Railway Returns - statistical information presented to parliament

[Compound2632]

It is my understanding that the railway companies were obliged by law to make annual returns to the Board of Trade, which were duly presented to Parliament. From what I've gleaned this was a requirement under one of the early Regulation of Railways Acts and was discontinued after 1913, the railways having come under government control before the end of 1914.

 

I've been searching The National Archives on-line catalogue to identify these returns without any success. Any suggestions?

 

L. Tavender, Coal Trade Wagons (self-published, 1991), cites Railway Returns for the data he reproduces on the railway companies' wagon stock totals at various dates, but his referencing is lamentably no more specific than that. 

Edited April 17, 2021 by Compound2632
Typo corrected

[Ian Simpson]

The British Library may help, when it's open again:

 

I'm hoping to get up to London when we reach the next stage of the CV-19 road map, and if there's a particular company and/or years I'll be glad to have a look.

BL membership is free, and I do recommend it as a great resource for historical research! It may not have the company minutes and reports of the individual companies, as the NA does, but it does have the books, articles and newspapers where they were reported and discussed.

 

 

 

[Compound2632]

Thank you @Ian Simpson, I'll follow that up.

 

My immediate interest is in the Midland Railway's returns for goods wagon stock by year or half-year.

[Ian Simpson]

There's a Google Books scan of several years of Railway Returns from the 1880s here: https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/Railway_Returns_for_England_and_Wales_Sc/Fh8PAQAAMAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=Railway+Returns+Capital&pg=RA7-PA21&printsec=frontcover

You can download it as a PDF file by clicking on the three dots on the right of the bar at the top of the page:

 

 

The Returns are mainly interested in the financial and safety aspects of the railways, and they concentrate on mileage and receipts rather than details of the rolling stock. So for 1884, the main goods info for the Midland is simply:

Table 2 "Traffic etc"
Goods traffic (p 54)
- Minerals                          14,846,106 tons
- General merchandise     9,620,185 tons
Gross receipts (p 55)
- Merchandise        £2,760,025
- Livestock                    £85,638
- Minerals               £2,165,835
Table 3 "Working expenditure etc"
Working expenditure (p 72)
- Repairs and renewal of coaches & wagons      £304,368
- Compensation for damage & loss of goods     £23,785
Rolling stock (p 73)
- Waggons of all kinds    75,008

Edited April 20, 2021 by Ian Simpson

[Compound2632]

10 hours ago, Ian Simpson said:

Waggons of all kinds 

 

... is good enough for my purposes. 

 

I'll get those Google Books ones. Also, a fellow Midland Railway Society member has access to all the Parliamentary Papers via a subscription that his German university has. So I think I'm sorted.

[Nick Holliday]

Having wasted a few hours looking through these volumes, I think there is a lot in them, but tricky to find. Apart from the statistics there are analyses of various accidents, brief reports of significant incidents, and I have found full BoT accident reports tucked away in the text. A search for "accident" can be very interesting and time consuming. I was taken by this analysis of staff death rates in 1884. Life as a goods guard looked dangerous then!

[Compound2632]

Having gone into this thoroughly:

 

The Railway Returns up to 1913 (reporting the situation at 31 December of the year just passed) list quantities of rolling stock under the following headings:

• Locomotives.
• Carriages used for the Conveyance of Passengers only.
• Other Vehicles attached to Passenger Trains.
• Waggons of all kinds used for the conveyance of Live Stock, Minerals, or General Merchandise.
• Other Carriages or Waggons used on the Railway not included in the preceeding columns.

The Railway Companies (Accounts and Returns) Act, 1911 changed the reporting requirements from 1913, requiring greater detail and introducing new categories:

 

Steam Locomotives and Tenders.

• Tender Engines.
• Tank Engines.
• Tenders.*

Rail Motor Vehicles - number and carrying capacity.

 

Trains Worked by Electric Power.

• Electric locomotives.
• Electric Motor Cars carrying Passengers - number and carrying capacity.
• Trailer Cars - number and carrying capacity.

Coaching Vehicles (other than Electric).

• Passenger Carriages - number and carrying capacity.
• Other.

Merchandise and Mineral Vehicles.

• Open Wagons - capacity under 8 tons and 8 tons and above.
• Covered Wagons - capacity under 8 tons and 8 tons and above.
• Mineral Wagons - capacity under 8 tons and 8 tons and above.
• Cattle Trucks.
• All Others.

Railway Service Vehicles.

 

The 31 December 1913 returns were not published until 1915; with the hiatus of the Great War, the next returns I'm aware of were for 31 December 1920.

 

I've had my attention drawn to the reports of the Midland Board to the half-yearly shareholders' meetings, of which the Midland Railway Study Centre has a large number - possibly a complete set. These include a "Return of Working Stock" which from at least 1877 gives, at the 30 June or 31 December (as appropriate):

 

Locomotive.

• Engines.
• Tenders.

Coaching.

• First Class.
• Composites.
• Third Class.
• Travelling Post Offices, Tenders & Vans.
• Horse Boxes.
• Carriage Trucks.
• Passenger Break Vans.

Merchandise and Minerals.

• Cattle Trucks.
• Goods Wagons.
• Covered Goods Wagons.
• Coke and Coal Trucks.
• Creosote Tanks.
• Timber Trucks.
• Break Vans.

I haven't yet looked at more than a handful of these. For 1860, there is only a single total for goods wagons, though goods brake vans are counted separately.

 

I would imagine that similar reports survive for other companies - as a key financial report distributed to shareholders, they ought to be among the most likely documents to survive. So there's plenty of material there to plot the growth (or otherwise) of your favourite company's rolling stock.

