Imaginary Rolling Stock

[Fat Controller]

3 hours ago, Corbs said:

Love it. Probably the way BR should have gone rather than continuing with 4 wheelers?

 

I watched a video about MGR operation when first introduced, I thought it odd that the train had to drive over the weighbridge, then reverse slowly over it, then load, then back over the weighbridge, and why they didn't just have a weighbridge either side of the loader?

Could have had effectively a dog bone arrangement at either end for almost non-stop operation. Presumably the use of the same weighbridge ensured no difference in calibration.

Arrangements varied from site to site; few sites were purpose built for MGR operation, most of them being opencast sites.  Wagons might go back under the loading chutes a second time if the initial load was short.

Power stations seemed to be built with gross and tare weighbridges either side of the unloading hopper.

[The Johnster]

Balloon loops at the power stations meant that you could in theory unload a train without stopping using the computerised 'slow control', but true non stop operation was not a thing I ever saw in 8 years of being a Canton freight guard.  IIRC you had to stop to engage the 'slow control' on a 47 anyway.  The collieries were all adapted from their original layouts, sometimes alongside traditional washery loading, and the restrictions of their sites in South Wales, hemmed in by valley sides and often between a mountain and a river, precluded balloon loops anyway; the sites were mostly long and thin...

 

At Blaenant in the Dulais valley, the empties from Aberthaw reversed and attached an air braked brake van at Jersey Marine, went up the valley past the colliery, and then dropped back 3 wagons at a time through the loading plant controlled by the brake van setter in the hands of a travelling shunter from Jersey Marine.  The loaded train then pulled forwards in order for the loco to run around; great fun!

[ruggedpeak]

4 hours ago, Corbs said:

Love it. Probably the way BR should have gone rather than continuing with 4 wheelers?

 

I watched a video about MGR operation when first introduced, I thought it odd that the train had to drive over the weighbridge, then reverse slowly over it, then load, then back over the weighbridge, and why they didn't just have a weighbridge either side of the loader?

Could have had effectively a dog bone arrangement at either end for almost non-stop operation. Presumably the use of the same weighbridge ensured no difference in calibration.

Just for info HMRS have an excellent book with full details of MGR:

 

https://hmrs.org.uk/merry-go-round-on-the-rails.html

 

Love the 4 axle MGR wagon btw :)

[Gibbo675]

19 hours ago, Satan's Goldfish said:

 

Very nice, any chance of seeing it mixed in with some standard HAA hoppers?. I think (although it's been a while since I did the research) that the Tiphook KPAs (?) saw time running in MGR sets as an experiment in their early years before being turned into autoballasters so it would be interesting to see how the numbers stack up in comparison.

 

Hi Mr Goldfish,

 

Just for you here is 58 001 in a proper livery, you may note that the HAA's are in freight stock red also.

 

 

Gibbo.

[Dr Gerbil-Fritters]

2 hours ago, Gibbo675 said:

here is 58 001 in a proper livery,

 

and very smart she looks, too

[Satan's Goldfish]

Yup, that works nicely Gibbo, good stuff. 58 in blue looks good, I can picture it in large logo now...

[BernardTPM]

Early artist's impression and a single ended export version.

[Mark Saunders]

The MGR was based on a French concept/design!

 

 

[Gibbo675]

1 hour ago, BernardTPM said:

Early artist's impression and a single ended export version.

Hi Bernard,

 

The class 58 is painted as I remember seeing an image in Modern Railways from way back in either the late 1970's or early 1980's. The exprot version looks like a big class 20.

 

Gibbo.

[Dr Gerbil-Fritters]

On 16/02/2019 at 21:17, BernardTPM said:

Early artist's impression and a single ended export version.

 

when you say. 'early artist' do you mean they were very young?  I would say around 8 judging by that painting

the single cab scheme is nice though, all over blue and all yellow cab, It makes me wonder why when large logo was rolled out they went for a light grey roof.  Never looked right, and always ended up filthy dirty.

