Over loading wagons

[34theletterbetweenB&D]

A thread relating to the use of tipplers for iron ore by Stewarts and Lloyds, reminded of something I had seen in David Larkin's 'Wagons of the early British Railways era, 1948 -54' . The illustrations on p21 (13T high goods wagons) commences with a BR steel high B487706, neatly loaded to one brick width from the top with bricks. Now these may of course be something special and low density, but they look like regular stock bricks, in which case the wagon has a circa 50% overload on its' rated 13T capacity by my estimate. (For comparison, the well known GN/LNER bogie brick vehicles with roughly 220% the capacity of a standard open, was rated for a 50T load.)

 

Having seen how easily road transport can be overloaded (witnessed a very exciting 'bending to the point of failure' moment when something dense was placed in the middle of a long flatbed not spec'd for such duty) are there any here able to comment on how often similar occurred on the traditional 4W wagon railway?

[craigwelsh]

Quite a few of the wagon pictures in LMS wagons and the Russell GW wagons book are actually taken purely to illustrated incorrectly loaded wagons. I think its in LMS Wagons vol 1 that there is a picture of tube hanging out of an open wagon (10t) over a long wagon and the wagon is low at that end while high at the other. Not so much overload as distribution of load but the springs are amazingly unbroken!

 

Most of the pictures are shifted loads or overhanging loads though.

 

The 16t minerals transferred for engineering ballast needed the holes cutting in the sides due to attempts at overloading.

[industrial]

During WW2 there were found to be a lot of 20T coke wagons running hot boxes, and the problem was found that the wagons were loaded to the top with iron ore.

 

There are many official photos of wagons with loads that were grater than the max load the wagon should carry.

[Fat Controller]

Back in 1973, I spent a couple of 'holidays' working for British Steel at Landore, doing the sorts of jobs that nobody wanted to do the rest of the time. One of these was to go through the lists of wagons received at the plant over a year, and check the amount of scrap that had been brought in by rail, with the intention of finding how many tonnes of scrap we should have had. I soon discovered that, checking laden weight against tare, 16t minerals would normally have about 20t of baled scrap, whilst their bigger brothers, the 21-tonners, would have near-enough 30t.

 

In more recent times, the RAIB site has had examples of either over-loaded wagons, or more usually unevenly loaded wagons, involved in accidents. One example was of a container train in Birmingham which encountered some incorrectly-canted track whilst carrying an uneven load (steel plate which had shifted), and consequently derailed.

 

One of the more spectacular accidents attributed to over-loading was a train carrying spoil and spent ballast in South London (Bromley?) a few years ago- the wagons were a heterodox collection of bogie opens, none specifically intended for the job, including former scrap wagons. The track spread under load, and part of the train fell off the viaduct it was on. When the Railway Inspectorate investigated, they discovered that some of the wagons (none of which should have had a laden weight of more than 102t)had a load of 100t+, giving an axle-load of 30t, in place of the 25.5t maximum.

[Guest stuartp]

A thread relating to the use of tipplers for iron ore by Stewarts and Lloyds, reminded of something I had seen in David Larkin's 'Wagons of the early British Railways era, 1948 -54' . The illustrations on p21 (13T high goods wagons) commences with a BR steel high B487706, neatly loaded to one brick width from the top with bricks.

 

There's a photo of a similarly loaded GWR 13t open in the same author's "Pre-Nationalisation Freight Wagons on British Railways", and I'm sure there's a pic of two or three in the background of one of the photos in one of Geoff Kent's books.

 

Edit - "Pre-Nationalisation etc", page 23, and "The 4mm Wagon" (Vol 1), page 5. In neither case do the springs on the wagons look as though they're close to bottoming out, and Larkin describes this as "the standard method of loading until the 1960s".

[The Stationmaster]

The only way of loading anything within limit is to weigh it, and lots of places did not have weighing facilities so dense (for volume) material could be overloaded quite easily. There was a whole spate of misloads (either overloaded or unevenly loaded) out of the Somerset quarries in the early - mid '79s with occasional but often spectacular derailments as a result when wagons either got hot boxes or simply eventually derailed due to uneven weight distribution but the move to larger PO wagons and enroute weight checking ended the bulk of the problem.

 

Overloading off engineering sites has been a problem for many years - partly due to inexperienced drivers on machines but more frequently due to the wish to get rid of as much spoil off thye site as possible at one go.

 

At worst the consequences can be destructive but are sometimes amusinng - on one occasion we had a derailed Gane in a yard and while it did not come off due to overloading it was a heck of a job rerailing it because it overloaded the MFD hydraulic jacks and they 'froze' - with one end of the wagon about 5-6 ft off the ground!

