"Foreign" wagons - How many would you see?

[kevinlms]

9 hours ago, Dungrange said:

 

 

That's very true, but with 650,000 prototypes to choose from, is there really a need for fictitious liveries? 

 

 

The same argument can be used, as to why create a fictitious station/other location, there are so many to chose from!

 

Fact is, people's personal choice comes into a decision and because of the wide range of names carried on PO wagons, from single examples to 1,000s, why not name them after family members etc.

[Tom Burnham]

I believe maltings also used anthracite for process heating.  Otherwise I guess general purpose household coal would mostly have come from the Notts, Derbys and South Yorks coalfield.  As well as wagons of collieries and local merchants there were also the larger regional and national coal factors and larger consumers might well have ordered direct from them by the wagon load rather than in smaller quantities from the local merchant.

[Andy Hayter]

15 hours ago, Dungrange said:

 

Thanks Andy - I think you make a few very good points, some of which are quite subtle, but which highlight why it’s not possible to have an accurate ‘rule of thumb’ generalisation that applies everywhere (as some have already highlighted).

 

Since there are few photographs of freight traffic on the Wisbech and Upwell tramway in 1921 and my wagon spotting skills are well below the observational skills of some, like @Compound2632, my approach has been to try and ‘forecast’ what I’d expect to see, and I’ve been adopting a two-step approach to that.  The first is to try and forecast the pre-war situation (based on trip lengths to the nearest stations, company ownership of the nearest stations and both the breakdown and size of each company’s fleet) and then try to consider how that may have changed post-pooling as company fleets mixed.  What I had identified is that the variable that my 1921 forecast is most sensitive to is the question of how quickly the fleets mixed - it's the biggest uncertainty I have.

 

 

I must admit that I hadn’t really considered that the speed at which the fleets mixed would vary across the country and be related to the intensity of freight traffic.  At a location that saw the arrival of 1,000 loaded wagons per day the impact of pooling would probably be obvious ten times quicker than a location that saw only 100 loaded wagons per day and 100 times quicker than at a location that saw just 10 loaded wagons per day.  It makes sense: I just hadn’t thought about it.  It doesn’t mean that comparisons at places like Birmingham Central aren’t useful, but means that when drawing conclusions about the impacts of pooling, one needs to be aware of the relative traffic levels and adjust accordingly, so as well as requiring fairly accurate dates for photographs post-1917, there is a need to understand the difference in freight intensity between the photographs being looked at and the location being modelled to fully understand the impact of pooling at a given date in the twilight years of the pre-grouping period.

 

 

I think this is also an interesting observation and I can see its relevance.  A lot has been written about pooling in the post-grouping period with an accepted general rule of thumb being that the number of LMS, LNER, GWR and SR wagons on a layout should be broadly in proportion with the size of each companies’ pooled fleet, so even a layout in the south of England should have more LMS than SR wagons.  However, whilst this might be true when considering just four companies, the same probably isn’t true when considering 20+ pre-grouping companies (in the same way as there are 20 countries that use the Euro).  I guess the question then becomes, what is the equilibrium point?  For my own forecasts I was assuming that I needed to weight each company’s fleet breakdown by the average distance to all stations on their network.  This means that I’m biasing the impact of pooling in favour of the local companies because whilst a Highland Railway wagon may have ended up in East Anglia, it would most likely get there having made dozens of shorter journeys, each of which present the opportunity for it to be sent back in the direction from which it came.  Therefore, even although pooling may have resulted in a HR wagon being spotted at Upwell, I think it would still have been rare (in the same way as certain Euro coins are still rare in rural France).  I guess that raises another question for me – should I be weighting the company fleets by distance (as I have done) or by something like the square of the distance, which would result in the expectation of fewer Scottish foreigners, with the foreign wagons being more heavily biased to the neighbouring companies?  That's a bit of rhetorical question.

 

 

Again, a subtle point that I hadn’t fully appreciated.

 

My approach to trying to derive a pre-WW1 forecast has been to start with an assumed deterrence function.  The local traffic (ie traffic travelling less than 10 miles) would be my baseline and the further away a station is, the less traffic it would dispatch.  For example, I was assuming that the average station 100 miles may produce just 1% of the traffic that would be generated at Wisbech (which is just 6 miles away).  I then looked at counting how many stations are 10-20 miles distant, 20-30 miles distant etc.  I did this accurately for stations within 100 miles, and then very crudely after that because it's less important.  Combining these then gives me a trip length distribution.  I was hoping that I could find data to calibrate this (since it would be virtually impossible to calibrate the deterrence function directly).

