pick up goods Fruit vans and pick up goods

[Phil Bullock]

On 05/10/2021 at 08:36, Nick Lawson said:

RJ Essery's "Illustrated History of the Ashchurch to Barnt Green Line - The Evesham Route" is also a useful source for this.

 

From a quick skim:

1. The season for produce ran from March to Christmas.

2. Even in the 50's when he fired on this line some produce traveled in sheeted open wagons.

3. The peak of the season was for plums, when the Midland had recorded shifting 1,000 tons in a week, which he estimates at 33 vehicles a day if you could pack 6 tons in each. Also the GWR was competing for this traffic, so the overall tonnage would have been higher; but the transport rates were consequently lower than in other areas.

Cheers Nick that looks like what Is quoted on the Warwickshire Railways site. I guess it’s why the GWR named a loco “Pershore Plum”!

Edited October 6, 2021 by Phil Bullock
Typo corrected … cheers @stationmaster, will do 100 lines

[The Stationmaster]

2 hours ago, Phil Bullock said:

Cheers Nick that looks like what Is quoted on the Warwickshire Railways site. I guess it’s why the GWR named a loco “Pershore Plum”!

Typo duly corrected

[Wickham Green too]

Perthshire was ( is ) better known for raspberries ! 

[Hal Nail]

On 04/10/2021 at 09:32, Nearholmer said:

 

Are you sure you aren't getting confused with a meat van? 

 

Positive.

But i was thinking of the BR fruit van, which was just a standard plywood van with extra side vents - which was the point i was making when the OP asked about a wagon in a film and whether it was a fruit specific one.

Edited October 5, 2021 by Hal Nail

[ikcdab]

On 03/10/2021 at 23:09, phil_sutters said:

In Kevin Robertson's Somerset & Avon Railways in Old Photographs, there is a photo of Axbridge station with a train of at least seven assorted vans, including two or more Siphons, being loaded with fruit in wooden chip baskets. On the flat porters' trollies some are stacked three high, with the bases resting on the handles of the ones below. It is from Lens of Sutton, from about the 1920s I would guess from the clothing.

Chip baskets were larger than punnets and were made of thin strips of wooden woven together, with a handle initially made of the same thin wood and later made of tinplate.

Well Cheddar and Axbridge were the strawberry capitals of the west country. So expect those vans to be full of them!

Ian C

[Nearholmer]

2 hours ago, Hal Nail said:

But i was thinking of the BR fruit van, which was just a standard plywood van with extra side vents

Can you find a picture of one to show us, because it still doesn’t sound like a BR fruit van to me.

[Steamport Southport]

This is a BR Fruit Van.

 

https://PaulBartlett.zenfolio.com/brfruitvan/e3a3c28bf

 

 

https://paulbartlett.zenfolio.com/brfruitvan

 

Not to be confused with the long version based on GWR vans mentioned earlier which were passenger rated stock.

 

https://paulbartlett.zenfolio.com/fruitd

 

 

Jason

[Hal Nail]

 

6 hours ago, Nearholmer said:

Can you find a picture of one to show us, because it still doesn’t sound like a BR fruit van to me.

 

5 hours ago, Steamport Southport said:

This is a BR Fruit Van.

 

In 7mm the Slaters plywood van kit is labelled a standard/fruit van and I'd previously noticed the vents, which is probably where I'd remembered it, albeit wrongly recalling it was a banana van.

 

Anyway the op had asked what the van in his dvd was and I was merely suggesting many specific fruit vans had vents, which may help identification. We are guessing without seeing the footage!

[Nearholmer]

12 minutes ago, Hal Nail said:

In 7mm the Slaters plywood van kit is labelled a standard/fruit van and I'd previously noticed the vents

Of course, you’re right! Not only the Slaters kit, but the real ones have those little shallow scoop-shaped ventilators low down on the sides, don’t they? I’d forgotten about that.

 

When you talked about side ventilators, my brain kept serving me images of louvred vents high-up on the sides, which are a feature of BR meat vans, and GWR fruit vans (which always look vaguely like cattle vans to me).

 

Apologies for misunderstanding you.

 

Also, I learned something by looking at that link Johnster provided. I’ve never seen those strange ventilated Vanwides before. They look like a half-hearted attempt to copy continental practice.

Edited October 6, 2021 by Nearholmer

[Nick Lawson]

22 hours ago, Phil Bullock said:

 I guess it’s why the GWR named a loco “Pershore Plum”!

Ah! With an experimental blue/purple livery perhaps?

[GWR_Modeller]

There is a diagram in Russell's Coaches vol 2 p242 of a Y6 fruit van and shelving.  Four layers about 13 or 14 inches apart.  From the description of a "wooden framework" to support two different sizes of "galvanised wire trays" it does not seem like a conversion that would be done daily.  It is unclear whether a space was left behind each door to step into the van to unload or whether this space had  shelves put in as the van was packed.  A rough estimate is there was 600 to 800 sq feet of load area depending whether the floor was included.

