Freight flows to add to your layout

Want to bring some different trains to your layout? Chris Leigh argues that you can’t go far wrong with a milk train while Richard Foster offers some alternative suggestions.

1 MILK TRAINS

trains have fascinated me from the earliest days of my interest in railways and my time trainspotting at Weybridge. The cleanest of white products, an important food source, was carried in the most filthy of tank wagons, whose three equally spaced wheelsets made an unmistakable rhythmic noise as they hit the rail joints. If that wasn’t enough, the train that I became familiar with, the 3.54pm Clapham Gate-exeter Central empties, was pulled by a top link Bulleid ‘Pacific’!

However, that wasn’t my only experience of milk trains. Once my interest in touring round branch lines really took off, I would encounter parked milk tanks at the rural end of their journey, at St Erth in Cornwall and Hemyock.

At the Grouping in 1923, over 280 million gallons of milk was being moved annually by rail. It was carried in churns loaded into ventilated wagons. The Great Western was the largest transporter of milk as it served the rich farmlands of the West of England, and it conveyed the churns in purpose-built vans code-named ‘Siphons’. In 1927, however, jointly with

the LMS, they introduced glass-lined tank wagons to accelerate the transport process.

The first milk tank wagons were on four-wheel chassis, but such was the weight of the loaded tank that a six-wheeled 3,000gal tank wagon was soon adopted as standard. The six-wheel chassis distributed the load better, kept the contents more stable under movement and allowed the dedicated milk tank trains to run at express train speeds. This also meant that top link power had to be rostered for milk trains. The longest runs were from Fishguard and Penzance to the dairy at Kensington Olympia, with tanks picked up at various points en route, some having been brought from branch termini coupled to the rear of the branch passenger train.

Initially, the GWR and LMS were joined by the LNER in using the tank wagons but the Southern took a different tack, using two and three-axle Dyson road tank trailers conveyed on special wagons. A later Gwr-built example survives at Didcot but is in a poor state.

The wagons were loaded at quite modest-sized creameries strategically located to serve the farms, from which the milk was still collected in churns left on roadside platforms. The tanks belonged to the dairy companies but the underframes remained owned by the railways. Thus, in their early years, the tanks carried liveries such as Express Dairy in white on dark blue but with the chassis carrying the railway’s number and data. The creation of the Milk Marketing Board in 1933 brought all the tank wagons under central control and their colourful liveries disappeared after the Second World War.

As with much of its traffic, BR started losing milk traffic to road transport in the 1960s and one by one the milk trains were withdrawn. 1981 was the last year in which milk moved by rail. A short-lived working was introduced between Chard Junction and Stowmarket using newly manufactured tanks on refurbished chassis. When it ended, the tanks were scrapped.

2 GLASS

You see glass everywhere… or rather you see through it everywhere! However, you rarely see its manufacturing process hinted at on layouts. Sand is a key ingredient, and trains of four-wheel hoppers are still a common sight on today’s railway as they have been for decades. But one thing has changed: the railway’s common carrier status meant that it also had to move finished glass products, and both the LMS and GWR, for example, built wagons that could hold crated panes of glass securely.

3 FORD

The Ford Motor Company’s famous ‘blue oval’ badge should, arguably, be as common on layouts as it is on the road. Aside from its own fleet of internal user locomotives at Dagenham, it made good use of BR’S ‘Cartic 4’ car transporters or, as this photograph shows, tractors in steel-bodied ‘Lowfits’. Ford also had a regular parts service that ran from its Halewood plant on Merseyside to Dagenham, that initially used ‘Palvans’ before it was containerised.

Below: A fine view of the famous dairy at Hemyock, which ensured that the Culm Valley Light Railway remained in use long after passenger service ended. The distinctive three-axle milks are in typically filthy condition: they would be steam-cleaned internally after every trip, the exteriors received little attention, and they could get very grimy indeed. KEITH JAGGERS

Magazine. Meccano CHRIS LEIGH Left: Rebuilt ‘Battle of Britain’ No. 34109 Sir Trafford Leigh-mallory heads an unusually short 3.54pm Clapham Gate-exeter Central milk empties through Weybridge. My first ever published picture, in

Looking equally grubby, ‘14XX’ 0-4-2T No. 1466 propels milk tank wagons into the dairy at Hemyock, on the other side of the station approach road, in August 1962. CHRIS LEIGH COLLECTION

‘West Country’ 4-6-2 No. 34002 Salisbury hustles the 3.54pm Clapham Gate-exeter Central milk empties past an Alton-bound stopping EMU at Weybridge on August 1 1964. KEITH JAGGERS

St Helens was home of famous glass manufacturer Pilkington and this May 20 1965 photograph of the Down yard features hoppers loaded with sand. Eagle-eyed readers may be able to spot a 12t glass wagon loaded with crated glass. RAIL ONLINE

Rowsley shed’s BR Caprotti ‘5MT’ No. 73138 passes Elstree with a trainload of new Ford tractors, from its Basildon tractor plant. BRIAN STEPHENSON