Compound2632

CRASSOC is fortunate in having members putting in the time and effort to research and publish such things, which help stamp the company's identity on a model.

Oh dear he's pulled ahead of me again. Entirely down to my idleness. I'm quite liking the Fox transfers too. I've not used the HMRS GWR wagon transfers though quite a few of their others. When the LNWR sheet was reprinted a couple of years ago, I got a couple of sheets. They're quite crisp. So I think it's a bit hit and miss. For early GWR I had been using a BGS rub-down sheet which required a good deal of patience but was rewarding in its own way. Flat, as the HMRS Pressfix transfers aren't.

I don't quite understand the statement about limited choice of numbers. One of the unusual features of GWR wagon modelling, compared to other pre-Grouping companies, is that numbering is known in detail, Lot by Lot. So there are several thousand numbers to choose from. But I've stated my principle of prototype fidelity before: always choose a class member for which there is no good photograph.

Continental wagons and a T9 at Didcot?

8 hours ago, Mikkel said:

Here is a Midland equivalent at Ashchurch: 

In this matter, the Midland wasn't quite as centralised as the Great Western. There was a provender store at Oakham as well as at Ashchurch. [Link is to catalogue thumbnail of Midland Railway Study Centre Item 88-2018-0064. Note the mix of sheeted opens and vans. The Midland had no specific provender wagon design; I'm not aware of any company other than the Great Western having such a thing.]

Sheet-making had quite a lot in common with sail-making so it's not surprising that there might be similarities of equipment and terminology. There's a splendid LMS period photo of the Midland sheet factory at Sheet Stores Junction in the Essery article in Midland Record No. 3. This shows freshly-stencilled sheets hanging up to dry, short edge uppermost, with rows of ropes down the sides just as in your GW photo.

47 minutes ago, Simond said:

I read that the sides of cuttings and embankments (and presumably other Railway land that couldn't be used otherwise) were harvested for hay. Can’t remember where or when, but it would be logical to use a/o store locally what would be needed, and ship the rest around the system.

 

atb

Simon

But not necessarily by the railway company - farmers of adjoining land could apply. 

1 hour ago, Mikkel said:

The Didcot railway Center has posted some nice photos:

https://www.facebook.com/DidcotRailwayCentre/photos/pcb.2960267614000107/2960257807334421/

 

Illustrating pooling of wagon sheets - a double-sheeted wagon with LMS and LNER sheets (better seen in the gwr.org.uk photo).

And for those who like that kind of thing, an ex-Midland D299 - with oil axleboxes, either from one of the late lots or more likely, upgraded from grease. No. 57??7 ?

2 minutes ago, DonB said:

provender wagons. I bet those  were rarely emptied immediately. Where were the provender supplies shipped from.? I don't envy the desk clerk trying to balance his/her books, regarding  (loose) hay and straw quantities.  

"The provender must be weighed on its receipt, and should a deficiency of any of the component parts be discovered, the circumstances must be at once reported. Great care must be taken to prevent waste and misappropriation."

That reads to me as an injunction to unload the wagon promptly.

There was some discussion of how provender got to Didcot in @Mikkel's earlier posts on his stable block, I think. 

Twelve bespoke provender wagons, each maybe achieving six round trips in a fortnight, that's 72 stables supplied. Of course that doesn't take into account the variation in sizes of stables. Did someone do a calculation that a wagon this big was needed to convey the fodder for a "standard" sized horse establishment, or was it just a case of askinging "What's the volume of 10 tons of provender?"?

14 hours ago, Regularity said:

Certainly seems to have gay on top, awaiting a tarpaulin...

I read that as a typo for "hay", rather than suggesting anything else!

On 13/11/2020 at 20:50, Mikkel said:

Incidentally, one might say that hay and straw is all very well, but what about the sacks of feed? I had a close look at a 1906 photo of the provender store at Didcot. Below is a crop. It suggests to me that sacks were loaded at the bottom of wagons, then covered with hay and straw. So the wagons we see in photos may well be full of unseen sacks! 

 

2 hours ago, Mikkel said:

Meanwhile back at the ranch, I got out the looking glass and read some instructions from the GWR Horse Dept that are reproduced in Tony Atkins' GWR Goods Cartage Vol. 1 (p76).  Unfortunately there is no date.

