Southern region ferry van trains: what sort of brake vans did they have (if any)?

[teeinox]

The ferry van train I have consists of a Hornby E5000 (later class 71) electric locomotive and a set of Hornby ferry vans for it to haul.  Prototypically, it would be on the Hither Green - Dover run.

 

The period is about 1960.  The locomotive is in the original Southern coach stock green, lined and no yellow warning panel.   The ferry vans bear the "flying crate" symbol.

 

The pictures I have seen are all later, and show such trains with no brake van.  But in 1960, would they have had a brake van, and if so what type: BR standard, odinary Southern, Queen Mary or something else?

 

Hope someone knows the answer!

[Simon Lee]

34 minutes ago, teeinox said:

The ferry van train I have consists of a Hornby E5000 (later class 71) electric locomotive and a set of Hornby ferry vans for it to haul.  Prototypically, it would be on the Hither Green - Dover run.

 

The period is about 1960.  The locomotive is in the original Southern coach stock green, lined and no yellow warning panel.   The ferry vans bear the "flying crate" symbol.

 

The pictures I have seen are all later, and show such trains with no brake van.  But in 1960, would they have had a brake van, and if so what type: BR standard, odinary Southern, Queen Mary or something else?

 

Hope someone knows the answer!

 

I worked at Dover in my career, with many staff who had been guards  from the 30s until the advent of DOO(F) 

 

The Queen Mary's  were  the vehicle of choice, especially once drivers had become aware of the power of the E5000's and accompanying speeds attained. 

 

 

 

 

 

[Ken.W]

All trains required a brake van prior to the 1969 manning agreement which then allowed guards to ride in the rear cab on non-passenger trains, and DOO of non-passenger trains didn't start till the late 80s

[teeinox]

Many thanks for your replies.

 

Queen Mary it is then.  Now to find a Bachmann one at reasonable cost!

[teeinox]

So, eventually a Bachmann Queen Mary turned up on eBay at a price I was prepared to pay.  Which was £13.12 plus P&P for a ratty example; no box, no couplings, filthy wheels and covered with dust to a thickness that would be 150mm/6” in prototypical terms.  But what do you expect for £13.12? Besides, it was perfectly renovatable!   So here it is, on the end of a train we might imagine making its way from Hither Green Continental Depot to Dover Marine:

 

[Wickham Green too]

Now, what you / we need is a variety of continental vans - to 4mm scale - to make that more representative !

[teeinox]

Funny you should say that!  I have 2 (ancient)  Hornby Dublo Traffic Services Ltd tank wagons, but not sure if they are period.  The Triang/Hornby Transfesa vans: inaccurate and a bit garish (they were never that bright blue).  What I fancy is a continental European bogie tank wagon: black, grim and atmospheric!

 

Tony

[jwealleans]

John Isherwood ( @cctransuk ) did some improvements to what i think were all Dublo tanks to make Continental ones and they looked pretty convincing.   I think the transfers are in his range, but no idea whether the photographs are still on the forum.   I downloaded some at the time - happy to post them here if he doesn't object.

 

Otherwise the Rivarossi Italian vent van (the brown one) is very close to 4mm scale.  

 

 

After that you're scratchbuilding.  It's not as hard as people think.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Edited June 1, 2022 by jwealleans

[teeinox]

5 minutes ago, jwealleans said:

John Isherwood ( @cctransuk ) did some improvements to what i think were all Dublo tanks to make Continental ones and they looked pretty convincing.   I think the transfers are in his range, but no idea whether the photographs are still on the forum.   I downloaded some at the time - happy to post them here if he doesn't object.

Many thanks.  The Dublo TSL ones, though battered, I have kept as original as possible, with the exception of painting the chain shackles (which are cast on) yellow and adding the missing one!  The only thing I backed off was from painting the solebars red: the Hornby Dublo construction made that problematical.  Others have gone a lot further, like changing the chassis but keeping the body.

