BOX VAN MAN
A rake of 12-ton box vans that delighted enthusiasts at the Great Central Railway over a decade ago have been restored once again, adding to the line’s 1950s main line feel. We talk to their owner, Nick Tinsley, and Matt Baker of the Quorn Wagon & Wagon g
The GCR’s goods train revival
Just a glimpse…
Quorn & Woodhouse station, during the Great Central Railway’s recent Winter Steam Gala. ‘Black Five’ 4-6-0 No. 45305 draws to a halt with a local stopping train, a featherweight load of just two BR crimson-liveried suburban Mk 1s.
After a brief pause for custom, the guard’s whistle blows, and the train gets under way again. The first sharp barks erupt from the ‘5MT’s’ chimney, almost drowning out the approaching rumble of another train heading in the opposite direction.
Quietly, almost unnoticed, another Class 5, BR Standard No. 73156, coasts through the other platform. Rattling along behind it, a lengthy rake of assorted BR bauxite 12-ton ‘Vanfits’, ‘Shocvans’, ‘Vanwides’ and a ‘Conflat’ with a BR red container on top, adorned with labels advertising all manner of goods in transit, from ICI fertiliser to Raleigh bicycles, and covered with scrawled chalk markings denoting their destinations countrywide. Just a fleeting moment. Just two ordinary BR black mixed-traffic 4-6-0s going about their daily business. But a moment in which the Great Central really did live up, once again, to its preservation-era motto of ‘Recreating the Experience’.
A FINE COLLECTION
“I’ve heard it said that we have one of the finest freight collections in the country,” says Nick Tinsley, the GCR’s Carriage & Wagon Manager, who first volunteered on the line in 1974, and later oversaw the construction of the Birstall (Leicester North) extension and the double track project.
He ought to know – for, apart from the ‘Windcutter’ mineral wagons which were saved thanks to a Steam Railway readers’ appeal, that fine collection is largely
down to him. Closely rivalling the huge stocklist of the GWR 813 Preservation Fund, he owns an incredible collection of 90 vehicles – 72 wagons, 14 coaches and four brake vans – that make up approximately two-thirds of the non-passenger stock on the GCR.
Together with other items off-site, and further acquisitions in the pipeline, he expects to match the 813 Fund’s total of 100 this year. But why?
Even though he was only six years old when BR steam ended, he’s driven by the same motives that are at the root of our entire preservation movement. Anger and despair at the sheer waste that BR’s modernisation set in motion, sending thousands of coaches and wagons for scrap, and a burning determination to save something – anything.
It all started in the early days of the Main Line Steam Trust, when he and a few school friends went to Vic Berry’s scrapyard in Leicester looking for spare coach parts. For transport, they enlisted the help of a man with a 7½-ton truck, and, Nick recalls: “Vic Berry was so astonished that two or three schoolboys had arranged this, he said we could have anything we liked as long as it wasn’t metal!
“Seeing all those coaches being scrapped, I thought ‘this is wrong – I’ve got to stop it’.
“I was convinced they’d all be gone before I got a chance – but around 1982 or 1983, when I was 20 or 21, I bought Mk 1 SK No. 25312 at Great Yarmouth from a BR tender list.
“Tender lists came to the railway regularly, and I wanted a Southern PMV, so I bid on one at Duddeston – and I thought ‘this is easy’.
“It would have seemed daunting to most people – but once you knew what to do with tender lists and how to deal with scrap merchants, it was as easy as going for your weekly shop.
“The first wagon I bought was a BR brake van at Newark [No. B954268, in 1984], and it just snowballed.”
Having started his working life as an apprentice bricklayer, he admits: “I’ve never earned big money, but I don’t drink, smoke or go on holiday abroad – I haven’t even got a passport – and while most people like to buy flashy cars, I’ve never had anything other than secondhand Transit vans!
“It’s only the transport costs that stopped me having more stock than I’ve got – I’ve never worked out how much I’ve spent on hiring lorries, but I’m sure it would have been cheaper to buy one!
