Theory of General Minories

[Pacific231G]

There is a very good image of Richmond Station(s) from 1928 on Britain from above

 

You need to register with the site to get it at full size but that's free and well worth doing.

It shows some interesting features. The apparently large empty space above the long Corporation Depot siding, later occupied by the the new goods yard is laid out as allotments- for railway workers perhaps.  The through station had forecourts with vehicle access on both sides, though the main buildings were on the up side as you'd expect. The terminal station also had its own forecourt and the four car District train was interesting. If there was a name over the terminus entrance I can't make it out.

The goods terminal is wonderfully compact with the very curvacaeous coal siding backing up to someone's garden wall and most of the the various coal merchants' pens between it and the rest of the yard.

That feature is interesting suggesting a fairly steady flow of domestic coal (you can see one coal dray with horde in the full size version of the aerial photo). There were probably some light industrial users of coal but, so far as I can tell, there was no large scale coal user such as a gasworks that would have been supplied from the yards. Richmond did have a gasworks but I don't know where and it was likely supplied from the river.

 

Seen from the north I think it would make a very attractive model in its own right with the coal siding running behind the pens making it more visually interesting and with plenty of shunting to deliver wagons, a good mixture of vans and opens, to the short goods depot at the end and an interesting short run round within its sidings.

The one thing I'm not seeing, and probably wouldn't expect to in what is effectively a London suburban station like this, are cattle pens.

 

 

 

Edited January 10, 2021 by Pacific231G

[simon b]

Another station worth mentioning is High street Kensington. 

 

It had 2 through platforms, 2 terminating platforms, and a substantial coal/goods yard accessed via a double kick back from platform 4.  Depending on the period it also had a overall roof, later just platform canopy's. There was also what appears to be a loco siding behind platform 1 for a time.  

 

Passenger stock was a little limited, but there were regular short coal trains from the midland region.

 

It has quite a few things in common with minories, though just not the track plan.

 

 

 

[Pacific231G]

1 hour ago, simon b said:

Another station worth mentioning is High street Kensington. 

 

It had 2 through platforms, 2 terminating platforms, and a substantial coal/goods yard accessed via a double kick back from platform 4.  Depending on the period it also had a overall roof, later just platform canopy's. There was also what appears to be a loco siding behind platform 1 for a time.  

 

Passenger stock was a little limited, but there were regular short coal trains from the midland region.

 

It has quite a few things in common with minories, though just not the track plan.

 

I can remember one of the terminal platforms being used ocassionally though I've not seen that recently. I think it was the terminus for some trains from Wimbledon and I did very ocassionaly change trains there when using a Wimbledon line train from Earls Court to get from Ealing Common to Paddington though most of them went through to Edgware Road.  I suspect they were only used at peak times which would have left P4 clear for goods workings at quieter times.

The London Underground system was and is very odd as urban "metros" go in the way it developed in such close alignment with main line railways, often taking over their branch lines while goods was still being handled. I can't think of another that shares its tracks with "normal" railways as the Underground does in several places. The Metropolitan, was of course an otherwise conventional railway that happened to run underground for part of its length rather than the type of specialist railway that took its name but little else. The London Underground also goes further out than most metros, more like the Paris RER in that respect  (though totally different in most others) so falls somewhere between a typical urban metro and a typical suburban network. 

The other odd thing is the distinction in that between London north of the river,  where most suburban service,s apart from those along main lines from the London termini, are Underground, and south of the river where they're mostly Network Rail.  It's clear from the plans proposed by various main line railways around the turn of the twentieth century that, had the electric underground network not started deverloping around that time, there would haver been the same tangle of suburban main line railways covering London's suburbs north of the river as therer are south of the river.    

[RJS1977]

The bay platforms at HSK are definitely still in use - and I have caught a train from those platforms on occasion.

