Theory of General Minories

[Flying Pig]

1 hour ago, Compound2632 said:

but by the BR period, I think most movements would be trip workings to the out-of-town marshalling yard.

 

A little early, I suspect.  Rationalisation of freight working largely took place from the 1960s onwards, so for most of the BR steam period it would probably be business as usual.  That doesn't preclude trip workings to marshalling yards of which there might have been several.

 

As @Joseph_Pestell indicates, stations frequently remained open for goods long after they closed to passengers so in that respect there's no reason not to build a goods version of Minories.  However the problem of end throw doesn't affect goods stock nearly so much, so the features that specifically characterise Minories maybe aren't needed.  Possibly a different layout would be more appropriate (and, I suggest, a separate thread for the passenger-station-converted-to-goods discussion).

[Nearholmer]

10 minutes ago, Flying Pig said:

A little early, I suspect. 

 

I don't know Birmingham, and I'm sure things varied from place to place, but the concept of an outer marshalling yard, plus trips to/from final destinations was well-established in and around London by the Edwardian period, possibly even earlier.

 

One disadvantage of models of big urban goods stations is that wagons took longer to load/unload than passenger trains, especially suburban passenger trains, so if lots of train movements are what you like, the original Minories concept takes some beating. 

 

I still think the most mileage in it is to go backwards in time, to c1900, just when urban/suburban railways were creaking under the strain of the huge traffic they were carrying, but hadn't yet been electrified. If you chose an outer terminus, perhaps inspired by somewhere like Richmond, where multiple companies operated services, it could be colourful as well as quirky and intensely busy.

[Lacathedrale]

That's what I was trying to emulate with the 'outputs', I had categorised them as local/regional/national which I guess is fairly analogous to your slow/semi/fast, @Zomboid - I feel ilke there is the germ of an idea to generate an operating pattern

[Compound2632]

1 hour ago, Nearholmer said:

 

I don't know Birmingham, and I'm sure things varied from place to place, but the concept of an outer marshalling yard, plus trips to/from final destinations was well-established in and around London by the Edwardian period, possibly even earlier.

 

 

Washwood Heath. We saw that they ordered this matter not necessarily better but in a similar way in France.

[Ravenser]

On 16/08/2020 at 13:34, ejstubbs said:

 

I can tell you that he pronounced "minoress" incorrectly.  The OED is very clear that the "i" should be long, as in "miner", or indeed "minor".

 

I suspect that, rather than being a corruption of the English name of the Order of St Clare, the pronunciation of the street name is actually derived from the Latin name for the order: sorores minores.  If we assume that pronunciation of medieval Latin was similar to modern Italian, the pronunciation of the second word of that phrase would have been quite similar to that of "Minories" today, and not very like "minoress" at all.

 

This topic was previously discussed on this thread as recently as June this year:

 

 

I note that a number of comments under that YouTube video mention the Minories place name in other English cities and towns, all of which appear to be pronounced the same as the street in London.

 

Many years ago I spent a couple of years working in an office in the Minories. We always pronounced the street Minnories, not Mynories

 

And I also studied English at university , and we had to spend a term tangling with Middle English - and it's pronunciation. English Latin pronunciation was certainly somewhat different to the Italian pronunciation that replaced it in the 19th century. But prior [ or should that be Prioress in this context?] to the Great Vowel Shift of the late 16th - early 17th English vowels sounded different... My elderly copy of Robinsons' Chaucer gives (on p. xxxi) 2 sounds for Middle English i - : "like i in machine " and "like i in sit". . Neither of those will give a "long" I as y . And the Dissolution of the Monasteries seems to have preceded the change in sounds (just)

 

So when the nuns lived there sorores minores will have sounded uncommonly like "minnories" , with the accent on the back end of the word - and the pronunciation of the street probably hasn't changed in 500-600 years, even if it would be correct to say Mynorite sisters in modern English

 

Meanwhile my bank insists on sending me Welsh chequebooks, although don't speak a word of welsh, live nowhere near Wales and have no Welsh name or ancestry..

 

Minories the plan is really best suited to steam suburban operation, because that could be extremely intense in the peaks .

 

Urban goods stations have rarely been modelled with any authenticity (and nobody would call Leicester South Goods a compact layout) . Bishopsgate Goods was another case of an old passenger terminus used as a goods station, but it would have been a lot less intensively operated than when it handled passengers (Bricklayer's Arms is a further London example).

 

Otherwise urban goods stations tended to be cramped places, commonly with the actual sidings at right angles and accessed by turntables and with shunting carried out by capstan and shunting horse, not locomotive. Just for a bonus they might well have several levels, reached by means of a wagon hoist.

