Agricultural produce by rail - what did farmers import (particularly on the W&U Tramway)?

[Dungrange]

2 minutes ago, Michael Hodgson said:

I take it you couldn't find any data on male cows?

Well, apparently the weight of a bull is around 1.1 tons.  If I were to express other animals in terms of bulls, I'd get an even lower number for cattle wagons required.

[Dunalastair]

21 minutes ago, Dungrange said:

Well, apparently the weight of a bull is around 1.1 tons.  If I were to express other animals in terms of bulls, I'd get an even lower number for cattle wagons required.

 

A bull (as opposed to a bullock) might well travel in a 'prize cattle van', possibly even in a passenger train (or tram). This 1900s GER example apparently survived being converted into a fruit wagon and lives on the North Norfolk.

 

https://www.geograph.org.uk/photo/2098018

[billbedford]

8 hours ago, Dungrange said:

Why was limestone given a category, but fruit wasn't? 

 

Fruit was carried in passenger-rated vans. 

[Nearholmer]

Which is mostly true, but sort of isn’t an explanation.
 

All sorts of things were conveyed in vehicles that were fit to be attached to passenger trains, and which sometimes were and sometimes weren’t attached to passenger trains. Where did they appear in the accounts? I think under the two “merchandise” headings - a lot of fruit and veg on the W&U will be under “merchandise by goods train”, because the volumes were such that special fitted goods trains took them forward.

 

My guess is that limestone got its own line in the accounts because it was charged at a particular rate and/or created particular demand for wagons by reason of its density.

 

 

Edited November 7, 2023 by Nearholmer

[Compound2632]

13 hours ago, Dungrange said:

Looks like I don't need too many cattle wagons.

 

I'm not so sure. It could well be a case of none for ages, then lots at once. Is there a monthly, or even less frequent, cattle fair in the district? Then there's the seasonal movement of lambs from the northern hill farms to lush southern pasture for fattening - September, I think @billbedford told me. So, if you don't want to build cattle wagons, don't model a market day. But if you do want to, you've got an excuse.

[TheQ]

Another source for manure was military bases, they used a huge amount of horses up till WW2, their exhaust was exported from the larger bases by the wagon load.

As for their horses, the officers horses travelled by horse box, the men's by cattle wagon.

[Dungrange]

1 hour ago, Compound2632 said:

It could well be a case of none for ages, then lots at once. Is there a monthly, or even less frequent, cattle fair in the district? Then there's the seasonal movement of lambs from the northern hill farms to lush southern pasture for fattening - September, I think

 

I agree that avoiding market day means there's no need for any cattle wagons.  However, the information in Peter Paye's book suggests that the traffic was relatively frequent, but it would appear in small quantities.

 

"Cattle wagons were a common feature until the 1950s for the conveyance of livestock to Wisbech, Kings Lynn and Ely markets held on Thursday, Tuesday and Thursday respectively.  Some animals were sent further afield to Cambridge, Peterborough and Huntingdon." 

 

That coupled with the low revenue in 1914 makes me think that whilst there were regular local markets, the farmers with livestock would not have been buying and selling animals each week, so on some market days there may have been trade and on others there might not.  

 

Peter Paye goes on to say that "Thursday was Wisbech market day and most early trains would convey cattle wagons with animals for trading whilst the late afternoon services would return with calves and heifers bought by farmers for fattening".  Use of the word most implies that some market day trains conveyed no animals, although the use of the word wagons (plural) implies that sometimes there was more than one.  I haven't seen a photograph with more than one cattle wagon in it, but there is also a quote from the April 1919 copy of the Great Eastern Railway Magazine, which stated "The tramway carried over 2,700 passengers on a recent Saturday.  On one trip the six miles journey was done in the scheduled 39 minutes including twelve stops on route, with all cars and three loaded cattle trucks. Not bad for a small four coupled tram engine."

 

Of course whilst it's stated that the three cattle truck were loaded, it doesn't necessarily mean that they were loaded with livestock.  I understand all sorts of arable crops were conveyed in whatever type of wagon was available.

