Milk tank wagons at branch terminus - but no creamery

[Peter Kazmierczak]

Can I justify milk tank wagons at a terminus where there is no creamery? Bought two old Hornby-Dublo 6-wheel tankers from my local model shop yesterday for £2 each - couldn't resist them.

 

Scenario: Small terminus set in a milk-producing farming area, but no creamery (1950s). Would milk arrive by tanker lorry from surrounding farms and be directly pumped into waiting railway tank wagons in the goods yard - no specific facilities being required?

Edited July 8, 2023 by Peter Kazmierczak

[Oldddudders]

Why not imagine the creamery is a couple of stations up the line, but - as with many yards - may only be easily accessed from the up direction. Thus every single day, a couple of empty tanks is worked down and back up again. 

[Wheatley]

Yes is the short answer, there are previous discussions on here (might be on the old version of the forum though) about loading from road tankers using portable pumps, usually two 4 wheel road tanker loads per rail tank. I suspect the examples given were from creameries remote from railway stations rather than directly from farms.

[Halvarras]

51 minutes ago, Oldddudders said:

Why not imagine the creamery is a couple of stations up the line, but - as with many yards - may only be easily accessed from the up direction. Thus every single day, a couple of empty tanks is worked down and back up again. 

 

One can use this scenario as an excuse for all kinds of stock (within reason!) to run into a BLT for a run-round manoeuvre, maybe recessing into a siding while the regular passenger service arrives and departs. 

Edited July 8, 2023 by Halvarras
System-induced spelling "error"!

[Paul H Vigor]

1 hour ago, Peter Kazmierczak said:

Can I justify milk tank wagons at a terminus where there is no creamery? Bought two old Hornby-Dublo 6-wheel tankers from my local model shop yesterday for £2 each - couldn't resist them.

 

Scenario: Small terminus set in a milk-producing farming area, but no creamery (1950s). Would milk arrive by tanker lorry from surrounding farms and be directly pumped into waiting railway tank wagons in the goods yard - no specific facilities being required?

Do I recall that some GWR/WR 6w milk tankers were used as drinking water tanks at isolated stations? Titley Junction had one, I believe?

[Peter Kazmierczak]

Thanks guys; food (or drink...) for thought.

£4 for this pair was a steal - never had any 6-wheel tankers before.

[brossard]

Scalescenes have a kit for a creamery. 

 

https://scalescenes.com/product/t038-low-relief-creamery/

 

Originally came out as a freebie in Hornby magazine and is now commercially available in 4mm.  I built it in 7mm:

 

 

Replete with 6 wheel tanks and utility van.

 

John

Edited July 8, 2023 by brossard

[Peter Kazmierczak]

So does this sound right for 1950s period:

 

1. Road tanker lorry goes around local farms collecting milk

2. Goes to railhead where milk is pumped into tank wagons

3. Milk goes off to dairy/creamery by train

Does anyone make a suitable 4mm tanker lorry of the period? Seen an EFE one but not sure if right type for 1950s.Tried Google/eBay but couldn't see anything suitable. 

Any lorry fans out there?

[Nearholmer]

Item 1 in your list might need a bit of thought, because many farms didn’t have tanker collection until the 60s, some I think even into the 70s. There was a discussion of this in one of the many milk threads.

 

I’m also a bit wary of the idea of pumping direct road to rail without cooling first. Again this was discussed somewhere else, but I think even the simplest loading points for tankers, Horam in East Sussex for instance, which weren’t ‘creameries’, had a receiving tank and cooling facility. Maybe if it was a short distance movement by rail that wasn’t needed, but I’m far from sure.

 

 

Edited July 8, 2023 by Nearholmer

[Ramblin Rich]

Torrington had a milk tanker loading point in the goods yard. Milk came from the dairy by road tanker. However it was not 'raw' milk it had already been through the diary before loading. At some point the goods yard became incorporated into the loading point

https://images.app.goo.gl/JXccAj2vvNPtmBVr6

Dolcoath in Cornwall and Marshfield between Newport and Cardiff were other loading points away from the diary.

