Big four era - moving wagons from other companies

[petethemole]

4 hours ago, Aire Head said:

 

Yes. Once the wagons became pool they would be sent wherever they were required in the same way a common user wagon would have been pre-war.

 

As a result they soon began to spread. This wasn't overnight and a good number of wagons wouldn't stray too far due to the cyclical nature of a lot of coal working.

Also, pooled PO mineral wagons were used for war-related merchandise traffic, carrying military supplies.  Photos of wagons at Southampton docks show cargoes such as ration boxes and oil drums in mixed rakes of PO 5, 6, and 7 plank mineral wagons, mostly colliery branded, and company merchandise wagons.  I can't post them due to copyright.

[Fat Controller]

11 minutes ago, petethemole said:

Also, pooled PO mineral wagons were used for war-related merchandise traffic, carrying military supplies.  Photos of wagons at Southampton docks show cargoes such as ration boxes and oil drums in mixed rakes of PO 5, 6, and 7 plank mineral wagons, mostly colliery branded, and company merchandise wagons.  I can't post them due to copyright.

Others were modified for specific traffic; examples that come to mind are open wagons having doors removed, and bolsters and semi-permanent couplings fitted to allow them to be used as 'Twin Bolsters'. Examples were still to be seen in the Llanelli/ Swansea areas into the late 1950s

[Michael Hodgson]

Would such wagons simply be requisitioned?  

I assume the owners got some sort of compensation for the damage inherent in such modifications - perhaps at a global level?

[Compound2632]

36 minutes ago, Fat Controller said:

Others were modified for specific traffic; examples that come to mind are open wagons having doors removed, and bolsters and semi-permanent couplings fitted to allow them to be used as 'Twin Bolsters'. 

 

End door wagons with the end doors removed, and coupled with the open ends face-to-face?

 

19 minutes ago, Michael Hodgson said:

Would such wagons simply be requisitioned?  

I assume the owners got some sort of compensation for the damage inherent in such modifications - perhaps at a global level?

 

I believe there was a general scheme covering use but I think that may simply have morphed into outright compulsory purchase at nationalisation. However colliery-owned wagons must have been nationalised on the formation of the NCB a year before railway nationalisation. How did that work out? 

[Aire Head]

55 minutes ago, Compound2632 said:

. However colliery-owned wagons must have been nationalised on the formation of the NCB a year before railway nationalisation. How did that work out? 

 

Presumably the RCH had a list from the beginning of the war of who owned what and calculated what the renumeration would be based upon that regardless of if the wagon still existed.

[Compound2632]

6 minutes ago, Aire Head said:

Presumably the RCH had a list from the beginning of the war of who owned what and calculated what the renumeration would be based upon that regardless of if the wagon still existed.

 

Something like that but I've seen it said that by the time of the reckoning-up ten years later not all the owners could be traced!

[The Stationmaster]

11 minutes ago, Compound2632 said:

 

Something like that but I've seen it said that by the time of the reckoning-up ten years later not all the owners could be traced!

PO wagon owners were compensated in. the railway nationalisation legislation at a set amount per wagon based on its date of construction and immaterial of its physical condition.

[Fat Controller]

1 hour ago, Compound2632 said:

 

End door wagons with the end doors removed, and coupled with the open ends face-to-face?

Correct

 

 

I believe there was a general scheme covering use but I think that may simply have morphed into outright compulsory purchase at nationalisation. However colliery-owned wagons must have been nationalised on the formation of the NCB a year before railway nationalisation. How did that work out? 

Apparently, the MoS ordered steel-bodied wagons as a notional replacement for wagons that wouldn't be fit for return. The second David Larkin tome on 'Absorbed Wagons of British Railways has some details.

 

[jim.snowdon]

4 hours ago, Michael Hodgson said:

Whilst I understand the pooling system would work well in the short to medium term, I'm not so clear about how it worked in the longer term.  When a wagon needed overhaul/repair it didn't get sent back to the Southern from Yorkshire, it was fixed locally.  There would be a cost for the work, so perhaps the Southern would be invoiced through the RCH?    The reason might be general wear and tear, or it might be accident damage through somebody's mistake, so was there a distinction as to cause/liability.  Would you send to the Southern for a replacement axlebox, or substitute one that didn't quite match the other 3 wheels?  If maintenance was not billed through, would you bother to overhaul a foreign wagon if it was fit to travel but not for use? 