 

I don't think there was any long distance movement of large quantities of cattle into the area for fattening as it was mainly arable farmland. I don't think there were any sheep or pigs either.

 

I therefore think I could get by without a single cattle wagon.

 

It's the thousands of tons of general merchandise that I'm more interested in.

[Annie]

3 hours ago, Dungrange said:

I therefore think I could get by without a single cattle wagon.

My tramways in the fens might be completely imaginary, but I would still consider it to be fairly daring to have no cattle wagons at all.

[Compound2632]

6 hours ago, Dungrange said:

It's the thousands of tons of general merchandise that I'm more interested in.

 

The trouble is, as you've found, that the cattle traffic is easiest to analyse since it's accounted for separately!

[Compound2632]

8 hours ago, TheQ said:

Another source for manure was military bases, they used a huge amount of horses up till WW2, their exhaust was exported from the larger bases by the wagon load.

As for their horses, the officers horses travelled by horse box, the men's by cattle wagon.

 

When horses were transported by cattle wagon, the wagon was sheeted over so that they couldn't see out, being easily spooked by the scenery passing by at speed, unlike cows who will just continue to chew the cud placidly or sheep who will bleat whatever... So modelling horses by cattle wagon is straightforward as it needn't involve modelling the animals.

[Dunalastair]

7 hours ago, Dungrange said:

 

I don't think there was any long distance movement of large quantities of cattle into the area for fattening as it was mainly arable farmland. 

 

 

Interesting discussion - good to see this kind of analysis, thankyou. I don't think that I have ever seen an image of a 'sheeted cattle wagon' - they must have been large tarps.

 

Even today, at our end of the fen, while the fenland fields are mainly arable, cattle are still fattened on the floodbanks alongside the rivers and larger drainage channels. It can be 'interesting' walking or running when the beasts congregate by the stile at the end of a section of grazing. With the likes of the Middle Level Main Drain passing close to Upwell, then I would have thought the grass there would need managing either by grazing or by hay cutting (which might itself offer tramway traffic if there was not local demand from animal husbandry). 

 

[Compound2632]

12 minutes ago, Dunalastair said:

I don't think that I have ever seen an image of a 'sheeted cattle wagon' - they must have been large tarps.

 

The standard size - 21 ft x 14 ft 4 in - would do. On a 19 ft long cattle wagon, there's 12 in at each end to wrap around the end of the wagon, while at 8 ft wide, there would be 3 ft 2 in hanging down over each side, enough to cover the open section. Many designs of cattle wagon had securing rings for the sheet ties.

[Dungrange]

On 06/11/2023 at 19:05, Compound2632 said:

I've been mulling over the exact same data, for the Midland. The thing one doesn't know is how far each consignment travelled.

 

And I've just realised how important that is.  When looking at livestock, I've calculated that ~ 0.055% of the GER livestock revenue was attributed to the W&U Tramway.  I was assuming that I could use that to calculate livestock transportation demand, but of course that figure only gives the revenue for the 6 miles that the cattle were on the tramway between Upwell and Wisbech.  That's fine if all livestock traffic only went to / from Wisbech, but since there was known trade with other local markets, I need to multiply my estimates using the methodology I've adopted by the demand weighted average trip distance for the commodity type / length of the Wisbech and Upwell Tramway.  So, if the average distance that cattle travelled was 60 miles, then my estimates are obviously out by a factor of ten.  Maybe my less than one cattle truck per week needs to be just less than ten per week.

 

I think I need to add a notice of correction to a few of my earlier posts, so that anyone else reading this in the future doesn't make the same mistake.

 

5 hours ago, Annie said:

My tramways in the fens might be completely imaginary, but I would still consider it to be fairly daring to have no cattle wagons at all.

 

As per my ramble above, I think I agree.  I'm underestimating the demand by a factor of the demand weighted average trip length / the length of the Wisbech and Upwell Tramway, so clearly there was more than one wagon per weeks worth of demand.

[Dungrange]

1 hour ago, Compound2632 said:

The trouble is, as you've found, that the cattle traffic is easiest to analyse since it's accounted for separately!