 

The trip length distribution that I’ve derived is highly plausible (the most common trip length is circa 30-40 miles, approximately 2/3 of traffic is travelling less than 50 miles and about 95% of traffic is travelling less than 100 miles).  However, what you’re highlighting is that the distribution of trip lengths will vary by location and whilst at some more urban locations perhaps 10% of traffic may have travelled more than 100 miles, in a sparsely populated areas there is probably a much lower proportion of long-distance traffic.  Again, the approach that I’m taking isn’t necessarily wrong, but I’ll need to give thought to calibrating the likelihood of the longer distance trips.  Whilst there was a lot of long-distance exports from Upwell, it doesn’t mean that there was a similar proportion of long-distance imports.

 

 

 

The resultant mix that I’ve derived as an annual pre-WW1 estimate for Upwell is as below, which overall, I think is plausible, although I’m still looking to make refinements.  Although that's an assumption that I would need about 21% of stock to be foreign, it's worth highlighting that the assumed likely foreign stock is very heavily biased to the local companies that were operating within 40 miles of Upwell.  I'd therefore expect a lower percentage of foreign stock at a location deep within one company's territory and a higher proportion of foreign stock at a yard on the periphery of a company's territory.

 

 

Unfortunately, it sometimes feels like this is an unanswerable question, but I suppose if none of us know the answer, there is no-one who can definitively tell us that we are wrong.  My next task is to look at the Private Owner wagon fleet!!!

 

 

Unfortunately, that's the answer that I though you might give.  I'm aware that the L&Y Railway Society also have some details on their website of L&Y registered wagons - https://lyrs.org.uk/lyr-private-owner-wagon-register/.  I'm assuming that the registers for the other companies, where these are available, will convey similar information.  I was hoping that there may be some high level breakdown of the circa 650,000 wagons by geography and/or wagon type, because going through each companies registers would be a mammoth task, which would probably be of little real value.

 

 

That's very true, but with 650,000 prototypes to choose from, is there really a need for fictitious liveries?  My interest is really, of the PO coal wagons that turned up in Upwell, how may plausibly came from Scotland, South Wales, the North East etc (which would be related to the size of the PO wagon fleet in each area).

 

 

 

Let me say how good it is to see someone using some statistical science to plan their operations - albeit that we are forced into assumptions because the detailed information we need  is scare.  Where documents exist we are indebted to people like Stephen ( @Compound2632 ) who spend hours pouring over and analysing the information and converting it to data.   Elsewhere we rely on photographic evidence and here we can be victims of unintended bias caused by the choice of subjects photographed as well as what has survived:  The collections of railway photographers being more likely to survive (mainly of busy locations for obvious reasons) whereas grandads odd snaps of some trains on a branch line were probably thrown away ages ago in favour of the shots of family members on the same film. 

 

One other curved ball has occurred to me this morning.  The pooling of wagons was introduced to reduce (but not eliminate) the number of empty wagons being shipped around the country.  So far, so good but I wonder how much old habits died hard when there was availability of wagons that meant a goods master could choose to send one of his own wagons or "return" a foreign wagon back in the direction of its home.   The more so perhaps if that wagon was in less than pristine condition.

 

Just musing.

[Compound2632]

15 hours ago, Dungrange said:

Unfortunately, that's the answer that I though you might give. 

 

Actually, I think there is a bit more that can be said but I need a moment or two to pull the data together...

 

On the registrations, it has to be borne in mind that these were only of new wagons; PO wagons built before 1887 remained in circulation up to 1914 in their original dumb-buffered state, or much longer if "reconstructed" with sprung buffers etc., in which case they were subject to inspection. What isn't clear to me is where reconstructed wagons were catalogued. Before 1887 some of the companies had maintained PO wagon registers, but registration with, say, the GWR, didn't mean automatic acceptance by, say, the LNWR, unlike the RCH scheme.