I think this is one of the driving forces behind the use of 'standard RCH' components, at least for the parts that were more liable to damage in service. That started with the PO wagons long before it spread to railway company wagons, but it did mean that wagon repairers could obtain parts from stock instead of having to send away to the original builders, particularly for items such as axleboxes, bearings, wheelserts, buffing and drawgear components, etc. It also, intentionally, meant that such components were up to the engineering standards required by the railway companies on whose track these wagons ran.

 

Railway company owned stock remained much more individualistic until the early 1920s, which would have had the result that if you needed a replacement axlebox, say, for an GER wagon that had traveled to the far North (as they did), you had to send to Stratford for a replacement. I suspect, though, that there may well have been rather more standardisation behind the scenes for components like bearings and wheelsets, as the most likely items to need attention in a wagon's travels. The early 1920s, essentially Grouping itself, saw a much wider adoption by the four railway companies of (RCH) standard components for their run of the mill rolling stock, a move that I would interpret as being in the interests of economy with wagons wandering far and wide under the Common User arrangements.

 

As to repair costs, it would not surprise me if there was an agreed arrangement whereby repairs below an agreed value were simply undertaken on a 'repair now and invoice later' basis. There could, though, be all sorts of other complications when a wagon could not be repaired under load and the load could not be transhipped. Even if transhipment was possible, someone still had to be paid, so there was an additional cost that had to be sorted out. There would, of course, always have been the issue of which company was liable for the defect in the first place.

 

[watfordtmc]

4 hours ago, Compound2632 said:

 

End door wagons with the end doors removed, and coupled with the open ends face-to-face?

 

 

The @Fat Controller hs already responded, but GW Goods Wagons has a diagram (as does vol. 1 of Essery's LMS Wagons) and Tatlow 4b includes two images of different, LNER, pairings as such.

 

I would think it a right pain to load and unload without damaging the vehicles though, which may be why other conversions removed the bodies entirely.

 

      References

1. GWR Goods Wagons, AtkinsA, Beard W, Tourret R, Oxford Publishing Co (Hersham) 1998.  pp 527 for diagram.
2. LNER Wagons Volume 4b, Tatlow , Wild Swan Books 2015.  pp 239-240 for discussion on twin bolster sets.

 

Regards

TMc

28/12/2021

 

[jim.snowdon]

5 hours ago, watfordtmc said:

I would think it a right pain to load and unload without damaging the vehicles though, which may be why other conversions removed the bodies entirely.

Very probably. The load would need to have been lifted a lot higher than would have been the case for a normal bolster wagon.

 

Possibly a reason why British practice never adopted the gondola wagon as used by the US railways.

 

[Craigw]

On 20/12/2021 at 03:30, Compound2632 said:

 

There's some truth in that but I believe what happened was that the GWR took the sheet rails off wagons that were in the pool. 

 

I have not read through all the posts, so maybe someone has noted this in the mean time.  In the early 192os at least the GWR had excluded vacuum fitted vans and Tarpaulin bar fitted opens from the common user pool and these carried the GWR "Not Common User" markings.  Page 289 of GWR Goods wagons (The big volume!) has photos of new O22 wagons from 1924-1925 carrying this. Not real easy to find photos of older wagons in the 1919-1925 period so hard to tell if they made a concerted effort to apply to all so fitted wagons.

 

Regards,

 

Craig W

[Compound2632]

3 hours ago, Craigw said:

I have not read through all the posts, so maybe someone has noted this in the mean time.  In the early 192os at least the GWR had excluded vacuum fitted vans and Tarpaulin bar fitted opens from the common user pool and these carried the GWR "Not Common User" markings.  Page 289 of GWR Goods wagons (The big volume!) has photos of new O22 wagons from 1924-1925 carrying this. Not real easy to find photos of older wagons in the 1919-1925 period so hard to tell if they made a concerted effort to apply to all so fitted wagons.

 

I think I've since seen sufficient evidence of GWR wagons with sheet rails in coal traffic well off the GWR to make me doubt my earlier statement.