[Fat Controller]

The only way of loading anything within limit is to weigh it, and lots of places did not have weighing facilities so dense (for volume) material could be overloaded quite easily. There was a whole spate of misloads (either overloaded or unevenly loaded) out of the Somerset quarries in the early - mid '79s with occasional but often spectacular derailments as a result when wagons either got hot boxes or simply eventually derailed due to uneven weight distribution but the move to larger PO wagons and enroute weight checking ended the bulk of the problem.

 

Overloading off engineering sites has been a problem for many years - partly due to inexperienced drivers on machines but more frequently due to the wish to get rid of as much spoil off thye site as possible at one go.

 

At worst the consequences can be destructive but are sometimes amusinng - on one occasion we had a derailed Gane in a yard and while it did not come off due to overloading it was a heck of a job rerailing it because it overloaded the MFD hydraulic jacks and they 'froze' - with one end of the wagon about 5-6 ft off the ground!

There is a published photo of the loader at Merehead, with a row of wagons in the foreground that had suffered after having too much stone dropped into them from a great height. They included an ex-LNER 13t 'dimple' with very bowed sides, and a 13t wooden-bodied open which looked like it had been sat on.

I haven't seen it in any of the pictures of Somerset operations, but in the Peak District, 16t minerals being used alongside 26t tipplers had '3/4' painted on the side panels in very large figures to remind the loaders.

[PaulRhB]

Collapsed bearings due to overheating or mechanical failure of the springs were common causes of derailment with the wagons in the earlier days. I've even seen a picture of a coach oveloaded so much that when buffered up the adjacent vechicles buffers overrode it's buffers and pierced the end of the coach!

Overloading has always been a problem which is why they now have quite a lot of methods of reducing the risk. Some 4 wheel engineers wagons have had sections cut out of the side so any overload just spills out at origin. The front loaders used to load sand and aggregate today often have a weighing system so you set the weight to be loaded and then it subtracts each bucket full until it gives an audible warning so the operator can drop some of the last load to precisely hit the weight, this method does require the digger driver to check the wagons are empty first though. At Wool the loader driver used to stand on the footbridge as the train arrived to make a quick visual inspection and see if any wagons needed a closer look, this saved him climbing up and down the ladders on every single wagon while still safely doing his job.

[LNERGE]

I've had the pleasure of watching a 16 tonner loaded with fragmented scrap on a few occasions. The grab doing the loading was used to 'consolidate' the load by giving it a good downward bash or three. It was no wonder the sides used to bow outwards. I recall one getting red carded at Bury St Eds because the sides were so badly deformed.

[Southernman46]

It was not unknown for 16t minerals at Sheerness steelworks to very occasionally be so badly damaged by the electro-magnet doing the unloading that the wagon itself ended up in the smelter - Ive sat on a Crompton in the sidings and watched this happen !!!!!

 

Also in another life some years later in 1996, I was involved in the clear-up of the mess created by the derailment of a number of 100t bogie box wagons loaded with spoil on a wheeltimber bridge at Bexley These ended up go over the viaduct into a small industrial estate below and it was 4 days before we knew for certain that nobody had been buried underneath. The report showed that some of these wagons were overloaded by up to 25tonnes and this fact was instrumental in all other types of spoil wagon appearing with "slots".

[Fat Controller]

It was not unknown for 16t minerals at Sheerness steelworks to very occasionally be so badly damaged by the electro-magnet doing the unloading that the wagon itself ended up in the smelter - Ive sat on a Crompton in the sidings and watched this happen !!!!!

 

Also in another life some years later in 1996, I was involved in the clear-up of the mess created by the derailment of a number of 100t bogie box wagons loaded with spoil on a wheeltimber bridge at Bexley These ended up go over the viaduct into a small industrial estate below and it was 4 days before we knew for certain that nobody had been buried underneath. The report showed that some of these wagons were overloaded by up to 25tonnes and this fact was instrumental in all other types of spoil wagon appearing with "slots".

Landore consumed a few 16 tonners as well- the ones that had been used for duff traffic in South Wales were prone to rot around the bottom of the sides and ends. The attraction from the magnet in the scrap bay was somewhat stronger than the strength of the residual metal....

The 'letterbox' sides on high-sided wagons for spoil traffic dates back to the 1980s, when large numbers of MCV and MXV were transferred to the various regional CCEs. Problems arose when EWS started, and started using what had been Departmental stock for revenue-earning traffic- I saw a couple of ZKAs that were being used to carry anthracite duff at Margam. Some clown hadn't noticed the large slots in the sides, and the load was trickling out of them

[meld]

One of the more spectacular accidents attributed to over-loading was a train carrying spoil and spent ballast in South London (Bromley?)

