Colliery Wagon Questions

[MR Chuffer]

Ah, I see @Aire Head is on the same lines, so to speak, as I posted.

Edited April 5, 2021 by MR Chuffer

[Possy92]

6 minutes ago, MR Chuffer said:

Been keeping on eye on this thread and a lot makes sense, then I see this? Located in the Northwest, where? Why would coal come from a port when Wigan was coal central. Also a lot of coal used in the Northwest came across the Pennines from Yorkshire.

 

I asked a question a while ago about why do so many photos I see of Lancashire railways seem to be coal from Yorkshire and empties returning, and got a wealth of information including an NCB map of UK coal deposits. A reason for the one way traffic was "quality". Wigan was sulphurous as was Burnley, good for gas, bad for steaming and brewing, etc. I can send you the map of you PM me.

 

My apologies, hadn't even thought of Wigan! (feel a right t!t now!)

 

I fear I may have been out in the bank holiday sun a bit too much today!

 

Need to get me some books on the subject, and the Lancashire area.

 

[Andy Hayter]

A further comment on the use of anthracite for brewing.  There were cases in the 19th century where "ordinary" coal was used in the malting houses and resulted in the drinkers suffering from arsenic poisoning due to impurities in the coal.  Anthracite being a much purer form of coal (without arsenic or other poisons as a major contaminant) became the favoured source of heat for malting.  

[MR Chuffer]

@Andy Hayter, correct, I came across this when doing my own coalfield research, grim indeed. And "Death in a beer glass" links to a body of research in a PDF.

[MR Chuffer]

Several people have asked for the NCB Coalfields map I mentioned up thread so I have included this link to a thread I ran with last year that answered many of my questions about trans-Pennine coal traffic and includes the Coalfields map.

 

 

[corneliuslundie]

Actually there was more steam coal in south Wales than anthracite, though in earlier years much of it went for export whereas quite a lot of anthracite was used throughout the country. The anthracite collieries were on the west side of the coalfield. For example, the BP&GVR "main" line up the valley served mostly anthracite collieries (and later opencast operations) whereas the part along the coast to Burry Port just a few miles to the east served collieries producing other types of coal.

I too had thought of the Wigan coalfield. A massive producer of coal in earlier years.

I used to own the book 

The Industrial Railways of the Wigan Coalfield: Part One, West and South of Wigan. Peden, J.A.; Townley, C.H.A.; Smith, F.D.

ISBN 10: 1870754182 / ISBN 13: 9781870754187

and also volume 2 covering north and east of Wigan. Two excellent tomes full of detail.

But as has been stated several times different coalfields, and even different collieries in the same coalfield and different seams in the same colliery, produced different types of coal, so there were often two way flows.

Be warned. Research into railway coal traffic could take up so much time you never build your layout!

Jonathan

[MR Chuffer]

4 minutes ago, corneliuslundie said:

Research into railway coal traffic could take up so much time

Agree but after all, coal was the bread and butter of most companies' railway traffic pre-grouping, and after. Since my original post a year ago when I was top heavy with Wigan-based PO wagons, I'm now much more nuanced in my coal train traffic and have as many Yorkshire POs as Lancashire/Wigan ones, thanks to PoWsides kits. and a select few RTR ones.

[The Stationmaster]

On 05/04/2021 at 11:45, Compound2632 said:

 

Guilty as charged! And glad to be corrected. I can see that that makes a great deal of sense in terms of line capacity between Swindon and Didcot.

And it avoided the climb up to Sapperton although assistance was also needed for heavier trains up the bank from Ledbury and probably oon the North &West as well.  But it did save line occupation on waht was the original South Wales Main Line via Gloucester as well as east of Swindon.

 

early GWR freight working contains some quite interesting and rather unexpected trains - a nice example being the daily Paddington Goods - Manchester working while there was also a regular working of coal for shipment from Pontypool Road to Merseyside.

[Compound2632]

1 minute ago, The Stationmaster said:

early GWR freight working contains some quite interesting and rather unexpected trains - a nice example being the daily Paddington Goods - Manchester working 

 

Via Wolverhampton, Shrewsbury, and Chester I suppose, but which way to Wolverhampton - B&OJ or OWW?

[TheSignalEngineer]

6 hours ago, Compound2632 said:

 

Via Wolverhampton, Shrewsbury, and Chester I suppose, but which way to Wolverhampton - B&OJ or OWW?

In 1910 from the opening of the shorter route the 9.35pm goods from Paddington to Birkenhead and Manchester was booked via West Ealing, Greenford, Bicester and Banbury. I don't know of the route before that.

[Compound2632]

41 minutes ago, TheSignalEngineer said:

In 1910 from the opening of the shorter route the 9.35pm goods from Paddington to Birkenhead and Manchester was booked via West Ealing, Greenford, Bicester and Banbury. I don't know of the route before that.

 

That is what I had assumed. But it's what they got up to in the days of the Great Way Round that intrigues me. And as like as not it was a saddle tank all the way.

[hmrspaul]

23 hours ago, Aire Head said:

 

 

Further to this Welsh Coal was typically Anthracite which was highly calorific and burned better and was often used by industries such as brewing.

