Keeping The Balance - 1974 Articles by D. Rowland

Bill Hudson - Private Owner Wagons

I considered starting a new thread on information from Bill Hudson's 1976 books on Private owner wagons but decided that it might be better here given that it has a relevance to modellers "keeping the balance". While Bill produced the books for recording Private Owner wagon information his overview made it clear that by far the largest proportion of PO wagons was concerned with coal traffic. Bill also gave a summary of the way UK coal traffic was handled prior to nationalisation of the coal industry in 1947 (a year before the nationalisation of the railways). the following is a summary of Bill's work.

In 1918 a census reported 626,323 PO wagons were registered to run on the railway (not included in that figure would have been wagons not registered for use on the railway but kept within private railway systems for internal use on those systems). 530,976 (84.79%) of those PO wagons were coal wagons! By 1938 there were 450,000 PO coal wagons (the 20s and 30s were difficult decades for companies). In 1938 72% were colliery owned, 22% owned by distributors and the remainder by statutory undertakings etc.

The mining industry organisation in the wake of the 1930 Coal Mines Act influenced the use of PO wagons. between 1930 and 1946 sales were controlled through seventeen district selling schemes. There were three versions; central selling, control of sales and group selling. The Central Council of Coal Owners co-ordinated the schemes.

Central Selling: - Collieries sold all their coal to a District Executive Board who sold on the coal as a principal and shared profits/losses between the member collieries in proportion to their annual supply tonnage. The Lancashire Associated Collieries scheme was the biggest central selling scheme.

Control of Sales: - Twelve districts adopted control of sale schemes. A colliery sold its coal to its own customers controlled by a sales committee in a district which prescribed the tonnage, destination and minimum price for the coal.

Group Selling: - Adopted by the Midland District (South Yorkshire, West Yorkshire, Derbyshire, Nottinghamshire and Leicestershire coalfields). The collieries formed in to groups, each represented by a Colliery Agent responsible to the district executive board and who controlled sales by the group.

The distributive side was organised in to three groups, Factors, Merchants and Dealers.

Factors: - Bulk buying wholesalers who did not break bulk when selling on to consumers and retail merchants. Generally paper transactions with the coal only handled when at least a full wagonload could be taken. for example at a large country house or hospital.

Merchants: - Retailers who bought from Factors or directly from Collieries for the purposes of selling to the public or breaking the bulk to sell to Dealers. The merchants took the coal in to their posession.

Dealers: - Individuals or Businesses which bought from Merchants, generally in loads less than a full wagonload. Usually they did not possess siding accomodation or offices devoted entirely to the sale of coal.

There were three classes of coal, Landsale, Industrial and Coastal.

Landsale: - Sold at the colliery to the Factors and Merchants.

Industrial: - Sold in bulk to industry and other public bodies.

Coastal: - Sent to the ports for export, coastal transport or for use by steamship companies. To prevent incurring demurrage (the costs paid to the shipowner for not having coal or coke ready to ship when the shipowner presents the ship as ready to load - time is money) the collieries, railway companies and docks agreed to having siding accomodation at the docks. Seventy ports were associated with shipping coal, mainly in the North East, Humberside and South Wales.

Coal and coke was difficult to store. Piles exceeding 11ft in height carried a a risk of spontaneous combustion. The industry depended on efficient transport, with a smooth and continuous flow. If that broke down then production could be halted and customers with limited storage facilities could be deprived of supplies.

Siding accomodation at the collieries was determined on the number of empty and loaded wagons required at the pithead. The actual number of roads beneath screens and loading plants depended on the number of grades demanded by the market.

Wagon ownership.

Wagons owned by the colliery were almost exclusively concerned with moving coal to customers and then returning empty to the colliery. If a colliery could not move all its coal in its own wagons then it could hire from the railway company for one particular journey. The North Eastern Railway preferred to encourage collieries to do this, keeping their rates low to encourage it. The N.E.R. preferred Hopper wagons and the company's staithes were predominantly of a type configured to handle coal hopper wagons rather than end tipping wagons or side tipping wagons. Some collieries preferred to hire in wagons from the wagon manufacturers (Roberts was one such manufacturer and hirer, even advertising itself as such on some of its wagons).

Wagons owned by Factors and Merchants were sent to the colliery of their choice, depending on the grade they required, and sent on to the customer's destination. This explains the wide ranges of some PO wagons.

Despatch.

Prior to WWII the colliery typically handed over to the railway company 40 or 50 loaded wagons in one train labelled for various destinations. These would be taken to the nearest marshalling yard, together with wagons from other collieries in the area, and shunted for directional working. For example, wagons from Barnsley area, having access to both the Midland Railway and Hull and Barnsley Railway, would be taken to Carlton for primary sorting. From there southbound traffic was taken to Toton for combination with Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire coal wagons bound for London and the Midlands.

