment following a sudden brake application, although I can also see that internal baffles would possibly make the internal cleaning of tanks more difficult.  Thinking further about the cleaning question, is there any evidence of the tanks being cleaned at Vauxhall as this would have required hot water to be piped from the dairy ?

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2 hours ago, C126 said:

 

It is pl. 103, by "R. E. Ruffell", in Marsden's 'The diesel shunter - a pictorial record', 1981.  Caption: "A rather interesting scene photographed at Waterloo station on 30 June, 1973, when D4114, later 09 026, hauled the daily milk train from Clapham Junction to Vauxhall and thence Waterloo, formed of one GWR milk tank wagon and a BG coach.  D4111, later 09 023, has been attached to the country end to haul this train back to Clapham Junction.  The 09 on the rear will now take up the duties of station pilot."  The BG is certainly not a B.R. Mk. I, but I do not know enough to say if it is L.M.S. or not.  It is in B.R. blue/grey.

 

Interestingly, searching for this turned up another photograph by Ruffell on p. 69 of Pallant and Bird's 'Diesel and electric locomotives of the southern region', 1984.  Caption: "No. 74.001 and empty milk tank at Waterloo in March 1976.  An '08' class shunter normally worked this humble duty."  It is just a tank, and no van.

 

This March 1968 photo has a similarly short rake of two tanks with a Birmingham type 3 at Clapham J. https://PaulBartlett.zenfolio.com/brmilktanks/e3aa0837f

 

Paul

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One of my favourites from your excellent collection, because it gives perfect proof of the IMS-liveried tank at that late date. Thank you for that!

 

What I'm not sure we know is where its going to or from, though.

 

 

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17 hours ago, Michael Hodgson said:

Drivers don't like signal going back in front of them regardless of what the service they're on.

Tendency to need a clean pair of underpants!

Unfortunately it did tend to happen in the mid '60s with the multiple aspect searchlight signals on the WR mainline between Southall and Friars Junction where it was known as 'bobbing'.  In that case the signal aspect would change from whatever it was showing to something else and back again or move between the three colours.  I was in the cab of a D8XX on a milk train one night and as we approached the signal on the gantry at Acton it 'bobbed' from green to red and stayed there for a few moments before going through all three colours then back to red and finally back to green.  The Driver had no option but to put the brake in but even at relatively low speed that was that and the miltas were still giving the loco substantial kicks up the back end when speed was reduced to cross to the Victoria branch at OOC East. 

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18 hours ago, C126 said:

It is pl. 103, by "R. E. Ruffell", in Marsden's 'The diesel shunter - a pictorial record', 1981.  Caption: "A rather interesting scene photographed at Waterloo station on 30 June, 1973, when D4114, later 09 026, hauled the daily milk train from Clapham Junction to Vauxhall and thence Waterloo, formed of one GWR milk tank wagon and a BG coach.  D4111, later 09 023, has been attached to the country end to haul this train back to Clapham Junction.  The 09 on the rear will now take up the duties of station pilot."  The BG is certainly not a B.R. Mk. I, but I do not know enough to say if it is L.M.S. or not.  It is in B.R. blue/grey.

 

Thanks, I thought it was in a magazine and checked a couple of candidates but it was actually in a book ! The BG is indeed an LMS type, that and one tank were the entire train; I wonder how profitable that traffic was for BR ? 

 

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On 28/02/2021 at 19:35, SED Freightman said:

Thinking further about the cleaning question, is there any evidence of the tanks being cleaned at Vauxhall as this would have required hot water to be piped from the dairy ?

There was an article in iirc Railway Bylines about the Vauxhall milk depot, apparently the tanks were washed out onto the ballast, or some drain under the track, which in summer smelled pretty rank.

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This thread reminded me of the phrase

Hymeks to Hemyock

as used by an Exeter driver who had moved oop north well before my time of having anything  much to do with operations  at either Sheffield or Exeter depots....

 

But the tanks were steam cleaned at the London end and then sent back on their way to collect more milk...

The 1800 ex St Erth let at that time for a reason...

to get to "London" in the early hours of the morning with fresh milk.

 

I have "been told" ( by several people who knew stuff) that the railway lost the milk contracts because lorries formed a sort of reirrigated mobile warehouse for the milk...

 

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On 01/03/2021 at 12:04, caradoc said:

 

Thanks, I thought it was in a magazine and checked a couple of candidates but it was actually in a book ! The BG is indeed an LMS type, that and one tank were the entire train; I wonder how profitable that traffic was for BR ? 

 

Very; it was a contract!

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15 hours ago, LBRJ said:

 

I have "been told" ( by several people who knew stuff) that the railway lost the milk contracts because lorries formed a sort of reirrigated mobile warehouse for the milk...

I'm sure this is part of the reason, but at the time BR were focussed on the core traffic as defined in the Beeching Report; intercity and commuter passenger, and bulk block freight contract traffic along with scheduled Freightliner.  Milk, Livestock, Pigeons, Newspapers, and eventually even Parcels and Mails were all disposed of as 'uneconomic', and general merchandise freight was in terminal decline.  Traffic that required attaching or detaching, or tripping, was discouraged for many years until it is nowadays more or less extinct.