[Satan's Goldfish]

Edging into the realm of imaginary locomotives, but I may have to add a single ended export version to my wish list. I'm sure I've tried drawing an export version before but it never looked right, looking at the version in the link I now know why; I'd always tried a class 20 style nose, but it looks so much better with the flat end and roof overhang. Guess it should be in the 58/1 numbering scheme?

[34theletterbetweenB&D]

On ‎14‎/‎02‎/‎2019 at 23:15, Gibbo675 said:

Imaginary Prototype MGR Wagon

...After buying enough HAA wagons to create a full formation of them I ended up with a couple of scrap bodies that were part of separate job-lots. One was a body and cradle with out a chassis and the other had smashed up W irons so with the bits I had I thought I might see what a bogie Variant might look like...

Highly credible.

 

It still somewhat surprises me that once nationalised BR failed to make the case for a large scale build of high capacity bogie wagons for bulk coal movement, on grounds of national interest. The saving in steel alone over the equivalent load capacity obtained from the obsolescent sixteen tonners (which would end up built in quarter million quantity!) should have been attractive enough to persuade the government to push the NCB to modernise their loading facilities as the essential primary enabler.

[BernardTPM]

2 hours ago, Dr Gerbil-Fritters said:

 

when you say. 'early artist' do you mean they were very young?  I would say around 8 judging by that painting

You may well think that, but I couldn't possibly comment...

[Fat Controller]

1 hour ago, 34theletterbetweenB&D said:

Highly credible.

 

It still somewhat surprises me that once nationalised BR failed to make the case for a large scale build of high capacity bogie wagons for bulk coal movement, on grounds of national interest. The saving in steel alone over the equivalent load capacity obtained from the obsolescent sixteen tonners (which would end up built in quarter million quantity!) should have been attractive enough to persuade the government to push the NCB to modernise their loading facilities as the essential primary enabler.

It would not have been enough to upgrade the loading installations; the unloading facilities at power stations, docks, steelworks would need to be modified, whilst a parallel fleet would have been needed to the domestic coal market. The longer-term savings would have been significant; persuading all parties to agree to them would have been difficult. The NER had used a fleet of bogie hoppers for flows from Ashington colliery to Blyth staithes prior to WW1, but when these were life-expired, it was 20t hoppers that replaced them.

[RLBH]

As long as collieries owned the loading facilities, merchants owned the wagons, and the coal customers owned the unloading facilities, the desires of the railways were almost irrelevant to how coal was transported. And the railways knew full well that four-wheeled 16-tonners weren't the economical way to do it; when they were carrying their own coal in their own wagons to their own facilities, they went for big bogie wagons, and hoppers if they could. And had done since before the First World War.

 

Nationalisation in 1921 might have given the railways the leverage to do the job properly; nationalisation in 1947 took nearly twenty years, though, so I wouldn't hold my breath.

[34theletterbetweenB&D]

2 hours ago, Fat Controller said:

It would not have been enough to upgrade the loading installations; the unloading facilities at power stations, docks, steelworks would need to be modified,...

Well indeed, that's why I described getting the loading side fixed as the 'primary enabler'. (And govt. could have done that, the NCB was all their own operation.) Offering the customer side of the picture a lower price for their coal arising from the efficiency gain would have supplied the motivation for getting their facilities suitably upgraded.

 

And nothing succeeds like success: other customers would have quickly enough noticed the benefits of equipping for more efficient bulk supply.

[Fat Controller]

14 minutes ago, 34theletterbetweenB&D said:

Well indeed, that's why I described getting the loading side fixed as the 'primary enabler'. (And govt. could have done that, the NCB was all their own operation.) Offering the customer side of the picture a lower price for their coal arising from the efficiency gain would have supplied the motivation for getting their facilities suitably upgraded.

 

And nothing succeeds like success: other customers would have quickly enough noticed the benefits of equipping for more efficient bulk supply.

Ironically, one of the important customers was ICI, who adopted bogie hoppers prior to WW2 for the flow of limestone from the Peak District to plants in the Northwich area. Didn't one of their senior personnel have links to the railway?

To give an indication of the potential economies at just one site, Carmarthen Bay power station, built in the late 1940s;

There were at least ten tipplers (shown on a track plan I've seen), served by eighteen double-ended sidings. Adapting this to hopper operation would probably at least halve the number of sidings, whilst a pair of discharge sidings would suffice.