“I knew which vehicles I wanted, and saved up – throughout the 1980s and 1990s, people were going for GWR, LNER, LMS and Southern stock, but ignoring really good BR Standard stuff that was going for scrap, so I deliberately went for that.”
STEAM-ERA SURVIVORS
Throughout the last years of BR and into the privatised era, he kept buying steam-era survivors from BR, the Ministry of Defence, EWS and DB Schenker, even preserving all the tool vans and mess coach from the Crewe breakdown train – the latter now fulfilling the same role for the volunteers of the Quorn Wagon & Wagon group who have restored the van train.
In 1991, he went to Booth’s scrapyard in Rotherham for some coach parts – and ended up rescuing Mk 1 SK No. 25711 with minutes to spare.
He remembers: “A train of 12 Network South East coaches arrived, and I went inside them to find the lights still worked, the toilets still flushed, and there were twoand-a-half week old newspapers still on the seats.
“I went into the office and asked ‘how much for an SK?’, then went and wrote ‘SAVE’ on one – if I’d had the money, I’d have bought all 12.
“Within 10 or 20 minutes, there was a claw literally ripping through them, coming out with whole compartment partitions and the lights still attached.
“After half a coach, I couldn’t watch any more – it still hurts me to think about it now.”
When the lucky survivor was delivered to Quorn, he continues: “We swept it out, and wrote to NSE to ask if they had any objection to us running it in their livery for a while. We got a very nice letter back saying ‘no problem, but please keep it clean’!”
Inevitably, though, there have been others that got away. “There was a steel LNER High wagon that I could have saved,” he says sadly, “but I thought at the time there’d be more coming. It turned out to have been the last one. That still bothers me.”
‘IT’S NOT ABOUT THE MONEY’
Today, he says of his prized coaches and wagons: “If someone offered me a million pounds for them, I’d say no. It’s not about money – it’s about saving things.”
With that same passion, determination and general preservation principle, he’s sometimes had to fight their corner, even after they reached the safe haven of the Great Central.
There was a time when this railway was so determined to recreate the BR steam scene of the 1950s and early 1960s, it wouldn’t even accept diesel locomotives as residents unless their owners agreed to paint them green. But, in more recent years, some of those ideals have become blurred by a stricter commercial outlook.
Back in 2014 (SR423), the line’s then managing director, the late Bill Ford, argued that the pseudo-BR red livery then carried by ‘8F’ No. 48624 was more attractive to passengers, and should therefore be emulated by a blue-liveried ‘2MT’ 2-6-0. Like many other railways, the GCR has decked out the Mk 1s of its dining train in an equally inauthentic Pullman-esque umber and cream – but has also gone beyond coats of paint to chop the end of one carriage into a verandah. And one previous general manager showed as little regard for history when it came to the goods vehicles.
“He was quite blunt,” Nick remembers. “He said ‘if you want another wagon you’ll have to get rid of three – they clog up the railway, they don’t make money and people aren’t interested.’
“I said ‘how do you think the Birstall extension and the double track got built?’ and eventually he conceded that they can be useful.”
It was during this same period that the GCR’s once superb freight trains entered a slow but noticeable decline. The unique and priceless ‘Windcutter’ rake – something as integral to this line’s history as the slate trains on the Ffestiniog – dwindled to less than half its original length; while the van train disappeared altogether, as they, and the other wagons that had formed the mixed goods, gradually fell out of use.
If someone offered me a million pounds for them, I’d say no. It’s not about money – it’s about saving things NICK TINSLEY
Now they’re back. Seemingly in the blink of an eye, this superb rendition of a BR-era fitted freight is once again gracing the GC’s double track, recreating the experience of a bygone era. A world superbly captured in the 1957 British Transport documentary Fully Fitted Freight, with all the romance of the classic Night Mail, as an express goods train speeds its valuable cargo through the night. A time when wagons like these, not articulated juggernauts, served the needs of the nation.
TANGIBLE VALUE
In contrast to its earlier attitude, says Nick, “ever since Quorn Wagon & Wagon started churning out the vans, and the train’s been running at galas and charters, the railway has been quite supportive.