[cctransuk]

29 minutes ago, jwealleans said:

John Isherwood ( @cctransuk ) did some improvements to what i think were all Dublo tanks to make Continental ones and they looked pretty convincing.   I think the transfers are in his range, but no idea whether the photographs are still on the forum.   I downloaded some at the time - happy to post them here if he doesn't object.

 

Otherwise the Rivarossi Italian vent van (the brown one) is very close to 4mm scale.  

 

 

After that you're scratchbuilding.  It's not as hard as people think.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

No objection you reposting my photos - the wagons in question were mostly / all based on Hornby Dublo models.

 

John Isherwood.

[jwealleans]

Thanks, John.   These are the ferry tanks I kept at the time for future reference:

 

 

 

 

 

[teeinox]

Many thanks for the photos.  I have been looking round for photos of actual consists for the early 1960s period.  They are very hard to find.  One line of attack led to Hither Green Continental Depot.  By the look of things, trains that went there from Dover were quite homogenous - rakes of Transfesa or Interfrigo.  That makes sense because the Depot, as I understand it, was built to handle imported fruit and vegetables.

 

Otherwise, it is less clear.  There were a fair number of tank wagons about, a lot on 4-wheel chassis.  How common bogie tank wagons were at that time, I don't know.  A train ferry was capable of delivering up to 40 wagons, depending upon the length.  So apart from the rakes destined for Hither Green Continental Depot, in what sort of consists were the others transported, and to where?  I assume that Hither Green Sorting sidings might have been an obvious destination for re-marshalling to onward destinations.  And were they mixed with ordinary BR freight traffic to and from Dover or were they in dedicated consists?

 

Information would be appreciated.

[Wickham Green too]

Bogie tank wagons in the early '60s were pretty well on a par with hens' teeth - and those were no more universal than they are now !

 

I think you'll find that there was a mix of dedicated 'ferry' workings between Dover and Hither Green and combinations with other traffics going elsewhere - I remember 'ferry' wagons of Oranges passing through Bromley South : I can't remember whether they were full trains or mixed with other stuff, but clearly not destined for Hither Green. No doubt what I remember would have been in daylight but most goods traffic in Kent was handled at night - so photos will be few and far between.

[jonhall]

Warning - Everything that follows is a generalisation.... 

 

There were of course two train ferry routes, via Dover, which mostly dealt with traffic from Southern Europe, and that was mostly agricultural products, and via Zeebrugge-Harwich, which was mostly from Northern Europe and was a different mix, probably more industrial and chemical traffic, if you think about the climatic difference between Germany and the UK, the growing season and range of crops wouldn't be all that different.

 

You also need to look where the UK end of the journey would be going, draw a line on a map between any major German chemical plant in the Rhine/Ruhr area, and say Ellesmere Port, and its pretty obvious which route would have been taken.

 

Jon

Edited June 12, 2022 by jonhall

[hmrspaul]

The Barrowmore site has reasonably eary ferry diagram books which show the huge number, and variety, of wagons - especially tanks - permitted to work to the UK. Which doesn't mean many did so at all regularly. 

 

Certainly wagons from the ferries ended up in general freight train consists. They can often be seen on the numerous photo collections that include 1960s trains. I never saw a 'foreign' continental wagon at Staines SR, but did get a couple of the BR ferry vans in their earlyish days - we are going into deep history when discussing early 1960s - only just in living memory (accepting very limited memory from the first decade of life). https://PaulBartlett.zenfolio.com/stainescentral/e6dc9caaa  https://PaulBartlett.zenfolio.com/stainescentral/ef8652f

 

Paul

[31A]

15 hours ago, Wickham Green too said:

Bogie tank wagons in the early '60s were pretty well on a par with hens' teeth - and those were no more universal than they are now !

 

I think you'll find that there was a mix of dedicated 'ferry' workings between Dover and Hither Green and combinations with other traffics going elsewhere - I remember 'ferry' wagons of Oranges passing through Bromley South : I can't remember whether they were full trains or mixed with other stuff, but clearly not destined for Hither Green. No doubt what I remember would have been in daylight but most goods traffic in Kent was handled at night - so photos will be few and far between.

