GWR Coal Drops & loading/unloading of coal in towns and goods yards

[Aire Head]

2 hours ago, KeithMacdonald said:

different kinds of coal

 

An important thing to learn when modelling mineral traffic as it can be very surprising especially the effects it can have on operations. It may seem odd to most people to have loaded mineral trains working in opposite directions along the same piece of line but it was far from uncommon in the past due to the different grades of coal and where they occured geographically.

[The Johnster]

Exactly; it's not just black rocks, you know!  Different pits and even different seams at the same pit could produce coal of widely differing friability, sulpher content, and calorific value, and industrial customers such as steelworks, gasworks and so on ordered mixes of coal of specific qualities in order to burn them at the greatest possible efficiency. 

 

One might even see loaded coal wagons being delivered to a colliery, if there was a landsale yard there and the coal produced at the colliery was not suitable for domestic use.  After the industry was nationalised in 1947, employees were entitled to 'concession coal' as part of their renumeration, and a big pit might employ several thousand men.  If it did not produce house coal, and the men were expected to collect their concession from the landsale yard, this inward loaded traffic could be quite considerable!

[Fat Controller]

12 hours ago, Aire Head said:

 

An important thing to learn when modelling mineral traffic as it can be very surprising especially the effects it can have on operations. It may seem odd to most people to have loaded mineral trains working in opposite directions along the same piece of line but it was far from uncommon in the past due to the different grades of coal and where they occured geographically.

The most extreme example, which lasted until the Miners' Strike of 1984, were of block trains of MGR hoppers which worked as far as the cement works at Northfleet, and the paper mills at Ridham Dock. Rather than heading North empty, they worked to one of the Kent pits, and picked up a return load of high-grade coking coal, which they took to one of the coking plants in the Chesterfield/ Rotherham area.

[Aire Head]

34 minutes ago, Fat Controller said:

The most extreme example, which lasted until the Miners' Strike of 1984, were of block trains of MGR hoppers which worked as far as the cement works at Northfleet, and the paper mills at Ridham Dock. Rather than heading North empty, they worked to one of the Kent pits, and picked up a return load of high-grade coking coal, which they took to one of the coking plants in the Chesterfield/ Rotherham area.

 

I remember watching a Fred Dibnah program a while back where he said he never understood why loaded coal trains went to and from Lancashire and Yorkshire. Simply put it was because Lancashire coal had a higher percentage of volatiles contained within.

[Morello Cherry]

18 hours ago, The Stationmaster said:

As already explained coal handled in local yards basically need no more than some blokes with shovels plus bags  to fill, and scales to weigh it.  Often done on the back of a lorry if the coal was going to be delivered soon after taking it out of the wagon.

 

BR started to move seriously towards closure of small yards and handling domestic coal at concentration depots in the 1960s but some places - witness BF - hung on for years mainly because they lacked convenient road access to a concentration depot.  Generally, as again previously noted. very often the last freight traffic to disappear from many stations, especially on branch lines - was coal but the sheer cost of moving by rail to an otherwise unused branch line or station yard made it grossly uneconomic to deal with. 

 

The general deal with coal merchants was that if they had handled coal there when a yard was open for receipt of coal by rail they were allowed to rent space after the station had closed for handling freight traffic.  if they used any additional space that was subject to Excess Space charges and they were all regularly monitored.  Sometimes completely new merchants would appear renting space in a disused goods yard - it happened at both the intermediate stations on our local branch line where one of those stations hadn't seen any coal traffic for years.  After the track was lifted a coal merchant moved in renting much of the land and building some very solidly constructed timber pens to hold his stock of coal - he simply went out of business when the market vanished (as it did for most domestic coal merchants).

 

Merchants who stayed on in their old space were required, as part of their rental agreement, to get all of their coal through a concentration depot and were subject to fines if they obtained coal from any other source.  On our regular trips around the area I worked in during the mid 1970s we kept an eye out for - usually bulk load - lorries carrying coal and we caught several merchants playing that game.  But it was far more difficult to catch them out on lines like the former S&DJt where there were no longer any railway staff, such as Signalmen or station staff, about.

 

In some cases former, traditional, coal yards with little or no mechanical handling kit were re-christened as concentration depots and remained as such until traffic began to decline - Merthyr was a good example of this.  The main reason coal traffic vanished had little to do with the railway and was really a consequence of changes in how people heated their homes or looked fora cleaner fuel that was more convenient. 

 

I read recently a book about continuity and change in farming that you could have taken a farm worker from the 1830s and dropped him into a 1930s farm and he would find very little different from 100 years previously, but that you could drop him into a farm in the 1970s and there would be very little that he would recognise. It is fascinating to me that in an age of HSTs, APTs, MGRs, block trains and so on and so forth, that there were operations like BF in the 1970s and 1980s that were so little changed from the 1870s and 1880s. The guys with the barrows at Charlbury would recognise the scene at BF. The biggest difference is no stationmaster on hand to make sure things are being done by the book.

 

It perhaps says a lot about how isolated some places were for such operations to continue for so long.