“They’ve noticed the positive comments, and realised that people do come to see the wagons – they’re an asset.
“We’ve had to make a supreme effort over two or three years, but it’s paying off.”
That ‘supreme effort’ has been carried out by the hard core of just five volunteers – Nick, Matt Baker, Ross Loades, Jake Ruddy and Dave Bower – who make up the Quorn Wagon & Wagon group. They’re so named, explains Matt, because “most railways have a Carriage & Wagon department – but we only do wagons!”
Although half a dozen Mk 1 coaches, some GUV and CCT parcels vans, and three Travelling Post Office coaches can be found on the group’s stocklist, “the railway’s own Carriage & Wagon department looks after the coaches,” Matt continues, “and we’re all members of Railway Vehicle Preservations, who look after the postal vehicles. We count the parcels vans as wagons!”
Also counted as wagons – because they’re numbered in the same sequence – are two Mk 1s converted for departmental use: the former Crewe breakdown train mess coach, No. ADB977107, and Test Car 2, No. ADB975397. The restoration of the latter, used mainly for testing wagons in its latter-day BR career, recently won the group the Morgan Award for outstanding achievement in preservation, and the Rail Express Modern Traction Award, in this year’s Heritage Railway Association Awards.
Summing up how much the group has achieved in such a short space of time, though, was that its website (quornwagonandwagon.co.uk) was the runner-up in the HRA Communication Award, an accolade the team had never dreamt of at the outset.
“We only started the website as a log!” says Matt. “About a year after we started, we kept thinking ‘when did we do that?’ and realising we didn’t know, so we should record it.”
WHEELS ON MY WAGON
Although officially founded in December 2017, he explains, the group had actually been in existence for more than a year: “It started in 2016 at the request of Neil Cave of TimeLine Events, who wanted to see a ‘bulk train’ with the same vehicles.
“Mixed freights are OK, but historically, the GC mainly carried bulk traffic – it was other heritage railways that had the mixed and pick-up goods trains.
“We did six or seven vans in the first year, and that’s when we really started hitting it hard.”
Depending on its condition, says Nick, the restoration of a van already complete with its chassis costs an average of around £1,000 for paint and materials, all of which the group have funded themselves. “We’ve found a cheap way of doing the roofs,” he continues. “We buy lorry curtain sheets from a breaker’s yard and paint them with black bitumen – though steam engines do have a nasty habit of chucking hot ash onto them, so they end up full of holes!”
But the vans that give Nick the most satisfaction are the three that were previously grounded bodies
– one used as the group’s tool store, but the other two now fully operational, thanks to the GCR’s Locomotive Department, who placed them back onto suitable chassis.
“I get more of a kick out of putting a grounded body back on wheels,” he says. “It’s righting a wrong.”
One of these is ‘Shocvan’ No. B850498, an unusual example of a GWR-design vehicle built at Ashford under BR auspices in 1950; its body was donated to the group by Swithland Sand & Gravel Ltd, and a tank wagon chassis found at the Foxfield Railway.
“The shock-absorbing gear was lost years ago,” says Nick, “but Matt very inventively made a set of dummy gear using bits of pipe and tube – you’d never know to look at it!”
The other former grounded body is ‘Vanfit’
No. B786348 – a serendipitous combination of two lucky and authentic finds.
“A woman in Nottingham gave us the chassis,” explains Nick. “She’d bought it because she wanted a van body to put her horse in – but didn’t realise she was buying the whole wagon!
“So a scrap merchant took the body off for her, and the chassis ended up going into the depths of Swithland yard for a number of years.
“One numberplate had been nicked, and the other was smashed, so I only know it’s from a Pressed Steel batch of around 2,000 built in 1961-62 – but then I found a body on an industrial estate in Loughborough.
It was No. B786348. “I looked up the number,” says Nick, “and realised it was a Pressed Steel one out of the same batch as the chassis!”