 

Yes, it's a bit of a challenge dealing with little snippets of data rather than having a comprehensive dataset to analyse.  Sadly they didn't have large databases to analyse in Excel.  However, I'll get there.

[Tom Burnham]

10 hours ago, TheQ said:

 

As for their horses, the officers horses travelled by horse box, the men's by cattle wagon.

Indeed they did - SE&CR special traffic notices referred to "officers' chargers" - horses were good enough for the other ranks.

[Welchester]

10 hours ago, TheQ said:

Another source for manure was military bases, they used a huge amount of horses up till WW2, their exhaust was exported from the larger bases by the wagon load.

As for their horses, the officers horses travelled by horse box, the men's by cattle wagon.

 

Didn't the supply of horses dry up in 1922 with Irish independence, which was a major impetus for the British army to mechanise?

[Compound2632]

1 minute ago, Welchester said:

Didn't the supply of horses dry up in 1922 with Irish independence, which was a major impetus for the British army to mechanise?

 

The supply of horses had already become very much depleted by the demands of the military during the Great War - the mortality rate for horses on the Western Front was considerably greater than that for men. This had certainly encouraged the Midland Railway to move to motor road vehicles, many of which were battery electric. The company's stock of horses for cartage fell from 4,763 at the end of 1915 to 3,007 at the end of 1922 while the number of road motors increased from 38 to 195 over the same period, showing that one road motor could do the work of around ten horses.

[billbedford]

I think we have a case of RTFM regarding cattle, i.e. Read The "Fine" Map. The 25-inch OS map for 1892-1914 shows a cattle dock at Upwell. This appears to be no bigger than one wagon, which would indicate that normal traffic in cattle was limited to one wagon at a time. 

[Nearholmer]

Unless the area was used in a big way for beef stock, which seems very unlikely given that the land is so fantastically productive in arable use, the cattle traffic may have been limited to animals coming in to be kept locally in the short-term before slaughtering by village butchers and local consumption, and the odd movement of small numbers of dairy cows or calves (I would wager that small numbers were kept locally to provide milk for local consumption).

 

Does Britain from Above include views of the district that allow livestock spotting?

Edited November 8, 2023 by Nearholmer

[Michael Hodgson]

24 minutes ago, billbedford said:

I think we have a case of RTFM regarding cattle, i.e. Read The "Fine" Map. The 25-inch OS map for 1892-1914 shows a cattle dock at Upwell. This appears to be no bigger than one wagon, which would indicate that normal traffic in cattle was limited to one wagon at a time. 

It would mean you could only load/unload one wagon at a time, not that the station could only handle one wagonload of cows.  The loaded wagon could be moved by hand to another siding and a second wagon moved into its place for loading.  Inconvenient but labour was cheap.

[Tom Burnham]

The Kent & East Sussex had a couple of internal use cattle trucks which saw little use after the first years.  There was the occasional truck with cattle or sheep to or from Tonbridge or Ashford markets.  However, the annual Biddenden Fair could result in 40 of 50 cattle trucks being handled on a single day.  The one day of the year when the 080T Hecate was really useful!

[Dungrange]

1 hour ago, Nearholmer said:

Unless the area was used in a big way for beef stock, which seems very unlikely given that the land is so fantastically productive in arable use, the cattle traffic may have been limited to animals coming in to be kept locally in the short-term before slaughtering by village butchers and local consumption, and the odd movement of small numbers of dairy cows or calves (I would wager that small numbers were kept locally to provide milk for local consumption).

 

I agree.  I think the majority of the land was used for arable farming, so beef stock wasn't a major trade.  I think it was just a few small dairy farms, which produced some outbound milk traffic (but probably not in sufficient quantities to justify the use of one of the GER milk wagons there was only 20 or 30 of them) and the cattle movements were, as you indicate, for local slaughter and for breeding swaps.  I think the trainloads of cattle from Scotland for fattening up went elsewhere in East Anglia.

