WFPettigrew

Or more mundanely... Alan Gibson? That's where I got my last batch of sprung 12" buffer heads for wagons built in the Dark Ages....

What about cantilering out the backscene over the void with a scenic board? Could give you more space to model buildings, etc. without the need to extend the baseboard to support smooth running of trains? The extra depth could maybe even allow you to put in more than just the railway backdrop, but have some hint of the wider city beyond? All the best Neil

But there was a potential hitch in all this. Any loaded LNWR covered wagon/van that was sent to a foreign line was then reliant on said recipient being able to unload the wagon. As an example, going by the OS 25 inch maps on the NLS website, there were only wagon turntables on the Furness Railway in the goods yards at Grange, Ulverston and Barrow. There isn't even a single one shown at Carnforth (to spin any incoming LNWR vans to the right orientation before despatching onwards) or at the big Preston Street goods depot in Whitehaven (though there was the loco turntable at nearby Corkickle shed I guess). A LNWR single door van arriving into any of the other goods yards on the Furness could not be unloaded in the goods shed if the door was on the wrong side. So either the LNWR would have had to be mindful of the orientation of the receiving station's goods facilities (including any reversals en route), and turn the wagon accordingly, or the FR would have to incur additional expense in tripping the van just to turn it, or the receiving station would have had to unload out in the open, from ground level, which would at least prompt a sense of humour bypass among the staff, and could result in the damage to goods which had been deemed necessary to travel under cover, if it was rainy the day the wagon arrived. All the best Neil

That's really very good painting of the planking! I am impressed how you've got real colour variations within each plank. Superb stuff! If you are using acrylics, have you seen the Vallejo "Old and New Wood Effects" pack - available from all good, etc. No connection, again etc., but I found it has the right mix of colours and a strategy for how to achieve, err, old and new wood effects. All the best Neil PS with the numberplate, paint white in a durable coat, paint black thinly, then use wet and dry paper on a flat surface to sand off the black and leave the white showing?

And another one. The Furness also had roof door vans (two types, one longer than the other but both rated to 10 tons) which like the LNWR ones had runners across the roof with a sliding hatch. The runners are clear to see and the look of the roof when viewed from the "far" side has a marked horizontal line where the end of the sliding roof section is sitting above the fixed - and looks very different to the lath-and-canvas style of the NER for example.

We seem to be able to keep about half a dozen different subject balls up in the air at once on here, so I hope I can be forgiven for throwing in another one! There has been discussion in the past about the way the railway companies slowly moved towards better identification of their wagon stock, such as the MR leading the way with large company letters on the sides of their wagons. There has also been chat about the addition of painted wagon numbers on the body side over and above a cast wagon plate. The impression I had got from what I have read previously is that this was an evolving picture driven by both a trend to make their own stock stand out as theirs (good marketing, and also helpful to ensure wagons found their way home in the days before pooling) and the numbers would help both goods agents and also RCH wagon number loggers to keep track of which wagon was in a particular train without having to get up close and peer at the plate on the solebar. However - regarding the numbers - was there a dictat at some point from the Board of Trade or the RCH or somesuch requiring companies to paint numbers on the side of wagons? From what can be gathered from photos with known dates, the Furness (yes here he goes again) started off with just the wagon plate on the solebar. Sometime just before the end of the 19th century they started painting the wagon number on the centre of the top end plank of an open (this would mean a number was visble on all four faces). Sometime and certainly by the middle of the Great War but possibly a bit earlier the FR was painting the number on the lower left of the wagon side, and the lower left of each end. The MR started putting wagon numbers on the sides about the same time. Was this a trend or was it by order? All the best Neil

Several sources say the that bridge was open by 1908, so unless the Derby registers are wrong, that's isn't our bridge. (Cue further circular discussion.."That's not my bridge, it's too curvy... That's not my bridge, it's the wrong date.... etc!!!)

