More Pre-Grouping Wagons in 4mm - the D299 appreciation thread.

[Miss Prism]

hubba, hubba, Exeter, tank engine...

[Compound2632]

4 hours ago, Rail-Online said:

 

Thank you. After 1917 on account of the number being pained below the M - rather conveniently! That brings to 19 the quantity of numbers in the 113xxx range in my little catalogue, all but one of which are definitely or probably D299, the exception being a D673 12 ton end-door mineral wagon, listed in Midland Wagons, though I've not yet traced the source. That wagon was built no earlier than 1913 - but could date from as late as 1920/1 - so was presumably a renewal of a withdrawn D299. It seem to me likely that the 113xxx range was largely occupied by an early 1890s D299 lot built as an addition to stock rather than as replacements for bought-up PO wagons; I haven't got far enough through the C&W Cttee minutes yet. 

 

Of course there's always the possibility that this is a D351 end-door wagon not a D299...

 

Tony, I assume that the full image will appear at Rail-Online if it's not already there? It would be useful to have your image reference for indexing.

Edited April 6, 2022 by Compound2632
clarity

[Compound2632]

Another pleasant day out at Kew, now moving on to the Carriage & Wagon Committee minutes.

 

In any organisation there are always senior managers who think that procedure does not apply to them:

 

Meeting of January 18th 1876

 

Minute 424 Two large trucks to carry 40 Tons ea. required

Read letter from Mr Allport dated Nov 20th 1875 recommending that two additional trucks to carry 40 Tons each be provided, the estimated cost being £1200.

Ordered

That the Traffic Committee be requested to submit the Requisition on the proper form.

 

Mr Harland, he of the missing wagon hunt, was not as I had imagined the office junior but a senior and long-serving officer of the Company, who became Carriage & Wagon Works Manager under Clayton:

 

Meeting of July 4th 1876

 

Minute 527 Mr Harland

Mr Clayton reported that Mr Harland who had been in the Company’s service over 36 years died on 24th Ulto and it was

Resolved

That this be brought forward again for consideration.

 

Meeting of July 18th 1876

 

Minute 533 Mr Harland

Referring to Minute 527

Resolved

That in consideration of the long and faithful services rendered to the Company by the late Mr Harland his Widow be presented with a Gratuity of £100.

 

Meeting of August 22nd 1876

 

Minute 560 Mrs Harland

Referring to Minutes 527 and 533

Read letter from Mrs Harland dated August 9th 1876 acknowledging receipt of cheque for £100 and thanking the Directors for their past and present kindness and consideration.

 

Minute 561 Mr Osborne

Resolved

That Mr J.P. Osborne Assistant Works Manager be appointed to the position of Works Manager rendered vacant by the death of the late Mr Harland.

 

Anyone who had over 36 years' service in 1876 must have started their career on one of the Midland's constituents.

 

Edited April 7, 2022 by Compound2632

[Rail-Online]

It may not be D299 but it is a Midland wagon and another number for the database!

58860 1951c Middleton Top

 

Tony

 

 

Edited April 11, 2022 by Rail-Online

[Mikkel]

On 07/04/2022 at 20:32, Compound2632 said:

Minute 424 Two large trucks to carry 40 Tons ea. required

Read letter from Mr Allport dated Nov 20th 1875 recommending that two additional trucks to carry 40 Tons each be provided, the estimated cost being £1200.

 

Large they may be, but £1200 for two trucks in 1876 seems a lot. I don't know if these inflation calculation websites are any good, but according to this one, "£1,200 in 1876 is worth £147,535.66 today". Another similar calculator site says the same.

[Simond]

Wow, almost the same as 7mm RTR today…

[Compound2632]

Back from a Wedding Anniversary holiday weekend at a cottage near Eastbourne that didn't have wifi, although it was advertised. Probably a good thing - it wouldn't have done to have been on RMWeb much...

 

We stopped off at Sheffield Park for a round trip to East Grinstead on the first train of the day - their Standard Class 4 2-6-4T, appropriately one of the majority built at Brighton, hauling a rake of mostly green Mk1s. So I was despairing of seeing anything remotely c. 1902-ish until I snapped this during the lay-over at Horsted Keynes on the way back:

 

 

Looking into G. Bixley et al., Southern Wagons Vol. 2, if not c. 1902 then at least pre-Great War, being, I think, an 8-ton vehicle to Southern diagram 1433, an example of Billinton vintage. The number sits between two given by Bixley, 8189 and 8206, both built in 1912, so I suspect it's of the same date. I suppose I could go and look up the Bluebell stock list...

