Bachmann Anchor Mounted Tanks at Warley

[Fat Controller]

Any thoughts on what we muddlers tend to call 'plain' spoke wheels ( no idea what the correct terminology was - nor for 'split' spoke for that matter ) ......... tended to be very much a Western speciality and I get the feeling they might have remained in production a little longer - but how WERE they made ? ; a single casting or a separate casting for each spoke and rim segment or ......... ?

They, like the split-spoke and disc wheels, would have been cast in one piece in open-topped sand moulds, AFAIK.  I believe that cast wagon wheels are still made in this manner, with the wheel being shrunk-fitted to the axle, and sometimes steel tyres being shrunk-fitted on to the wheel centre.

[Brinkly]

I've just bought two of these tank wagons, one silver Benzene and one black BP tanker.

 

Very simple question, would either of these been used to deliver domestic fuel, or were these solely used for bulk traffic to and from factories?

 

Kind regards,

 

Nick.

[Fat Controller]

I've just bought two of these tank wagons, one silver Benzene and one black BP tanker.

 

Very simple question, would either of these been used to deliver domestic fuel, or were these solely used for bulk traffic to and from factories?

 

Kind regards,

 

Nick.

When first introduced, the silver Class A ones would have normally worked to ordinary goods yards, where the load would have been siphoned out (no bottom discharge in those days- the valves weren't sound enough) into road tankers or tins.  The Class B ones would have been more likely to have been carrying industrial fuel, and working to a factory of some sort.

[Dunsignalling]

I've just bought two of these tank wagons, one silver Benzene and one black BP tanker.

 

Very simple question, would either of these been used to deliver domestic fuel, or were these solely used for bulk traffic to and from factories?

 

Kind regards,

 

Nick.

Benzene was/is a substance added to petrol AFAIK so the wagons probably moved the stuff to oil refineries. I think other posts have suggested it may have been a by-product of another industry.

 

Other Class A tanks (mainly used for petrol) and the black Class B tanks (paraffin, diesel and heating oil, amongst other things) certainly used to serve local fuel depots etc. in the 1950s and early 1960s.

 

John  

Edited July 28, 2016 by Dunsignalling

[Arthur]

 

 

 

Benzene was a by product from the coal carbonisation process i.e. the production of coke from coal. It was used as a pure motor spirit at one time but later became an additive to petrol, having a high octane rating it gave improved performance.

 

Benzene is also a precursor molecule to the manufacture of a wide range of other important organic chemicals. It's value in this market saw it gradually phased out from motor fuel use by the 1960s. It has long been recognised as a carcinogen which has limited its direct use outside controlled commercial environments.

 

As demand grew for organic chemicals over the second half of the 20th Century benzene was increasingly refined from crude oil.

 

The tanks Bachmann have modelled would most likely have been in traffic between coke oven plants and refineries and petrochemical plants and possibly between refineries and large scale organic chemical plants.

[Wickham Green]

They, like the split-spoke and disc wheels, would have been cast in one piece in open-topped sand moulds, AFAIK.  I believe that cast wagon wheels are still made in this manner, with the wheel being shrunk-fitted to the axle, and sometimes steel tyres being shrunk-fitted on to the wheel centre.

I don't think modern day wheels actually use any shrink-fitting as I understand they're pressed onto the axles ( I stand to be corrected on that ) .... as for tyres, they're a rarity nowadays as current thinking is to use 'monobloc' wheels : once they're turned down to scrapping size the whole wheel's scrapped ( not sure if they even bother ultrasonic testing the axles for re-use or just chuck the whole lot in the furnace !!?! ). The old 'split' or 'open' spoke wheels were assembled from a number of forgings - hence the form of them - sometimes you can see how they're assembled with a ring of rivets round the rim.

[TheSignalEngineer]

One at Snow Hill

6667 Snow Hill by Prof2940, on Flickr

[Jub45565]

Nice photo! Interesting weathering too.

[Arthur]

I suspect that earlier split spoke wheels were made from wrought iron, the material of choice for stress situations before Bessemer developed his process for making steel in bulk. Wrought iron cannot be cast so the spokes, centre and rim would have been forged to shape and then assembled. Riveting wrought iron parts together was common practice.

 

Axles were certainly wrought iron and failures in them led to the Patent Shaft and Axletree Company in Wednesbury which had developed an axle made from six blooms of wrought iron bound longitudinally and forged into a single shaft. In cross section it had six segments the idea being that it was unlikely a fracture in one would spread to another.

 

I don't know about later, single spoke axles in steel but I guess that they would have been cast, machined and fitted with a tyre.