If the north west is being modelled there would have been anthracite going to the plant nurseries around Ormskirk as it was used for their heating boilers. 

 

Paul

[The Stationmaster]

22 hours ago, Compound2632 said:

 

Via Wolverhampton, Shrewsbury, and Chester I suppose, but which way to Wolverhampton - B&OJ or OWW?

I shall dig out my 1892 STT and see what I can glean from it although alas it doesn't have all the sections in it and I haven't got complete coverage for 1901 either I'm afraid.

 

I don't know about saddle tanks on that working but I suspect the final stretch to Manchester would have been a tender engine to minimise the need to pay another company for water.  Some coal trains out of South Wales were at one time definitely worked by saddle tanks or pairs thereof.

[TheSignalEngineer]

On 06/04/2021 at 12:52, The Stationmaster said:

Early GWR freight working contains some quite interesting and rather unexpected trains - a nice example being the daily Paddington Goods - Manchester working while there was also a regular working of coal for shipment from Pontypool Road to Merseyside.

Over the years a lot got railway nicknames which in the 1930s were enshrined in GWR publicity material. The night train from Paddington to Birkenhead was The Northern Flash. Other examples included The Birmingham Market was mainly for live cattle and meat from Birkenhead to Bordesley, the Bordesley to Swansea train was known as The Hardware and the Margam to Bordesley was The Tin Man.

Edited April 7, 2021 by TheSignalEngineer
typo

[Compound2632]

17 minutes ago, TheSignalEngineer said:

The night train from Paddington to Birkenhead was The Northern Flash. Other examples included The Birmingham Market was mainly for live cattle and meat from Birkenhead to Bordesley, the Bordesley to Swansea train was known as The Hardware and the Margam to Bordesley was The Tin Man.

 

I rather like the 19th century goods train names recorded by Ahrons such as the "Searchlight" - afternoon up express goods from Penzance, on account of its three-lamp headcode, and the evening down Exeter "Flying Pig" - I doubt that made it into the publicity material. He does mention the Manchester, 9.50 pm from Paddington, limited to 27 wagons as far as Reading and then 31. It ran via Leamington. He says it was the fastest standard gauge goods train until the early nineties, though outclassed by the Midland and Great Northern fast Manchester goods trains - over no section averaging more than 30 mph and only 25 mph north of Leamington, against the 33 mph - 35 mph of the northern lines.

[The Stationmaster]

46 minutes ago, Compound2632 said:

 

I rather like the 19th century goods train names recorded by Ahrons such as the "Searchlight" - afternoon up express goods from Penzance, on account of its three-lamp headcode, and the evening down Exeter "Flying Pig" - I doubt that made it into the publicity material. He does mention the Manchester, 9.50 pm from Paddington, limited to 27 wagons as far as Reading and then 31. It ran via Leamington. He says it was the fastest standard gauge goods train until the early nineties, though outclassed by the Midland and Great Northern fast Manchester goods trains - over no section averaging more than 30 mph and only 25 mph north of Leamington, against the 33 mph - 35 mph of the northern lines.

Definitely booked via Leamington in an 1891 STT.   Regrettably i have no STT details for it beyond Victoria Basin Wolverhampton.

[Compound2632]

On 04/04/2021 at 21:35, corneliuslundie said:

And I forgot to say that not all coal bought by railway companies would be for loco use. Quite an amount would have been used for space heating - stations, signal boxes etc. Works would also have used coal. A few railways also had electricity generating stations in the days when generation was by private companies. And in earlier years it would have been wanted for railway owned gas works, producing gas for carriage lighting etc. 

 

The gas coal from Derbyshire for the GWR's Swindon gas works has been mentioned. I wonder about gas for carriage lighting - it seems to me that the number of gas-transporting wagons (like the GW's cordons) was too few for the total demand. Many stations were gas lit from their local municipal supply. Was town gas used for carriages? In the Birmingham area, the Midland had carriage sidings at Kings Norton, Walsall, Redditch, and Evesham, where sets of carriages were stabled overnight, but the carriage working was arranged so that every set had a rest day in the main carriage sidings at Saltley, where presumably they were cleaned out, washed, and topped up with gas. The City of Birmingham Gas Department's huge Saltley works was just on the other side of the tracks but the engine shed site had a small gasholder with some associated buildings - was this a small gasworks for carriage lighting gas? It's not something found at other Midland sheds as far as I've looked. Of course gas coal and locomotive goal are different things; it just so happens that at Saltley the carriage and locomotive depots were adjacent. Did other "concentration" carriage sidings have their own small gas works?

 

As to coal for heating railway stations, would here have been a delivery of coal bought centrally by the company (8, 10, or 12 tons delivered at a time) or would the stationmaster have been responsible for buying it from local merchants (himself, for example) albeit from his own station yard? One piece of evidence for wayside stations having large stocks of coal for their own use is provided by Peter's mining exploits in The Railway Children.

[MR Chuffer]

2 hours ago, Compound2632 said:

wonder about gas for carriage lighting

I do too, Essery has so few gas store holder wagons listed, D835/836/837/588 - 12 in total, 2 for the SDJR. I want to park a rake of carriages at my BLT overnight, so where would they be topped up?