When pooling took place in 1940 during WWII it became the responsibility of the railway companies to provide sufficient wagons. Any wagons in running order could be used and then rarely returned to their originating colliery. (This was not the entire story though, since in the LNER's NE Area the long predominance of NER/LNER Hopper wagons running to infrastructure built to accomodate hopper unloading meant that there was effort expended to ensure that only wagons suited to bottom discharge found themselves at destinations which could only handle that type of wagon.)

Very informative Frank.

Thanks Annie. The website for the South Pelaw Junction model railway has a photograph from the collection at Beamish Museum capturing two snowploughs at the junction during the 1930s. What it also captures is a rake of private owner coal wagons in the eastern fan of sidings at Stella Gill. They include a wagon belonging to "The Bestwood Coal and Iron Co. Ltd. Nr, Nottingham" as well as a wagon carrying S C in large letters and another lettered POLMAISE. A fourth wagon is indistinct, but the caption reports it as SUTTON HEATH COLLIERY. Polmaise Collieries were located to the east of Stirling at a place called Fallin and Sutton Heath Colliery is at St, Helens in what was then Lancashire. So, wagons from coal mining areas in Lancashire, Nottingham and Central Scotland at exchange sidings in the County Durham coalfield. I believe that either town gas production or coking coal was to do with their presence. Coal from the County Durham coalfield was well suited for processing in to coking coal, for steel production and for smokeless fuels and also in demand by gasworks for producing town gas.

http://southpelawjunction.co.uk/wp/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/68294.jpg

After reading elsewhere about the randomness of freight stock in the steam era UK I have decided to give this thread a bump.

I am of the opinion that Don Rowland did some sterling work in 1974 and while modellers may not have been able to approach the number of vehicles to meet the requirements of his notional location with a shed having a stable of 10 locos Trainz does give the modeller the chance to build something that is close to it.

On reading the latest issue of Model Railway Journal I have learned that Don Rowland, the author of the "Keeping The Balance" articles passed away in August 2021, aged 91.
Here's to dry rails and a clear line in the hereafter Don.

With KotangaGirl uploading some Private Owner Coal Wagons I have decided to give this a bump. Nearly a year has passed. Post #21 above has some very pertinent information about coal traffic in Britain during the steam era.

Some time has passed since I added to this thread. However, I will bump it after laying track on a route in the vicinity of Tyne Dock on the Pontop & South Shields Branch in NE England.
That portion of the route is along the original Stanhope & Tyne route built in the 1830s and which went bankrupt by 1841 due to the cost of paying the wayleaves.
They were a way of avoiding the expense of an Act of Parliament when it came to building a line, particularly a coal line by paying landowners rent, through wayleaves to use their land.
As anyone who has studied waggonways in NE England can see, waggonways came and went with some frequency.
Sometimes they came back again, using part of the first route for another colliery and then, after that was worked out, went again.
Renting, rather than buying the land was one way of attempting to reduce capital costs, especially when the expense of an Act of Parliament was considered.
However, when landowners discovered the route proposed to lay the S&T to South Shields some at the eastern end near the Tyne held out for exorbitant rates, especially when they knew agreements reached elsewhere on the route had effectively set it in stone by the time the S&T agents arrived in the district.

In any event, by the time 70 years had elapsed, the railway landscape along the former S&T down in the vicinity of Tyne Dock was very, very different to the early days.

Five sidings, three of which were long were present close west of the line south of Harton Junction.
I loaded up the sidings with NER 10.5T coal hoppers and they swallowed 241of them.
Their location and the access to them from the south at Green Lane Junction tends to make me think that they were for storage rather than train marshalling.
Coal wagons not required during the summer colliery holidays had to be put somewhere since they were not being hauled around the network with coal for the docks or industry.

Definitely worth a bump Frank. There's a lot of useful information that you've gathered together here.

Two of the sidings in that group to the east of the South Shields branch tunnel from Jarrow were shorter, diverting from a turnout on the easternmost siding.
While the two sidings helped fill the space between the top of the eastern embankment of the tunnel and the Pontop & South Shields branch running lines between Green Lane Junction and Harton Junction the turnout halfway down that siding meant that the total capacity of 46 (28+18) was actually less than the single long siding would have provided without the divide (65).
The only way to use the "full" capacity of the sidings would be to fill siding No.4 with 28 hoppers and then fill the whole length of sidIng 5 right the way to the entry point, including the turnout, with 65, essentially "locking" those 28 hoppers on No. 4 behind the hoppers on No.5.

The use, as well as custom and habit of operating those sidings is lost to us, since the railwaymen shunters at Tyne Dock were likely never interviewed about their working lives "on the dock". An exception to this in the mid-80s was a BBC Look North TV program "Coast to Coast" (Slow Train to Riccarton 1986) talking with former railwaymen on the Border Counties line in Northumberland, but even that was more about events they remembered from the 1940s and 1950s, rather than how the stations or lines were worked. It is available on You Tube from a different age of local TV programming.

The credits thanked contributions by Mrs K. Wallace, Bill Lynn, Elizabeth Scott, Marshall Shaw, Neville Stead and Ernie Burns, none of whom are likely to be with us now. Commentary was by Alan Wood.