 

Perhaps Minories could be treated as a compressed version of Fenchurch St, with tank engines from two companies (GER/LNER and LTSR/LMS) bustling around on rakes of Hattons Genesis 4 and 6 wheelers. There was a swarm of foreign companies' goods stations in the Fenchurch St approaches, so the 2 road kickback goods shed - perhaps with a third siding serving a wagon hoist - could easily be justified. N7s are available, Buckjumpers and Gobblers might be produced , a Tilbury tank or two or a NLR 4-4-0T would add atmosphere along with the gaslights, cobbles and pea-souper fogs. Who is that figure in a deerstalker stalking down the wooden platform? "Always carry a revolver east of Aldgate, Watson."

[Compound2632]

8 minutes ago, Ravenser said:

 

English Latin pronunciation was certainly somewhat different to the Italian pronunciation that replaced it in the 19th century.

 

 

Replaced only in Roman Catholic liturgical usage, though that seems to have spilled over into choral pronunciation. We have an elderly lady in our parish, a late-in-life convert from Anglicanism, who visibly winces at our Latin - made worse by our Parish Priest, who is an enthusiast for bringing more Latin back into the liturgy.

 

11 minutes ago, Ravenser said:

Perhaps Minories could be treated as a compressed version of Fenchurch St, with tank engines from two companies (GER/LNER and LTSR/LMS) bustling around on rakes of Hattons Genesis 4 and 6 wheelers. There was a swarm of foreign companies' goods stations in the Fenchurch St approaches, so the 2 road kickback goods shed - perhaps with a third siding serving a wagon hoist - could easily be justified. N7s are available, Buckjumpers and Gobblers might be produced , a Tilbury tank or two or a NLR 4-4-0T would add atmosphere along with the gaslights, cobbles and pea-souper fogs. Who is that figure in a deerstalker stalking down the wooden platform? "Always carry a revolver east of Aldgate, Watson."

 

Throw in a Midland Johnson condensing 0-4-4T and a Great Northern Stirling J13 0-6-0ST on goods transfers for good measure!

[whart57]

I'm not sure what the prototype situation was but what if the Minories like goods station was serving an inner city market - Billingsgate, Covent Garden, Leadenhall, that sort of thing. Could well be a cramped site, and at certain times of day would be busy and the porters would have to be pretty smart in unloading

[Nearholmer]

Yes, you are right, they must have got a shift on at times.

 

Many of these urban goods stations went up several storeys above entry track level, and down below it, so a model might look like three or for tracks entering the slit of a post-box, unless it was made open at the side, partially sectioned, to show the inside of the ant-hill.

 

I suggested the sectioning idea to Mr Rixon for his layout in the making, but I don't think he bit.

 

Another idea might be to use the goods station as the FY, and focus the layout on the immediate approach tracks, with lots of shunting going on. Wagons could disappear into the fiddle-warehouse and emerge later after being loaded/unloaded - which might not be all that interesting with covered wagons, but could be with opens. Hasn't Mr Rice published a plan that involves some of this?

 

But, it rather ceases to be Minories.

 

Sorores minores. Call me Dolores, like they do in the stories.

 

Edited August 25, 2020 by Nearholmer

[Joseph_Pestell]

All the goods stations around Fenchurch St (and elsewhere in the City) could only take short trains (around 20 wagons). So I think that we can safely assume that the trains only travelled to yards in the suburbs before being marshalled into longer trains for onward travel. These would almost all be handled by small tank locos.

As someone else has mentioned, a parcels station could be more interesting in terms of locomotives to be seen.

[Nearholmer]

3 minutes ago, Joseph_Pestell said:

So I think that we can safely assume that the trains only travelled to yards in the suburbs before being marshalled into longer trains for onward travel. These would almost all be handled by small tank locos.

 

Spot on.

 

Reading about it all the other day in the book that I recommended to Schooner, the thing that amazed me was the number of such trips each day. Some of those depots were being served by what amounted to an hourly service from their parent marshalling yard, and given how many depots there were in such a tight space it must have been possible to 'spot' several goods trains in each direction every hour.

[Zomboid]

1 hour ago, Lacathedrale said:

That's what I was trying to emulate with the 'outputs', I had categorised them as local/regional/national which I guess is fairly analogous to your slow/semi/fast, @Zomboid - I feel ilke there is the germ of an idea to generate an operating pattern

It could just be that I like to imagine the whole system, but to create an operating pattern, the function and destination of the trains is pretty essential. 