 

1 hour ago, billbedford said:

I think we have a case of RTFM regarding cattle, i.e. Read The "Fine" Map. The 25-inch OS map for 1892-1914 shows a cattle dock at Upwell. This appears to be no bigger than one wagon, which would indicate that normal traffic in cattle was limited to one wagon at a time. 

 

I agree that does indicate that any traffic was regular small quantities and not large numbers of wagons at a specific time of year.

 

1 hour ago, Michael Hodgson said:

It would mean you could only load/unload one wagon at a time, not that the station could only handle one wagonload of cows.  The loaded wagon could be moved by hand to another siding and a second wagon moved into its place for loading.  Inconvenient but labour was cheap.

 

Agreed.  I suspect that the traffic was generally one or two wagons to Wisbech on market day (Thursday) and that there may have been just a single wagon on other days to whatever other local markets the local farmers wanted to use.  No need to cater for the peak in demand (which might have been three wagons) if a single wagon was the regular maximum.  As you say, loading, shunting and loading the next wagon wouldn't have been a major issue on market day.

[Dungrange]

On 07/11/2023 at 22:20, billbedford said:

Fruit was carried in passenger-rated vans. 

 

Apart from a couple of vans being attached to the passenger trams at Upwell, the majority of the fruit from Upwell and all of the fruit from the other depots would have been conveyed in goods trams.  However, this raises an interesting question.

 

In Peter Paye's book on The Wisbech and Upwell Tramway, he refers to strawberry's being conveyed overnight to Edinburgh and Glasgow.  Once off the Tramway, these were obviously conveyed, either in passenger trains or express goods trains and since the Great Eastern Railway (GER), North Eastern Railway (NER) and North British Railway (NBR) all used the Westinghouse brake, the conveyance of products to the north would have been straightforward.

 

However, for produce heading west to say Birmingham, there is the issue of the braking system used by the company or companies over whose tracks the service needed to run.  I understand that the London North Western Railway (LNWR) used the vacuum brake, so how would fruit have been conveyed to Birmingham?

• Using dual braked stock (I don't think the few fruit vans that the GER had were dual braked)
• GER Westinghouse fitted vans as far as Peterborough, which would then be conveyed as though they were unfitted over the LNWR network
• LNWR Vacuum fitted vans, which would be conveyed as far as Peterborough in ordinary goods trains by the GER but then in express goods services by the LNWR
• GER Westinghouse fitted vans as far as Peterborough and then transhipped to LNWR vacuum fitted stock at Peterborough

Any thoughts?  It would appear that in the in the harvesting season, up to 1,000 tons of fruit was being dispatched each week, so that probably required 300 wagons per week or 50 wagons per day, which is a lot of demand for wagons that are in low in numbers.

[Annie]

I have the Model Railway Constructor January 1986 Datafile article on GER Sundry Vans which includes fruit vans.  It's written by a knowledgeable member of the GER Society so it is pretty much the last word on this kind of GER specialist vehicle.  And just as a point of information a number of them were either dual braked or piped through for the vacuum brake due to the GNR refusing to accept fruit vans without the vacuum brake.

Too much article space is given over to some shabby lot known as the LNER, but apart from that it's all good.

 

If you would like PDF copies of the article pages PM me and we can sort something out.

[Compound2632]

6 hours ago, Dungrange said:

However, for produce heading west to say Birmingham, there is the issue of the braking system used by the company or companies over whose tracks the service needed to run.  I understand that the London North Western Railway (LNWR) used the vacuum brake, so how would fruit have been conveyed to Birmingham?

 

As a point of comparison, the M&GN also had a considerable volume of fruit traffic, for which it had a large (by its standards) stock of ventilated vans fit for passenger train working. The M&GN was a vacuum line, like both the owning companies; nevertheless a good proportion of these vans had Westinghouse through pipes.

 

It wasn't necessary for a vehicle to be dual braked but to be able to roam anywhere it needed to be at least dual piped. 

 

By the way, I'd be surprised if a good portion of fruit traffic off the GE at Peterborough for the Midlands, Lancashire, etc. wasn't routed via the Midland rather than the LNW?  

Edited November 9, 2023 by Compound2632
sp.