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Wagons - to carry 10.0.0 - tare 6.4.0 - what does it all mean ?


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14 pounds to a stone, 8 stones to a hundredweight. 112 pounds. 20 Cwt to a ton. 200 sacks to a 10 ton wagon. 

 

Why ? Well traditionally a lot of things were in 1 cwt sacks. Coal, cement, plaster. It's about what a tradesman could put over his shoulder and carry. Metrication changed it to 50 Kg bags , and the safety elves halved it to 25 Kg, roughly half a cwt. Good thing they did, shifting stuff in 112 lb sacks was damn hard work. 

 

A lot of measurements were based on what a man could do. An acre, a furlong by a chain, what a man could plough in a day. 

 

A Firkin is about 9 gallons. If I humpfed 20 sacks up a close in a day ( And you would need that to plaster a traditional Glasgow flats ) I'd drink a firkin of beer. And I wouldnae be bothered aboot the next firkin wagon..... 

 

(sorry , couldn't resist an old joke ..... ) 

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On 06/03/2014 at 06:04, The Stationmaster said:

Anyone who trusted the tare weight for a rate based on ton miles was not to be trusted.  If you are loading for a ton mileage rate ideally the wagons should first be tare weighed and then weighed loaded.

And again, in reverse, at the destination.

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16 hours ago, MartinTrucks said:

The diameter of the wheels would affect the tare weight, a pair of 'new' (full-size) wheelsets weighing more than a pair that were almost at scrapping size. Timber varies significantly in density, joinery quality being heavier than carcassing.

Regards,

Martin

Disc wheels would weigh differently to spoked ones too. 

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Americans give short measure, 16 fluid ounces in a pint, Imperial gives the full measure 20 fluid oz in a pint..

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Even the wagons of a newly built batch could show variations of a few quarters. And Tim can forget all about long and short 100s (and tones for that matter) as we are talking standard avoirdupois measurements here where a cwt is 1/20 of a ton of the 'proper' 2240lb.

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For new builds, its definitely due to the density of the wood, paint, and assorted hardware.  

Remember, as "standard" as many wagons were, there was always variation.  Rather easy to forget such variation can naturally occur in our world of computerized mass production.  

Even in my line of work, our products often vary in weight by a pound or two, and they only weigh sub 100lb!  Once you scale that up to a few tons, its not hard to see the range that's possible. 

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6 hours ago, Ian Morgan said:

and one chain (22 yards) is the distance between the stumps on a cricket pitch.

 

Indeed it is - but for the benefit of our younger members, I feel obliged to point out that it's actually t'other way round.  The distance between the stumps is one chain, which is a unit of length defined as being equal to 66 feet / 22 yards.

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On 05/03/2014 at 20:49, peter220950 said:

Slightly off topic but this thread has brought back memories of the 'good old days' when 'life was simple', it's worth bearing in mind that when I started work in the late '60's ( less than 50 years ago), there were 112 pounds in a hundredweight, twenty hundredweight to the ton.

 

In monetary terms there were 12 pennies to the shilling and 20 shillings to the pound.

 

There were twelve inches to the foot, three feet to the yard.

 

My first work was working up bills of quantities for a building firm which involved multiplying pages and pages of items such as 12 tons, 3 hundredweight and 12 pounds of reinforcing steel by its cost of five pounds three shillings and sixpence per ton, or yards feet and inches of timber at rates of pounds shillings and pence per yard.

 

Similarly the weights of coal and freight carried by rail had to be costed manually, i doubt I could even remember how to do it nowadays.

 

And all of this without electronic calculators, who says modern life is complicated?

My Fathers early Railway jobs were as clerks at stations and he brought home large card ready reckoners for varying traffics so it was easy to read off how much to charge for a given mileage.

 

In my experience having tares down to quarts wasn't very common on wagons with the exception of privately owned tank wagons which had this until metrication - and then they went over to (apparently) very accurate kilograms.

 

It is noticeable that italics were quite often in italics - nothing to do with the GWR which used italics a lot for wagon writing - for many years on BR.

 

This has been a good discussion about something many of us would take for granted as well understood and also as I get asked for the tare of a wagon and the concept these were large ranges of possibilities doesn't always go down well.

Paul

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The Pressfix transfer sheet that Slaters used to include in their 4 mm scale Midland wagon kits has half a dozen tare weights, two of which are rather interesting: 5.4.7 and 4.15.6. I've just bought one of the re-issud kits; these include waterslide transfers with substantially the same artwork but rearranged, now fourteen different tare weights but, sorry to say, still including these two anomalies.

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15 minutes ago, Phil Bullock said:

20 Hundredweights to the ton. 

 

Ton = 2240 lbs

 

So Hundredweight = 112 lbs

 

 

Which is all rather circular. By definition [Weights and Measures Act 1963]:

 

1 lb = 0.453 592 37 kg

 

hence

 

1 qtr = 12.700 586 36 kg

1 cwt = 50.802 345 44 kg

1 ton = 1 106.046 908 8 kg

 

Now there can be no confusion. A wagon with a tare weight (mass) 6.10.2 has a mass of about 6 630 kg or 6.63 tonnes.

 

 

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20 minutes ago, Compound2632 said:

 

Which is all rather circular. By definition [Weights and Measures Act 1963]:

 

1 lb = 0.453 592 37 kg

 

hence

 

1 qtr = 12.700 586 36 kg

1 cwt = 50.802 345 44 kg

1 ton = 1 106.046 908 8 kg

 

Now there can be no confusion. A wagon with a tare weight (mass) 6.10.2 has a mass of about 6 630 kg or 6.63 tonnes.

