Compound2632

I don't think any harder; there's every bit as much variation between companies in 4 and 6-wheeled carriages as there is in bogie carriages, if not more.

Not sure you need lamp-irons on the close coupled end.

Compare https://www.warwickshirerailways.com/lms/lnwr_oldmil1445.htm.

Easier and quicker than I thought. Grant of 1974: "on a Chief Argent a representation of the Steam Engine "Locomotion" and a Tender proper." "Proper" is a technical word in heraldry meaning in its natural colour - like "eigen" in eigenfunction, for the quantum mechanics in the audience. I note the borough's motto: optima petamus "let us seek the best". Which they are doing, it would appear, having given up on floreat industria "may industry flourish".

I've never done the Three Peaks myself (and never will) but take vicarious satisfaction in my sons having done it three years ago. I've been up Ingleborough twice, from the Ingleton-Hawes road, but a long time ago!

The one in the Darlington coat of arms is clearly intended to be Locomotion No. 1 (I haven't looked up the blazon), built at R. Stephenson & Co.'s Newcastle factory. Shildon AFC display Timothy Hackworth's Royal George. Was that built in Shildon?

I'm sorry, I was over-hasty; insufficiently entish. I simply have an abhorrence of bold (and capitalised) assertion presented as fact. The onus is on those who make such assertions to demonstrate that they are factually correct.

From theory to practice. I've made myself a frame for making mineral loads: It's made from 0.060" (1.5 mm) Plastikard and is designed to make loads from 55 mm to 62 mm long (covering everything from Slater's Midland coke wagons to 16'0" over headstocks wagons such as Coopercraft GWR opens) and from a minimum width of 25.5 mm (coke wagons again) to at least 30 mm. It is 5 mm deep to the top of the ledges with another 1.5 mm for levering out anything that gets accidentally glued in place. It's in two L-shaped halves, one fixed, the other held in place by a rubber band: Also in that photo is an example of a card load base cut to size and painted with black acrylic. After some experimentation and clearing up of mess, I've gone for the idea of clingfilm between the base and the frame. (Apologies, I haven't looked back to check who suggested that.) Now I've just got to work on my ballasting technique: For this one, with the coarse ballast, I've got an extra card former in the bottom of the well so that the depth from the top of the former the load is being glued to to the lip of the frame is reduced to 2 mm. Experiments continue. Makes you see why folk prefer modelling vans!

Three pithily-stated opinions!

Date matters here, particularly for the Midland, which was van-poor in the 19th century - about 1.7% of stock in 1894. There was a great bust of van-building around the turn of the century, settling down to a steady steam thereafter, with the result that vans had risen to over 8% of stock by 1905 and 10% by 1921 - this trend continuing throughout the grouping and into BR days. As to the proportion of opens in mineral traffic, there are two lines of argument: 1. High-sided opens were built to replace bought up PO wagons. There were nearly 64,000 of the later, with 62,000 D299, 9,000 D 351, and another 5,000 or so of other mineral diagrams by c. 1902, 76,000 in total. Therefore 12,000 were not required for mineral traffic. This argument is weak on two fronts: firstly, the growth in mineral traffic throughout the period; secondly, the number of new PO wagons - 40,000 registered by the Midland by 1903, though, given the number of wagon building firms on the Midland system, not necessarily all destined to run over Midland routes. 2. Comparison with the LNWR and GWR, which had about 82,000 and 88,000 wagons respectively at the end of 1921 (of which around 14,000 vans in both cases). These companies made much greater reliance on PO mineral wagons, the LNWR having around 7,000 mineral wagons and the GWR essentially none (in both case, excluding loco coal wagons, which are not counted separately in the Midland totals - around 3,000 in the LNWR case). Taking the LNWR as comparable in size, extent, traffic, and wealth to the Midland, we could assume that its total of 81,000 goods (non-mineral) wagons was about the same as the number of wagons the Midland had in non-mineral traffic, leaving 41,000 Midland wagons in mineral traffic, at the end of 1921. Extrapolating back to c. 1902, that suggests that about half of the D299s were in mineral traffic (along with the 14,000-odd other wagons to mineral diagrams). One can look for photos of goods (not mineral) trains and also study accident reports. These show the trend one would expect, from goods trains being composed mostly of low-sided wagon (D305 and its antecedents) in the early 1880s to a higher proportion of vans in the 19th century. But be aware that vans were often concentrated in certain types of train - the Manchester-London express goods train that came to grief at Sharnbrook in 1909 included just three opens out of 24 vehicles; 18 of those vehicles had the automatic vacuum brake, all of them vans. I would say that 20% is probably too high a proportion in an ordinary goods train but it does depend on date and locality. I'm writing an article on this whole topic for the Midland Railway Society Journal - should appear in the Summer issue this year. NB. I've lazily used the word "van" to cover all types of vehicles with roofs except livestock vehicles - ordinary covered goods wagons together with vehicles for specialised traffics such as meat, fruit, bananas, road vehicles, and gunpowder - but excluding passenger rated stock - horseboxes, fish, fruit & milk vans etc.