[Compound2632]

31 minutes ago, MR Chuffer said:

I do too, Essery has so few gas store holder wagons listed, D835/836/837/588 - 12 in total, 2 for the SDJR. I want to park a rake of carriages at my BLT overnight, so where would they be topped up?

 

I suspect that the carriage working would be arranged so that once a week each set visited the main carriage sidings in the district - Bradford for you? - along the lines I described for the Birmingham area - and that's where their gas tanks would be refilled. 

 

From the Birmingham area again, the Aldridge - Brownhills line (Walsall Wood branch) had a two-coach shuttle service. This pair was swapped over with another pair each week, the fresh coaches going down to Aldridge on the back of a Monday afternoon New Street - Walsall train and the old pair coming back to Saltley on a train up from Walsall on Tuesday morning. Whether this means there were four carriages achieving only 50% utilisation or they were used elsewhere during their week off, I don't know.  (These were bogie arc roof carriages of 1880s vintage but their original oil lamps replaced by gas.) [All this Birmingham stuff is from the October 1922 Carriage Marshalling Book, Midland Railway Study Centre Item 00625.]

[corneliuslundie]

Yes, I raised the question about other uses of coal because I was not at all sure how much of it would have been acquired. It is an interesting thought that local station masters might have bought coal locally.

Railway owned gas works: of course I cannot now find any mentions but I am sure I have read of at least one railway owned works.

So further work needed.

Jonathan

[John-Miles]

I seem to remember the Midland used a system called Pintsch for its gas lighting. DId this use town gas? The Midland also had a policy in areas with a lot of signals of lighting them by gas and certainly in the case of Chesterfield, they built their own gas works rather than using the town supply.

[John-Miles]

According to Wiki, the Pintsch system used a compressed fuel gas made from naptha. Naptha is a loosley defined term for volatile hydrocarbons

[Nick Holliday]

5 hours ago, Compound2632 said:

The gas coal from Derbyshire for the GWR's Swindon gas works has been mentioned. I wonder about gas for carriage lighting - it seems to me that the number of gas-transporting wagons (like the GW's cordons) was too few for the total demand. Many stations were gas lit from their local municipal supply. Was town gas used for carriages? In the Birmingham area, the Midland had carriage sidings at Kings Norton, Walsall, Redditch, and Evesham, where sets of carriages were stabled overnight, but the carriage working was arranged so that every set had a rest day in the main carriage sidings at Saltley, where presumably they were cleaned out, washed, and topped up with gas. The City of Birmingham Gas Department's huge Saltley works was just on the other side of the tracks but the engine shed site had a small gasholder with some associated buildings - was this a small gasworks for carriage lighting gas? It's not something found at other Midland sheds as far as I've looked. Of course gas coal and locomotive goal are different things; it just so happens that at Saltley the carriage and locomotive depots were adjacent. Did other "concentration" carriage sidings have their own small gas works?

Although town gas was originally used for carriage lighting - such as on the Met, where there were huge gas bags on the roofs - it had a problem that, as the pressure in the tank lowered, the lighting dimmed.  The introduction of Pintsch gas in the 1890's was  a break through, in that its luminescence(?) remained constant, regardless of pressure, and it was widely, if not universally, adopted.  Pintsch gas was an oil gas, and could be created on site in small retorts heating up a liquid, and these retorts required little space, and might not be noted on maps. At Swindon and in other railway towns, the main gas works would be supplying the town and works, with gas lighting and heating in the paint shops, for example. There was a network of supply pipes from the oil gas holder to outlets laid between the tracks, allowing stock to be refilled without the need for wagons.  Similar arrangements no doubt existed where space allowed and the demand made it worthwhile, with tank wagons servicing more remote locations. For example, the LBSC had Pintsch gas plants at Brighton and New Cross, with a third located originally at Battersea and later removed to Eardley carriage sidings, with all the rest served by a fleet of around 16 vehicles.

[TheSignalEngineer]

1 hour ago, John-Miles said:

The Midland also had a policy in areas with a lot of signals of lighting them by gas

The LNWR had gas lit signals at New Street when my grandfather worked there. They were fed from the station lighting supply. He joked about having worked on a 'gas lit colour light' in the tunnels which consisted in a spectacle plate in front of a gas lamp.

[Michael Hodgson]

7 hours ago, John-Miles said:

I seem to remember the Midland used a system called Pintsch for its gas lighting. DId this use town gas? The Midland also had a policy in areas with a lot of signals of lighting them by gas and certainly in the case of Chesterfield, they built their own gas works rather than using the town supply.

Pinsch gas was popular with railways for carriage lighting, and was also used for marker buoys etc because burners were more stable and it could be left unattended for longer periods than town gas.  However as the inventor was German, it was politically embarrassing particularly in the Quintinshill accident in which many troops never made to the front.  It was also contributory to several other accidents where it added fuel  wreckage. 

 

Most decent sized towns had their own gas works, coal in by rail, coke and tar being by-products which could come out by rail.