Works diversified into building buses, cars and tanks

DURING the 1920s and 30s when recession hit the railway rolling stock business, the Wagon Works diversified into the production of bus and car bodies.

Then as war in Europe loomed, rearmament orders boosted business. On December 21, 1939 the Ministry of Supply ordered 950 covered railway wagons to be used by the British Expeditionary Force in France.

Incidentally, the British Government had to pay French railways for the privilege of running troop trains over its tracks.

The wagons - steel underframes with wooden bodies - represented nine months work for the factory, but the order was never completed. By May 1940 the BEF, or most of it, was back in Britain following the evacuation from Dunkirk.

For the rest of the Second World War no railway trucks were built at the Wagon Works. Instead production shifted to military hardware.

Gun platforms, bridge layers, shells, lifting cradles and 764 Churchill tanks were contributed to the war effort.

The disappearance of military contracts post war once again demanded diversification and the Bristol Road firm bought the Hatherley Works, makers of kitchen and garden furniture.

Next William Gardner and Sons, the local milling machine manufacturer, was bought.

Next came the acquisition of Gloucester Foundry, which made castings.

In 1957 a big order was received to make carriages for Toronto’s underground railway network, but it proved to be the last substantial order of its kind.

The final passenger coach made at the Wagon Works was built in 1961 for Sierra Leone railways, where it is probably still in service.

The last freight wagon left the factory in 1968.

For the next decade the once illustrious maker of railway wagons for the world and sumptuous coaches for royalty survived by building freight bogies and two-axle railway suspension systems, but the company was by then in terminal decline and finally folded in the early 1980s.