The MOD lose things?

[Guest stuartp]

Some spoil wagons may have ended up in various spent ballast tips along with their loads.

 

A colleague of mine was once a guard working to (amongst other places) Hunslet tip. They worked rakes of Grampus and other spoil wagons down there, the method of unloading being to drop all the side doors and push the spoil off with an excavator before levelling it off once the train had gone. Being temporary tracks there were no buffer stops and occasionally one would go off the end. It was generally considered less bother to give it a shove with the excavator and bury it rather than spend the rest of the shift trying to re-rail it.

 

Several years later he got a phone call from an ex-workmate. "Get down to Hunslet and have a look - they've found one of our wagons !" Contractors had been pile driving for new office blocks, and had encountered an obstruction which had stopped the pile driving rig. On digging down to the problem they had discovered the remains of a Grampus, neatly folded in half around the end of the pile.

 

He was also once partly responsible for parking an 08 in somebody's allotment but that's another story...

[daveyb]

You should also be aware that it is nearly as bad to have too many as too few in MoD accounting... Far easier to practise Shallow Water Inland Dumping (as oppose to Deep Sea Dumping and sometimes known as 'chuck it in the lake') for that couple of small arms rounds. I could reveal the whereabouts of quite a lot of ammo if pressed by Lt Helga of the Gestapo!

 

Some things are more expensive to re-stock than simply dispose. A left hand wing assembly turned up instead of a right (again only one digit different) so it was destined for the bin! Luckily bin digging was acceptable in those days.

 

Other things I known the Army to have lost include:

 

The RSM's Land Rover from Bracht (Germany) in 1994 (he was not a well liked man and when he abandoned the LR at the end of an exercise, it was parked up 'elsewhere').

 

A 20 foot reefer of meat supplies en route to the Falklands in 1997. I was helping to find some ISO containers for a job we had and had been allocated specific boxes. The lad in the yard came along to help look. Right in the middle of the stack of standard 20 foot MoD ISOs was one reefer. Opening the doors after about 4 months of it having been missing released a smell that will never be forgotten!

 

 

Interesting that the OP states that the wagon was to go from Burton Dasset to Brecon. The Kineton trains are now routed to/from Fenny Compton despite them being the same set of sidings and junction.

 

 

[Fat Controller]

Didn't Brecon lose all rail connections before 1967? Pretty certain that the Neath and Brecon and Brecon and Merthyr connections had gone; less sure about the route via Hereford and Three Cocks.

The practice of labelling wagons for destinations that are no longer served continues- there was an SNCF coil wagon crippled at Paddock Wood before Christmas with a printed label advising it was travelling from Tata Margam to Dover. I don't know where the rest of the train went to....

[The Stationmaster]

I understand that when TOPS was introduced, starting in Cornwall the spare wagons were rounded up and sent north.

Each yard previously kept a few wagons of each type they might need against future loading requests.

As more yards were progressively cutover to TOPS the wave of spare/surplus wagons moving north grew and grew,

such that a rethink of policy was needed otherwise the whole of Scotland would have been filled with unwanted wagons. .

 

No it didn't work at all like that. The only wagons most places held on hand waiting order were usually recorded as such so known surpluses existed - the problem pre-TOPS was getting them to the right place at the right time and even more importantly keeping control of wagons as they were emptied, or detained underload. As TOPS cutover the surpluses, and various other fiddles such as the 'rotating Vanfits' in a yard where I was at the time, showed up a bit more starkly and could be added together very quickly on the system.

 

And with that information they could be dealt with a lot more easily so it was far easier to manage changes on things like Monetary Limits on repairs, for example the limit on one common sort of wagon (i think it was probably Vanfits) dropped to around the 5 bob mark (25p) in early 1974, i.e. if the wagon needed repair and the work was going to cosy more than 25p the wagon was condemned, even if it had been fully overhauled a few months previously). So what happened was that the 'stored' and 'under and awaiting' figures increased as did the number of wagons held surplus over Monetary Limit (which already happened because of seasonal traffics). The next stage then was to see what happened when the peaks arose and if there was still a surplus it went for scrap, or insome cases it was simply decided the surplus would not be held pending any peaks. And the wagons just went to whatever storage locations existed - one of our yards in South wales contained several hundred.

Talking of buried wagons when the Paddington remodelling was going on in 1967 there was a very large slip on the Greenford branch which absorbed several thousand tons of spoil from Paddington together with at least two Grampus - they are presumably still there.

 

[Rivercider]

Mike,

I stand corrected on that.

I did not actually see TOPS introduced, but did later work with some of the ImplementationTeam.

 

Once TOPS was introduced a wagon could stay 'lost' for quite a while if it did not move from yard to yard.

But once on the move the receiving yard would often realise they had one extra, and records would be updated accordingly.

 

cheers

[multiprinter]

Didn't Brecon lose all rail connections before 1967?

 

That didn't stop a 'squaddie' presenting me with a forces warrant made out to Brecon - in 1990. He was blissfully unaware that the station had closed long ago. After some discussion as to the best alternative, we altered it to Abergavenny and I arranged for a phone call to his father to collect him from there.

[kevinlms]

I have had an enjoyable read throught all these posts, going back to the first gulf war post, we could order anything as long as we had a pattern number, the amount of stores that turned up for the mine hunters that we didnt have a use or could carry, including a lynx helecopter.

 

Ian G

 

Another friend of mine worked for a major US corporation.

Using the computer, he was successfully able to "move" stock around at will. When some one told him it was impossible, he demonstrated his skills. He picked the most expensive item (and he assured me it was seriously EXPENSIVE) in the primary store in the US, shipped it across to Germany or somewhere (the item disappeared without trace for 3 days), showed up breifly in the German store, disappeared for another 3 days and then reappeared in the US 3 days later. The item of course didn't move.

 

No one was apparantly able to reproduce his actions and he wasn't going to let on.

 

B)

 

Kevin Martin

[Caledonian]

Well, if they weren't found by 1982 I'm sure they went down with the Atlantic conveyor... I am reliably informed that whilst it was a very sad event, many stores logs of units in the Falklands were brought up to date as missing items had been lost with the conveyor (IIRC someone worked out that the amount "lost" on it was hundreds of tonnes over what was actually carried!).

 

m0rris

 

Remember it well; the general consensus afterwards was that it wasn't sunk by the Argentinians at all, but by the weight of all the stores it was carrying.

[mr45144]

Remember it well; the general consensus afterwards was that it wasn't sunk by the Argentinians at all, but by the weight of all the stores it was carrying.

And if that failed there was always DOFAD (Dues Out Fire at Donnington).

 

Kev

[M.I.B]

. There was also a situation in Berlin in 1947 where around 4000 tonnes of coal was missing when the auditors paid a visit to a certain british depot. Better not go into that too deeply.

Bernard

 

I helped bury the stockpile in the early 90s. There was a lot or argument as to who owned it, and to save arguments because it needed shifting on a timescale, it was dumped in a small quarry with plastic sheeting on top, and covered over with soil. The idea was that it would be safe there until ownership was sorted out.

 

We also buried most of Spandau Prison where Hess lived. To stop souvenier hunters the place was levelled and carted off to a similar large hole in the ground and suitable earthed over.

[BR60103]

There's a story that when Germany was taken over at the end of the war, an army unit was given a list of Krupp's stock that was to be disposed of. The stock on hand was lower than the list so the production line was restarted until they had the amount that was to be disposed of.