 

*For 1913, the Midland reported 22 more tenders than tender engines. One is told that the LNWR was economical with tenders, yet it had only had 35 fewer tenders than tender engines. The Great Western had an excess of 76 tenders. Those exceptionally well-run railways the North Eastern and the Lancashire & Yorkshire were at par.

Edited May 9, 2021 by Compound2632

[Caley Jim]

Mike Williams provides a table of CR wagon stock returns at 5 year intervals between 1870 and 1905, and comments :-

 

Between 1870 and 1875 the wagon fleet doubled while the number of mineral wagons trebled.    .......    The 1880's were relatively stable, followed by another large increase in stock in the 1890's, driven by a 35% increase in mineral wagons.     ........    in 1907 the fleet peaked at 67531 wagons after which it steadily declined as high capacity mineral wagons replaced the old 8-ton wagons at a the rate of 2 for 1.

 

Jim

[Compound2632]

1 hour ago, Caley Jim said:

Mike Williams provides a table of CR wagon stock returns at 5 year intervals between 1870 and 1905, and comments :-

 

Between 1870 and 1875 the wagon fleet doubled while the number of mineral wagons trebled.    .......    The 1880's were relatively stable, followed by another large increase in stock in the 1890's, driven by a 35% increase in mineral wagons.     ........    in 1907 the fleet peaked at 67531 wagons after which it steadily declined as high capacity mineral wagons replaced the old 8-ton wagons at a the rate of 2 for 1.

 

Jim

 

Interesting. I have been doing an analysis of the Midland wagon stock. Likewise, in the 20th century, as 8 ton wagons were replaced by 10 ton and 12 ton wagons, the total fleet size was roughly constant but the total capacity increased by 12%.

[Compound2632]

I'd not previously heard of the Accounting Historians Journal but if I had I wouldn't have expected to find in it an article I'd want to read. But here we go...

[Ian Simpson]

That's my summer reading sorted!

Seriously, thank you for highlighting this article. The way accounts were reported made a big difference to the shareholders' mood in the early days of railways. The temptation to pay dividends out of capital rather than revenue was already a feature in the 1830s, so that the London & Croydon Railway's Parliamentary Act forbade the company to pay any dividends until the line was actually open and running trains. That was okay until the contractors encountered problems making cuttings that didn't collapse in the London clay, at which point the shareholders revolted and threw out the Board.  They then discovered the company's books, which used a single entry method, were in such a haphazard condition that it took months to sort things out.

Edited August 2, 2021 by Ian Simpson

[Compound2632]

I think one would struggle to find a variety of fraudulent practice and dodgy accounting that wasn't first practiced by the directors of the early railway companies. 

[Caley Jim]

The CR board were thrown out by shareholders on several occasions, not only for paying dividends out of capital, but also for offering the preference shareholders of companies they took over a higher dividend than the company's own preference shareholders were getting!

 

Jim

[bbishop]

On 21/04/2021 at 08:54, Nick Holliday said:

Having wasted a few hours looking through these volumes, I think there is a lot in them, but tricky to find. Apart from the statistics there are analyses of various accidents, brief reports of significant incidents, and I have found full BoT accident reports tucked away in the text. A search for "accident" can be very interesting and time consuming. I was taken by this analysis of staff death rates in 1884. Life as a goods guard looked dangerous then!

Nick, goods guard was a relatively safe occupation, compared with breaksman.  Also most of the engine driver and fireman deaths would be walking along or crossing tracks.  Bill

[Nick Holliday]

11 hours ago, bbishop said:

Nick, goods guard was a relatively safe occupation, compared with breaksman.  Also most of the engine driver and fireman deaths would be walking along or crossing tracks.  Bill

What is a breaksman? There is a separate category for porters and shunters, (Not sure why they were lumped together, but I suppose at smaller stations the porters were involved in shunting the yard) and I would have thought shunters were the vulnerable ones. Since the number of engine crews (around 12,800) is close to the total of breaksmen, goods guards and passenger guards, 13,309, this suggests to me that all of these categories were associated with running trains, the shunters doing the work on the ground.

[Compound2632]

3 hours ago, Nick Holliday said:

What is a breaksman? There is a separate category for porters and shunters, (Not sure why they were lumped together, but I suppose at smaller stations the porters were involved in shunting the yard) and I would have thought shunters were the vulnerable ones. Since the number of engine crews (around 12,800) is close to the total of breaksmen, goods guards and passenger guards, 13,309, this suggests to me that all of these categories were associated with running trains, the shunters doing the work on the ground.

 

I assume a brakesman is a man employed to pin down wagon brakes - often of wagons on the move. Would he perhaps be more usually employed at the top of an incline rather than at a goods station?

[Michael Hodgson]

24 minutes ago, Compound2632 said:

 

I assume a brakesman is a man employed to pin down wagon brakes - often of wagons on the move. Would he perhaps be more usually employed at the top of an incline rather than at a goods station?

He could travel on the train - I think it would be the appropriate term for the blokes who rode the Festiniog gravity trains other than the person in charge, and being a less skilled job would be a lower wage.

 

Some continental wagons had a small cabin or platform on the end for a travelling brakesman, which would have been necessary every so many wagons before continuous brakes were developed, and they might be coupled brake end to brake end so he could hop between two wagons on the move.  Dangerous and miserable job - on the Iron ore line to Narvik, they employed Sami (the politically correct term for Lapps) heavily wrapped in furs for this work when the line first opened.  Temperature can be -40 degrees in winter.