 

"All requisitions for Provender must be made (through book no. 605) to the Horse Superintendent. They will be due at his office on each alternate Thursday [...] A supply for fourteen days ending on a Monday must be ordered each time, except for those Stations specially instructed to order weekly [...] The provender must be weighed on its receipt, and should a deficiency of any of the component parts be discovered, the circumstances must be at once reported. Great care must be taken to prevent waste and misappropriation."

 

So this suggests bi-weekly delivery as the norm, rather than weekly as stated elsewhere. The weighing is also interesting. How would that be done I wonder. Perhaps there would be scales at the stables. 

My underlining. This all suggests that the fortnightly delivery could be a single wagon loaded with the appropriate combination of ingredients - the heavy sacks of oats at the bottom, with the hay piled up loose on top. 

2 hours ago, Mikkel said:

Horse Superintendent.

This gentleman really needs to give over shouting at his staff, for the sake of his own larynx if no other reason.

5 minutes ago, Regularity said:

It’s big because the load is not very dense.

But for the same load the larger wagon will have the greater tare weight.

1 hour ago, Mikkel said:

Photos tend to show that the top flap was folded over the side flaps, but in model form this can look a bit odd I find. Stephen has done it nicely here though:

 

 

 

That was my first sheeted wagon (in modern times) and as far as I can recall I was following my nose so I was really pleased when I came across this:

[gwr.org.uk]

It's the other railway but tucked in corners seem to have been the aim:

It gets tricky once the load piles up above the sides of the wagon, as with your load of provender. Then one's up against the challenge of representing loose folds and general bagginess. There was a post on my wagon building thread giving a link to a sailing-ship-modelling website - I've not tried their methods but there are some interesting techniques illustrated there.

Wagons with two sheets were marshalled so the the leading sheet overlapped the trailing sheet, so that the wind didn't get in the gap and cause havoc.

I suspect that the sheet is as much to restrain the load as to protect it from the weather. With baled hay, there's no such need, so lorry-loads of bales are only roped (strapped, these days) not covered. 

I do think that to achieve a realistic look, sheets do have to be tied down so that the load is an integral part of the model. 

Sorry, brain fading this evening after a long day so my remarks are coming across as a bit disconnected.

On 07/11/2020 at 22:49, Regularity said:

I think they remained as 4 wheelers, or at least some of them did, e.g. for the Blackwall services.

I may have been confusing what the GE did with the LNW's rebuilding 28ft 6-wheelers in pairs to give 56ft carriages - though that was without increasing the width; they remained 8ft wide.

12 hours ago, Mikkel said:

What a strange task it must have been for the coach builders at Swindon to do the narrowing work. 

The opposite was done at Stratford, where old 8ft wide carriages were cut lengthways and had an extra 1ft width added to increase capacity from 5-a-side to 6-a-side. I think thety were mounted in pairs on bogie underframes at the same time.

Are not the uprights identical to the LNWR design, fully documented in LNWR Wagons?

But there were many vehicles built with standard gauge bodies on broad gauge underframes, so only the underframes need modification.

20 minutes ago, Miss Prism said:

It's difficult to predict when oil to gas conversions took place, and some V diagram vehicles kept their oil pots until a fairly late stage.

Would there be any effort to make or keep a branch set with all gas or all oil lamps - from the point of view of economy?

I have to confess I couldn't produce evidence for what the LNWR or Midland called it! "Tumblehome" may just be modeller's cant. I gather it's a disputed term anyway, as ship modellers will point out that it's the term used for the inward (reverse) curve above the waterline giving a traditional sailing ship its characteristic pear-shaped cross-section. 

You don't mention how you formed the tumblehome...

Interesting. I'm hoping to get my hands on my local copy of Atkins before the lockdown bites. Your 19451 is from os Lot 76. The photos I've been using all show wagons with the "more bolts" corner-plates:

One from os Lot 75: 19159 [Wood, plate 28]; three from os Lot 97: 20159 [Wood, plate 23], 20176 [Jackson & Tattershall], and 20181 [Wood, plate 32]; one unknown: 6683 [Jackson & Tattershall]; and one from os Lot 112, 20435 [Wood, plate 29]. Old series lots 75 and 112 were built at Saltney; I don't know where Lot 97 was built but it was presumably contemporary with Saltney's Lot 98, completed April 1874, just as Lot 76 is presumably contemporary with Saltney's Lot 75, completed December 1872. So I can only suppose that whichever works built Lot 97 was building wagons to the same pattern as Saltney, whereas the works building Lot 76 followed its own pattern - but which works? Paddington, Worcester, or Swindon? This is just the period when wagon construction was being concentrated at the new works at Swindon, Saltney's last new wagons being built in late 1874.