 

So with that in mind, there were about 80,000 PO wagons registered with the Midland by grouping. The Midland had bought up nearly 67,000 PO wagon between 1882 and the mid-1890s, so I think one can infer, taking into account the size of the company's own mineral wagon fleet, that at least 100,000 wagons were in mineral traffic on the Midland by grouping, up from around 70,000 in the 1880s. The increase in capacity was bigger, since by grouping most of these wagons were of 10 ton or 12 ton capacity, compared to the 1880s, when older PO wagons could be only 6 ton or 7 ton capacity.

 

More to follow.

[burgundy]

54 minutes ago, Andy Hayter said:

 

Let me say how good it is to see someone using some statistical science to plan their operations - albeit that we are forced into assumptions because the detailed information we need  is scare. 

Statistical science is at least as interesting a pastime as building model railways. However, if the national wagon fleet was, say, 100,000 vehicles and your layout of Upwell can accommodate, say, 50, your selection of wagons is only ever going to be an approximation. Since wagons, by their nature, tend to come and go, as long as your have broadly the right proportions, that is good enough.

You can even legitimately have the occasional oddball - for example a farmer taking delivery of a new traction engine. Would it have come from Rochester, Leeds or Thetford? 🙂

Best wishes 

Eric

Edited January 6 by burgundy
emoji added to suggest that this should not be taken too seriously!

[kevinlms]

2 hours ago, Andy Hayter said:

 

One other curved ball has occurred to me this morning.  The pooling of wagons was introduced to reduce (but not eliminate) the number of empty wagons being shipped around the country.  So far, so good but I wonder how much old habits died hard when there was availability of wagons that meant a goods master could choose to send one of his own wagons or "return" a foreign wagon back in the direction of its home.   The more so perhaps if that wagon was in less than pristine condition.

 

Just musing.

Alternatively, a good goods master, should return a wagon to it's home direction LOADED, because that was fully within the rules (even before any type of pooling) and so save mileage (wear and tear) on his own companies wagons.

Edited January 6 by kevinlms
Wrong word

[burgundy]

On 04/01/2024 at 18:53, Dungrange said:

 

Obviously the image in this post has been lost, but did this information contain any details of where the wagons were from or does it just record the owning company of the various wagons?  Ideally, I'd like to know what proportion of traffic had travelled more than 50 miles, 100 miles, 150 miles, etc to understand what a typical trip length distribution looked like, so a large sample size would be ideal.

Not exactly the lost image, but my own transcription of the analysis carried out by Jonathan Abson and published in the Brighton Circular rather a lot of years ago. It was based on the goods traffic data for Sheffield Park for the period 30 Nov 1899 to 31 March 1900. During that period, 702 wagons passed through the yard, of which 634 belonged to the LB&SCR. The balance was made up of 25 POs, 18 Midland, 10 LNW, 6 GN, 3 SECR, 2 NE, 2 GC and one each from the NS and GE.

 

By vehicle type, these were broken down into

 

Type

Sheeted merchandise LBSC 217 GC 1 MR 6 NE 1

Merchandise LBSC 228 NE 1

Single Bolster LBSC 82

Empty LBSC 41

Coal LBSC 1 GC 1 GN 6 LNW 9 MR 11 NS 1 PO 25 

Van LBSC 37 GE 1 LNW 1 SER 3

Double Bolster LBSC 13

Coke LBSC 5 MR 1

Cattle LBSC 5 

Machinery/road vehicle LBSC 5 

 

Jonathan's conclusion was that, if your layout were to have 20 wagons, 14 would be Brighton opens, 3 would be timber wagons (either single or double bolster), 1 would be a van or cattle van, 1 would be a PO and 1 would be a foreign wagon.

 

Just to put this into context, Sheffield Park station served Sheffield Park house, Fletching village and Turner's timber yard (which explains the timber bolsters). As a rural area, the local community might have been expected to be pretty self sufficient, with agricultural produce leaving the station. Sheffield Park itself (the big house) might have generated some more interesting traffic, as the owner was frequently visited by the Prince of Wales, hosted visiting international cricket teams and also hosted “Volunteer” (territorial army) Field Days.

 

I hope that this helps

Best wishes 

Eric  

[Andy Hayter]

@kevinlms

But only if there are balanced flows - and often there would not be: either permanently of seasonally *.  