[Zigzag Canyon]

Here is a picture of the C&O's Sportsman leaving Detroit's Fort Street Union Depot in 1958.  The arrangement of the single slip and some curved turnouts reminds me of Minories.  And here's a link to the photograph:  https://historicdetroit.org/galleries/union-depot-old-photos

Edited September 4, 2020 by Zigzag Canyon
grammar

[Lacathedrale]

So, is there a defined amount of fiddle yard or off-scene space is required for Minories? How many single ended fiddle yard tracks? How many operations before shuffling and how long is each the average movement?

Edited September 10, 2020 by Lacathedrale

[Pacific231G]

3 hours ago, Lacathedrale said:

So, is there a defined amount of fiddle yard or off-scene space is required for Minories? How many single ended fiddle yard tracks? How many operations before shuffling and how long is each the average movement?

How long is a piece of string? In the original Minories article Cyril Freezer did suggest that, for solo operation, the terminus could be connected to a simple balloon loop. His argument was that, since commuter trains were often more or less identical with more or less identical locos, an outgoing train could simply become the next or next but one arrival, as the operating challenge is to handle a constant stream of arrivals and departures without getting fouled up.

I'd also note that Bill Banwell and Frank Applegate's pre war gauge O Maybank layout, representing a GCR secondary main line terminus with four platforms, goods sidings and an MPD, was fed by a four road semi-automatic traverser and capable of operating a complete timetable sequence.  Cyril Freezer saw Maybank as a youngster at the MRC Easter show and it was definitely one of the major inspirations for Minories.  In its final exhibition appearances- it was damaged beyond repair in the Blitz- Maybank was fitted with a return loop.

 

 

 

[Nearholmer]

Approaching this another way: how many different trains can a Minories sequence-timetable plausibly use?

 

I would suggest:

 

- "the posh train of the day", which might be either the stockbrokers' train that runs to town semi-fast and is made of corridor coaches, or the boat train that connects with a down-market overnight ferry to the low countries at a muddy Thames-side quay that handles mostly goods, or whatever other excuse you can think of for a daily posh train.

 

- newspaper train (might also convey railway parcels and/or royal mail), but I've always wondered how these heavy things get to the platform - big goods lift needed.

 

- fitted goods train, mostly vans, to serve the goods depot if you build the version with one.

 

- probably two suburban trains, representing lots of such trains by shuttling to and fro.

 

To me, that suggests five fiddle roads, given that you might start the sequence at 0600, with the station totally empty apart from goods wagons at the depot. You might squeeze it down to four by berthing one suburban rake in the terminus, but that is "at the wrong end of the job" n the morning really.

 

First arrival is a light loco as turnover engine, which I'm assuming doesn't need its own FY road and can simply be plonked on the track at the FY exit.

 

Next the first suburban arrives, then the second, then the turnover engine comes into play, and the suburban shuttle game continues ad-infiniitum, less intensively outside the peaks.

 

The posh train either arrives late in the morning rush (stockbrokers), disappears as ECS, to come back as ECS at 1700 for a 1720 departure, or, if it is the dull boat train, arrives awkwardly in the middle of the morning rush, gets dealt with as ECS and comes back ECS in time for a c2000 departure.

 

The goods gets dealt with during the slack hours around lunch-time (saturday is a challenge if the model is set during the 44hr week period!).

 

Empty newspaper vans arrive c2200, with the paper train out somewhere after midnight, when silence falls for a few hours. Remember that the paper train might need an extra van on saturday night to cope with the extra volume of papers, but can depart earlier because Fleet Street prints the "provincial sundays" quite early - this is good, because it allows it to get out of the way ready for any track possessions needed by the railway engineers, who always have to work saturday nights, but don't much mind because the overtime is worth nearly two-and-a-half normal days wages (how do I know this, you ask?).

Edited September 10, 2020 by Nearholmer

[Compound2632]

12 minutes ago, Nearholmer said:

- probably two suburban trains, representing lots of such trains by shuttling to and fro.

 

I'd go for two inner suburbans - close coupled sets if modelling the earlies, high-density compartment stock or ultimately 4-VEPs - and one outer suburban working throughout the day (as opposed to the morning / evening stockbrokers' express) - higher class of carriages or at least a higher proportion of firsts, in the earlies, stock with lavatories a bit later, tending to 4-CEP. Fancier motive power too - 4-4-2T vs 0-6-2T, or whatever. Might even be the sort of engine that needs to go off-stage for turning.