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On 01/03/2021 at 12:04, caradoc said:

I wonder how profitable that traffic was for BR ? 

 

Profitable enough for BR, I think, but the MMB got fed-up with the un-reliability and inflexibility of the service that they received. Quoting myself from the St Ivel thread:

 

"......... the agreement between the MMB and BR governing milk transport by rail from Wales and the West of England ran to an end in October 1965, after which Unigate and Express made their own arrangements with BR (from an academic thesis http://etheses.whiterose.ac.uk/18843/1/TS Thesis Final Draft.pdf )."

 

The Vauxhall service was I think all Unigate (by then branding as St Ivel, having acquired that brand in the takeover of Aplin & Barrett c1959), and BR and Unigate seem to have put some effort into sharpening the whole operation up in the late-60s, which implies that it was profitable for them both. But, as others have said, as BR got out of "fiddly" traffic, the marginal cost of this one to them must have risen sharply, which is presumably what killed it off as they sought to pass that cost on.

 

The MMB clearly thought milk by rail had some potential quite late in the game, because they funded (part-funded?) the rebuilding of a fleet of tank wagons that barely got used.

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On 05/03/2021 at 00:11, LBRJ said:

I have "been told" ( by several people who knew stuff) that the railway lost the milk contracts because lorries formed a sort of reirrigated mobile warehouse for the milk...

 

More or less. It came down to a mix of cost and reliability. The MMB lost faith in BR after the 1955 ASLEF strike and was looking to take control of the distribution chain to prevent such a strike disrupting their business in future. As lorries improved, it became increasingly cheaper to transport milk by road and also feasible to do so over longer distances.

 

Dairies close to London switched first with places like Frome losing their rail service in the late 50s. The most distant creameries retained their trains the longest as these were the ones that retained a competitive advantage over the roads longest. By the late 70s, only Cornwall, Devon and west Wales were still dispatching milk by rail.

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On 05/03/2021 at 17:01, Nearholmer said:

But, as others have said, as BR got out of "fiddly" traffic, the marginal cost of this one to them must have risen sharply, which is presumably what killed it off as they sought to pass that cost on.

 

I think it was more a case that road hauliers were increasingly able to undercut BR as lorries increased in range and efficiency.

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11 hours ago, Karhedron said:

 

I think it was more a case that road hauliers were increasingly able to undercut BR as lorries increased in range and efficiency.

Some of the milk companies set up their own transport firms; Unigate had one called 'Wincanton Transport'. They were allowed to carry goods for third-parties, so reducing their cost base.

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Both my point, and Karhedron's are correct.

 

If we had a graph of the unit cost of transport of milk over a fixed distance against time, all corrected for inflation, we would see that the unit cost of rail transport rose over time, particularly as it became the only "fiddly" traffic left, and the unit cost of road transport fell over time as that "new technology" developed.

 

In another thread, we looked at how rail haulage of milk from East Sussex to SE London seems to have ceased relatively early (cWW2) because, once the roads were improved and the vehicles were available, road could undercut rail very easily on such short (<50 mile) trips. miles

 

For hauls of c150 miles, the date at which road became cheaper than rail was later, c1965 - it needed bigger, better lorries, on better roads.

 

I guess if you wanted to shift thousands of gallons of milk every day from Scotland to the South of France (quite why I'm not sure!), rail might still be cheaper than road now.

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27 minutes ago, Nearholmer said:

B

 

I guess if you wanted to shift thousands of gallons of milk every day from Scotland to the South of France (quite why I'm not sure!), rail might still be cheaper than road now.

It might sound bizarre, but a few years ago there was a regular flow of milk from West Wales to Emiglia Romano. It was taken as far as Abbeville (south of Boulonge) by road (using 'Mansel Davies ac Fab'), then transferred to rail containers. I do wonder why the producers of Grano Padano and Parmigiano were so keen to use Welsh milk?

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On 27/02/2021 at 12:16, roythebus1 said:

All this makes me wonder when the empty tanks were cleaned out; at the collection or delivery point? It seems they were never cleaned outside!

 

They were normally cleaned at both ends. After unloading in London, at minimum they were given a rinse out to remove any residue as otherwise it would go off by the time it returned to the country creamery. As one of the other posters mentioned, the tanks at Vauxhall were normally rinsed out straight on to the track which gave platform 1 a somewhat pungent aroma. By the 1970s, it had got so bad that all the ballast had to be dug out over the course of a weekend and a concrete apron installed. Of course the milk traffic ceased a few years later so it was all for naught.

 

This image of Vauxhall gets wheeled out regularly on these threads but is worth wheeling out again because of the wealth of detail. The 1st and 3rd tanks are in the process of being cleaned out as the manhole covers are open. I believe the thin hose with handle in the nearest tank is a steam lance which is a pretty good way to sterilise the tanks. I have not heard of any chemicals being used in the cleaning process but it is possible. The middle tanks seems to be in the process of being emptied as it has a fat hose attached to the outlet valve.

