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Street running in the Lancashire mill towns


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Having modelled 7mm narrow gauge for a few years I'm developing the urge to build a little something in standard gauge again.

My space is strictly limited to 150x60cm so I can fit it into the car and move it up and down the stairs if need be.  That means a pretty compact layout, short stock, and probably tight curves - and @JimRead of this parish is a particular inspiration with his O gauge micro creations.

 

I was looking through the old OS maps for a possible prototype and just up the road from me in Oldham there was a very extensive network serving the mills and factories.  No surprise there.  But it seems that in Edwardian times at least there was a significant amount of street running track on sidings from the LYR and LNWR lines.

One section caught my eye in particular: Gould Street.  There are two tracks running down the street in parallel, one of which serves Fountain Mill and the other of which branches into several sidings serving the various parts of Platt Bros' Hartford Old Works.  This could make a nice shunting layout viewed from the factory yard to the NE, with traversers hidden behind walls and buildings.  Some of the other works (Hartford New Works for example) even had narrow gauge internal systems that I could shoehorn in with a bit of modeller's licence.

 

So before I begin building anything, do other modellers have any knowledge of these street running operations in, say, the 20s and 30s?  What kind of stock was used and how?  And are there any things I shouldn't miss, or that I should avoid?

Thanks!

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A little bit at Walkden Avenue Wigan, A short branch from Rylands sidings signal box ran down and crossed both over Buckley Street / Walkden Ave and under the West Coast main line. It served cotton mills, coal in mainly. Note bridge was built for 4 tracks, still has two to this day (and still looks the same). Only a short distance of street running. Finished in the 50's I think.

 

image.png.c20be505fb878d166f2728f69a018982.png

 

https://maps.nls.uk/geo/explore/index.cfm#zoom=16&lat=53.55710&lon=-2.64246&layers=168&b=1

 

Brit15

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A related question about street-running in general.

 

Some of the sidings served must have been very basic indeed - just a set of stop-blocks at the end of a short stretch of plain track with no run-round facilities.  Trains serving such sidings must, therefore, have been propelled on either their way in or their way out.

As propelling is a rather more hazardous undertaking than hauling a train I wonder what the regulations had to say on the subject.

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  • RMweb Gold

Lots of ways around this: use a rope to pull the wagon in, or a pole to push it out, or a rope around a capstan to pull it out in the other direction.

Fly-shunt it in (get the loco and wagon moving, brake briefly to slacken the coupling, uncouple, loco pulls away smartish and the points are thrown after it to get the wagon to roll into the siding.

Make use of gravity.

Use manpower, with or without pinchbars.

Run-around loop at some other point of the line, and shunt only from one direction.

Lastly, if it is just one or a few wagons, have a man walking ahead with a red flag to clear the traffic, or even riding on the leading wagon to provide hand signals to the driver.

At this remove, with living memory of such becoming a thing of the past, the ideal is photographic evidence, especially if the pictures are moving - there may be something on YouTube or similar.

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Thanks all for the useful information!

The photos are especially valuable here - they've already provided answers to questions like "what did the p-way look like" (inset in setts) and "did the locos have skirts" (many didn't).  I also like the look of that little Peckett as a candidate for micro motive power, though I'm considering an inside cylinder Black Hawthorn for a first scratchbuild.

 

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A lot of these railway lines laid in streets pre dated the tramway act where the requirements to enclose the wheels and motion came about 

 

For example in Dundee there were lines down  a public road, Dock Street between the Caledonian and North British goods stations and the harbour which appear on Ordnance Survey maps back to 1857.

 

As they were already in place I would presume they had “grandfather rights “ not to enclose the locomotives 

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  • 2 weeks later...

I've another question for the knowledgeable.  What did the factory/works entrances look like?  I presume they were gated but I'd be interested to know more, and how for instance the oblique Hartford Old Works entrance would have worked.

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If you go back in time to before WW2 and even more so pre-WW1, horses were used as prime mover for most goods traffic for local delivery off the rails. No reason why you couldn't use it on rail for the odd wagon, and no problem finding a bloke who knew how to drive one.  You didn't have to screen their moving parts either.  Common sense kept people at a safe distance from a moving vehicle.  The safety issue was more where full length trains were in operation.

 

Many factories were fairly small affairs - those that generated or received a lot of traffic would probably have private sidings and located close to a railway.  As for gates, most places needed them not so much for safety but to protect against theft out of hours, and gates would be open when the place was working (which might be 24 hours).  A paper-based system kept track of legitimate business as you didn't want strangers wandering into your Goods Inwards or Goods Outwards yards unless they had business there.  So foremen, warehousemen, clerks etc would be keeping an eye out for anything irregular.  Factory workers typically had to clock in and out, and might well have their own entrance, with customers using the posh front door.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Not Lancashire, but I've found a nice photo of the rail entrance to Aberdeen Gas Works:

full

 

The sliding gates make a lot of sense for providing security without obstructing the street.  I imagine other sites of the same period did similar.

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Iron gates across the rail access to Fry's factory in Keynsham:

 

https://www.google.com/search?q=frys+keynsham+rail&sxsrf=ALeKk0005M5kSygNdSkCJq9VQo89ZZeW9A:1623142238672&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjC5riE1IfxAhUPjRQKHZC8A6UQ_AUoBHoECAEQBg&biw=1440&bih=757#imgrc=Jc_5NAgEaju_xM

 

The wooden 'fence'-like gates seen in some of the images were to protect the railway on the other side of the main road.

 

Edited by Captain Kernow
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19 minutes ago, Michael Hodgson said:

women in Wigan

Some contradictions here, first there are a lot of men of limited stature in Wigan, recruited from S Wales coal and Cornish tin mines for working in the Wigan mines in the nineteenth century; and secondly, a specialist cycle shop I deal with says a major supplier supplies more XS women's bikes to the northwest than anywhere else in the UK. Some sweeping generalisations here to sort out...

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I'm not sure where stereotypes of women really come into this unless you're thinking of athletes doing a different kind of street running! :P

 

4 hours ago, Regularity said:

My, Lancashire was very big in the old days!

Maybe I should change the thread title?  Industrial street running obviously wasn't confined to Lancashire and there are some interesting prototypes outside the county - I only said because I was looking at Oldham as inspiration.  And then went off-topic with a picture of Aberdeen.

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5 hours ago, PenrithBeacon said:

Fry's Keynsham.png

This would make an interesting model, but probably only suitable for 2mm

 

Frys (Cadbury's) factory at Keynsham.  If you modelled the line crossing the road and up to the factory but omitting the factory and Keynsham station.

 

Gordon A

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3 hours ago, Gordon A said:

 

Frys (Cadbury's) factory at Keynsham.  If you modelled the line crossing the road and up to the factory but omitting the factory and Keynsham station.

 

Gordon A

 

There's a thread on here (somewhere) about a very nice 4mm scale model of the road crossing into Fry's.

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7 hours ago, Michael Hodgson said:

Yeah, my dad used to say the women in Wigan were built like full backs.

 

image.png.f6b8f26017801085b8a68f8d9088e99f.png

  

Wigan pit brow lasses - DON'T mess with the one on the right !!

 

Brit15

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