 

Minimum motive power for this needs to be three engines of the inner suburban class and two of the outer suburban class.

Edited September 10, 2020 by Compound2632

[Nearholmer]

Yes, and if you are as far forward as the 1960s, say, your outer-suburban service could be DEMU as opposed to EMU to add a bit of variety (not that non-southern people could really tell the difference!).

 

You could save the posh train for racing at  Epsom, Lingfield or Plumpton, or similar things like Glyndebourne week.

 

Or, you could go the other way and have a really rough train, for when Minories are playing away, or an exotic, but still rough, train coming from somewhere like Accrington when they are playing at home. Mind you, Minories isn't really well located to have even a fourth division team. Maybe the ground is actually a couple of stops out, like Millwall (now they needed/created really rough trains). The club probably started as the works team of a frozen meat import dock, and they are nicknamed The Freezers.

[roythebus]

Goods traffic on the Widened Lines was indeed intense at time. Trains were short, locos were 0-6-0T or 0-6-2T. the GWR stuff was tripped infrom Acton Yard or Paddington goods, Midland stuff to Cricklewood/Brent, ER from Hornsey or Temple Mills, and Suvvern didn't get a look in except on cross-London. But on our Minories the Suvvern would be served from hither Green/Bricklayers Arms or Nine Elms either via the East London Line or Holborn viaduct. So an excuse to run any region's goods trains and locos.

 

Trains had to be short because of loco route availability, terminal capacity, and live capacity, fitting in between an intensive suburban services of the Underground and the main line.

 

My latest idea for a Minories style plan is High Street Kensington, 2 through tracks tunnel to tunnel, 2 terminal tracks again tunnel to tunnel, and a substantial coal depot accessed from one of the terminal tracks via a 3 way switch-back to street level. and no run-round in the goods yard. I still haven't worked out how the loco ran round, but it would arrive in the terminal road, propel the goods train up an incline, pull it up another incline, then propel it to another incline, pull back again then propel into the sidings!

 

Maybe they used horses to drag the empty wagons onto the loco or gravity down the first incline onto the loco? Nobody seems to know. Sounds fun though.

 

 

[St Enodoc]

3 hours ago, Nearholmer said:

but don't much mind because the overtime is worth nearly two-and-a-half normal days wages (how do I know this, you ask?).

Best to start at 0001 Sunday as I recall.

[St Enodoc]

3 hours ago, Nearholmer said:

DEMU as opposed to EMU to add a bit of variety (not that non-southern people could really tell the difference!).

You could tell by the black clag coming out of the top.

[autocoach]

Doesn't this topic really go back to the original  real Minories:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minories_railway_station  of the London and Blackwall

 

I always fancied a Southern 3rd rail EMU version. Worked with 3-Sub Shebas but one platform capable of a 4-Sub, possibly worked by Bulleid double deckers for rush hour ....

[Nearholmer]

6 hours ago, St Enodoc said:

Best to start at 0001 Sunday as I recall.

Time and a half Saturday, double time Sunday, so yes, a 12hr shift, which a possession usually ended-up as, was better started at 0001, but mine were always 2000-0800 to allow time to prepare the train, get the gang ready etc, Then be out of the way for the first train on Sunday morning.

 

Long old time ago now.

 

 

 

[Joseph_Pestell]

Answers above have focussed on the number of roads required in the fiddleyard (and some good thoughts there).

 

But what about length? It seems to me that one can easily create a layout where 40% of the length is non-scenic, which seems like a waste.

 

And if Minories is in a major conurbation, trains will surely be a minimum 6 coach length. Even with 48' or 51' coaches, our train is going to be 5' long and the layout therefore a minimum of 13' long (using a traverser) or 10' x 7' L-shape.

[Nearholmer]

Do you want a dimensionally accurate set-up, or a reasonable representation compressed in length?

 

Cos if you want the former it gets very long and dull, which I guess is why people tend to go for the latter; certainly the layout was designed specifically for the latter.

 

Of course, pre-1900 on the ‘subsurface lines’, or Broad Street in its death throes, yield very short trains while remaining realistic, but they are somewhat niche themes.

[Zomboid]

Length is a personal preference thing.

I think I said earlier that I would be happy with a maximum train length of 3 carriages and a CCT. 4 would be better, but going beyond that wouldn't make operating the layout any more enjoyable for me. Many (most?) would disagree whole heartedly with that much compression, but for me the fun lies in recreating the operation rather than in visual fidelity, and I could believe in a 3+CCT train representing a medium distance service on a secondary main line.

Edited September 11, 2020 by Zomboid