 

They are usually used by the "limited service" Olympia shuttle, which runs (IIRC) five times in the morning and twice in the evening, though they can also be used to turn back other services in the event of disruption.

 

With regards to the development of the Tube network in North London, a number of lines were originally constructed by the main line companies but later absorbed by the LPTB, including the Central Line east of Stratford and parts of the Northern Line.

[KeithMacdonald]

Lots of coal wagon shunting?

 

 

Ref:

https://maps.nls.uk/geo/explore/#zoom=19&lat=51.49962&lon=-0.19155&layers=170&b=1

[KingEdwardII]

That bottom line in the coal depot involves some entertaining shunting operations! Potentially 4 reversals to get a truck in or out of there. I'm left scratching my head as to why it was designed like that.

 

Yours,  Mike.

[Zomboid]

1 minute ago, KingEdwardII said:

I'm left scratching my head as to why it was designed like that.

Looks like a switchback to gain elevation to me

[Harlequin]

6 hours ago, KingEdwardII said:

That bottom line in the coal depot involves some entertaining shunting operations! Potentially 4 reversals to get a truck in or out of there. I'm left scratching my head as to why it was designed like that.

 

Yours,  Mike.

 

There were lots of ways of shunting that didn't require a loco... Pinch bars and shoulders, horses, cables and capstans and, of course, gravity for some of the moves if the yard allowed it.

 

Edited January 11, 2021 by Harlequin

[simon b]

There were also wagon turntables in the sheds nearest the running lines.

 

Here is a link to one of the trains passing Stamford brook, a nice manageable size.

Edited January 11, 2021 by simon b

[KeithMacdonald]

20 hours ago, simon b said:

There were also wagon turntables in the sheds nearest the running lines.

 

Here is a link to one of the trains passing Stamford brook, a nice manageable size.

 

Link?

[Flying Pig]

A quick search popped up a few references to coal trains at High St Ken: a thread on District Dave's forum, a thread on RMweb and a signalling plan on Harsig's site (third down, Cromwell Road Area).

 

Edit: forgot to add that the RMweb thread mentions an article in the February 2016 edition of Backtrack covering these workings, which maybe has some information about how shunting was carried out.

 

Here's a picture linked from one of the threads showing the coal train at a different stage in its journey.

 

 

Edited January 12, 2021 by Flying Pig
Backtrack article

[simon b]

Yep, that's the pic I tried to link to.

[Flying Pig]

There's an interesting nugget in an article Freight on the Underground, downloadable from the London Underground Railway Society here (3MB pdf): a picture on the final page clearly shows the variation in levels as seen from the station platforms, with a Jinty shunting.

 

This page refers to the building of the yard.

 

[SZ]

More theory... the most minimal Minories

 

Truncated and near closure, single platform, lie by siding for use between the 'peaks'

 

 

 

 

Or the 'Bastille' version, for maximum simplicity

 

The Z-Plan, an underappreciated micro-layout format

 

 

Edited April 10, 2021 by SZ

[Nearholmer]

 

On 11/01/2021 at 15:25, KingEdwardII said:

I'm left scratching my head as to why it was designed like that.

 

I'm pretty sure in my mind that they decided it was more efficient than the alternative way of gaining enough height to operate "gravity drops", which would have been a wagon lift.

 

Wagon lifts were used "the other way up", to come off a viaduct to a lower coal yard, at some places in London, but (a) they limit throughput, and (b) lifting full wagons, even when using a counter-balanced system, as I'm sure they were, uses energy, whereas a finely counterbalanced "loaded down" system barely any.

 

I wonder if the haul up the final zig (or zag) was by winch, with empties being gravitated back down. that would explain the two sidings, one "in", one "out", at the final reversal point, but I haven't delved into the surviving MR records, which probably contain the answer, because they contain quite a lot of the engineering detail of the other London area "drops". 