 

However, fitted wagons generally were excluded from the pool until 1936 and even then did not include GW opens or vans or SR opens [See tables in Atkins et al., GWR Goods Wagons (3rd edition) and Tatlow, LNER Wagons Vol. 4A]. Without Atkins to hand, I'm relying on the caption to this photo, which states that O22 included both fitted and unfitted wagons. (Why weren't they on different diagrams, as they're operationally different?) Was it only the fitted examples that were NCU?

[Tom Burnham]

There's quite a bit about WW2 wagon utilisation and the changes to the Common User system in the "Inland Transport" volume of the Official History of the War, which is available on Kindle.

"The absence of adequate pooling arrangements for railway owned resources applied to wagons of all types.  It contributed to the shortages not only of wagons, but of the wagon sheets and ropes, essential for many traffics.  Before the war, each company had its own stock of wagons, and had a domestic wagon control organisation which arranged the distribution of this wagon stock on its own system.  Between the companies, there existed a 'common user' arrangement by which about four-fifths of these railway owned wagons could be run loaded over each other's lines in return for 'journey payments' which were settled through the Railway Clearing House.  A 'balancing arrangement' existed by which differences in the exchange of loaded wagons were redressed twice weekly by an exchange of empty wagons between the companies - the principle being that each company had a right to a stock of wagons by number and class equal to that it actually owned.  Although 'journey payments' were sustended at the outbreak of war, the peace-time common user system was still considered adequate.  In practice, however, it failed.  The Great Western Railway, for example, owned only 82,453 wagons out of a total railway stock of over 660,000, and had only one-quarter of the requisitioned privately owned wagons on its system.  This railway, which... bore the brunt of the burden of increased war-time traffic [because incoming ocean-going ships were sent to west coast ports instead of the east or south coasts or the Thames], found that the wagon stock over which it had effective control was too small.  The 'Jenkin Jones' Committee stated in its report that the principles on which the common user arrangement was set up had frequently failed since the beginning of the war, principally because the Great Western and Southern companies had not handed over to the other companies the wagons which they were due to pay - that is, in the form of returned empties....  The principle that ownership should determine the balance of wagons between the groups was clearly intolerable in war when changes in war-time traffic had entirely altered the wagon requirements of the different groups.  Thus, on the one hand, the Great Western and Southern railways might have fewer wagons than they needed, and on the other, since they were no longer liable to pay a fine for retaining wagons belonging to other companies, they might be tempted to keep an excessive number of wagons on their lines....  The problem of wagon distribution was further complicated by the transference of the half million privately owned wagons from their owners to the control of the railway companies....  It was therefore decided to suspend the common user arrangements and create a pool of freight rolling stock that could be distributed among the four main groups according to their actual needs and the conditions prevailing from day to day.  On 1st March, 1941, the Railway Executive Committee instituted an Inter-Company Wagon Control Organisation with Headquarters at Amersham.  It had responsibility for all freight rolling stock, including requisitioned wagons, wagon sheets, and ropes.  The organisation was staffed by a number of experienced wagon distributors drawn from all companies...."

[Pandora]

A company Wagon Repairs Ltd was formed in 1918 to deal with maintenance and repairs of wagons , a logical solution  for when wagons required attention when far from the main workshops or outstations of their  owners.

 

https://www.gracesguide.co.uk/Wagon_Repairs

 

[Compound2632]

12 minutes ago, Pandora said:

A company Wagon Repairs Ltd was formed in 1918 to deal with maintenance and repairs of wagons , a logical solution  for when wagons required attention when far from the main workshops or outstations of their  owners.

 

https://www.gracesguide.co.uk/Wagon_Repairs

 

 

That was a consolidation of the wagon repair arms of the major wagon builders. If you were the owner or hirer of say, a Charles Roberts, S.J. Claye, or Gloucester wagon and had a repair contract with them, you could sleep sound at night confident that your wagon had the support of a nation-wide chain of wagon repair gangs, each with their own little hut, at each of the major marshalling yards. Wagon Repairs simply meant that the workmen in neighbouring huts started talking to each other, though no doubt some of them were laid off.

[bécasse]

7 minutes ago, Compound2632 said:

Wagon Repairs simply meant that the workmen in neighbouring huts started talking to each other, though no doubt some of them were laid off.

