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Live pigs in transit


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22 hours ago, Nearholmer said:

The GWR General Appendix, which cites a lot of Min of Ag regulations, makes clear that all livestock was to be treated approriately as regards feeding and watering. Not all the regs are dates in the Appendix, though, and I know that animal welfare legislation improved over the years, so pre-grouping porkers may have been trated more harshly than post-grouping ones.

 

What happened to pigs at Cirencester, dare I ask? It had (still has I think) a big livestock market, but was it a centre of "processing" too, or was the district one where pigs were fattened-up before the inevitable happened at Calne?

 

PS: Swindon is named from "Swine-down", because the area was pig-central from AnglSaxon times, apparently.

The 'Wiltshire Cure' was, and still is, a highly regarded treatment (unlike the 'York Cure', which was at least equally regarded but now, as I understand, is extinct). So the pig trade into (and products out of?) places like Cirencester or Calne may have been of pretty high value/priority?

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34 minutes ago, Caley Jim said:

Well, the GNoS certainly wasn't! :nono: No matter how you define the word! 

 

Jim 

I believe it was (then) the largest single company/network created by a single Act.

And it was greatly to the North of most places not reached by the Highland.

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53 minutes ago, Regularity said:

And it was greatly to the North of most places not reached by the Highland.

Remember that the Highland ran from Perth and went all the way up to Wick and Thurso, so more to the east than the north.

IIRC both companies set out with intentions of linking Aberdeen with Inverness, something neither achieved directly and they were not the best of neighbours!   I recall Aherns starting his chapter on the GNoS with words along the lines of 'The Great North was a terrible railway, in fact it had no right to be called a railway!'

 

Jim

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I've had one of those thoughts one has when one finds oneself wide awake in the small hours.

 

My four Midland wagon-loads of pigs are all at second hand, three from notes made from a wagons received ledger at Uttoxeter in July 1914 and one from notes taken from a Number Taker's book from 1892, though to be from Guiseley. So these are at second hand. On a recent visit to The midland Railway Centre, I did look at some ledgers from Skipton, from the late 1890s. Each double page is divided into columns: Date; Invoice (number); From; To; Name (of recipient); Species (which my notes describe as " brief description of goods, e.g. Cattle, 1 Ck ale - mostly hard to decipher"); Weight; then various accounting columns. This ledger does not include wagon numbers. However, the key point is that the "Species" column is only about ⅜" wide - so, as noted, the descriptions are very compressed. I don't know if the same is true of the Uttoxeter and Guiseley books.

 

Looking again at the three consignments of pigs received from the Uttoxeter book, two are from Kettering and one from "B & S". That might be shorthand for a station but comparing with other entries, it looks more likely to be the name of a firm.

 

Kettering got me twitching. What sort of pigs come from Northamptonshire?

 

Could it be that these pigs in opens are not porcine but ferrous?

 

Pig iron?

 

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Edited by Compound2632
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22 minutes ago, Compound2632 said:

Could it be that these pigs in opens are not porcine but ferrous?

They could be ferrous but the Tamworth breed of pigs were to be found in the C19th across Staffordshire, Warwickshire, Leicestershire, and Northamptonshire (far from being pig-ignorant, after a few days of 'spot the pig' we're all pig-expert!). 

 

If anybody has an "account" with Huntley film archive, there is a film of a farm move in the 'railways' category but only available in preview if signed up, which I'm not.  Even so, it'll only be one instance (if any) of pigs in transit which may or may not be typical.

 

Kit PW

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1 hour ago, Compound2632 said:

Could it be that these pigs in opens are not porcine but ferrous?

 

Pig iron?

Did the Midland have dedicated pig iron wagons?  If so, would they just be classed as opens in the ledgers?

 

Jim

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54 minutes ago, Caley Jim said:

Did the Midland have dedicated pig iron wagons?  If so, would they just be classed as opens in the ledgers?

 

Unlike the Caledonian and North British, the Midland did not have any special wagons for pig iron traffic. This question was discussed a while back on my wagon building thread, where I was looking at evidence from wagon labels. There, the conclusion was that ordinary 8 ton low-sided (three plank dropside, D305) wagons would have been used. However, my feeling is that the four numbers in question are more likely to be high-sided (5-plank, D299 or its successors). To explain why I think that would be a whole article in itself.