 

@burgundy as I think you are trying to suggest, statistics will only help to predict trends.  It was never designed to predict individual events and as such we can always - with a good back story - have strangers in the midst of our home stock.  When the strangers outnumber the locals, then there might be a bit of a credibility gap.

 

*Professionally I worked with this for many years.  The movement of goods has largely moved from rail to road and road hauliers have tended to work together to do their own bit towards eliminating empty trucks returning to base, so company 1 in country A might work with company 2 in country B, so that if company 1 was dropping off goods in country B, company B would look to see if they could get a load back to country A for company 1.

 

All well and good but there were some unsolvable situations and the UK provided a good example.  70% of all international trucks delivering to the UK returned to the continent empty.  There just were no back loads.  The consequence was that it was very much more expensive to deliver from say the Ruhr valley to the UK than to deliver in the reverse direction.  The hauliers charged the inbound to the UK journey with both legs of the ferry crossing so at least if the truck returned empty, this wasted cost had already been paid.  

Edited January 6 by Andy Hayter
clarification

[Oldddudders]

1 hour ago, burgundy said:

Not exactly the lost image, but my own transcription of the analysis carried out by Jonathan Abson and published in the Brighton Circular rather a lot of years ago. It was based on the goods traffic data for Sheffield Park for the period 30 Nov 1899 to 31 March 1900. During that period, 702 wagons passed through the yard, of which 634 belonged to the LB&SCR. The balance was made up of 25 POs, 18 Midland, 10 LNW, 6 GN, 3 SECR, 2 NE, 2 GC and one each from the NS and GE.

My dame-skool maths says that shows about 90% of the wagons were home-railway, 10% the rest. This was late-Victorian stats, of course, but it does rather fly in the face of the assertion that 30 years later the mix was wholly different. Had commerce on the railway really changed that much after a World War and Grouping?

[Compound2632]

23 minutes ago, Oldddudders said:

My dame-skool maths says that shows about 90% of the wagons were home-railway, 10% the rest. This was late-Victorian stats, of course, but it does rather fly in the face of the assertion that 30 years later the mix was wholly different. Had commerce on the railway really changed that much after a World War and Grouping?

 

What changed with the Great War was the introduction of common user agreements. So, after the Great War, one could have exactly the same traffic flows but with quite different wagons. It's getting folk to understand that the introduction of common user agreements during the Great War period represents a watershed in the distribution of wagons that is a core theme of this thread!

[burgundy]

2 hours ago, Andy Hayter said:

.............we can always - with a good back story - have strangers in the midst of our home stock.  When the strangers outnumber the locals, then there might be a bit of a credibility gap. 

If you were feeling mischievous and wished to test the limits of credibility, you could always model Sheffield Park on the day of a Volunteer Field Day. You might legitimately see trains of foreign stock delivering  Volunteer battalions from all over the south of England, with thousands of men in uniform. You might also see the LB&SCR's own "armoured train" in action (to the detriment of the normal timetable).

Of course, as penance, you should run a pretty boring normal service for most of the other 364 days of the year!

Best wishes 

Eric 

[Compound2632]

@Dungrange, in 1918 the Board of Trade conducted a survey of private owner wagons. John Arkell wrote an article on this in the HMRS Journal, Vol. 22 No. 10 (April-June 2017) pp. 345-349, from which this table is copied:

 

 

The article gives the background to the survey and more statistics expanding on these figures. I was surprised to learn the numbers for hired wagons - for colliery wagons, 22% on hire purchase and 9% on simple hire, and for merchants, 16% and 24% respectively, the remainder being owned outright. I had thought the proportion on hire was greater.

[Mol_PMB]

2 hours ago, Compound2632 said:

 

What changed with the Great War was the introduction of common user agreements. So, after the Great War, one could have exactly the same traffic flows but with quite different wagons. It's getting folk to understand that the introduction of common user agreements during the Great War period represents a watershed in the distribution of wagons that is a core theme of this thread!

Agreed, and there were lots of other changes during that period. Of course the railways were under the control of the REC, which would have made it easier to implement nationwide changes which individual railways might have been reluctant to follow otherwise.