Most unlikely in 1918. Shortage of skilled labour on the ground was probably one of the prime reasons behind the formation of the joint Wagon Repairs company. In practice, there had probably been some ad hoc sharing of tasks between the various companies for a while - after all there was a war on.

[The Stationmaster]

30 minutes ago, bécasse said:

Most unlikely in 1918. Shortage of skilled labour on the ground was probably one of the prime reasons behind the formation of the joint Wagon Repairs company. In practice, there had probably been some ad hoc sharing of tasks between the various companies for a while - after all there was a war on.

Actually during the F Great war itr was not at all unusual to find men who were laid-off from work and who had not yet been called for military service - my paternal grandfather being one of them.  Having been laid-off by the NER he was then on the dole for some months prior to be called forward by the army which had a glut of men passing through initial training.

[laurenceb]

Whilst on the subject of wartime railways,  did the GWR and Southern publish history's of their wartime operations? I know that the LMS & LNER did.

[petethemole]

28 minutes ago, laurenceb said:

Whilst on the subject of wartime railways,  did the GWR and Southern publish history's of their wartime operations? I know that the LMS & LNER did.

War on the Line: The Southern Railway in Wartime, by Bernard Darwin, 1946.  I have a copy somewhere.  Reprinted by Middleton Press, 1984.

[laurenceb]

Thanks for that Pete

[watfordtmc]

Somewhat off the main topic and reverting to brake vans:

 

It would seem that even before the 20th century LNWR and Midland brake vans had regular work that took them onto the South Eastern/SECR systems.

One consequence was the adoption; by the SER of what was basically the contemporary Midland brake van – then a six-wheel 20T vehicle – as its own standard brake van, complete with the open balcony at one end.

 

LNWR vans meanwhile have been recorded as far south at Redhill, reportedly working via Reading  (?) and presumably Oxford (Ref 1).  This reference also contains an image of a LNWR brake van at Grove Park, though I imagine that would be on a cross-London trip working.

 

In return a SER/SECR van worked through to Oxford via Reading, and could on occasions be “…extended as far as Crewe, LNWR.” (Ref 1).  I assume this would have been via Wellington and Market Drayton as I’m not too clear whether it was possible to ‘run through’ from the GW to LNW (or vice versa) at Oxford before the changes brought about by World War Two.

 

Not too common an occurrence I would think, but I doubt a SE guard worked all the way through.  Likewise I find it hard to think a LNW guard worked through to Redhill.

 

Whilst I’ve also seen the claim that GW brake vans were not favoured by other companies/ regions guards on safety grounds, I’m not convinced that occupational safety, as opposed to operational safety was a material consideration for ‘management’ much before the late 1960’s, which the @The Stationmaster comments bear out.

 

Rather more to the point I think is a comment in Southern Wagons 4 (Ref 2), where the principal complaint about the GW vans, from the Southern guards’ perspective, was the need to go out onto the veranda to look out and/or work the brake.

Indeed the Southern itself had fallen foul of this issue in the 1920’s; when the SEC Maunsell pattern vans, with no lookouts, had started to work on the South Western section, where brake vans with lookouts (or duckets) were well established practice.

 

I have seen it suggested that the ‘Not in Common Use’ brand was specifically applied to brake vans without lookouts to limit them to local or trip workings, and that this was brought about by complaints from guards, possibly supplemented by a resolution from the, then, NUR’s traffic grades conference.

 

Perhaps worth bearing in mind that early builds of the BR standard brake van were allocated on a regional basis and early photographs of these vehicles show the regional brand applied (Ref 3).

 

References

1. An Illustrated History of Southern Wagons Volume 3: SECR, Bixley G, Blackburn A, Chorley R, King M, Oxford Publishing Co (Shepperton) 2000.  pp 117 for discussion on brake van workings.
2. An Illustrated History of Southern Wagons Volume 4, Bixley G, Blackburn A, Chorley R, King M, Oxford Publishing Co (Hersham) 2002.  pp 99 for brief comments on the pros and cons of brake vans.
3. British Railways Brake Vans & Ballast Ploughs, Gent E, HMRS 1999.