Obviously these aren't the branch line termini being asked about, but the principle of loading rail tanks from lorries away from the dairy is not unknown.

There's been several threads on milk depots eg

@Karhedron is very knowledgeable in the milk traffic field and might be able to help as well.

 

 

[Wheatley]

Usually farm >> creamery >> rail tanker >> London. 

 

Occasionally farm >> creamery >> road tanker >> rail tanker >> London. 

 

Rarely farm >> creamery >> road or rail to other bulk user. 

 

Karhedron of this parish has tracked down a lot of these movements, search on his username. 

 

Incidentally other cities, including some large ones such as Glasgow and Birmigham, were self sufficient in milk from the surrounding area, most rail tanks went to London. 

Edited July 8, 2023 by Wheatley

[brossard]

1 hour ago, Ramblin Rich said:

Torrington had a milk tanker loading point in the goods yard. Milk came from the dairy by road tanker. However it was not 'raw' milk it had already been through the diary before loading. At some point the goods yard became incorporated into the loading point

https://images.app.goo.gl/JXccAj2vvNPtmBVr6

Dolcoath in Cornwall and Marshfield between Newport and Cardiff were other loading points away from the diary.

Obviously these aren't the branch line termini being asked about, but the principle of loading rail tanks from lorries away from the dairy is not unknown.

There's been several threads on milk depots eg

@Karhedron is very knowledgeable in the milk traffic field and might be able to help as well.

 

 

 

The picture that inspired the scene above can be found in MRJ 114 from 1999, page 279.  I'd attach it but there is copyright.

 

John

[Flying Pig]

13 hours ago, Peter Kazmierczak said:

Thanks guys; food (or drink...) for thought.

£4 for this pair was a steal - never had any 6-wheel tankers before.

 

 

Going by some of the prices being asked online it certainly was.  They appear to be on a GWR underframe with DC brakes, btw.

[The Johnster]

At Torrington the creamery was adjacent to the station but had no rail access, so the milk was driven the few yards to the loading platform in road tankers.  Marshfield was only a few hundred yards as well.  

[Coach bogie]

By the 1950's you also have the option of the greater use of road tankers loaded onto the 6 wheel carriers. There is an excellent 3D output from Bygone wagons.

 

Mike Wiltshire

 

[Kris]

Not on a branch, but Saltash had a creamery away from the station and the milk was then taken by road to the station for its onwards journey. 

[Oldddudders]

Arguably, Torrington is a sort of double-ended terminus, because few passenger trains ever worked through. I think Beddgelert was like that in the Welsh Highland's original form. 

[Izzy]

7 hours ago, Flying Pig said:

 

Going by some of the prices being asked online it certainly was.  They appear to be on a GWR underframe with DC brakes, btw.

They shout Hornby Dublo or Wrenn to me given the couplings, but I could be wrong……

 

Bob

Edited July 9, 2023 by Izzy

[Nearholmer]

Back to churn vs tanker collection from farms:

 

This shows the change in milking methods over time.

 

’Bucket’ doesn’t necessarily imply hand-milking, because there were basic milking machines that pumped to a bucket, but I reckon that bucket milking probably correlated fairly closely with collection from the farm in churns, rather than by tanker, because it was a system that involved barely any infrastructure, no pipe-work, no cooling facility, no storage tank.

Pre-war, the % using any form of milking machine was very small, and take-up was very slow, partly because it was much harder to control contamination/hygiene when using a machine of any sort, also it was believed that hand-finishing was necessary to prevent cows getting mastitis - after the farm at the school where my father worked installed a simple milking parlour c1965, the last bit of the process was by hand, and I recall all the rigamarole of washing the cows before milking and the machines after, and a special weekly deep-clean. There were only about 20-30 cows, so the machinery didn’t save a massive amount of time, it just altered the job, and allowed MMB tanker collection three times a week instead of churn lorry twice a day.

 

All sort of relevant to the OP’s suggestion of a scene based on collecting by tanker from farms, then loading direct to rail ……. The more I think about that, the less plausible it feels for multiple reasons. The road shuttle from a dairy half s mile away seems the way to go with this IMO.