 

Our lay-over was to await the arrival of the second up train of the day, headed by the rebuilt Stirling 0-6-0 No. 69, in full Wainwright, along with the Metropolitan carriages, so I regretted making an early start...

 

The leading carriage of that train was a Southern or LSWR one. This brought home vividly a point that I knew perfectly well theoretically: just how narrow Victorian tender locomotives were. 

[Simond]

Joking aside, an interesting year;  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1876

 

the S & C opened:

 

The line opened for goods traffic in August 1875 with the first passenger trains starting in April 1876. The cost of the line was £3.6 million (equivalent to £350 million in 2020)[9] – 50 percent above the estimate and a colossal sum for the time.

https://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/mortgageshome/article-7943741/House-prices-174-years-70-year-period-got-cheaper.html.  House prices were higher, relative to earnings.

 

I haven’t found anything that cost £1200 then to get a comparison.

 

Edited April 11, 2022 by Simond

[Mikkel]

1 hour ago, Compound2632 said:

Our lay-over was to await the arrival of the second up train of the day, headed by the rebuilt Stirling 0-6-0 No. 69, in full Wainwright, along with the Metropolitan carriages, so I regretted making an early start...

 

The early bird catches the wrong train.

 

Still, it sounds like a nice trip. Meanwhile, this may be of interest: 

 

[Compound2632]

4 hours ago, Mikkel said:

Large they may be, but £1200 for two trucks in 1876 seems a lot. I don't know if these inflation calculation websites are any good, but according to this one, "£1,200 in 1876 is worth £147,535.66 today". Another similar calculator site says the same.

 

For much of the 19th century, a 0-6-0 goods tender engine cost around £2,000, so £600 for a 40 ton trolley doesn't sound so unreasonable. From working through the MR committee minutes for 1867 - 1876 (so far), I've got some information on wagon prices, though it's complicated because when wagons were built by contractors, the Midland bought wheels and axles, bearing and buffing springs separately (The Patent Shaft Co, Wednesbury, features prominently), supplying these components to the wagon building firms - very much like our kits! In early 1875, tenders were accepted for 1,000 low side goods wagons from Ashbury (500 @ £40 10s), Gloucester, (250 @ £39 5s), and C. Janson & Son, Darlington (250 @ £35 6s 8d); when the C&W Committee sought authorisation from the General Purposes Committee, the estimated cost was £84,000, i.e. £84 per wagon; at about this time a set of wagon wheels and axles was £25 from The Patent Shaft Co but it's not straightforward to work out the cost of springs as these were charged for by the hundredweight.

 

Using the Bank of England inflation calculator, that £84 per wagon in 1875 would be £10,300 now. But that is, I think, highly misleading: you couldn't get anyone to build you 1,000 low side goods wagons for £10 million in 2022; quite apart from lack of manufacturing capacity and sourcing the necessary quantities of well-seasoned English oak and Baltic pine, labour rates are very much higher relative to other costs, even supposing one could find people with the skills.

 

On the other hand, £84 is about twice the going rate for a Dapol RTR O gauge wagon, so @Simond's jest was close enough to the bone. You'd struggle to get four RTR 00 wagons for that price, either, and a set of Alan Gibson wheels and axles for one wagon will set you back £7. So in 4 mm scale we're at about 30% of 19th-century prices for wagons but not yet, thankfully, for locomotives.

Edited April 11, 2022 by Compound2632

[Compound2632]

10 hours ago, Rail-Online said:

It may not be D299 but it is a Midland wagon and another number for the database!

58860 1951c Middleton Top

 

Thanks again, Tony. D607 - there are a number of 12 ton mineral wagons, D607 or D673, along with some 10 ton 5-plank merchandise wagons, D302 / D663A, known in the 62xxx range; all presumably renewals of D299 wagons themselves built as renewals of PO wagons bought up c. 1883.

[Compound2632]

On 07/04/2022 at 19:32, Compound2632 said:

Mr Harland, he of the missing wagon hunt, was not as I had imagined the office junior but a senior and long-serving officer of the Company, who became Carriage & Wagon Works Manager under Clayton:

 

Anyone who had over 36 years' service in 1876 must have started their career on one of the Midland's constituents.

 

 

A bit more on Robert Harland, courtesy of some private correspondence:

 

"It seems that Robert Harland, in common with many of the foremen on the North Midland Railway, was from Newcastle (a bone of contention with suitably skilled Derbeians), and was originally employed by the company on 1st February 1840. By 1842 he was already considered to be one of the railway's Principal Servants, and held the title Foreman of Joiners.