The North Eastern Railway Association (NERA) had a trio of articles in 1982 by a contributor, J.B. Dawson who, as a teenager, lived at Eastgate station on the Weardale branch since his father was the Station Master between 1905 and 1932. While not strictly a LNER employee, at the age of 70 he recalled the way the station operated half a century before the articles were written. "My earliest recollections go back to the latter years of The Great War, when we had German prisoners of war from a nearby camp at work on the station unloading bread and foodstuffs from a perishables van attached to the passenger train on to a large sheet laid on the platform." I don't expect that I will see that displayed on a screenshot any time soon.

"These sidings consisted virtually of one long line with access to the main line at a midway point trailing in the down direction. the main siding held 18 normal wagons, and there was another serving the cattle dock and held seven wagons, giving a total standage of twenty-five wagons. if more wagons arrived, as often happened, the only place for them was to leave them on the train. An adequate warehouse and bench, with hand crane was provided, and also a weighbridge capaable of weighing a two-wheeled cart, later replaced to weigh a small motor lorry or a horse and cart."

The phrase normal wagon likely means the open goods wagon with 5 planks of about 8 - 10 Tons capacity. We can easily forget that this was the normal standard of general goods transportation pre-WWII, often beneath a canvas "sheet" (tarpaulin) and not the "1950s" BR seeming ubiquity of the covered van. The railway's management of their sheets was immense, involving manufacture, assignment, location tracking, invoicing, repairs and disposal. Unsurprisingly, some left the works and were never heard of again. Given that this even happened to wagons from time to time (imagine!) it is no great leap to realise that in a large organisation, sometimes things "fell off the back of a lorry, or wagon, (or van for that matter). Sometimes even the whole wagon itself!

There is a nugget of information about the station in the quote from J.B. Dawson's article. Even in the 1920s/30s a small country wayside station with a mere 2 sidings could receive on one train more than the 25 wagon capacity of the station. Eastgate, Dawson recalled, had a normal daily requirement for ten open wagons in which to load gannister, with much of it bound for Sheffield for use in the steel industry. On at least one occasion, Eastgate had 80 empty wagons stored in sidings about two miles away, which may well have been the loop on the branch at the south end of the Heights Quarry incline, to the west of Eastgate station. In his recollections, Dawson wrote that repeated requests for additional siding space and a high loading dock failed to be acted on. Well, the latter request was acted on at some point after he left Eastgate since photographs of Eastgate post-WWII show that the cattle dock had been converted into a raised loading dock so that stone could be tipped into open wagons. In Dawson's time stone had to be manhandled in to the wagons, a practise which must have been a strain on the available labour during WWII.

"There were no coal cells, the three or four wagon spaces at the buffer end of the main siding being used to stand wagons of coal in connection with the Station-master's coal sale, which was an important part of most Stationmaster's livelihood. Usually three or four grades of household coal were available, mostly delivered in colliery-owned side-door wagons, which were allowed to stand until the contents had been sold." So, the "effective" capacity of the station sidings was actually 21 wagons, since the Stationmaster was priviliged to reserve 4 for his coal business. The four grades of coal may have come from one colliery (which would mean four tracks at the colliery, (screens) able to deliver one grade per screen, or several different collieries. I do not know if one of those household grades was coke - or whether that is an evolution of the late 1940s. As I child at one point I lived in a 1940s built pre-fab bungalow which had a coke fire in the living room. Imagine today if a company let you keep a wagon in your yard until it was unloaded! Not at once, but over days (or weeks).

There is another nugget, a small village such as Eastgate in rural Weardale, with stations nearby at St John's Chapel, Wearhead, Westage and even Stanhope itself, could justify the Stationmaster having up to 40 Tons of coal in the siding for him to sell. I am quite fascinated about how the Stationmaster actually funded this business as significant sums of cash must have been involved. Security may not have been an issue. Today, I can imagine leaving 40 Tons of coal in a yard overnight unguarded would be a recipe for its magical disappearance. How times have changed.

The NERA e-booklet "Mortimer's Turnips" revealed something of the way Stationmasters coal landsale worked. "Stationmasters were authorised to act as agents for colliery owners by selling coal to retail customers. They received al allowance of up to 5% by weight of the coal from the colliery for doing so."

There were rules though, Stationmaster Mortimer was admonished for being discovered ordering coal directly from colliery agents and not going through the District Minerals office in York, which N.E.R. regulations required. In 1897 and 1898, Mortimer sold 200 Tons of coal for each year and the writer calculated that would have added 12% to his salary of 25 shillings per week (£30k p.a. in current money) - in other words it was worth an average of 3 shillings per week to him (£3.6k p.a. in current money). All transactions had to be recorded and along with weights were subject to checking by company inspectors while doing their rounds. It was against company rules for Stationmasters to trade on their own account, though some did (Mortimer included) but the company would mostly turn a blind eye unless it actually cost them money.