 

 

Edited July 9, 2023 by Nearholmer

[Cwmtwrch]

9 hours ago, brossard said:

The picture that inspired the scene above can be found in MRJ 114 from 1999, page 279. 

Which shows the loading bank at Totnes. The dairy is in the background of the photo, about 2-300 yards away, being right behind the platform, but lacking a rail connection again.

[Michael Hodgson]

I remember milk sold to the public used to be advertised as "TT" (Tuberculin Tested) because of a safety issue about possible infection.  I don't know about the mechanics of this testing or cooling, pasteurising etc, but as the typical farm in the 1950s didn't have large herds of cattle.  They only produced a few churns at a time, I remember there was often a wooden loading stage at the end of the farm track, from which churns were collected on flat-bed lorry which didn't need to go up the dirt track to the farmyard.  I think there would have been a contamination issue if milk from different herds was mixed to form a tankerload before it had been tested.  In later years, the wooden stage was still there but falling apart; there were fewer farms but with larger herds, the farm track got improved, milk was then collected by small tanker, but I think much of the procesing was relocated to farms.

[Nearholmer]

52 minutes ago, Michael Hodgson said:

think there would have been a contamination issue if milk from different herds was mixed to form a tankerload before it had been tested

There was, and it became quite a problem in the 1930s when rail-tank transport was introduced.

 

The old method of hand-milking, then churn from farm all the way to London, then transfer contents to a delivery churn, which dispensed from a tap into a jug, all non-pasteurised, sounds a nightmare from an infection point of view, but it was (a) surprisingly clean, with low contamination (bacteria count at the farm a quarter that of machine milking), and (b) kept any outbreak tightly confined.

 

Introducing bulking, by rail or road, had to be coupled with pre-cooling (to keep the bug-breeding rate down during transit), and pasteurisation at the bottling plant, and as I noted above  the introduction of machine milking meant lots of extra cleaning routines at the farm.

[Oldddudders]

Such a different world from today, where milking can be robotised. Each cow wears a tag, and the gate to the milking parlour will only open to her if she is due to be milked. Attachment of milking devices, including washing of teats etc is automatic, and the system spews out huge amounts of data re yield per cow per session etc etc. Testing is still required by the creamery, and AFAIK this is still a manual activity. 

[Michael Hodgson]

1 hour ago, Nearholmer said:

 

 

The old method of hand-milking, then churn from farm all the way to London, then transfer contents to a delivery churn, which dispensed from a tap into a jug, all non-pasteurised, sounds a nightmare from an infection point of view, but it was (a) surprisingly clean, with low contamination (bacteria count at the farm a quarter that of machine milking), and (b) kept any outbreak tightly confined.

 

 

My mother was a coal-miner's daughter in rural Northumberland and used to talk about an even simpler approach in the 1930s, but they didn't need rail transport or bottles as it was local.  It would have been hand-milking, transferred to a churn which came round the village on the farmer's horse-drawn cart.  You took your own jug out the milkman who filled it from the churn using a ladle.

[The Stationmaster]

14 hours ago, Nearholmer said:

Item 1 in your list might need a bit of thought, because many farms didn’t have tanker collection until the 60s, some I think even into the 70s. There was a discussion of this in one of the many milk threads.

 

I’m also a bit wary of the idea of pumping direct road to rail without cooling first. Again this was discussed somewhere else, but I think even the simplest loading points for tankers, Horam in East Sussex for instance, which weren’t ‘creameries’, had a receiving tank and cooling facility. Maybe if it was a short distance movement by rail that wasn’t needed, but I’m far from sure.

 

 

Jobs Dairy at Didcot didn't commence farm collections by tanker until the very early 1960s.  Jobs then forwarded milk to Harmondsworth by their own road tanker.  

 

As a bit of family aside one of my uncles loaded churns to trains as a Porter, leter left teh railway and worked on the family farm where he, with a couple of siblings; looked after and milked cows - initially by hand until they installed milking machines in 1952/3.  Finally after the family gave or the farm tenancy in the 1960s he later went to work for Jobs on a regular night shift driving a bulk tanker to Harmondsworth.