Nick Holliday

You might find Issue 24 of Railway Archive of interest. An excellent article including photos and drawings covering the station and its history. 24 pages of gems, from Lightmoor Press.

They seem to be very elusive, only appearing on a large scale OS map from the thirties, as far as NLS are concerned at least, and not showing on the regular map display. Are these the ones? (The four in a row in the middle of the map) If so, according to the measuring tool they seem to be about 33' x 24', with the middle pair slightly smaller, perhaps 30' x 24'. However, the measuring tool doesn't seem to be working particularly accurately on this mapped area, at least on my computer.

Yellow is not such an improbable livery, particularly on vans. It seems to have been quite popular with salt manufacturers, such as the widely modelled Saxa Salt van, mustard makers, Colmans, cement suppliers and breweries. Just looking at Keith Turton's first Lightmoor book, there are a number of yellow or orange coal wagons, including Colmans, which had a similar livery to the vans, J R Wood of London and Southampton, and Wallace Spiers & Co, who not only seemed to have their wagons painted yellow, but also, like Formula One cars, occasionally had sponsorship, most notably Crystalate Billiard Balls, which featured the yellow livery. Peter Matthew's said that Bath Stone Firms painted their two plank wagons in lemon yellow. It was also not unknown for a more conservative livery to be enhanced with horizontal or diagonal stripes of contrasting colour, perhaps yellow, such as C & G Ayres of Reading. As @bbishop notes, many Private Traders' wagons were supplied on a hire basis and also on lease. Often the hire agreements contained clauses regarding regular repainting and maintenance, which kept the wagons in better condition than some of the railway company stock. Once, or if, they became knackered, the hire agreement could be terminated, and the wagons returned to the actual owner, and new wagons could be hired to replace them, as necessary, albeit perhaps at a higher rate than before. I don't know how traders who bought the wagons outright managed - I suspect that the procedure depended on the Financial Directors' views on the liquidity of the company and the benefits of having newer wagons as opposed to continued maintenance of ageing stock. I suspect this was rather like buying a car these days. There would be a basic range of designs available, and the hirer could opt for various alternatives, such as end and/or bottom doors, and extras, such as the commode handles required in Wales. Only large companies, such as Stephenson Clarke, would have the resources and knowledge to order a totally bespoke design to suit their particular operational requirements. I am not aware of any wagons being sent out unpainted, and it was common for wagons to be sent from the works directly to a suitable colliery to be loaded before being sent to the clients' premises. This would depend on the relative locations, but it made economic sense for, say, the Gloucester company to send a new wagon to a Midlands colliery and then to Sussex or wherever, rather than it going empty to the South East, only to be sent, empty again, to the north to be filled.

The book @34theletterbetweenB&D refers to, Great Northern Railway Engine Sheds : Volume 2 The Lincolnshire Loop Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire 122 Pages does have quite good coverage of Lincoln shed, with 12 pages devoted to it, second only to Colwick, with further information on cranes, water towers and turntables in the appendices. It includes the loco allocation as of 1st January 1923 and a comprehensive listing of the duties covered by the locos shedded there, but does seem to tail off towards Nationalisation, if that is the period you are interested in.

I don't want to be a party-pooper, but the common practice for painting Private Traders' wagons seems to be to paint wooden solebars the same colour as the body, and steel underframes black, although I believe there were exceptions, but not as many as the earlier RTR examples would suggest, but this is your livery. Conversely, I don't think that many had the interiors painted the body colour - either it was left unpainted or given a coat of whatever left-over paints were around, perhaps a mucky grey colour (smudge?).

Coal bins, especially those alongside the tracks, are uncommon outside the southeast, even more so on rural branch lines. Looking at a couple of Salopianish locations, Oswestry and Welshpool, a feature, at least of the Cambrian, was to have a coal depot, consisting of a large solid platform, with some covered protection. If you visit the wonderful Britain from Above website, and look at Welshpool, there are some good views of the coal bank, with the benefit of a large number of, sadly rather blurry, private traders wagons. The best photos were taken in 1939, probably before the PO wagons were pooled, so representative of wagons that might have been seen earlier. Perhaps one of the wagon experts have been able to identify some of the traders.