I presume inspection of the wagon register would resolve that question but of course not explain the difference in design.

References:

Tony Wood, Saltney Carriage and Wagon Works (The Wider View / Great Western Study Group, 2007)

B.L. Jackson and M.J. Tattershall, The Bridport Branch (OPC, 1976) photo of West Bay station, June 1900.

I rather like the engine on the left of your photo. 

The Midland had a handful, too. But far and away the largest fleet of glass wagons was that of the LNWR, which had over sixty - as it served Pilkingtons at St Helens. So in most parts of the country, if your station is receiving plate glass for the swanky new department store, it's most likely to arrive on LNWR wagons.

3 hours ago, Mikkel said:

Interesting to see the mileages, thanks Stephen.  

Yes, I've lost track of how we got onto that! However, one final point: The Midland's loco stock and train mileage increased much more than its rout mileage, giving that high route mile utilisation figure. What this obscures is the increase in capacity through quadrupling of tracks etc. that went on steadily through the 1880s and 1890s. A better measure to look at would be miles of running lines rather than miles of route.

The big difference between the LNWR and MR in the 1872 - 1900 period is that the LNWR was, with exceptions in the West Riding, largely complete, whereas the Midland was still vigorously expanding. The same could be said of the LSWR and certainly the MSLR / GCR. The SER increase is a bit spurious, one should compare the combined SER and LCDR total in 1872,  357, with the SECR 1900 total, 697, giving an increase of 340, 95%.

Some data, comparing 1870 and 1900, extracted from R.J. Essery & D. Jenkinson, An Illustrated Review of Midland Locomotives Vol. 3 (Wild Swan, 1988) Ch. 6:

Total route mileage:

                       1870                1900             growth

LNWR            1,507               1,937              28%  

GWR              1,387               2,627              89%

Midland          972                1,437              48%

Total train mileage (millions):

                       1870                1900             growth

LNWR             25.0                 49.2                97%  

GWR               16.1                 46.4              188%

Midland         17.9                 48.0              168%

Reported loco stock:

                       1870                1900             growth

LNWR            1,591               2,984               88%  

GWR                 929               1,988             114%

Midland           850               2,615             208%

Locomotives per million train miles:

                       1870                1900             

LNWR             63.6                 60.7

GWR               57.7                 42.8

Midland         47.5                 54.5

Train mileage (millions) per route mile:

                       1870                1900             growth

LNWR           0.017                0.025               47%  

GWR             0.012                0.018               50%

Midland       0.018                0.033               83%

The biggest mileage growth for both the GWR and the Midland was between 1870 and 1880, the GWR expanding by absorption of the B&E &c., the Midland by the opening of new lines, notably the S&C. It's interesting that only on the Midland was the growth in locomotive stock greater than the growth in train mileage: dividing one by the other we have: LNWR: 0.91; GWR: 0.60; Midland: 1.24. This is reflected in the increase in the number of locomotives per million train miles, though that utilisation measure remained better than the LNWR. In 1870 the Midland was desperately short of locomotives. By 1900 the LNWR and GWR were both working their systems 50% more intensively whereas the Midland was working its system 83% more intensively - no wonder Train Control was just around the corner!

The trade should not have been complaining about the Midland at least, since over 70% of the locomotives built for it in the period came from the trade.

On 17/10/2020 at 11:38, ChrisN said:

 

I note that the Cambrian is ignored.  They probably saw the Pre-grouping map produced by Hattons, (I think), that had the whole of the Cambrian absorbed by the GWR.    (*shakes head*)  

 

The Cambrian had over 100 locomotives. 

The criterion is 100 locomotives in 1872. Thus not only the Cambrian, but the Glasgow & South Western, Highland, and Furness are excluded, along with the Hull & Barnsley and Midland & Great Northern, neither of which existed in 1872. All over or very nearly at the 100 locomotive mark by 1900.