 

"Both Harland and John Dun, Foreman of Smiths, were brothers-in-law to the Head Foreman Mr Dobson. In a letter to The Railway Times (Issue 254 Vol.5 no.46, 12 November 1842) during the winter of discontent, accusations were made that Dobson employed an improficient brother, a smith by trade, as an apprentice turner, but paid him the same wages as the most experienced men at the Works.

 

"Under the newly formed Midland Railway, Harland became a key part of Kirtley's team at Derby, and was promoted to Chief Foreman under Superintendent Charles Mills. You already know his final position with the company."

[Nick Lawson]

19 hours ago, Mikkel said:

 

Large they may be, but £1200 for two trucks in 1876 seems a lot. I don't know if these inflation calculation websites are any good, but according to this one, "£1,200 in 1876 is worth £147,535.66 today". Another similar calculator site says the same.

However, the https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/currency-converter

(admittedly more limited in year options) offers a better deal for the purchaser: it reckons £1200 in 1870 (sic) was approximately £75,130.80 in 2017. No I don't know if that is valid either!

[Compound2632]

3 hours ago, Nick Lawson said:

However, the https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/currency-converter

(admittedly more limited in year options) offers a better deal for the purchaser: it reckons £1200 in 1870 (sic) was approximately £75,130.80 in 2017. No I don't know if that is valid either!

 

I'll take that. What I have noticed is that the Committee invariably accepted the lowest tender, except in cases where the firm was unable to contract for the full quantity - as presumably in the case of C. Janson & Son - in which case they would place an order for the quantity the firm could commit to, and then move on to the next lowest tender. This policy did from time to time result in unhappiness but even the big firms could be receiving solicitor's letters when delivery fell behind what had been contracted for. Pretty much all the well-known firms were represented in every tender process - Metropolitan, Gloucester, Lancaster, Birmingham, Midland, S.J. Claye, Oldbury, Ashbury, Brown Marshall etc. but ocasionally an obscure firm turns up - Janson, for example, is not listed in C. Sambrook, British Carriage & Wagon Builders & Repairers 1830-2018 (Lightmoor Press, 2019).

Edited April 12, 2022 by Compound2632

[Asterix2012]

20 hours ago, Compound2632 said:

 

For much of the 19th century, a 0-6-0 goods tender engine cost around £2,000, so £600 for a 40 ton trolley doesn't sound so unreasonable. From working through the MR committee minutes for 1867 - 1876 (so far), I've got some information on wagon prices, though it's complicated because when wagons were built by contractors, the Midland bought wheels and axles, bearing and buffing springs separately (The Patent Shaft Co, Wednesbury, features prominently), supplying these components to the wagon building firms - very much like our kits! In early 1875, tenders were accepted for 1,000 low side goods wagons from Ashbury (500 @ £40 10s), Gloucester, (250 @ £39 5s), and C. Janson & Son, Darlington (250 @ £35 6s 8d); when the C&W Committee sought authorisation from the General Purposes Committee, the estimated cost was £84,000, i.e. £84 per wagon; at about this time a set of wagon wheels and axles was £25 from The Patent Shaft Co but it's not straightforward to work out the cost of springs as these were charged for by the hundredweight.

The two trolley wagons would also  be specials with a fair number of non standard components.

 

So not really comparative to mass production of standard open wagons.

 

So likely a premium cost  

[Compound2632]

47 minutes ago, Asterix2012 said:

The two trolley wagons would also  be specials with a fair number of non standard components.

 

So not really comparative to mass production of standard open wagons.

 

So likely a premium cost  

 

The order was eventually placed with the Patent Shaft Co., Wednesbury - the wheel and axle specialists, a "wrot" (wrought) iron vehicle clearly being outside the capabilities of the usual wagon firms; they quoted for £340 each with delivery in six weeks from receipt of order. It's unclear if wheels and axles &c were extra but in any case that's well below the estimate.

[wagonman]

On 11/04/2022 at 20:23, Mikkel said:

 

The early bird catches the wrong train.

 

Still, it sounds like a nice trip. Meanwhile, this may be of interest: 

 

 

Off the top of my head I'd say that was probably a G&SWR wagon. Oh the joys of pooling!

 

 

Richard

[Compound2632]

16 minutes ago, wagonman said:

Off the top of my head I'd say that was probably a G&SWR wagon. Oh the joys of pooling!