 

 

And it's of course the fault of the metric system, that those conversions are such odd amounts!

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Aye, but well. 

 

So how many folk have a 257.425 Kw shunter? 

 

Oh, 350 HP . 

 

Hmm, thing is I'm an electrical person, I see buildings in KW, but I see motors and engines in HP . I see sizes in imperial, I see electricity in metric. 

 

And don't get me started on the British Thermal Unit...... 

 

Point is, I think folk just like units that relate easily to sensible quantities in real life. Yes we can all do a fast conversion in our heads but measures just roll off the tongue too nicely to be scrapped. A pint, a pound of mince, a yard of ale.... 

 

Now, why should the modeller be bothered ?  Well, quite simply a lot of materials used to make the historic stock and buildings we model came in imperial sizes. So we can interpret a photo knowing what those sizes were likely to be. 

 

Just a late thought. 

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8 minutes ago, Dave John said:

Aye, but well. 

 

So how many folk have a 257.425 Kw shunter? 

 

Oh, 350 HP . 

 

Hmm, thing is I'm an electrical person, I see buildings in KW, but I see motors and engines in HP . I see sizes in imperial, I see electricity in metric. 

 

And don't get me started on the British Thermal Unit...... 

 

Point is, I think folk just like units that relate easily to sensible quantities in real life. Yes we can all do a fast conversion in our heads but measures just roll off the tongue too nicely to be scrapped. A pint, a pound of mince, a yard of ale.... 

 

Now, why should the modeller be bothered ?  Well, quite simply a lot of materials used to make the historic stock and buildings we model came in imperial sizes. So we can interpret a photo knowing what those sizes were likely to be. 

 

Just a late thought. 

And of course many of us model them at 4mm to the foot...

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On 17/04/2019 at 18:59, Talltim said:

Still don’t understand hundredweight. I can just about get my head around the concept of a short hundred (100) and a long hundred (120), but a hundredweight seems to relate to neither of those


It's really old. It comes from ancient Germanic "hundred" which was translated in Latin to Centum, hence CWT for Centum Weight. A Germanic hundred was "six score", one score being 20, six scores being 120.

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On 05/03/2014 at 09:39, LMS2968 said:

Your assumptions are correct: Tare = unladen weight. The three figures were just for precision. There were 28 pounds (lb) in a quarter, four quarters in a hundredweight (cwt; 112lb), twenty hundredweight in a ton (2240lb).

 

Considering that no-one was that bothered when the wagons were being loaded, such precision seems a waste of time!

My late grandfather started work in 1913 for Briggs  Whitwood colliery at Castleford. As a "boy" one of his duties was attaching wagon tickets. He told of a whole train of coal being returned by a London merchant because, having emptied the first wagon and swept it, the dust and fragments exceeded one stone. The customer bothered!

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Despite being brought (dragged) up and ejumacated, allegedly to 'O' level standard, in the imperial 'old money' era, I never really mastered it as a mental exercise in terms of weight, or some of the odder area/length units, despite repeating it by rote in primary school until you had it pat.  You didn't have to, as we all had 'Silvine' school note books with times tables and all the imperial units on the back cover as a ready reckoner, and jobs such as wagon checking that used the units regularly had their own versions.  When curmudgeonly old so and so's like me moan about millennials and their dependence on calculators or digital time, this should, I think, be taken into consideration.  

 

But I knew a bloke on the railway, a shed labourer, years ago, who claimed he could not do arithmetic, it was too hard for him.  Well, perhaps, but he could tell you what you'd get for any sum of money in pounds, shillings, and pence, for any horse at any odds for any bet, with the tax correctly deducted, in his head and in a few seconds, assuming the nag came in of course.  I'd have trouble doing that with a calculator, a device by which I can get any sum accurately wrong to 16 decimal places.

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10 hours ago, The Johnster said:

Despite being brought (dragged) up and ejumacated, allegedly to 'O' level standard, in the imperial 'old money' era, I never really mastered it as a mental exercise in terms of weight, or some of the odder area/length units, despite repeating it by rote in primary school until you had it pat.  You didn't have to, as we all had 'Silvine' school note books with times tables and all the imperial units on the back cover as a ready reckoner, and jobs such as wagon checking that used the units regularly had their own versions.  When curmudgeonly old so and so's like me moan about millennials and their dependence on calculators or digital time, this should, I think, be taken into consideration.  

 

But I knew a bloke on the railway, a shed labourer, years ago, who claimed he could not do arithmetic, it was too hard for him.  Well, perhaps, but he could tell you what you'd get for any sum of money in pounds, shillings, and pence, for any horse at any odds for any bet, with the tax correctly deducted, in his head and in a few seconds, assuming the nag came in of course.  I'd have trouble doing that with a calculator, a device by which I can get any sum accurately wrong to 16 decimal places.

Now returning to Pounds, Shillings & Pence, now how many would want a return to that?

 

Fact is, any system can be used if you're used to it, but something new such as a return to old currency, would create chaos - even amongst those who were brought up with it, like I was.

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4 hours ago, kevinlms said:

Now returning to Pounds, Shillings & Pence, now how many would want a return to that?

 

I would for one, fish, chips and mushy peas for half a crown, optional (proper Yorkshire) fishcake at sixpence, and imperial food tasted better than metric food!

 

Mike.

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