Another example of these WW1-period changes that I have studied recently is how parcels and 'miscellaneous' traffic was charged, which changed nationwide on 2nd April 1917. Not necessarily the rates, but a wholesale change from payment in arrears to payment before the parcel was sent. Which meant the sender paid cash at the originating station, the fee being calculated by a clerk there, rather than the total price being added up along the way and recorded on an invoice at the destination. The payment was accounted for with stamps, which meant that all the railways had to start issuing stamps for parcels on that date (previously only a few of the bigger railways had done so, although stamps for letters and newspapers by rail were more widely used).

This difference is too small-scale for us to observe on a model railway but it's another example of how a change to the paperwork had a significant effect on the handling of goods by the railways. Parcels and 'miscellaneous' accounted for a worthwhile percentage of the value of rail-borne goods at many stations, as although the quantities were smaller the rates were much higher than an equivalent weight of coal or potatoes. At this time, the railways offered the only national parcel courier service.

 

Mol

Edited January 6 by Mol_PMB
last sentence.

[burgundy]

Picking up an earlier question about types of coal, the PO wagons for Sheffield Park were operated by the following companies 

Bestwood

Birley 

Cardiff Navigation colliery

CRC Cannock and Rugely collieries

Lamont Warner

Linby

Newington

Nuneaton

Parry

Pelsall

Roundwood

Rickett Smith 

Staveley 

Talk'o the Hill Colliery

Wigan coal and iron

Taken with the company coal wagons listed in a previous post, this may suggest the typical sources of coal sold in the south of England and also the mix of colliery and coal factor owned vehicles. Newington is the nearest to a "local coal merchant", being based in Lewes. 

Best wishes 

Eric 

[Compound2632]

24 minutes ago, Mol_PMB said:

Agreed, and there were lots of other changes during that period. Of course the railways were under the control of the REC, which would have made it easier to implement nationwide changes which individual railways might have been reluctant to follow otherwise.

 

Yes, but outside of the period of REC control there was the RCH General Managers' Conference, which brought uniformity to the commercial operating practices of the railways.

[Compound2632]

In fact, the REC was pretty much was the RCH General Managers' Conference renamed! It may have had greater powers but the people were the same.

Edited January 6 by Compound2632

[Dungrange]

5 hours ago, burgundy said:

If you were feeling mischievous and wished to test the limits of credibility, you could always model Sheffield Park on the day of a Volunteer Field Day. You might legitimately see trains of foreign stock delivering  Volunteer battalions from all over the south of England, with thousands of men in uniform. You might also see the LB&SCR's own "armoured train" in action (to the detriment of the normal timetable).

 

I see nothing wrong with that, provided that is what you set out to model and don't claim that a one off event is a 'typical day'.  Whether it is easier to model a specific day or not depends on whether the information is available to allow you do that - eg is there a record of a special timetable for the event?

 

7 hours ago, Oldddudders said:

My dame-skool maths says that shows about 90% of the wagons were home-railway, 10% the rest. This was late-Victorian stats, of course, but it does rather fly in the face of the assertion that 30 years later the mix was wholly different. Had commerce on the railway really changed that much after a World War and Grouping?

 

The 'commerce on the railway' didn't change much over the first 30 years of the 20th century.  In the post-grouping period, I'd guess that you'd still find that close to 90% of the traffic at Sheffield Park originated at a station on former LB&SCR territory, with the other 10% arriving from further afield.  The traffic patterns themselves probably didn't change radically. 

 

What did change radically was the wagons used.  In the pre-pooling period (ie pre-1917), something being transported from 10 miles away in Lewes would always have been loaded in an LB&SCR wagon, whereas post-pooling, it could be loaded into any suitable wagon that happened to be available in Lewes irrespective of who owned the wagon.  The 90% of 'local' traffic would therefore arrive in wagons belonging to a mixture of companies.  Initially, this would have been biased towards local companies, but over time, random wagons from the other end of the country would turn up conveying produce on a 10 mile local trip from Lewes to Sheffield Park.  Therefore in the context of 'how many foreign wagons' it represents a significant change.  At busy rail centres there would have been a literal step-change in the late pre-grouping period, but in rural backwaters, the change would have tended to be more gradual.

 

10 hours ago, kevinlms said:

Alternatively, a good goods master, should return a wagon to it's home direction LOADED, because that was fully within the rules (even before any type of pooling) and so save mileage (wear and tear) on his own companies wagons.