 

That was indeed the conclusion.

 

It did raise a question to which I don not know the answer but have a hunch: what were the arrangements for one company repairing another's wagon, or a PO wagon, when it was a cripple on the first company's lines? I imagine things would not change that much as a consequence of pooling. My hunch is that minor repair to get a wagon back in service was done locally, possibly by a travelling repair team, the cost being charged to the wagon's owner. This is based on the catalogue descriptions of some documents in the Midland Railway Study Centre collection, in particular several examples of two forms, which seem to have been in use from at least the 1870s through to after the Great War:

• Form No: G. F. 233. Notification of wagon put off for repair. 
• Form No: G. F. 234. Notification of completion of wagon repair. 

The Midland, as the largest goods and mineral line in the country, had an extensive network of wagon repair shops around its system, built up in the 1860s when the facilities at Derby were totally inadequate to the situation. The Litchurch Lane C&W works, opened in 1877, did not significantly change the way wagon repairs were dealt with, as far as I can see, apart from being a repository of standard parts; rather, it enabled new wagon construction to be brought in-house.

[wagonman]

A friend of mine has been transcribing a notebook kept by someone working at the MR repair facility in Bath in 1890 and this lists the vehicles dealt with and how they were disposed of afterwards. The wagons were a mixture of PO and company wagons, the latter being more or less evenly divided between MR, SDJR and LSWR – no 'furriners' in those days.

[Compound2632]

I was at the Midland Railway Society AGM today, on Zoom. The society's outgoing President, Andrew Surry, gave the customary Presidential Address, his subject being the factors that led to the Midland Railway's London Extension being a success.

 

He first demonstrated that it was a success: the Midland spent £4 million on the expansion of its network in the late 1860s, principally the lines to Manchester and London; at that time the company was paying 7%, and continued to pay 6% - 7% over the next four decades. In contrast, the Great Northern spent £4 million on its West Riding and Derbyshire lines in the early 1870s; it too had been paying 7% but following this investment its dividend rarely exceeded 4%. (Andrew did not note, though I would, that the GN's £4 million was a larger fraction of its total capitalisation than was the Midland's, so the GN was taking a bigger risk.)

 

He then sought to identify the reasons for the London Extension being a success. Key to this, he argues, was that the Bedford to St Pancras main line was only a part of a larger scheme - a vital part, of course, but of little value without the tentacular network of link lines and running powers around the capital, enabling Midland goods and mineral trains to reach all parts of the capital, as illustrated by the panel at the right-hand end of this map:

 

 

[Embedded link to Midland Railway Study Centre item 20628.]

 

Along the way, he showed several photos that we've seen here, such as this one we were discussing recently:

 

 

[Embedded link to NRM DY 1797, Poplar, dock & coal tipping apparatus, Sept 1922.]

 

The routing of wagons from Coppice Colliery, served by the LNWR lines on Cannock Chase, to the Midland depot at Poplar Docks might, I think, be a product of the traffic agreement of 1908 that foreshadowed the formation of the LMS group.

 

Andrew also used a photo I'd not seen before, of a double-headed mineral train on the London Extension after the Great War - smartly turned-out Class 3 and Class 4 goods engines with a real mixed bag of pooled opens. The leading wagon, piled high with coal, was a Furness 2-plank!

 

[Regularity]

2 hours ago, Compound2632 said:

Andrew also used a photo I'd not seen before, of a double-headed mineral train on the London Extension after the Great War - smartly turned-out Class 3 and Class 4 goods engines with a real mixed bag of pooled opens. The leading wagon, piled high with coal, was a Furness 2-plank!

Oh, that would be lovely to see.

[Compound2632]

15 minutes ago, Regularity said:

Oh, that would be lovely to see.

 

Yes, I'm going to ask Andrew where it comes from. I can't find it in the Midland Railway Study Centre catalogue - but as you might imagine putting "double head"* into the search turns up a lot of photographs!

 

*which finds double headed/header/heading.

[WFPettigrew]

3 hours ago, Compound2632 said:

Furness 2-plank

Oooh!

[MarcD]

The only photos I have ever seen of the 2 planks were loaded with general goods or slate.

 

Marc 

[WFPettigrew]

10 minutes ago, MarcD said:

The only photos I have ever seen of the 2 planks were loaded with general goods or slate.

 

Marc 

 

Well indeed, Marc,  but then this was in the Wild West of pooling, when anything could happen....!?!