[The Johnster]

Resistance to anything other than the 9' wheelbase unfitted coal wagon from the mining industry was deeply entrenched; even vacuum fitted wagons were discouraged and the NCB shunters would remove the hoses.  Not until the advent of MGR was any real progress made, and this still involved 4 wheelers, as well as many pits not being involved in the traffic and using traditional wagons for another couple of decades or so.

 

Schemes that needed anything more than the very minimum capital outlay were not popular in the late 40s or early 50s, the government's main concern being balance of payments after an expensive war that recouped no economic benefit to this country at the same time as having to pay off the Americans for the "Lease Lend' deal.  Efficiency was all very well but not when it came at a cost; the foundation for the UK's industrial collapse in the face of competition from foreign industries re-equipped after wartime destruction with US aid in the 70s was being laid, albeit unintentionally, and it wasn't just the unions to blame!

[Poggy1165]

There is also the issue that if you were a small coal merchant, unloading by hand, you really did not want your coal arriving in massive great wagons. For many years the merchants preferred an 8 ton wagon, so the 16 ton standard wagon of post-war fame must have been a great leap forward for these guys, and not one that they necessarily appreciated. 

You load sixteen tons, what do you get?
Another day older and deeper in debt
Saint Peter don't you call me 'cause i can't go
I owe my soul to the company store
 

[RLBH]

5 hours ago, Poggy1165 said:

There is also the issue that if you were a small coal merchant, unloading by hand, you really did not want your coal arriving in massive great wagons.

Which is where the NER really scored. They had a different system of coal distribution to other railways, something like the later coal concentration depots, where large quantities were delivered to a few locations. This meant that large railway-owned wagons could be used, and the drops at the coal depots got enough use to pay off in lower supply costs.

[Poggy1165]

Yes, the NER practice is interesting. Was coal in that part of the world less friable than elsewhere? Because apparently a common complaint was that coal drops tended to smash the coal into fragments. I can think of examples of coal drops on the former MS&LR, for example at Ardwick and Penistone, but when the GC London Extension was built they simply provided "ordinary" goods sidings.

 

The NER also had the advantage of being very rich and having a virtual monopoly, so they could afford to supply the coal wagons and were, to a very large extent, able to dictate to the punters. Most railways were not in that happy position.

[melmerby]

1 hour ago, Poggy1165 said:

 Was coal in that part of the world less friable than elsewhere?

Coal certainly had different properties depending where it was mined.

Some was hard as bricks, some was soft and tended to fall apart easily.

When I was young coal was still in short supply and what you got varied tremendously.

My parents reckoned the coal merchants would ¾ fill a cwt bag with "slack", basically soft rubbish and top it with some hard stuff to make it look like a good quality sackfull!

 

I've no idea whether the hard of soft had the better calorific value

Edited February 19, 2019 by melmerby

[rockershovel]

6 hours ago, melmerby said:

Coal certainly had different properties depending where it was mined.

Some was hard as bricks, some was soft and tended to fall apart easily.

 

I've no idea whether the hard of soft had the better calorific value

 

Look at the narrow fireboxes of the GWR 4-6-0s compared to the vast fireboxes of US locos designed for soft Colorado coal ...

[Zomboid]

I'm not sure that's quite a true comparison. A 28xx even on Welsh coal would have been no use at all on an American main line.

 

Colorado coal might well have been junk, but those engines don't really stand comparison to the machines we used over here.

 

The fact that the GWR never needed a wide firebox for any purpose whilst the others ended up using them in various situations might be more instructive.

[Coryton]

6 hours ago, melmerby said:

Coal certainly had different properties depending where it was mined.

Some was hard as bricks, some was soft and tended to fall apart easily.

When I was young coal was still in short supply and what you got varied tremendously.

My parents reckoned the coal merchants would ¾ fill a cwt bag with "slack", basically soft rubbish and top it with some hard stuff to make it look like a good quality sackfull!

 

I've no idea whether the hard of soft had the better calorific value

 

Wasn't "nutty slack" essentially an official version of that?