Unloading loose loads in steam era goods yards

[spikey]

Mrs Spikey has once again asked me a question which I was unable to anwer. 

 

Suppose an ordinary 5 or 7 plank wagon loaded with sand or gravel turns up in a small steam-era goods yard, the local builders merchant having ordered it.  He sends his lorry to collect it, and that pulls alongside the wagon.  Two chaps get out armed with shovels. 

 

I seem to have gone through my entire trainspotting period without ever witnessing what happens next, so what did?  Was it really a case of hop up onto the load and start shovelling over the side until the door could be dropped without significant loss? 

 

 

[Gordon A]

One option is if the wagon has working bottom doors and can be positioned on a siding run over something similar to the North Eastern coal drops.

The purchaser may have a tractor or crane fitted with a clam shell grab. Men and shovels will finish off the emptying of the wagon.

 

Gordon A

[Wickham Green]

But if it's an ordinary five-planker ( without bottom doors ) it's back to 'Plan A' and the guys with the shovels. ( A 7-plank wagon would be grossly overloaded if filled with these materials, of course - so a five-planker is far more likely.)

[Compound2632]

Put up and dig in. The LNWR had loco coal wagons without any doors whatsoever - likewise Midland Railway manure wagons. 

 

Where there was a side door, wouldn't it be dropped first? Many small coal merchants ran wagons with side doors only - this being the only viable option for unloading at a typical wayside station coal siding. 

 

 

[uax6]

I'm not sure I would drop the side door first, there would be a lot of weight on that door, and I wouldn't want to be near it when it went! I would have though that you would have stood on the load and dug down near the doors to reduce the weight, then opened them.

 

Andy G

[spikey]

17 minutes ago, Compound2632 said:

...Where there was a side door, wouldn't it be dropped first?

 

That's the bit that's always puzzled me, since I never once witnessed it at the time.  Surely if you have a wagon with a loose load (coal, sand, mangels, whatever) and the first thing you do is drop the side door, part of the load immediately hits the deck?  Or are we saying the idea was to get a lorry with the side/end already down as close as possible alongside first?

 

ETA - Having moved more than my fair share of 2 ton loads of manure over the years, I can well imagine what it must have been like shovelling a wagonload of the stuff over the side - particularly in the rain..  B****r that for a lark!

Edited September 19, 2019 by spikey

[Compound2632]

2 hours ago, spikey said:

ETA - Having moved more than my fair share of 2 ton loads of manure over the years, I can well imagine what it must have been like shovelling a wagonload of the stuff over the side - particularly in the rain..  B****r that for a lark!

 

No further need to imagine. Claverdon, date unknown but "early". May be kelp rather than manure. More from Warwickshire Railways, at Claverdon: coal, of various sizes, being unloaded directly onto the loading bank - note the extra piece of boarding alongside the dropped door of the nearest wagon. The lumps in the third wagon are so big they would almost certainly stay put when the door was lowered. After 1922, despite the 19th-century aspect of two of the wagons - LMS on the side of the second wagon. Another early one - note dumb-buffered wagons, this time unloading into a cart. Bricks packed into the nearest wagon - that's going to be a tedious job for someone.

 

None of these show the act of opening the door. This photo, from the HMRS website, is suggestive - the F.W. Butcher wagon has been partly unloaded, with a semi-circular bite taken out of the load around the drop door on the far side.

Edited September 19, 2019 by Compound2632
Photo link corrected

[Fat Controller]

3 minutes ago, Compound2632 said:

 

No further need to imagine. Claverdon, date unknown but "early". May be kelp rather than manure. More from Warwickshire Railways, at Claverdon: coal, of various sizes, being unloaded directly onto the loading bank - note the extra piece of boarding alongside the dropped door of the nearest wagon. The lumps in the third wagon are so big they would almost certainly stay put when the door was lowered. After 1922, despite the 19th-century aspect of two of the wagons - LMS on the side of the second wagon. Another early one - note dumb-buffered wagons, this time unloading into a cart. Bricks packed into the nearest wagon - that's going to be a tedious job for someone.

