Freight Operations - Private Owner Vans and Tank Wagons
Other PO stock included limited numbers of privately owned vans,
carrying commodities such as cement, salt and tinplate.
Cement is
quite nasty stuff so the railways were reluctant to carry it in their own
wagons. There were therefore quite a number of PO cement vans, the 'Iron Mink'
type van being a favourite for this traffic but there were also a number of
wooden bodied types used. During the summer months, when most building work
takes place, one of these PO vans parked on a siding near a building job would
be a not uncommon sight, with up to half a dozen if it was a major construction
in progress. If you make a hash of the livery on a PO cement van simply splash
lots of white about, they were often very heavily stained with cement dust,
which has a strong bleaching action. I believe the last of the iron mink cement
vans were retired in the 1950's, but at about this time Blue Circle purchased
some new longer wheelbase plywood bodied vans for their traffic.
There
was a successful British Railways container system the `L' type container, used
for cement traffic (see Fig ___). These containers were unloaded onto road
vehicles in the goods yard for delivery to the site. The Graham Farish Presflo
and Lima Prestwin cement wagons can serve for post 1960's bulk cement
deliveries to a local station goods yard. They are not actually PO wagons
although they wee often painted in cement company colours. The presflo wagons
were originally designed to be unloaded into road lorries (themselves fitted
with a 'pressflo' body) in goods yards for delivery to the mixing site. The
unloading was accomplished using heavy, dark grey, reinforced rubber flexible
hoses about four inches in diameter. Coiled-wire guitar Bottom E strings
painted dark grey would serve for these hoses. The compressor used to provide
the air for the system was a fairly standard type, usually a two-wheeled
trailer type machine, and these can be knocked up from scrap. The sketch below shows the early BR owned lorries used for this traffic and a later PO lorry with a distinctive tapering back-end to the silo. I believe lorries of this general outline, but some much larger and running on eight wheels, continued in use into the 1970s (possibly the 1980s)
Fig ___ Cement lorries
Following the closure of the local goods yards in the late 1960's a `ready
mixed concrete' plant with its own siding would be a more probable destination,
taking deliveries of cement powder, sand and gravel. This option is further
discussed in the section on lineside industrial premises.
Salt was
shipped in PO wagons and vans of various designs. Salt has to be kept dry and
up to the 1960's most was shipped in cloth bags. Most salt was shipped in vans
or in comparatively high sided wagons fitted with a partial solid roof and a
canvass cover over the central opening. In Cheshire quite long rakes of salt
wagons would be seen but in the rest of the country one or two salt wagons in a
rake would be the norm. Companies which traded in 'dry salteries' offered a
number of types of salt and often other materials such as saltpetre, soda
crystals and alum which might be transported in their own wagons (these
companies are discussed in Volume 2 under Salt).
Tinplate is steel
coated with tin, which has a better corrosion resistance, 'tin cans' are
actually made of tin plated steel. To differentiate between plated steel and
solid tin (one use for which is in electrical condenser coils) the latter is
often called 'block tin'. Model railway multi-strand layout wire is usually
called 'tinned copper wire', this is because the individual strands of copper
have to be tin-plated if the wire is to be wrapped in rubber or they will
corrode. The tinplate vans would have restricted workings, mainly on fixed runs
between the factory (in South Wales) and either a private siding at the works
using the stuff or the local goods yard for road delivery. These van featured
some interesting designs some had peaked roofs and unusual side doors were
common, the sketch below shows a fairly conventional type that could be easily
made up using a Peco 'ventilated van' kit (the Peco van with vertically planked
sides).
Fig___ Tinplate vans
PO Tank Wagons
A lot of tank wagons were privately owned
and tank wagons for chemicals and liquid fuels were usually moved in small
numbers handled by regular goods trains. During the second world war there were
block movements of oil and petrol tank wagons for military use but only in the
1960's did the block working become the norm for petroleum tankers. The Graham
Farish square tank wagon is an old design often used by Private Owners for
carrying coal tar from gas works but also used for oil and chemical traffic.
Another interesting tank design is the hutched tank wagon mentioned in the
section on Rolling Stock Development -Tanks.
Breweries made some use
of tanks, both standard railway tank wagons and the de-mountable kind. These
would run between breweries and distribution centres and would be unlikely on a
branch line. They also owned some PO vans for delivering beer barrels, but most
of this traffic was carried in railway company stock, usually redundant cattle
wagons. Illustrations of some beer carrying vans and tank wagons will be found
in the section on rolling stock design.
Milk tank wagons were hybrid
vehicles with a privately owned tank on a railway company chassis, the
operational used of the milk tanks has been discussed earlier in the section on
Non Passenger Coaching Stock Operations - Milk. Dapol has released a handy six wheeled milk tank wagon in a number of liveries, see under that company entry in the section on Available Models.