This thread goes round in circles. A Scherzer Bascule bridge was erected over Buccleugh Dock in Barrow in 1907-8, this was a replacement structure taking the line to Ramsden Dock station, and one of two bridges in Barrow that I mentioned recently as also being possible weak points in the FR route for armour plate wagons! The road bridge to Walney Island nearby was also built at the same time as a bascule lifting bridge. All the best Neil

That script writing on the final picture of the whatever-it-is looks remarkably/suspiciously like "Handyside"???

Briefly heading back into the land of armour plate, and so far there has been no clearly steer from the Cumbrian Railways Association regarding any weight limits on the Furness Railway - other than the sensible observation that any armour plate for the Barrow shipyard would, on reaching Barrow, have to cross either the lifting bridge over Buccleugh Dock (on the passenger route to the Ramsden Dock station and to the workers' Shipyard station) or via the original Devonshire Dock bridge over the original entrance to Barrow docks, in order to reach Barrow Island and the shipyard. So that's two further potentially weak structures that could have had a bearing on this discussion. (Or they were all built to the same weight limit requirements?) Stephen's document showing the special working from Sheffield to Barrow nails beyond doubt that such movements existed, but if that hadn't come to light, there was evidence that's been stood in plain sight for over 30 years (since it was published in Ken Norman's book on the FR). I cannot post here for fear of copyright infringement but there is a Sankey collection image of a wagon pile up on Barrow Island, in and amongst the shipyard buildings, taken probably in the late Great War or post Great War period. It shows a number of wooden wagons in various states of dismemberment, and central to the chaos is what I am told is an MR armour plate wagon. The description I have been given is that it is a "50 ton armour plate wagon" built 1918. It looks similar to the drawing posted earlier, but has different bogies and buffers. Is that a newer diagram? Oh and Japanese battleships being built in Barrow? Here' s the Kongo being fitted out on Buccleugh Dock in 1909: https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=761308958592862&set=a.542487551249421 All the best Neil

Ah think you've cracked it Stephen. Quick calculation - making this change reduced the tons per foot from (roughly) 2.2 to 1.7. In comparison the "L2" with its side tanks and bunker weighing it down (a little over 55 tons in just under 37 feet) presents 1.5 tons per foot. So this does sound like either early twitchiness about the viaducts, or possibly the ongoing concerns about mine workings swallowing more locomotives or rolling stock following the sad demise of FR Sharpie Number 115 down into the mine workings at Lindal a decade before. I will ask the wisdom of the CRA if they have any intel.

That is interesting, thank you! That was less than a decade before the expensive rebuilding of the original viaducts over the Kent and Leven Estuaries, so was this an issue with axle loadings when the civil engineer began to get twitchy about the state of the structures? I am not sure - that would be 7.5ton per axle plus the net weight (so say c10 ton per axle total?). This is significantly less than the then largest 4-4-0s from a certain Mr Pettigrew (the so-called K3s) which were loading over 14 tons per axle, and they weren't banished from the mainline. (The Pettigrew larger wheel radial tanks, the so called L2 and L3, also put down over 14 tons an axle.. Now, Mr Rutherford the civil engineer tried for years to get them banned for allegedly damaging his track but that was an ongoing row over their rather frequent derailments mostly on very lightly laid or badly maintained sidings at the iron ore mines or the iron/steel works! Pettigrew in exasperation sought expert witness support from the LYR who were running radial tanks as well, but Rutherford was determined. As soon as Pettigrew retired, the tanks were barred from "fast passenger" work!) So if not axle loading, was this something to do with getting them over the summit at Lindal (1 in c 75 on either side) when the FR had limits on the numbers of wagons in goods trains but perhaps not limits on the loading? Curious...!

Including relatively recently - which then presented a bit of an issue when there was a little local difficulty in the Falkland Islands..