 

Regards

TMc

29/12/2021

 

[Nick Holliday]

11 hours ago, watfordtmc said:

LNWR vans meanwhile have been recorded as far south at Redhill, reportedly working via Reading  (?) and presumably Oxford (Ref 1).  This reference also contains an image of a LNWR brake van at Grove Park, though I imagine that would be on a cross-London trip working.

 

In return a SER/SECR van worked through to Oxford via Reading, and could on occasions be “…extended as far as Crewe, LNWR.” (Ref 1).  I assume this would have been via Wellington and Market Drayton as I’m not too clear whether it was possible to ‘run through’ from the GW to LNW (or vice versa) at Oxford before the changes brought about by World War Two.

 

Not too common an occurrence I would think, but I doubt a SE guard worked all the way through.  Likewise I find it hard to think a LNW guard worked through to Redhill.

Admittedly this is during wartime, 1918, but regular timetabled goods services on the LBSCR included:

Willesden to Redhill and back - The L.N.W.R Co.'s Engine and Men will work the train throughout. (No time within working timetable to exchange vans)

Willesden to Norwood Junction and back, Willesden to Norwood Junction and back and Willesden to Three Bridges and back - all noted as "Worked by London and North Western Company's Engines, Enginemen and Guards."

Also

Old Oak Common (GWR) to Three Bridges and back - "Worked by the G. W. Co's Enginemen and Guard"

Great Northern Company's goods trains to Norwood Junction via Tulse Hill or Streatham - "Worked between Ferme Park and Tulse Hill/Streatham by G.N. Co.'s Engines and Men" (Interestingly maximum loadings are given for F. Class Engine (23 wagons) and M. Class engine (19 wagons)

SECR Redhill Junction to Willesden and back "The S. E. & C. R. Co.'s Engine and Men will work the train throughout" but it does pause at Shepherds Bush on the way north for around 30 minutes, but not on the way back!

[Compound2632]

There were a great many cross-London goods workings by the trains of the northern lines - Midland and Great Northern via the Widened Lines, Midland via Acton Wells and the N&SWJR, as well as the LNWR workings from Willesden. These generally worked as far as exchange sidings with the southern lines - Hither Green, Norwood Junction, etc., and also in the Midland's case at least, its own goods and coal depots. Conversely, the LSWR worked goods from Cricklewood on the Midland through to its own system. There's a topic, which covers goods and passenger workings in the pre-Great War period:

But thanks for pointing out the LNWR / SECR workings via Reading (the western limit of the SER) which is of local interest to me. I wonder if these workings did only start during the Great War?

[The Stationmaster]

14 hours ago, laurenceb said:

Whilst on the subject of wartime railways,  did the GWR and Southern publish history's of their wartime operations? I know that the LMS & LNER did.

As far as wartime information is concerned there are various publications - mostly inevitably long out of print - that have appeared over the years but the level of detail is very variable.  There is the 'LMS At War' by Nash published by the LMS in 1946 and there is also another volume, which I don't have immediately to hand, which covers various people involved in inland transport who received awards for dealing with the consequences of air raids.

 

Post war articles in 'The Railway Magazine' also covered various features of wartime operation and I found some excellent information about the military use of Dean Goods in France during the Great War in a series of articles published c.1920/21 which I used when writing a magazine article.

 

One of the best sources for the Great War, albeit tending a lot wider is  Edwin Pratt's work including 'British Railways in The Great War' of which volume 1 was reprinted some years back and is a mine of information including such things as the British railway equivalent of the Schlieffen Plan which - among many other things - dealt with both the mobilisation and transport to their depots of reservists and the transport of the BEF to Southampton (all of which - unlike the rail part of the Schlieffen Plan - actually worked exactly as planned).  Pratt's work was also published as a series of individual thin card backed booklets which appear to be about one chapter of the books.  I don't know to what extent they cover individual Companies and those they do cover seem pretty generalised (I've seen booklets covering, separately, the GWR and LNWR and there were probably more).   These can be picked up fairly cheaply if you can find them.

 

There are probably various documents at Kew although the only one I have seen - when my daughter obtained a copy for her MA work - is the GWR operational plan traffic notice for the movement of Admiralty coal (prepared in 1911) which includes trainloads and some details of engine working such as 28XX working through to Warrington where they handed over to the LNWR for working northwards (subsequent to which the trains worked to various ports on the east coast).