Hardly expat. C&A was started in Holland in 1861, and has stores in over 20 countries. They pulled out of the UK because their shops were losing money hand over fist.

There was probably less reason to replace covered wagons, since they were seldom loaded to anywhere near their stated capacity. In LNWR Recalled the figures quoted for average loadings in vans rose to around 3 tons by 1920, a figure similar to data on the GWR, where the only merchandise wagons carrying anything substantially higher than 3 tons originated from Cardiff and Swansea - perhaps steel castings were classed as general merchandise and skewed the figures. I suspect the newer 12 ton vans were built to the same specification as the mineral wagons without any expectation of carrying that load.

Peco seems to be a sensible place to look. https://peco-uk.com/products/scissors-crossing-medium-radius?variant=7435677499426 Oops, sorry. I could have sworn that I had selected Code 100 to find it. My iPad doesn't like the Peco website much!

This fleshes out the story of Mr Spry, from the Sussex Photographers website

I’m not sure where these levels came from. The OS maps on the NLS website have very few spot levels, and they are usually at road level. A gradient of 1 in 25 would be rather infamous - Lickey Incline is a mere 1 in 38! I have found a website, https://www.railwaydata.co.uk/ which appears to provide level and gradient data for the rail network, and this seems to indicate that the line through the station runs at 1:381 from Western Boulevard to the Daybrook bridge. The line further north does get a bit steeper, roughly 1:80 and 1:60 around Hucknall and Lindy stations. Sidings would generally be level, if at all possible, to prevent the likelihood of runaways, or unexpected movement in the yard, which is possibly more relevant on a model, as our wagons seldom have working brakes.

I’ve spoken to John Minnis, and he believes it was taken by F W Spry, who worked in the area and produced various postcards, including a view taken at the same time, looking in the opposite direction from the cattle dock end.

Just been looking at the 1845 Bradshaw to see what the London & Brighton Railway (yet to join the London & Croydon Railway in the LB&SCR) was running on its only mainline to Brighton. In the Down direction there were eight trains. The first train was a "Cheap Train", presumably Parliamentary, followed by a 1st, 2nd and 3rd train, a 1st class only Mail train, a 1st & 2nd, 1st class only, 1st & 2nd, another 1st class only and the last train was 1st, 2nd & 3rd. The UP timetable was effectively the same, but in reverse order, with the Parliamentary train the last train from Brighton to London. However, where this applies to the above comment, there is a footnote that states, regarding the 1st class Mail and one of the 1st class only trains each way: - "Two second class inclosed (sic) coaches will be attached to these trains. Fare 10s 6d" The standard fares are Fast 14/6 (One train a day only stopping at Reigate), 1st: 12/0, 2nd 8/0 and 3rd 5/0, so there seems to be a premium for getting an enclosed carriage! There is another footnote that 1st class passengers could book through to Shoreham and be able to stay in their carriage for most services, whilst the rest of the people had to change trains at Brighton

A quick scamper through NLS maps and Google found your second type at Tilehurst, GWR, Watford, LNWR and Hadley Wood, GNR. This makes sense, as the staff and passengers wouldn’t really want to be humping luggage and trolleys up unnecessary steps. However, I suspect that your first configuration did occur, perhaps when a line was quadrupled sometime after the original construction. In more recent times, any replacement footbridges would be flat, for accessibility concerns, with a lift from the platform.

Whilst that book is a fascinating view of Victorian railways in the Lewes area, I think it is highly unlikely that this photo is one of his. His heyday was much earlier than the possible date of this, by some twenty years, although he did take a brief interest around 1910 when the new Marsh I3 4-4-2 tanks appeared. John Minnis, the compiler of this book, has an incredible knowledge of railway photographers and, as far as I am aware, included all of Bedford’s railway photos in the collection, including views on the Great Northern and Midland. None seem to have been taken in West Sussex, and the style and quality of the Littlehampton view is very different. I hope to be seeing John this weekend and I will try to buttonhole him on the subject.