 

Whether any disc wheels were ever cast in steel I have no idea but I believe that most were drop forged, that would certainly produce a much stronger wheel. Taylor Bros. steel works in Trafford Park were a major manufacturer of railway wheelsets and in the 1950's they installed a semi automated wheel forge. An octagonal shaped steel bloom was cut to the right length, heated to forging temperature, and that 'blank' squeezed into shape under an 8000ton hydraulic press. The wheel was then machined and, I presume, a tyre shrunk on.

 

I've posted this link before

 

https://youtu.be/ln5Lz8gMe_k

 

It's Lindsay Andersons rather strange 1967 film 'The White Bus'. Scroll to 20 minutes in and there's a minute or so of footage taken at Taylor Brothers, then part of the English Steel Corporation. It shows an axle being forged under a steam hammer, the 8000 ton wheel blank press, a wheel straight from the press. an octagonal wheel blank ready for forging and ends with the open hearth furnaces.

 

One other major wheelset supplier, Steel, Peech and Tozer in Rotherham also forged the wheel.

[PenrithBeacon]

...

 

So, Bachmann; come clean and declare which liveries are authentic and which are not !!

 

...

So of the models which have been released so far, which of them is known to match the prototype? By this I mean that the livery and the physical dimensions are of a prototype and can be shown to be of a prototype. I get the impression that this is not true of any of them at present.

 

Regards

[Clive Mortimore]

I also have these:

 

Cheona Publications, Railways in Profile series.

 

No.4: British Railway wagons - Railtanks, compiled by G. Gamble. 

 

No.14: British Railway Private Owner tank wagons, compiled by R. Tourret.

 

Pages 36/37 of the former carries photos of two distinct types of 20t anchor-mount tanks in Shell-BP Class B livery. One looks very like the Bachmann model but with a slightly fatter barrel (or so it appears to me) but the other is radically different.

 

John

Hi John

 

The wagon in plate 60, page 37 looks different because it is a lagged tank. Under the lagging the tank would/could be the same as in the other photo. If you look at the other two photos on those pages of the RCH 1927 design tank wagons the one in plate 61 is also lagged and looks quite different to the one in plate 58 but again under the lagging it is very much the same. It is a pity that no manufacturer makes lagged tanks, they would add another dimension to our oil trains. 

[Brinkly]

Here are my newly improved Anchor Mounted tanks, granted one shouldn't have a tie-bar! D'oh!

 

 

 

 

Smiths 3-link couplings, Jackson wheels and a tiebar too far!

 

Kind regards,

 

Nick.

 

[Clive Mortimore]

Looking at various photos and comparing the model I now have, it appears the tank is too short to be a 20 ton tank. On the photos of these class B tanks the dished ends overhang the buffer beams but the model has the dished ends well inside the bufferbeams. Plus the bufferbeams are far too long/wide as normally on tankers the beams are cut shorter and only just pass the solebars, of-course this can be addressed easily but the tank is just another avoidable mistake.

 

Dave Franks.

Hi Dave

 

I agree about the B tank being on short and maybe too smaller a diameter. Having built one copying (badly) Geoff Kent's model my Bachmann models do seem to have smaller tanks. I have built some with smaller tanks but they are supposed to be 14 ton wagons not 20 ton.

 

Tank wagons are great to study and model I have had hours of fun making them over the years. Not 100% accurate but hopefully I have a good variety representing the mixture of types seen up until the advent of fitted block trains.

[Wickham Green]

 

 It is a pity that no manufacturer makes lagged tanks, they would add another dimension to our oil trains. 

Yeah ....... depends what you mean by 'another dimension' though : if you mean we could add a few lagged tanks to our fuel oil trains - probably not ! ....... as I understand it small blocks of bitumen tanks, at least, would have operated from refineries to specialised roadmaking depots around the country and would rarely have fraternised with unlagged tanks : not so sure about other traffics such as ( extra ) heavy fuel oils. ( check out a copy of 'Oil On The Rails' )

[Arthur]

It's possible, I cannot say for sure, that lagged tanks also served coke oven by product plants carrying away tar. So loaded Benzene and lagged tanks originating at the same source.

 

As I say, possible though I have no definitive proof.

Edited August 2, 2016 by Arthur

[hmrspaul]

It's possible, I cannot say for sure, that lagged tanks also served coke oven by product plants carrying away tar. So loaded Benzene and lagged tanks originating at the same source.

 

As I say, possible though I have no definitive proof.

I don't know about Benzene, but I agree about the lagged tanks. There were numerous town gas production plants and these produced various valuable byproducts including tars which required suitable tank wagons, lagged or not with mechanisms for heating the tar to unload it. Some lagging could be quite crude including held in place with chicken wire http://PaulBartlett.zenfolio.com/yorkshiretardistillers/e319e7410

This is a very late lagged anchor mounted tank http://PaulBartlett.zenfolio.com/berrywiggins/efb2a888 and Briggs ran a fleet out of Dundee to local yards for road works etc. http://PaulBartlett.zenfolio.com/briggsdundee/e31e22bb0

 

Paul

[The Stationmaster]

It's possible, I cannot say for sure, that lagged tanks also served coke oven by product plants carrying away tar. So loaded Benzene and lagged tanks originating at the same source.