 

None of these show the act of opening the door. This photo, from the HMRS website, is suggestive - the F.W. Butcher wagon has been partly unloaded, with a semi-circular bite taken out of the load around the drop door on the far side.

The method of opening the door was probably like that used nowadays for tippers and containers; move the catches until they're just holding, then either send an apprentice to knock them open, or hit them with a piece of scaffolding pipe or similar from a safe distance.

[Compound2632]

5 minutes ago, Fat Controller said:

piece of scaffolding pipe or similar from a safe distance.

 

Broom handle? In the second Claverdon photo there are a couple of brooms leaning up against the furthest wagon.

 

Where there were bottom doors, there was an RCH standard catch release mechanism worked by a lever under the solebar. We recently had a thread on how to get the doors shut again...

Edited September 19, 2019 by Compound2632

[Fat Controller]

Just now, Compound2632 said:

 

Broom handle? In the second Claverdon photo there are a couple of brooms leaning up against the furthest wagon.

Might serve; when I spent a while unloading boxes, we used a hefty bit of 4"x4"

[spikey]

36 minutes ago, Compound2632 said:

... May be kelp rather than manure.

 

Kelp for sure.  Trust me.  I know this stuff!

[F-UnitMad]

2 hours ago, Fat Controller said:

The method of opening the door was probably like that used nowadays for tippers and containers; move the catches until they're just holding, then either send an apprentice to knock them open, or hit them with a piece of scaffolding pipe or similar from a safe distance.

Every HGV Driver on Containers will have a bit of scaffold pole in their kit. 2ft long is fine. Also comes in handy for hammering the more reluctant handles back home, too.

A broom handle would just snap in half.

Interesting OP question, though.

[Rising Standards]

My understanding from my very limited knowledge is that the weight did indeed have to be taken off the door by way of man and shovel before it could be dropped in relative safety for removing the bulk of the load. I forget the source, but I believe I saw this mentioned in an article that showed a (probably 7 plank) wagon with a dropped section taken out of the top plank over the doors, the reason for the notch's presence being claimed to be that a chap shovelling a load over a height greater than that of the notch was entitled to a higher wage.

[Compound2632]

8 hours ago, Rising Standards said:

the reason for the notch's presence being claimed to be that a chap shovelling a load over a height greater than that of the notch was entitled to a higher wage.

 

Around the turn of the century, when coal merchants were moving to slightly higher capacity wagons - 6-plank 10 ton rather than 8-ton 5-plank - there was a vogue for the top plank above the door to be hinged to open up and over, the reason being to counter demands for higher wages in the London area in particular. (Apologies I haven't gone looking for the source of that information.)

[Fat Controller]

10 hours ago, Rising Standards said:

My understanding from my very limited knowledge is that the weight did indeed have to be taken off the door by way of man and shovel before it could be dropped in relative safety for removing the bulk of the load. I forget the source, but I believe I saw this mentioned in an article that showed a (probably 7 plank) wagon with a dropped section taken out of the top plank over the doors, the reason for the notch's presence being claimed to be that a chap shovelling a load over a height greater than that of the notch was entitled to a higher wage.

Not heard of that, but there were coal wagons which had the planks above the doors removed, so that they could serve as merchandise opens. This was a WW2 measure, I believe.

[AMJ]

There are some of the wagons in the private owner wagon series of books that don't have a full height drop down door.  They just have one that is half height of the body.  

 

Some have a pair of doors above this that open horizontally.  If you open these you would get out some of the load from the top before then opening the drop down door.

 

Certain types of load might have been bagged into sacks which makes trans shipping far easier.

[Compound2632]

30 minutes ago, AMJ said:

There are some of the wagons in the private owner wagon series of books that don't have a full height drop down door.  They just have one that is half height of the body.  