 

Vauxhall milk delivery

 

The tanks were cleaned again at the country end prior to filling. This shot of St Erth shows a washout in progress. The creamery was blessed with a concrete apron so they probably didn't have quite the same pong as they did at Vauxhall.

 

http://www.cornwallrailwaysociety.org.uk/uploads/7/6/8/3/7683812/3297982_orig.jpg

 


The short lived Chard to Stowmarket service using the refurbished MMB tankers was killed off, in part, by the lack of washout facilities at Stowmarket. This meant tanks were returned to Chard with a smelly congealed mess in the bottoms. Some poor soul then had the thankless task of going in and cleaning them out with a hose and brush.

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On 28/02/2021 at 15:23, The Stationmaster said:

Actually there were two trains of milk empties to South Wales for many years.  The morning train left Kenny at 11.55 and in the 1966-67 service it ran to Cardiff while the train leaving Kenny after 20.00 ran to whitland.  But things changed over the years thus at one time the late morning/early afternoon train ran to Whitland.   The WR milk working was fairly heftily reorganised in, I think, the early 1960s and I know that in 1968 a lot of milk trains for which Control Office cards existed never actually ran as the cards would come back to the Train Office scored through for the entire week.

 

Around 1964 BR and the MMB signed the "Western Agreement" which shut down milk traffic on the MR and ER and concentrated traffic into London on the WR and SR. I would expect this probably had a big effect on milk trains and their operation.

  

On 28/02/2021 at 15:23, The Stationmaster said:

I can't recall when the Milk Controller's post went in the London Division Control but that was about the mid- late '60s - possibly a little later.  covid aside I still regyl ularly see on e of the last WR Milk Controllers and if I remember when our lunch group gets back together (whenever that is) II'll ask him. 

 

Another request for a brain dump here. ;) 

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One point which has not been explored in connection with the move to road transport was the effect of bulk collection from farms.  While this began in the early 1960s (in some areas if not everywhere) what happened at that time was that the milk still went to the same fairly local places - dairies, bottling plants etc - that milk in churns had gone to from the farms.  But even in the 1960s that saw a change where some. of the bulk collections were taken direct to London  instead of being dealt with fairly locally.  That obviously reduced 'handling' of the traffic and was facilitated by/encouraged the use of larger lorries which reduced unit costs.  There was no way rail could economically compete with that.

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On 05/03/2021 at 17:01, Nearholmer said:

 

The MMB clearly thought milk by rail had some potential quite late in the game, because they funded (part-funded?) the rebuilding of a fleet of tank wagons that barely got used.

Thinking back a bit, in around the mid 1980's the long term freight planners at Waterloo did look at a scheme to move milk in block trains to a proposed new terminal on the West London Line (near White City ?), possibly from Chard.  The proposal came to nought as BR was then unable to guarantee provision of the service which was required to operate daily, excluding Chrismas Day.

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On 22/03/2021 at 12:04, Nearholmer said:

I guess if you wanted to shift thousands of gallons of milk every day from Scotland to the South of France (quite why I'm not sure!), rail might still be cheaper than road now.

 

You probably don't even have to go that far afield. In the mid 90s, Milk Marque invested in a service called the Milkliner. The idea was to transport semi-trailers mounted on existing tiphook pocket wagons from Penrith to Cricklewood. This would have taken about 20 lorries per day off the M6/M1. In many ways, it was a spiritual successor to the old Rotanks of the 1930s.

 

The service got as far as prototype trials before Milk Marque was broken up by the Monopolies and Mergers commission so the idea never went into full service but there are some shots of the test train about. Normal motive power was a pair of 20s or 37s.

 

DRS Class 20/3's, 20304 & 20303 on the 'Milkliner'

 

Direct Rail Services Class 37/6's, 37609 & 37610

 

Edited by Karhedron
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On 23/03/2021 at 21:33, SED Freightman said:

Thinking back a bit, in around the mid 1980's the long term freight planners at Waterloo did look at a scheme to move milk in block trains to a proposed new terminal on the West London Line (near White City ?), possibly from Chard.  The proposal came to nought as BR was then unable to guarantee provision of the service which was required to operate daily, excluding Chrismas Day.

There was at one time a milk receiving location on the WLL near Viaduct Jcn so it sounds as if it might have been part of a plan to redevelop that?

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1 hour ago, The Stationmaster said:

There was at one time a milk receiving location on the WLL near Viaduct Jcn so it sounds as if it might have been part of a plan to redevelop that?

 

Was that the Unigate dairy at Wood Lane? It was one of the main destinations of the WR milk trains and was refurbished in the mid 80s. IIRC Princess Diana reopened it in 1987.

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3 hours ago, Karhedron said:

 

Was that the Unigate dairy at Wood Lane? It was one of the main destinations of the WR milk trains and was refurbished in the mid 80s. IIRC Princess Diana reopened it in 1987.

Now you mention Wood Lane and Unigate, yes I am pretty sure that Wood Lane was the destination with a new siding/s to be constructed adjacent to the WLL.  It sounds as though the rail proposal may have formed part of the dairy refurbishment scheme.

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