[KingEdwardII]

9 minutes ago, Nearholmer said:

they decided it was more efficient than the alternative way of gaining enough height

Looking at the photograph of the yard posted further up on this page, I can't see much in the way of height variation within the yard. There is a steep climb up to the yard from the main tracks which explains the switchback arrangement there, but once into the yard, it all looks fairly level. So I doubt that height variation explains the peculiar track layout relating to the bottommost line on the map above.

 

The photo implies that perhaps they didn't use that bottom siding much anyway since there is a road truck parked right across it.

 

Yours, Mike.

[Harlequin]

38 minutes ago, SZ said:

More theory... the most minimal Minories

 

Truncated and near closure, single platform '1', lie by siding for use between the 'peaks'

 

 

 

 

Or the 'Bastille' version, for maximum simplicity

 

 

 

It's not Minories without the opposing crossover, IMHO.

 

[Nearholmer]

On 10/01/2021 at 15:39, Pacific231G said:

There were probably some light industrial users of coal but, so far as I can tell, there was no large scale coal user such as a gasworks that would have been supplied from the yards. Richmond did have a gasworks but I don't know where and it was likely supplied from the river.

 

The "goods station" at Richmond was the original passenger terminus, and mega-cramped, but there were other goods facilities: in the vee of the Clapham Junction and Kew lines, serving a timber yard and including a long siding into the gas works; in the area north of the station throat; and, on the northern side a few hundred yard west of the LSWR "new" station (IIRC this latterly became the traction substation unloading bay) . Latterly, the second of these took over from the old passenger station site.

 

This https://www.britainfromabove.org.uk/en/image/EPW022843 does show coal being handled in the old passenger station yard, including a cart being loaded, but you will see how very small the facility is for such an urban area.

 

But, to me the coal facilities seem too small for the population, even after the goods facilities were enlarged, so I too wonder if there was a significant river coal trade as well, and whether maybe coal merchants operated from other railway yards not too far away, there was a huge, purpose built, coal yard at Hounslow, for instance.

 

 

Edited April 10, 2021 by Nearholmer

[Nearholmer]

7 minutes ago, KingEdwardII said:

So I doubt that height variation explains the peculiar track layout relating to the bottommost line on the map above.

 

That little kickback is very odd, and I've wondered whether it was either a cripple siding, or used to unload something rare and exotic that couldn't be gravity-handled - coke maybe, or compressed-coal briquettes, I'm not at all sure.

 

I spent a while at a very dull training course in the hotel that overlooks the former site, wondering about such historic trivia!

[Compound2632]

5 hours ago, SZ said:

More theory... the most minimal Minories

The Z-Plan, an underappreciated micro-layout format

 

4 hours ago, Harlequin said:

It's not Minories without the opposing crossover, IMHO.

 

Of the three, only the Z-plan achieves the Minories beau idéal of eliminating reverse curves. But as @Harlequin implies, it lacks the key functionality of arrivals or departures from any platform - unless you assert that there is only one platform, in which case the layout can be reduced to a single point.

[Nearholmer]

This is becoming a bit like one of those Japanese gardens, where you run a rake across some gravel, and sit down to contemplate.

 

“Now, Grasshopper, you must hear the sound of one point changing.”

[Compound2632]

24 minutes ago, Nearholmer said:

This is becoming a bit like one of those Japanese gardens, where you run a rake across some gravel, and sit down to contemplate.

 

We haven't quite reached the limit of a closed station with track lifted and only the ballast remaining!

[Harlequin]

9 minutes ago, Compound2632 said:

 

We haven't quite reached the limit of a closed station with track lifted and only the ballast remaining!

 

Raked ballast, of course, around manicured plantings of Rosebay Willowherb.

 

[Compound2632]

Just now, Harlequin said:

Raked ballast, of course, around manicured plantings of Rosebay Willowherb.

 

Not buddleia, then?

[SZ]

Next up, a Möbius Minories - with truly simultaneous arrival and departure...

 

Edited April 10, 2021 by SZ