 

 

There might be a few exceptions but only 4 or 5-plank wagons (up to about 3 ft internal depth) normally had full height drop down doors. 6-planks or more (4 ft internal depth or more) generally had 5-plank high (3 ft) doors with the top planks through, except...

 

30 minutes ago, AMJ said:

Some have a pair of doors above this that open horizontally.  If you open these you would get out some of the load from the top before then opening the drop down door.

 

 

Rather rare for PO wagons but quite a few company wagons designed thus - thinking particularly of the high-sided opens built by the SECR and LSWR in the 20th century. Plus, on PO coal wagons and some company designs, the hinged top plank.

 

30 minutes ago, AMJ said:

 

Certain types of load might have been bagged into sacks which makes trans shipping far easier.

 

Quite so:

 

 

NRM DY 9301, released under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike (CC BY-NC-SA 3.0) licence by the National Railway Museum.

 

... though the OP was about loose loads. Sacks were usually agricultural produce - grain in particular but I suppose other stuffs. Sacks were often railway company property.

 

For loading in general, I refer once again to the early British Railways documents on the Barrowmore Model Railway Group website, particularly the General Instructions on Handling, Loading, Sheeting and Unsheeting of Traffic dealt with at Goods Stations and Instructions for Handling and Loading SSpecified Traffics. However, these are not very illuminating for mineral traffic.

Edited September 20, 2019 by Compound2632

[Wickham Green]

23 minutes ago, Compound2632 said:

 

 

Interesting place to choose to load ( unload ? ) a wagon : seems to be half way across a crossover - which itself is rather oddly placed ( Maybe this is loco release from a short headshunt behind the camera - but that only allows for a pretty short rake of wagons t be run round.).

[The Stationmaster]

3 minutes ago, Wickham Green said:

Interesting place to choose to load ( unload ? ) a wagon : seems to be half way across a crossover - which itself is rather oddly placed ( Maybe this is loco release from a short headshunt behind the camera - but that only allows for a pretty short rake of wagons t be run round.).

Doesn't really matter - it's in a siding (but I reckon the wagon is more likely to have been positioned there for the photo as the paving doesn't extend into the four foot.

 

Back to the OP.  Don't forget that sand & gravel, or near equivalent, would often be produced locally so it would be more expensive to buy it in via a railway delivery - a lot depended on the local geology.  Once machine made bricks came in they were a different matter and many local brickworks failed to prosper so that traffic depends to soem extent on the period modelled.

 

Although 'the railway' didn't like it many traders but especially coal merchants liked to back their road vehicle hard up against the wagon side to minimise loss from the load falling to ground between the wagon and the road vehicle.  In later years some coal merchants used that to take the easy way of unloading a wagon by opening the door in the hope the coal would land on their vehicle.  Coal of course isn't easy to shovel if you're digging into it from above although that was the normal method in many places except the b north east where coal drops were more common.

 

I believe the top flap referred to above was known as a London flap and I've an idea it has been  discussed in some depth previously on RMweb 

[Compound2632]

19 minutes ago, The Stationmaster said:

Doesn't really matter - it's in a siding (but I reckon the wagon is more likely to have been positioned there for the photo as the paving doesn't extend into the four foot.

 

Yes - one of various series taken to illustrate correct (and incorrect) methods of loading a wagon. I'm pretty sure it's been specially prepared to show a cross-section of the load and normal practice would be to fill up the whole wagon from the bottom.

 

19 minutes ago, The Stationmaster said:

I believe the top flap referred to above was known as a London flap and I've an idea it has been  discussed in some depth previously on RMweb 

 

Yes but the only reference I can find searching on "London flap" is here: 

 

 

Edited September 20, 2019 by Compound2632

[DCB]

17 hours ago, Compound2632 said:

 

No further need to imagine. Claverdon, date unknown but "early". May be kelp rather than manure. More from Warwickshire Railways, at Claverdon: coal, of various sizes, being unloaded directly onto the loading bank - note the extra piece of boarding alongside the dropped door of the nearest wagon. The lumps in the third wagon are so big they would almost certainly stay put when the door was lowered. After 1922, despite the 19th-century aspect of two of the wagons - LMS on the side of the second wagon. Another early one - note dumb-buffered wagons, this time unloading into a cart. Bricks packed into the nearest wagon - that's going to be a tedious job for someone.