Correct, and certainly some of those were built in Barrow. A number of the residential streets on Walney Island which were built at the same time were named after said ships - including Mikasa Street, named after the surviving battleship. https://www.kinenkan-mikasa.or.jp/en/

Thanks Stephen. I suspect there may also be issues around the metallurgical quality of the finished product - certainly by some point in the 20th century the shipyards would have realised that buying bog standard steel from the local works (Barrow had its steelworks til the 1980s) wouldn't cut the mustard for a specialist application like a submarine hull, armour plating, whatever. I don't know when such expertise first came to the fore, but I would observe that Barrow steelworks became famous even in FR days for making railway rails which were exported around the world, rather than making steel for the hungry shipyard one mile to the south. So, I suspect that there may have been more to this than simply the ore fields being worked out. The biggest deposits were still being mined up uptil circa the Second World War other than Hodbarrow at Millom (the biggest ore sop of them all) which finally closed in 1969. All the best Neil

Were they known wagon pinchers?! I presume this is not just an issue with the Snow Hill etc tunnels - or was it? On a possibly more serious note, with the armour plate wagons, mention of Barrow has rather predictably made me sit up and pay more attention. The photos you've been able to post are for these wagons carrying other heavy items, but how would armour plate have been carried? I am presuming in plate sections, but would they have used trestles or was it laid flat, and therefore limited to the possibilities of the various applicable loading gauges? Those numerous shipyards would have had demands for steel that surely would have been more regular than something that could be moved as an Out Of Gauge load? All the best Neil

Are those Pregrouping railways/Furness Wagon Co products? All the best Neil (modelling Furness in, err, Furness!)

Big likes from me! Don't tell @SteamAle he will want it at SolRail in November...! All the best Neil

If you think Henley is bad, poor Marlow is even worse.... A new bare platform created by BR in the grottiest corner of the old goods yard, so they could flog off most of the site to an industrial estate.

😂

Thank you for this detailed explanation which makes perfect sense. And if a northern company were to send empties down, it would make perfect sense too that those were used on a train back to that railway's territory. So yay, as we were...!

Further to all this, I have been having some doubts. The fruit destined for Belfast clearly needed to be dispatched with great urgency. Being perishable probably also means it is delicate (e.g strawberries) and would not take kindly to repeated handling. Plus, this traffic originated in Kent. So - would the correct vehicles not be NPCS from the SECR? It was the SECR's traffic, and transhipping to MR vehicles at Brent or St Pancras would add time and handling. Against this would be if this traffic was not considered to be a wagonload or indeed a vanload, but was individual crates that happened to fill not one but several vans, in which case it would be more likely to be transhipped perhaps? Thoughts?

Paul isn't that at least part of the the point - viz "iron carriers". I cannot speak for the Taff Vale and other S Wales companies, but here in Cumbria the Furness had more 2 planks (plus a fair number of one planks) than any other type by some margin, in part to carry around pig iron from the numerous iron works. They also used these wagons for slate (see the D299 thread on more than one recent occasion!). There is no point in adding higher sides if the main traffic will never fall out of a one or two plank, because it's so dense. (Unless you really try hard to make it fall out, like the Caley did at Thankerton with this FR fixed side wagon loaded with what looks like Kirkby slate, 1913. I don't think there is copyright on this 110 year old image but will remove if informed otherwise.)

Ah, that makes sense. What a beast that six wheeler is! Thank you, will add the D361 to my notes of things to get at some point towards the magnum opus layout dream....! All the best Neil

Having read this, I then went onto the Slaters site, and am now a bit confused! Slaters doesn't brand their MR wagon kits with diagram numbers in the main product title, but looking at this: https://slatersplastikard.com/assets/instructions/4024FInstructions.pdf I cannot see a reference to a Slaters kit for D1272? However the fruit van kit I had been thinking about (the one branded MR 10 TON COVERED FRUIT VAN) would appear to be the same as the drawings in these instructions for the D361, as long as it has the larger wheels and is vac fitted? So is there a kit for the later D1272? And which diagram does the 10T covered fruit van actually apply to? Sorry if I am being thick (again)! Neil