 

Brian

 

That would have been Bexley, Just the Crayford side of the station the line runs over a set of arches that are leased out for mostly car repair work...

 

Made the news IIRC.

 

Mike

[40044]

Brian

 

That would have been Bexley, Just the Crayford side of the station the line runs over a set of arches that are leased out for mostly car repair work...

 

Made the news IIRC.

 

Mike

 

http://www.railwaysarchive.co.uk/documents/HSE_Bexley1997.pdf

[Southernman46]

Thanks for the report link - it brings back memories - personally it wasn't a great time to be working in the maintenance dept of Railtrack South East

[flyingsignalman]

Not quite on topic but concerning damage to wagons (but this time during unloading).

I was at Moreton (Merseyside) signal box one wintery sunday, the ballast had frozen in the bogie hoppers and wouldn't drop out. A JCB being used to spread the ballast on the adjacent line was brought up to the wagon and proceeded to knock six bells out of it until the ballast started to flow.

[Southernman46]

A regular occurrence on track renewals

 

and for those of us old enough to remember the 1983-84 coal strike - trying to unload coal trains that had stood loaded for months over the winter - it was astonishing to see the extent to which permafrost persisted within the coal even into early April - amazing

[mjh]

Back in the early '90s I worked on the per-way for British Rail briefly while on vacation from Uni.

 

We had a project to re-ballast / relay S&C at an overhead electrified suburban station on a branch to a major city. Being a junior Technical Officer I had the 'easy' Saturday night shift where all we were down to do was remove the track and ballast and commence re-ballasting. The station was elevated and the only easy way to get the excavators to site was on a lowmac wagon. The excavators were loaded at the conveniently located diesel depot beyond the far side of the station from the worksite.

 

The overheads and signals had all been de-energised, and my small team and I had set up the lasers for controlling the bull-dozer, and were back in the van having a cuppa while the trackmen made a start on removing the track.

 

All of a sudden the door of our transit van slid open;

"Which one of you divvies is in charge then?".

The three much more experienced hallade gang members point at 19 year old mjh, who is, technically, the senior technical guy on duty.... "Er... I'm the TO. What's up?".

"How do you think you're going to get the excavator over here when you've put it on a wagon that's to big for it...."

 

Turned out that the wrong type of lowmac or some such had arrived, and the load inspector had - luckily- picked it up on time, before we used it to rip out the OHLE on (IIRC) at least four tracks.

Having been told by the guy to cancel the job there and then, before persuading him to phone and speak to my duty manager first, we spent a little time trying to find a way to get the excavator to site before eventually giving up and cancelling the job.

 

What would have been a relatively short night to earn our eight hours of overtime then ended with us running out of fuel on the motorway on the way back from dropping a note through the door of my PTOs house to tell him the job had been canned. Not a great night really all told :icon_mutter:

[Baby Deltic]

An interesting thread. Anyone interested in the loading techniques used by BR, and pictures of busted wagons or shifted or badly secured loads could search for the following books:

 

British Railway Wagons - Their Loads And Loading, by Brian Grant and Bill Taylor MCIT MILT.

 

Volume 1 - ISBN 978-1-87594-205-1.

 

Volume 2 - ISBN 978-1-85794-300-9

[Jan]

A thread relating to the use of tipplers for iron ore by Stewarts and Lloyds, reminded of something I had seen in David Larkin's 'Wagons of the early British Railways era, 1948 -54' . The illustrations on p21 (13T high goods wagons) commences with a BR steel high B487706, neatly loaded to one brick width from the top...

I've been pouring over this image with a view to making a load for a PD 13t, and it looks to me as if the second layer is bricks on end. Not sure what difference this would make, but I'm intrigued as to how they were loaded. It's difficult to see because of the colour of the bricks.

 

Cheers

 

Jan

[Trog]

The 16t minerals transferred for engineering ballast needed the holes cutting in the sides due to attempts at overloading.

 

It was not the attempts that caused the problem but our successes.

 

Some of the original letter box slots cut in the wagon sides were later enlarged when the C&W realised that the PW had figured out that spent ballast would bridge over them.

[Trog]

The station was elevated and the only easy way to get the excavators to site was on a lowmac wagon.

 

Lomac's that is luxury I once had to get a Cat D4 dozer to site by running it along the top of the rails for half a mile. Walking backwards in front of it while crouching down so as to see under the blade, gesturing left and right to the driver to keep him on the rails.