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You are here: Home > Forum > Miscellaneous > The real thing (anything else rail-oriented) > Freight

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Freight 26/01/2011 at 22:42 #2297
UK RailFan
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17 posts 		hi will someone please enlighten me on the old style of freight handling i.e. common carriers, wagonloads, freight marshalling and rates. Its been an interest of mine but cant find out much about it. I thought someone on here must know a fair bit....

thank you,
Andrew
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Freight 26/01/2011 at 22:42 #13345
UK RailFan
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17 posts 		hi will someone please enlighten me on the old style of freight handling i.e. common carriers, wagonloads, freight marshalling and rates. Its been an interest of mine but cant find out much about it. I thought someone on here must know a fair bit....

thank you,
Andrew
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Freight 27/01/2011 at 17:32 #13348
kbarber
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1712 posts 		Bit busy until tomorrow afternoon, should be able to give some bits & pieces then; my personal experience is early 1980s (air-braked wagonload service but it developed out of the old wagonload services) but I saw & have heard some bits about earlier practices. Any specific questions you have would be welcome too, give me some starting points.
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Freight 28/01/2011 at 17:30 #13354
UK RailFan
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17 posts 		hi k barber thanks for your reply. Im just curious to know about common carrier arrangements (i.e. what they were), marshalling of freight wagons at yards, loading goods onto wagons and the rates the railway charged for carrying goods. if you could enlighten me that would be great.

yours,
Andrew
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Freight 30/01/2011 at 07:07 #13359
kbarber
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1712 posts 		OK Andrew here goes (apologies for not getting to this on Friday).

Most of my knowledge is on the operating side so anything I say will be biased in that direction. I certainly don't know what the charges were for carrying freight, for instance, nor what they are today.

AIUI "Common Carrier" is a legal definition. A common carrier is required to accept & carry any freight that is requested. Absolutely any. Without exception. In the case of the railways the charges were regulated by Parliament, which had enormous consequences from the end of the 1920s onwards as road transport grew. An awful lot of ex-servicemen purchased ex-army lorries after WWI and set themselves up as road hauliers; they were unregulate (by & large) and therefore able to choose what traffic they would carry and how much to charge for it. Unsurprisingly they focused on high-value stuff, often relatively lightweight and easily handled without special facilities - the stuff that had previously cross-subsidised the (more expensive to handle) stuff the railway was left with. Unable to raise rates, the railway was left operating a loss-making service by parliamentary order but without receiving any compensation for doing so. I think the common-carrier status was finally withdrawn in the 1960s but it took over a decade for the legacy to be overcome.

The wagons used were usually crude in the extreme: a box on 4 wheels, minimal springing, 3-link couplings & handbrakes. Once road competition became established the railway companies had little spare money to upgrade theirs. There was an enormous number of private owner wagons too, many of them carrying coal and quite a few owned by local coal merchants & such. The chances of getting them upgraded started at zero and went down from there. So the archetypal British freight train was composed largely of wagons that were already old-fashioned in 1900, without any suspicion of continuous brakes and having to be timetabled accordingly. (Having said which, they were not subject to particular speed restrictions until after a series of derailments in the early 1960s, so it was possible to see them running at quite a speed on occasion.) The amount of upgrading that happened even so was quite remarkable and freight working started to change considerably from about the 1920s.

Common carrier status led to a lot of exceptional loads. That is a topic in itself; there was a whole section in the Block Regs dealing with it and an infrastructure of loads inspectors and planning staff for dealing with them.

Not sure I can help a great deal with loading (not sure what your specific question is). Bulk traffics like coal would be dealt with (mostly) by special equipment at the collieries; unloading might be a man with a shovel at the local coal merchant's, a mechanical tippler into a ship's hold, or absolutely anything in between. Other traffic would be barrowed, craned or simply humped on the poor goods porter's back (there were lists of what freight facilities and crane capacity each station had). By the time I was on the railway, there was a publication called the "Working Manual for Rail Staff"; IIRC the green pages dealt with loading & sheeting (I think the white pages had more to do with marshalling and I know the pink pages were the dangerous goods instructions).

Once loaded the wagon would have a label (actually a card approx. 6" X 4"put in a spring clip on each side, giving details of destination and load (particularly the weight). In most cases it would simply be left until the daily trip working (often referred to (mainly by modellers?) as a "pick-up goods) arrived to take it away. Larger establishments might have their own loco which would move it to a departure road, again to await the tripper. It would then be launched upon an odyssey through the marshalling yards of Old England until it reached its destination. At each yard, staff would check the label and work out from that what next yard it should be sent to, shunting it into a siding accordingly to make up the next departure. (If it was purely a local trip it could be done without any intermediate yard.)

Hypothetical example. A wagon from Baldock to Letchworth would just be taken direct on the daily tripper (which, I suspect, worked out from Hitchin and served stations & sidings to Royston). For anywhere else it would be taken, first, to Hitchin Up Yard (in those days a traffic yard), where it would be put into one of four sidings, making up trains for Ferme Park, New England, Cambridge or Bedford (there used to be a Hitchin - Bedford line). Most likely one train a day for each of those locations. If going to the Nottingham area it would probably be sent to New England, who would marshal it for Grantham who would send it on to Colwick (owned by the GNR!) who would trip it across to Toton who would finally trip it out to (say) Spondon. (If our wagon were loaded at Henlow, by contrast, it would go on the Bedford trip, thence to Wellingborough, Leicester and Toton. Posession - and therefore which company gets the revenue - is nine points...) Of course it could go first to Royston, whence it would go on the Cambridge tripper and on to Whitemoor before reaching New England. then as before.