I remember seeing oranges in Continental ferry wagons passing through Cambridge in the late sixties/early seventies; I seem to think they were in blue Spanish Transfesa vans with the sliding ventilators open.  Whether they were unloaded in Cambridge (at that time they could have been) or just passing through I don't remember.

[jwealleans]

Would they have gone to Histon for Chivers Hartley, Steve?

[cctransuk]

1 hour ago, jwealleans said:

Would they have gone to Histon for Chivers Hartley, Steve?

 

Highly likely - there are published photos of Transfesa vans at Chivers, Histon.

 

CJI.

[Oldddudders]

ISTR seeing Transfesa wagons at Paddock Wood, presumably dropped off/picked up by Dover trips. 

[31A]

3 hours ago, jwealleans said:

Would they have gone to Histon for Chivers Hartley, Steve?

Quite possibly (I see John thinks so too); I seem to recall seeing them when we went train spotting at the Cattle Market after school, which was at the south end of the station and I think they were on trains arriving from the London direction, i.e. Temple Mills & Dover.

[teeinox]

Many thanks for all your replies.  They are most informative.  I found an article on Wikepedia, I think on freight through Dover.  According to that, the traffic imported into Dover via the train ferry included fruit and vegetables, chemicals, and nuclear fuels between the continent and the BNFL complex at Sellafield.  One of the chemical suppiers appeared to be a company called ETRA, based in Zurich.  Exports included china clay from south-west England to Switzerland and steel products from Teesside to France and Spain.  That fits with jonhall drawing attention to the geographical and economic split both in the UK and in continental Europe which influenced the choice of Harwich or Dover for particular traffics.  In addition, apart from the dedicated trains for perishable traffic to Hither Green and sometimes to the LMR (I have an undated photo of a blue class 71 with a "BA" headcode), there were no other trains dedicated to ferry traffic.  Onward distribution otherwise was as individual wagons conveyed in BR's wagonload network.

 

Seem about right?

[Oldddudders]

There is an RMwebber called SEDFreightman who is extremely knowledgeable about, well, SED Freight! if you can attract his attention, he may well put some meat on the bones already exposed.

[Wickham Green too]

1 hour ago, teeinox said:

... One of the chemical suppliers appeared to be a company called ETRA, based in Zurich.  ...

I saw four of their tanks in the yard at Cambridge 27/8/83 ...... no idea whether that was the final destination - they were just sat in the yard opposite the station.

[31A]

6 minutes ago, Wickham Green too said:

I saw four of their tanks in the yard at Cambridge 27/8/83 ...... no idea whether that was the final destination - they were just sat in the yard opposite the station.

 

I suspect they may have been there in connection with the Ciba-Geigy traffic to / from Duxford which was quite busy at that time; I believe they received chemicals from their plant in Basel.  Traffic which ended with the end of the train ferries; Ciba-Geigy's quite new and once-busy Duxford siding going out of use at the end of Speedlink (around the same time).  I worked at Cambridge station in the 1980s and lived in a flat overlooking the yard; in the 1980s it was quite a busy place!

[Rivercider]

23 hours ago, Wickham Green too said:

Bogie tank wagons in the early '60s were pretty well on a par with hens' teeth - and those were no more universal than they are now !

 

I think you'll find that there was a mix of dedicated 'ferry' workings between Dover and Hither Green and combinations with other traffics going elsewhere - I remember 'ferry' wagons of Oranges passing through Bromley South : I can't remember whether they were full trains or mixed with other stuff, but clearly not destined for Hither Green. No doubt what I remember would have been in daylight but most goods traffic in Kent was handled at night - so photos will be few and far between.

Regarding imported oranges in ferry vans, a former BR colleague of mine talked about seasonal wagonload traffic of marmalade oranges which was for the local Italian community. Sadly I cannot remember where he worked before I knew him in Bristol, (but it was somewhere like Bletchley or Bedford, wherever there was a sizeable population of Italian descent), this must have been early 1970s, possibly a little earlier 

 

cheers