 

That's something I'm aware I haven't taken account of in trying to estimate how many foreign wagons I'd need.  The problem is knowing what percentage of the time a back load could be found within the required timescale for returning the wagon.  I'd guess that the majority (but not all) wagons returned empty.

 

12 hours ago, Andy Hayter said:

One other curved ball has occurred to me this morning.  The pooling of wagons was introduced to reduce (but not eliminate) the number of empty wagons being shipped around the country.  So far, so good but I wonder how much old habits died hard when there was availability of wagons that meant a goods master could choose to send one of his own wagons or "return" a foreign wagon back in the direction of its home.   The more so perhaps if that wagon was in less than pristine condition.

 

It's one reason why I'd never expect to get to a scenario where there was a totally even spread of the various companies wagons across Great Britain by the Grouping.  There is also the issue of maintenance.  Presumably wagons were returned to their home territory for maintenance at regular intervals and therefore, it means that wandering wagons weren't being continually mixed up year after year.  There is then the issue of new builds, which of course always start off on their home turf, so like maintenance the scrappage and replacement with new wagons will also tend to 'reset' the mixing of wagons that pooling created.

 

On 05/01/2024 at 18:18, burgundy said:

I am afraid that may introduce another rabbit hole for you to explore. 

11 hours ago, burgundy said:

Statistical science is at least as interesting a pastime as building model railways.

 

I agree it can become a bit of a rabbit hole - I've still to look at seasonality and better estimate a disaggregated demand (which was part of the reason for trying to create a trip length distribution) as to get demand from the company accounts, I really need to know the average trip length.

 

11 hours ago, burgundy said:

However, if the national wagon fleet was, say, 100,000 vehicles and your layout of Upwell can accommodate, say, 50, your selection of wagons is only ever going to be an approximation. Since wagons, by their nature, tend to come and go, as long as your have broadly the right proportions, that is good enough.

 

Agreed.  In pre-grouping days, an 'average' goods tram on the Wisbech and Upwell tramway would have comprised nine wagons and a goods brake.  Of these nine wagons, around seven wagons would probably have been from the GER, one from the GNR and the final one most likely from either the MR or the LNWR.  Every so often, one of these wagons could be swapped for something more exotic.  However, for me, that's the purpose of the exercise.  I've already purchase an SECR wagon and two GWR wagons, just because Rapido made them and an LSWR wagon because EFE Rail have produced one.  None of these would have been regular visitors.  All could plausibly have traversed the tramway in 1921, but chances are, they never all appeared in the same train.  It will seem obvious to everyone that I can't produce a plausible W&U fleet without GER wagons, but I'd say that it's just as essential to have GNR, MR and LNWR wagons in my fleet, as whilst these may not have appeared in every train, there was most likely at least one wagon from each of these companies on the tramway every single day.  However, if no-one produces a model of a Furness Railway prototype, I don't really care - I'm not planning to own a model of every single wagon that may have appeared.

 

11 hours ago, burgundy said:

You can even legitimately have the occasional oddball - for example a farmer taking delivery of a new traction engine. Would it have come from Rochester, Leeds or Thetford? 🙂

11 hours ago, burgundy said:

emoji added to suggest that this should not be taken too seriously!

 

Perhaps not, but it is another question.  I've actually ordered a model of a 'vintage tractor' from Scale 3D along with some figures (https://www.scale3d.co.uk/products/copy-of-old-farm-tractor-1).  I believe that this a model of the Fordson F, which was first imported into the UK from the USA in 1917.  A local production plant was subsequently set up in Cork (which at that time was part of the UK) and 'domestic' production commenced in 1919.  If one arrived in East Anglia in 1921, it would most likely have been one manufactured in Cork and then shipped to Great Britain.  I will therefore need a suitable wagon of the company that operated the port in which it would have been 'imported'.  I suspect that it would be unlikely that it would arrive on a GER wagon, although I don't know how they were distributed in these early days.  No doubt that could become another 'rabbit hole'.

Edited January 6 by Dungrange

[Dungrange]

On 05/01/2024 at 18:18, burgundy said:

The proportion of different PO wagon operators will have less to do with simple numbers and more with the types of coal for which there was a market in Upwell. Different uses required different types of coal and those generally came from particular areas. Len Tavender's book on Coal Trade Wagons offers an introduction to this. 