 

If you packed 2 tons ie 4480 lbs that would mean something like 7lbs of soft fruit per sq ft of shelf.  I am trying to visualise that amount and it sounds alot if you need to avoid damaging the fruit for retail customers.  Apples and veg would be very different.

 

 

[Tom Burnham]

Galvanized wire trays doesn't sound like something you'd use for soft fruit. The traditional round wicker fruit baskets would go to the market in the city and then at least to the wholesaler and would eventually make their way back empty to the farm. If you went over to wire trays you'd need a big pool of them to make the system work. The Rly Mag did a series of articles in the early be 1900s on handling various special traffics including fruit but I don't recall so much of that sort of thing in the 1930s. Was there something on strawberry traffic from Calstock in the Southern Rly Mag?

[Nearholmer]

In another thread (no, I can’t remember!) I linked to a big series of archive photos that I found, showing the process of picking strawberries, and getting them away by rail in Hampshire c1905. The baskets used were those 2lb or 4lb tall handled wicker ones, loaded onto big open shelves on farm carts, two or three shelves one above the other, looking as if they were fitted just for the season, then the baskets transferred to railways vans, loading the shelves, then the floor, finishing on the floor right up to the doors.

 

In that case the cans were 6W passenger-rated ones, some from the LNWR going as far as Birmingham and Edinburgh.

 

The successors to those returnable 2lb or 4lb baskets were the ‘chip baskets’ (called ‘trugs’ in Sussex, although not actually trugs), then cardboard ones with tin handles that are still used by some farms for market-stall trade. 
 

If you ferret around on the web, there are other images showing loading practice in later period goods-type fruit vans, but the ones I’ve found show mixed loads, trays and baskets of fruit on shelves, sacks of vegetables on the floor, and I think are posed to give staff an idea, rather than being real loads.

 

Passenger-rated fruit and milk vans, attached to passenger trains or run as ‘seasonal specials’, were also used for “quick wilting” salad crops such as watercress, lettuce, radishes etc., and flowers have already been mentioned.

 

One thing I’ve not quite ‘nailed’ is how the SR handled this perishable traffic once it had withdrawn the pre-grouping 6W fruit and milk vans, which seems to have been progressively from the mid-1930s. My surmise is that the traffic went in the various forms of LWB and bogie ‘utility vans’ that were built in big numbers over the same period, but I’m not certain whether all/some of those designs had shelves - does anyone know?

Edited October 6, 2021 by Nearholmer

[Phil Bullock]

On 05/10/2021 at 11:18, The Stationmaster said:

Typo duly corrected

Cheers Mike fingers get fatter as I get older….

[Wickham Green too]

On 06/10/2021 at 07:57, Nearholmer said:

...... GWR fruit vans (which always look vaguely like cattle vans to me). .....

Well, some DID start life as cattle wagons ! ( dia.Y10 ex W10 )

Edited October 8, 2021 by Wickham Green too

[The Stationmaster]

8 minutes ago, Phil Bullock said:

Cheers Mike fingers get fatter as I get older….

Just another symptom of the progression towards increased maturity (or a second childhood, or in some cases a good excuse for one ).

[Wickham Green too]

Second childhood ? ............ I never terminated the first one !

[GWR_Modeller]

9 hours ago, Tom Burnham said:

Galvanized wire trays doesn't sound like something you'd use for soft fruit. The traditional round wicker fruit baskets would go to the market in the city and then at least to the wholesaler and would eventually make their way back empty to the farm. If you went over to wire trays you'd need a big pool of them to make the system work. The Rly Mag did a series of articles in the early be 1900s on handling various special traffics including fruit but I don't recall so much of that sort of thing in the 1930s. Was there something on strawberry traffic from Calstock in the Southern Rly Mag?

The text and diagram I referred to are clear about the galvanised wire trays however I cannot imagine the fruit was put on them loose and I don't think I suggested that, rather I think they were edged shelves to stop the containers of fruit falling off during movement of the van.  I imagine the wire shelves might have been something to do with cost or weight or much more likely they were to permit the circulation of air although once they were packed the effect would be less.

 

Some images of historical picking show strawberry containers which do not appear to be designed to be stacked stablely filled and include 'trugs' and shallow round wicker baskets.  They are also often filled above the rim.  Of course it is possible the containers seen in field weren't used for transport and the fruit was repacked.  If not it seems obvious the trugs baskets etc would have be put on shelves to fill a wagon.  Early post war images show both larger punnets with handles and punnets in trays which if the handles folded might be stackable and even later the standard wooden friut tray with triangular corner posts can be seen packed with punnets.  I remember these before they were replaced by the heavy duty reuseable nesting plastic trays used by modern supermarkets.  Once you have a stackable unit shelving in wagons is redundant but before then it is a requirement.

[Tom Burnham]

Scanned from a local publication, this photo of Staplehurst station (SER) in 1887 is said to show piles of bushel baskets on the platform, returned empty from Covent Garden and en route to local farmers.  In the siding behind, hop pockets (large sacks with dried hops) are being loaded into typical round-ended SER wagons.  Although the hop pockets were large, they weighed only 1 1/2 cwt each.