I get more of a kick out of putting a grounded body back on its wheels. It’s righting a wrong NICK TINSLEY
RARE FINDS
The most remarkable finds of all, however, were the two consecutively numbered fibreglass ‘BD’ containers discovered on a farm near Doncaster thanks to a post on social media – Nos. BD4303B, now in Nick’s ownership, and BD4304B, which Matt acquired.
“There were only six of them ever built,” explains Nick, “they ran together between Bedford Midland Road and a location in Wales; they were all disposed of together; these two went to the same farm, and now they’re going to run together again!”
Nick’s container was the first to be restored, making its debut in the van train on charters and at the Winter Steam Gala during January. “People were jockeying for position to take photos of it,” he says.
Including the container and a ‘Blue Spot’ fish van, the train can stretch to 18 vehicles; though at the time of writing, it was not solely a van train, but a ‘covered train’, with another historic addition – 1963 Derbybuilt ‘Shochood B’ No. B726344, a unique example in preservation. Latterly converted to a ‘Dace’ engineering wagon, it is one of three survivors – but the only one that has been converted back to original condition.
“That was a lot of signwriting!” remembers Matt. “Usually I can do a wagon in a day, but on this, it took me a day to do one side!”
Offers of some more van bodies, and a pair of ‘Type A’ containers, in varying stages of disrepair at Loughborough shed, could not only extend the train to as many as 24 vehicles, but provide another unique BR-era re-creation.
“We’ve run out of ‘Conflats’ to put the containers on!” says Matt. “But, realistically, we’ll probably only be able to make one good container out of the two – so we can put it on one of the ‘Medfit’ wagons, which BR also did.”
ENGINEERS’ TRAIN
Looking further ahead, the group plans to start restoring the open wagons next – thereby reconstructing the mixed goods rake – and will then move on to the huge collection of departmental wagons – ‘Dogfish’ and ‘Catfish’ hoppers, ‘Grampus’ and ‘Rudd’ open wagons, ‘Salmon’ and ‘Sturgeon’ bogie bolsters – to form a 1950s engineers’ train.
“We’re focusing on the wooden open wagons first, because they’re more vulnerable,” explains Matt. “If we don’t do them now, they trap water and then the chassis will be gone.
“But I’m looking forward to doing the engineering wagons – we like to have a high total each year, and they will be quick wins.
“We can do a van body in three or four weeks – but a steel wagon just needs a scrape down and a repaint.”
That repaint will be the same high standards as the vans, he adds. Most railways treat their engineering vehicles as nothing more than working plant, and it shows – but these will receive the correct BR black livery with straw lettering, even down to their original ‘Return Empty To’ allocations, which Matt has researched.
Such attention to detail doesn’t stop at vehicles with flanged wheels. Matt owns a Morris Minor van and, jointly with Dave Bower and Quorn station volunteer Jack Shaw, acquired a 1953 Scammell Scarab mechanical horse last year. Both have been painted in BR crimson and cream livery, and Nick is keen to find a 1960s Ford D-series lorry to complement them, providing cameo scenes of how freight consignments continued their journeys from goods yards.
“BR wasn’t just about railways,” says Matt. “It was a whole system of transporting goods from door to door – the railways themselves had the biggest fleet of road vehicles in the 1950s, and that story never gets told.”
BACK THE UNDERDOGS
In an increasingly tough and commercialised preservation world, where every item of rolling stock needs more than ever to earn its keep or justify its existence, the work of the Quorn Wagon & Wagon group is an example of how otherwise unremunerative items can continue to have a useful – and educational – purpose.
“Wagons are always the underdogs,” says Nick, “but railways are about moving freight, not people. Why is a wagon any less important to railway heritage than a steam loco? They’re just as much a part of the scene as semaphore signals.
“My concern is for wagons on other railways that are dumped – I fear that some sites will be short of room and get rid of them. That’s happening now – the GC has already told me it’s full.
“Every railway has rows of wagons in sidings – but hopefully what we’ve done can spur people into action.
“Don’t just say they’re an eyesore – do something positive about it.”