Most of these yards would be flat yards with simple "loose" shunting (not "fly" shunting, as some people call it - that is an altogether more dicey operation!). The incoming train is drawn back out of its siding, the points set for the first wagon(s), the loco gives a good shove towards the sidings and the shunter simultaneously uses a shunting pole resting on the buffers to lift the 3-link coupling of the hook; whne travelling fast enough the shunter signals the driver to stop and the "cut" rolls off into its siding, after which points are changed for the next cut and the process repeated. There is no attempt to marshal each siding in any order. Whitemoor was a hump yard, but apart from gravity doing the work of shoving wagons into the sidings there was little difference in principle.

By the late 1920s things had improved a bit, with longer trunk hauls either missing out or calling briefly at intermediate yards and the beginnings of portion working. So our wagon would most likely find its way to Whitemoor, where it would be shunted together with the other Colwick traffic and New England traffic would be made up separately. Both rafts would then be attached to a Temple Mills - Colwick that would call at Whitemoor. The incoming train would have Whitemoor traffic on the front and this would remain attached to the train engine, which would shunt to a spare road while New Englands were attached to one end of the train and Colwicks to another. By this time, too, some trains ran with a "fitted head" - anything from a couple of wagons next to the engine to virtually the whole train having continuous brakes. Obviously these could run at speed with a good deal of confidence. A few freights were fully-fitted; on the GN the famous "Scotch Goods" left Kings X goods around 3pm and was manned by the top link (there is a tale I read of Bill Hoole running it so fast that the Control Log recorded him stopped by signals because he'd caught up with the Talisman).

From the 1970s, computerisation (TOPS) and the spread of air-braked wagons allowed much more portion working and planned transits of a kind that was inconceivable fifty years earlier. But often the mechanics of shunting hadn't changed at all. It was only the end of Speedlink in about 1991 that finally brought that kind of working to an end.

I'm sorry this has been rather a long epistle; I hope I've answered some of your questions. Perhaps you'd come back with anything specific you want to know and I'll try to help further.
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Freight 30/01/2011 at 12:47 #13361
UK RailFan
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17 posts 		thank you Neil that was very useful and informative
thank you,
Andrew
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Freight 02/02/2011 at 16:29 #13377
Right Away
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71 posts 		Andrew, take a look at this railway modelling website containing a wealth of interesting freight operations information:

http://myweb.tiscali.co.uk/gansg/
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Freight 02/02/2011 at 17:27 #13378
UK RailFan
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17 posts 		Thank you right away that was very useful and answered some of my questions
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Freight 08/02/2011 at 15:29 #13480
KeithThomson
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3 posts 		Thanks for the interesting post kbarber.....I have one question:

kbarber said:

AIUI "Common Carrier" is a legal definition. A common carrier is required to accept & carry any freight that is requested. Absolutely any. Without exception.
What would happen for freight items that do not fit into the loading gauge? Or was the pricing such that any goods over certain size/weight had very high charges and the situation just didn’t occur?
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Freight 09/02/2011 at 14:15 #13493
kbarber
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1712 posts 		KeithThomson said:
Thanks for the interesting post kbarber.....I have one question:

kbarber said:

AIUI "Common Carrier" is a legal definition. A common carrier is required to accept & carry any freight that is requested. Absolutely any. Without exception.
What would happen for freight items that do not fit into the loading gauge? Or was the pricing such that any goods over certain size/weight had very high charges and the situation just didn’t occur?

Yes I found myself wondering that - and coincidentally came across the answer: there was an exception for items that could not be physically fitted within the loading gauge. (But of course the loading guage is pretty big and that led to some very exceptional loads being carried, sometimes requiring blocking of other lines, wrong-line running (the only time, as far as I can see, that a normal running move would be allowed wrong-line without special instructions or SLW) and sometimes even dismantling of signals & such, although that was a bit extreme.)
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Freight 09/02/2011 at 17:14 #13497
Danny252
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1461 posts 		kbarber said:
without special instructions
Surely there would be instructions provided to tell the signalmen to route it wrong line? I'd hardly expect the guard to pop up and say "Send us wrong line could you? It's a bit big, y'see..."!
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Freight 09/02/2011 at 18:26 #13499
postal
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5190 posts
Online 		In the Rule Book Module TS1 (available on line here) it includes:

22.1 Signaller being aware of out-of-gauge loads

You must not let a train proceed that is carrying an out-of-gauge load unless you have the details that apply to the movement of the train.

The details of any restrictions that must be applied will be given to you by:
• a written notice, or
• instructions from Operations Control.

Presumably this would now cover any instructions to work wrong-line or whatever, superseding the situation Keith remembers.
“In life, there is always someone out there, who won’t like you, for whatever reason, don’t let the insecurities in their lives affect yours.” – Rashida Rowe
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Freight 09/02/2011 at 19:21 #13500
mfcooper
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707 posts 		There are some trains to this day that are out-of-gauge along certain stretches of line. These train will carry an X in their train description, and paperwork for these will be provided at each signal box explaining the restriction. Sometimes it's certain platforms through a 4-track railway station, sometimes fast vice slow lines, etc.
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Freight 10/02/2011 at 13:27 #13532
kbarber
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1712 posts 		Danny252 said:
kbarber said:
without special instructions
Surely there would be instructions provided to tell the signalmen to route it wrong line? I'd hardly expect the guard to pop up and say "Send us wrong line could you? It's a bit big, y'see..."!

Sorry, should've been clearer, what I had in mind was special signalling or operating instructions (such as those relating to SLW, where elaborate precautions exist to ensure trains don't meet head-on in the section). An Exlo would normally be proceeding under the authority of a special traffic notice and that (alone) would give a bobby authority to use a running line in the wrong direction without putting in SLW and without getting special permission from higher-up (a provision that exists to get assistance round a failure). But yes Danny, you're quite right, there would be a notice (or Control authority) of some sort.
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