 

Edited by Compound2632
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1 hour ago, Caley Jim said:

If so, would they just be classed as opens in the ledgers?

 

That's another point. The ledgers I've looked at, along with these transcripts, can give the wagon number but they do not give the type of wagon; that often has to be inferred from the load. So coal, coke, etc. are obviously opens. Uttoxeter in July 1914 was getting regular loads of granite from Bardon Hill quarry - one consignment noted as for the UDC - roadstone? From the numbers, this could be a mix of low-sided and high-sided opens. "Goods" is a frequent catch-all description, in which case there is often also a note of the sheet number, demonstrating that the wagon is an open. Sometimes "Van" is specified; Uttoxeter received 18 vans from Somers Town (the major Midland goods station in London) in that month - so that looks like a regular circuit from London, maybe four days a week. Was that van just for Uttoxeter traffic or did it serve all stations on the North Staffs line from Burton (or possibly Derby) to Stoke?

Edited by Compound2632
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This thread has reminded me of a pig incident at Rugby in the early 1960s. I was train spotting during the summer holidays when a young pig appeared on the track on the Down side of the station. All trains were stopped and it ran up and down for about 10 minutes defying all efforts of the staff to apprehend it. Finally someone appeared with a net, which was thrown over the animal and it was duly taken away. I don't know how it was transported be we assumed that it had escaped from the cattle pens in the goods yard. That was just across the road from the cattle market. 

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7 hours ago, Michael Hodgson said:

Spot is a dog!

...except for the Gloucestershire 'Old Spot' which is definately a pig. (see https://gospbu.org/blog/ for the "Old Spots Gazette").

 

1 hour ago, Compound2632 said:

Wasn't it Spot the ball?

Well, I could never see it.  A bit like trying to find live pigs in transit in the early C20th, you know it's there but trying to find proper evidence.....

 

Kit PW

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I can imagine this being popular in specialist railway society journals: publish a full-page grainy photo of, say, a station yard, from which the pig has been digitally expunged, and ask readers to mark its location with a cross.

 

For younger readers, a sort of “Where’s Wally”, with a porker in a striped pullover and a bobble hat.

 

 

 

Edited by Nearholmer
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  • 2 weeks later...

You want pig anecdotes ? When I was at the grammar school in the 1970s, one of the science teachers was explaining Boyle's Law when he looked out of the classroom window , exclaimed "Good heavens, there's a pig on the headmasters lawn" and then continued with the lesson. The rumour subsequently circulated around the school that one answer in the end of year physics exam asserted that Boyle's Law states that the pressure of a gas is inversely proportional to the volume  of the pig on the headmasters lawn... 

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29 minutes ago, CKPR said:

one of the science teachers was explaining Boyle's Law

 

Sorry. Thread drift but...

 

When I taught geography, during the nineties, we had to refer to Boyle's Law in an attempt to teach climatology, at GCSE no less.

We might as well have tried teaching in Swahili or flying to the Moon.

 

When I asked the "Science" Department about the ineptitude of the "little darlings" they were amazed at our stupiidity in attempting such a demanding feat.

I was informed that the Physics O level that I obtained in 1973 was almost the equivalent of an A level in the late nineties.

Talk about dumbing down!

 

Still, the experiment I always liked was that where you chucked a brrick out of a window, with a ticker tape attached, in an attempt to calculate the terminal velocity of gravity.

Don't remember much else abour it apart from the thrill of legally chucking bricks at any passing masters/ ancilliary staff/ kids you didn't like.

 

Ian T

 

Edited by ianathompson
typo
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7 hours ago, ianathompson said:

in an attempt to calculate the terminal velocity of gravity.


You sure it wasn’t the rate of acceleration due to gravity? You’d need one heck of a tall tower to get terminal velocity with a brick, I think.

 

Our physics classroom was in a new block five storeys tall, so we too had a lot of fun at this stage with bricks, feathers etc.

 

 

Edited by Nearholmer
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