UK Coal Traffic
Hello HotShotJimmy
Some information courtesy of Bill Hudson and his work on UK private owner wagons. This is also reproduced on my old "Keeping the Balance" thread in prototype talk.
Bill Hudson 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;
1. Central selling,
2. Control of sales
3. 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,
1. Factors.
2. Merchants.
3. 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,
1. Landsale.
2. Industrial
3. 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 to 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.)
While the industry was nationalised in 1947 and the organisation evolved in to Areas and Districts, the processes of sale and distribution did not change overnight. Railway nationalisation occurred in 1948 and British Railways had to work with the National Coal Board since it was the railways largest customer by some margin.
What you need to do for your route is to determine who was producing coal, where were they producing it at, who was buying coal and what was the means by which they secured it. Domestic and industrial coal consumption was considerable post-WWII, especially during the winter months. Even post-WWII there was still coastal shipment from ports such as Goole, Hull and Immingham, even if not on the scale of its peak pre-WWI. You should consider that coal is not a uniform commodity. It has grades in size and varies in its qualities. Some is suitable for producing coal gas, usually the same type which is suitable for producing coking coal. Coking coal is in demand for iron and steel production. Some coal is suitable for furnaces, of which power generation through steam production is one use. In some cases customers could fill their needs locally and in others they had to go some distance to do so. London is a case of a large city which did not have its own sources of coal close by but some users in coal-producing areas did not have a local source of coal suitable for their purposes either. This is why an old photograph of Stella Gill sidings in the North East Coalfield has Private Owner wagons from Lancashire and Scotland in the sidings.