 

Thanks - I'm not paying £100 for a second hand book on E-bay, but I note that the National Library of Scotland (NLS) have a copy, so I'll have a read the next time I'm there.

 

23 hours ago, hmrspaul said:

Upwell is in an area that had glasshouses. They would be heated with anthracite - so from some of the South Wales field IIRC the western end. 

 

I'm assuming the glasshouses would have been for some of the fruit.  I hadn't given much thought to that being where some of the coal was used.

 

12 hours ago, Tom Burnham said:

I believe maltings also used anthracite for process heating. 

 

I'm not aware of any maltings in the vicinity of Upwell, but I clearly need to spend more time reading up about the local industries.

 

12 hours ago, Tom Burnham said:

Otherwise I guess general purpose household coal would mostly have come from the Notts, Derbys and South Yorks coalfield. 

 

My assumption was that most of the coal was either for household consumption (principally in winter) and for the various pumping stations across the fens (which required year round deliveries).  My assumption was that coal traffic from Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire would dominate, but that was based on proximity rather than understanding that coal is not a uniform product.  I do have a list of known PO wagons, but I'm not sure how biased that list is, because I'm presuming it was just what has been observed in a photograph.  What we have photographic evidence of definitely travelled the tramway, but of course the absence of a photograph doesn't mean that there weren't other PO wagons that may have been more regular visitors (just never captured on film).

 

4 hours ago, Compound2632 said:

@Dungrange, in 1918 the Board of Trade conducted a survey of private owner wagons. John Arkell wrote an article on this in the HMRS Journal, Vol. 22 No. 10 (April-June 2017) pp. 345-349, from which this table is copied:

 

 

The article gives the background to the survey and more statistics expanding on these figures. I was surprised to learn the numbers for hired wagons - for colliery wagons, 22% on hire purchase and 9% on simple hire, and for merchants, 16% and 24% respectively, the remainder being owned outright. I had thought the proportion on hire was greater.

 

Thanks - that's what I was hoping existed, albeit it doesn't have a geographical split.  It does however indicate that at least 85% of PO wagons conveyed coal and PO wagons that weren't a simple open wagon were relatively rare.  I had been hoping that I could adjust my trip length distribution by removing stations that aren't in coal producing areas to create a regional breakdown of PO coal wagons, but if as @burgundy has highlighted distance and fleet size are not the main determining factors, I probably don't need anything more than an appropriate balance between colliery and factor wagons.

 

Edited January 6 by Dungrange

[Compound2632]

5 minutes ago, Dungrange said:

Thanks - I'm not paying £100 for a second hand book on E-bay, 

 

I did get a copy for rather less, not so very long ago, via AbeBooks or Amazon - I forget which - though I see neither have a copy at the moment.

[Nick Holliday]

As the various items I posted three years ago have disappeared, and have been referenced lately, I thought it might be worthwhile re-posting them, as I have tracked down most of the files, but, unfortunately, I have forgotten the source of some of the information, for which I apologise.

Although @burgundy has summarised Jonathan Abson's information from Sheffield Park at the end of 1899, here are the main tables.

@Penlan I think it was, provided the table of wagons recorded at Bristol in 1920, which engendered considerable discussion regarding the effects of Pooling

Peter Tatlow supplied the table that shows the changes in wagon numbers after grouping

The following table breaks down each company's stock, mainly around 1922, into the various uses.  Some of the classifications are fairly arbitrary and are not intended to be definitive.

Whilst the final table, I think courtesy of David Jenkinson, shows the sizes of each company's loco, wagon and coaching stock fleets

 

[Compound2632]

13 hours ago, Nick Holliday said:

Whilst the final table, I think courtesy of David Jenkinson, shows the sizes of each company's loco, wagon and coaching stock fleets

 

... at 31 December 1921? (Since LNWR and L&YR are listed separately.)

[Dungrange]

19 minutes ago, Compound2632 said:

... at 31 December 1921? (Since LNWR and L&YR are listed separately.)