More unseen van spotting and still thinking about refrigerated meat vans, I was reminded by a post of @Florence Locomotive Works's of an official photo of Lawley Street goods station dated 11 July 1911. This vantastic view is a crop from an enlargement on the Warwickshire Railways website: The refrigerated meat van next to the Great Northern van is D372, of which 100 were built to Lot 372 of 1896; 50 were fitted with AVB through pipe, this is one of them. It has acquired oil axleboxes, having been built with Ellis 10A grease boxes, according to the official photo [R.J. Essery, Midland Wagons Vol. 1 (OPC, 1980) Plate 151]. The van to the left, with the same style of bodywork (including narrow doorway, only 3'6" vs. 4'9" on later vehicles) but passenger running gear (larger wheels, J hangers to the springs, and clasp brakes) must be D374, of which 210 were built to Lots 444 and 480, of 1898 and 1900. I've not come across a photo of one of these before. Both appear to have the horizontally-boarded panel top left of the bodyside, as seen on the official photo of a D395 van of 1910 [ibid, Plate 218; MRSC Item No. 64129]. In that photo, the boards appear to be screwed or nailed in place, so it can't be a hatch. In the Lawley Street photo, there is what appears to be a label on the D372 van, so perhaps that is the purpose of this feature. The Great Northern van appears to be an 18 ft vehicle with clasp brakes (i.e. AVB) and footboards to the doors, which are cupboard rather than sliding, and no roof ventilators. I can't find an exact match for this [P. Tatlow, LNER Wagons Vol. 1 (Wild Swan, 2005) pp. 44-46]. In the row behind, there's a D357 14'11" covered goods wagon on the left. This has been given a brake cross-shaft and left-facing lever on the side opposite the brakes. Next to this is a cupboard-door van. The only such were the tariff vans D382, 250 built to Lot 433 of 1898, and the banana vans D365, 200 built to Lot 608 of 1905 and 25 with this style of door to Lot 649 of 1906. (The road vans built for the S&DJR in 1895 originated this style.) The lack of roof ventilators suggests it's a tariff van. The style of lettering - recently freshened up, by the look of it - differs from that illustrated in Midland Wagons [Plates 203 and 204]. The latter show around 9" M.R in the left-most panel of the framing; here we see probably 12" M in the same position, the R being in the next panel along, by comparison with a photo of a similarly-lettered sliding-door banana van built in 1910 [ibid, Plate 201; MRSC Item No. 64125]. Behind the Great Northern van, there's a standard D362 8 ton/D363 10 ton covered goods wagon demonstrating that Midland wagons were light grey when they came out of the paint shop! Finally, in the third row back, the van half into the goods shed has louvres under the eaves but not on the lower bodyside and lacks roof ventilators, indicating that it is a D378 covered fruit van, of which 100 were built to Lot 370 of 1896. An interesting selection of vans, demonstrating that the comparatively rare (compared to the tens of thousands of high-sided and low-sided opens) can be common enough if one looks in the right place.

As I said, I was dreaming on! Unpleasant business, flying. I've not flown for over five years and haven't missed the experience. Not that rail travel is that much better these days.

Fell to fake news.

I think that was his point. I will. The past year has demonstrated that business travel is a lot less necessary than self-indulgent executives had supposed. And given that we now have control over our own glorious country, surely the idea of holidaying in it will win out over going to those foreign parts we've got rid of?

Yes, indeed, since wagon turntables tend to be a mark of early construction. Thinking of Midland examples, there are the ones at wayside stations on the Bristol & Gloucester, presumably kept on conversion of gauge because of the rather cramped arrangement of the goods yards, and at London coal depots - West Kensington for example.

! Derek, I hope you haven't choked on that.

Yes but I find a very great deal of supposition is required! Certainly more than that they're Caledonian.

But this is predicated on low-cost short-haul flights having a long-term future which is very much in doubt once the true environmental costs are factored in, as they will increasingly be.

Nicely observed there. I know you've moved on for the time being but I'll just point out that those Curzon Street wagon turntables are LNWR not Midland. The LNWR was very heavily into such things, combined with capstan shunting, whereas they were rather rarer on the Midland - though not unknown. The three main Midland goods stations in Birmingham, Lawley Street, Camp Hill, and Central, did not have them.

Has a certain steampunkish charm!

Not so! It has been observed that Hornby's attempt at applying LNWR livery has come out looking distinctly Caledonianish!

Historically, that would seem not to be the case for travel to Ulster, else why would the Midland have run sleeping cars St Pancras - Stranraer? Setting aside the Midland having bought the Belfast & Northern Counties, the route was evidently competitive against the North Western to Holyhead and the Great Northern on to Belfast.

On one of my first trips through the Channel Tunnel, a little boy sitting on the other side of the carriage to me was disappointed at how dark it was out of the window, up to the moment he became convinced he'd seen a fish.

Walking up Ingleborough backwards...

I've had a look through the available GNoSR accident reports - most are there for the 1880s but not after that. Again, a good few mixed trains, marshalled the same way as those HR ones with the carriages at the rear. The accidents are spread around the GNoSR network. I was quite surprised that for such a small line, virtually all the wagons mentioned were from the home company - I came across just one CR and one NBR wagon; no HR ones. Coal was being conveyed in GNoSR wagons, so I suppose this was coming in to Aberdeen by sea. Maj. Marindin's report on the accident at Kintore on 11 September 1888 includes a table giving details of the loads, destinations, and points of origin of all the wagons in one portion of the train. Of these twelve, eight were carrying coal, including one NBR wagon - the only one not originating from Waterloo. The remainder were one each of lime, grain, casks of oil, and "general".