» Wonderful shop had everything a man needed
MANY older residents in the city will remember when railway carriages were built in Gloucester and exported to all parts of the world.
The Gloucester Railway and Wagon Company was established in 1860 to build coal wagons.
In 1862 the firm built Britain’s first iron wagon and later that decade export orders were received.
Among the earliest of these was a contract to manufacture rolling stock for Imperial Russian Railways.
The trucks were duly made and dispatched to the Czar’s empire, where they performed well - but there was a problem.
The axles boxes were packed with vegetable grease, which Russian peasants stole at every opportunity to use as cooking oil.
A less palatable lubrication was found.
Soon the Wagon Works diversified its production.
Railway stock remained its core business, but horse drawn carriages were also made in large numbers.
When the internal combustion engine came on the scene the Wagon Works fitted coachbuilt bodies, such as charabancs, buses and lorries, onto chassis supplied by various motor makers.
The firm’s joinery department branched into new territory by producing oak fireplaces, sack trucks, pulpits and diverse items from wood, which arrived in the city from the Baltic states and Canada via the Sharpness to Gloucester canal.
The Boer war boosted business and long lines of supply wagons became a familiar sight in the city, trundling from the Bristol Road factory to the railway station or docks bound for South Africa.
During the Great War the company built artillery wagons by the hundred, but when military contracts disappeared in 1919 recession bit deep.
The company managed to stay afloat by scratching around for whatever business there was to be had.
It was at this time the company won an order to build carettes, which were one wheeled rickshaws.
Used by British empire civil servants in the Far East, the carette boasted two shafts between which the person doing the pulling was positioned.
Behind him, presumably holding on tightly, the passenger sat above the single wheel, wobbly and unstable.
More impressively, perhaps, the Wagon Works was commissioned in 1936 to build a state coach for the fabulously wealthy Maharaja of Indore.
Almost twice as long as a standard railway coach, the specification for this palace on bogies was fit for a prince and cost a king’s ransom.
When completed, the state coach was taken to Southampton for shipping to India, but while the voyage was underway there was an uprising in Indore and the unfortunate Maharaja was deposed - so he never enjoyed the benefits of Gloucester craftsmanship at its finest.
Gloucester Railway Carriage and Wagon Company didn’t make steam rollers, but many vehicles manufactured by the Bristol Road firm were seen on local roads.
The horse drawn trams that clopped through the city from May 1879 until they were superseded by electric versions in March 1904 were made by the Wagon Works.
So were carts for Borough Flour Mills in Tewkesbury and drays used by Stroud Brewery, Godsells Brewery and the fleets of parcel delivery wagons run by the Midland Railway and GWR.