 

Yes, it appears so - all the numbers I've checked tie up with those in The Railway Yearbook 1922 (which relates to 31 December 1921).  Interestingly, the summary table in The Railway Yearbook combines the LNWR & L&YR, but they are still both listed separately in the LNWR 'chapter' and those figures tie up with the above.  The column headed 'Wagons' would appear to be the combined total for goods wagons and service vehicles (which are generally categorised separately in The Railway Yearbooks).

[Compound2632]

14 minutes ago, Dungrange said:

The column headed 'Wagons' would appear to be the combined total for goods wagons and service vehicles (which are generally categorised separately in The Railway Yearbooks).

 

Yes indeed - the separate listing of service vehicles in BoT annual returns and company annual reports & accounts being introduced by the Railway Companies (Account and Returns) Act, 1911. The total for the S&DJR is purely goods brake vans and service vehicles - loco coal wagons, ballast wagons, and rail wagons - apart from a small number of revenue wagons retained for local peat traffic, the remainder of the goods stock having been divided between the owning companies in 1914. I remain puzzled by the very small goods wagon fleet of the M&GN - it seems always to have been that small, even in Eastern & Midland days.

[Dungrange]

16 minutes ago, Compound2632 said:

The total for the S&DJR is purely goods brake vans and service vehicles - loco coal wagons, ballast wagons, and rail wagons - apart from a small number of revenue wagons retained for local peat traffic, the remainder of the goods stock having been divided between the owning companies in 1914.

The Railway Yearbook 1922 gives figures of 58 Goods Train vehicles and 171 Service vehicles for the S&DJR as at 31 December 1921.  The Goods Train figure presumably includes Goods Brakes (don't know how many), so the fleet of retained revenue vehicles was obviously small.

 

19 minutes ago, Compound2632 said:

I remain puzzled by the very small goods wagon fleet of the M&GN - it seems always to have been that small, even in Eastern & Midland days.

 

Yes - me too.  As the M&GNJR operates very close to the W&U tramway, I initially assumed I would need a few M&GN wagons - until I realised how few they had.  I can only assume that they relied quite heavily on the parent companies for wagons for longer distance exports.  That is, for seasonal produce that was to be sent to stations in Midland territory, the MR provided the M&GNJR with a number of empty wagons, with the GNR doing the same for exports to GNR territory.  The small fleet was maybe sufficient for the 'internal' traffic between stations on the M&GNJR serving a very sparse population and outside the seasonal peaks in agricultural produce.

 

The most useful breakdown that I've found of the M&GNJR stock is what is listed in one of the Tatlow books based on a survey as at November 1919:

 

High sided goods - 49

Lime wagons (covered) - 3

Open fish truck - 3

Ventilated covered van (Westinghouse Pipe) - 45

Machinery wagon - 4

Single bolster wagon - 18

Double bolster wagon - 4

Large cattle truck (vacuum pipe) - 135

 

Ballast wagon - 61

Ballast brake van - 8

travelling crane & runners - 4

High sided for lime - 3

Covered packing van - 4

Signal & works van - 2

Signal & works wagon - 1

PW carriage - 1

Telephone wagon - 1

Mess & tool van - 2

stores van - 1

Weights & measures - 1

Dirt wagon - 3

Refuse high sided wagon - 1

Twin gas tank - 2

10T Goods brake van - 16

 

What I note though is that whilst there were allegedly no low sided goods wagons in 1919, the same publication states that 31 low sided goods wagons were transferred to both the LMS and LNER in 1928, implying that they had 62 low sided goods wagons by 2028.

[Compound2632]

1 hour ago, Dungrange said:

The Railway Yearbook 1922 gives figures of 58 Goods Train vehicles and 171 Service vehicles for the S&DJR as at 31 December 1921.  The Goods Train figure presumably includes Goods Brakes (don't know how many), so the fleet of retained revenue vehicles was obviously small.

 

It was 14 peat wagons and 44 goods brake vans.

 

1 hour ago, Dungrange said:

Ventilated covered van (Westinghouse Pipe) - 45

Large cattle truck (vacuum pipe) - 135

 

The ventilated vans were used for fruit traffic in the season and apparently travelled far and wide. The joint was a vacuum line like its parents, so I think what Tatlow means here is that many or all were Westinghouse piped as well as vacuum piped.

 

By some curious chance, the M&GNJR and the S&DJR both had 135 cattle wagons!