 

As I say, possible though I have no definitive proof.

 

Rather handily there is a photo in the latest issue of 'Railway Bylines' showing the 11.00 Llantrisant - Coke Ovens trip on 25 October 1956 - with two tank cars immediately behind the engine and another visible further back in the train.  They are fairly certainly Class B cars although the photo is of course in b&w and they were no doubt bound for one of the coking plants.

[Mark Saunders]

It's possible, I cannot say for sure, that lagged tanks also served coke oven by product plants carrying away tar. So loaded Benzene and lagged tanks originating at the same source.

 

As I say, possible though I have no definitive proof.

 

Arthur

 

United Coke and Chemical had there own tar tanks of which two were on site at closure, one of which is preserved at Scunthorpe!

 

Mark Saunders

[Wickham Green]

Rather handily there is a photo in the latest issue of 'Railway Bylines' showing the 11.00 Llantrisant - Coke Ovens trip on 25 October 1956 - with two tank cars immediately behind the engine and another visible further back in the train.  They are fairly certainly Class B cars although the photo is of course in b&w and they were no doubt bound for one of the coking plants.

Must have a closer look at that photo ...... they can't possibly be 'Class A' products BECAUSE they're immediately behind the loco ; they're very small tanks with a prominent - though totally illegible - board along the side ; obviously a very heavy product so may not be hydrocarbon of any sort .......... maybe sulphuric acid - or such like - lead-lined tanks would be heavy in themselves and would dictate a lower payload.

[Arthur]

 

 

Had a look at the photo myself. I couldn't find a prototype photo but they look a bit like this model, based on a prototype Cowburn & Cowpar sulphuric acid tank.

 

 

I have a vague recollection that sulphuric acid did have some connection to gasworks/coke ovens and by product plants, either it was produced there or used in one of the refining processes.

[Arthur]

This probably confirms it, it's a flow sheet for one half of the By Product stream at Dorman Longs Port Clarence plant on Teesside. It shows the flow for the rectification of Benzole and high up in the stream sulphuric acid is being added in to the process at a number of points.

 

 

Note the output of Benzene, and some of its uses, lower left.

 

.

Edited August 3, 2016 by Arthur

[The Stationmaster]

Must have a closer look at that photo ...... they can't possibly be 'Class A' products BECAUSE they're immediately behind the loco ; they're very small tanks with a prominent - though totally illegible - board along the side ; obviously a very heavy product so may not be hydrocarbon of any sort .......... maybe sulphuric acid - or such like - lead-lined tanks would be heavy in themselves and would dictate a lower payload.

 

The leading one might be an acid car - it is roughly similar in size to one we had dumped in the yard at Radyr, allegedly waiting works attention from Powell Duffryn.

[The Fatadder]

My knowledge of tank workings only goes back to around 1997, so in preparation to going and buying some of these to run with my older Bachmann tanks through Brent in 1947, would it be a block working of just tanks (presumably just one brand), or would it just be a handful mixed into a longer mixed freight?

 

So far I don't think I've seen a single photo showing a tank working on the main in my period....

 

Thanks

Rich

[Fat Controller]

My knowledge of tank workings only goes back to around 1997, so in preparation to going and buying some of these to run with my older Bachmann tanks through Brent in 1947, would it be a block working of just tanks (presumably just one brand), or would it just be a handful mixed into a longer mixed freight?

 

So far I don't think I've seen a single photo showing a tank working on the main in my period....

 

Thanks

Rich

It would be 'penny numbers' scattered within mixed freights in almost all cases; quite possibly several small groups of different owners' tanks within a longer, mixed, train. Block workings of petroleum products would be largely confined to those from refinery to first marshalling yard (Fawley- Eastleigh, for example). This pattern of working continued well into diesel days; I've just found a photo, in 'Heyday of the Hymecs', of 7064 at Fishguard in 1970 with a rake of empty minerals with half a dozen unfitted Shell Mex-BP Class B tanks at the rear.

[Wickham Green]

My knowledge of tank workings only goes back to around 1997, so in preparation to going and buying some of these to run with my older Bachmann tanks through Brent in 1947, would it be a block working of just tanks (presumably just one brand), or would it just be a handful mixed into a longer mixed freight?

 

So far I don't think I've seen a single photo showing a tank working on the main in my period....

 

Thanks

Rich

Once again 'Oil On The Rails' is the 'bible' you should be studying for oil traffics etc. ........ probably not in your local library but you yuor local club ( if you have one ) might have a copy ............ and no doubt Ebay would have one from time to time !