 

None of these show the act of opening the door. This photo, from the HMRS website, is suggestive - the F.W. Butcher wagon has been partly unloaded, with a semi-circular bite taken out of the load around the drop door on the far side.

The caption  "Claverdon: coal, of various sizes, being unloaded directly onto the loading bank,"  doesn't really fit what is happening.  The coal is being bagged up into 1 cwt sacks before being moved away.   One drop door is supported on coal sacks,  The standard unit was the 1 cwt sack of coal in those days.  Often wagons would be left part emptied as coal stores in sidings which annoyed the railway companies immensely hence the demurrage charges for wagons not emptied promptly.   I would suggest loading a lorry or cart with loose coal from a wagon was quite unusual.   More likely to be a wheelbarrow or straight in a sack and then moved 50 or 100 yards to the merchant's store. For domestic customers each sack would have to be weighed.   The coal industry was very inefficient and they seemed to like making themselves work.

Its difficult to model except in a diorama fixed at a moment in time as the blokes would be shovelling, filling bags, shifting bags away and filling more until the wagons were emptied and the wharf cleared. I gloss over the unloading, I just winkle out the coal load when no one is looking and go straight from full to empty.

[PatB]

Not railway, but a bit of personal experience. Back when I landscaping we would regularly collect bulk loads like sand, gravel, topsoil etc in a non-tipping dropside truck (SIIa Forward Control Landie, so quite high) . Unloading, unless we could get right up to where it was needed, was a case of me getting up on the load with a shovel and hoicking enough into wheelbarrows at ground level to clear, or nearly clear, one side or the tailboard. Then we could drop the side/tail and do a lot of the remaining unloading from ground level. It didn't take that long to offload a couple of tons (yes, I know what the payload of the FC was officially), so a couple of blokes should have been able to clear a wagon in reasonable time.

[The Stationmaster]

1 hour ago, DavidCBroad said:

The caption  "Claverdon: coal, of various sizes, being unloaded directly onto the loading bank,"  doesn't really fit what is happening.  The coal is being bagged up into 1 cwt sacks before being moved away.   One drop door is supported on coal sacks,  The standard unit was the 1 cwt sack of coal in those days.  Often wagons would be left part emptied as coal stores in sidings which annoyed the railway companies immensely hence the demurrage charges for wagons not emptied promptly.   I would suggest loading a lorry or cart with loose coal from a wagon was quite unusual.   More likely to be a wheelbarrow or straight in a sack and then moved 50 or 100 yards to the merchant's store. For domestic customers each sack would have to be weighed.   The coal industry was very inefficient and they seemed to like making themselves work.

Its difficult to model except in a diorama fixed at a moment in time as the blokes would be shovelling, filling bags, shifting bags away and filling more until the wagons were emptied and the wharf cleared. I gloss over the unloading, I just winkle out the coal load when no one is looking and go straight from full to empty.

It probably was inefficient to our eyes but you never came across a poor coal merchant back in the days when most households were reliant on it.  It was often said that you never saw a poor undertaker or a poor coal merchant

[mikejames]

the station master said

It was often said that you never saw a poor undertaker or a poor coal merchant

 

my memory was of 'a poor bookie'

 

mike james

[doilum]

4 hours ago, The Stationmaster said:

It probably was inefficient to our eyes but you never came across a poor coal merchant back in the days when most households were reliant on it.  It was often said that you never saw a poor undertaker or a poor coal merchant

Those of us who started paid employment in the early 1970s will remember a much more leisurely pace of work and a quite reasonable expectation of what a couple of students could achieve with a brush, shovel and an ancient barrow in a given time.