Going Loco

With a collection of locomotives and rolling stock dating from Victorian times to the 1960s, there's plenty to discover.

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10 JANUARY

Wonderful Winter Wagons: Tanks for the memory – part one. Oil be back

What?!
It’s 2025 already?!
Yikes …
Ok, I suppose I had better write some New Year’s resolutions.
Go on a diet. Ha! No. I like snacks …
Get fit! No, I already have a fitness plan. Working as a volunteer at Didcot takes care of that.
Errrr, think of something fast before option 1 is a thing again …
I know, I should write some more of those Going Loco thingies – people seem to like them.
In all seriousness though, I’m sorry there hasn’t been much input from yours truly as of late. Life has very much got in the way as it is often wont to do. Thanks awfully to those people that contacted Didcot to see if I was alright. I am really quite touched by the concern for my wellbeing. While we are not out of the woods yet, myself and my family remain safe and healthy.
Enough of that sort of thing, new year, new start and all that …

The Slough Estates wagon in its most recent livery

The four-wheeled tank wagon was once a common sight on the railways of the UK but they are becoming increasingly rare. Bulk traffic loads use larger twin bogie designs. Smaller shipments today use containerised tanks that go on the same wagons as every other ISO container. These vehicles need to move faster to keep up with the traffic on the railway. However, Didcot has preserved examples of three four-wheeled and one six-wheeled tankers that were designed for the transport of non-dairy fluids.* Of these, one is for water (more of which next time) and the other three are for the transport of oil derivatives of one kind or another.

The development of railway tank wagons has a long history. The earliest are recorded as being in use in the 1840s. The vast majority of liquids were transported in casks, tins and barrels until the 1860s, however. The economy of scale was always going to win out to a certain extent at least. This was especially true as the majority of tank wagons built to run on Britain’s railways are what is known as Private Owner. This means that they were constructed for, owned and maintained by the company producing the product being transported. Railway companies like the GWR owned very few tank wagons of their own as a result.

The wooden chassis of the wagon under repair

The first tank wagons were not of the type that instantly springs to mind when thinking about these vehicles. The early tanks were rectangular, not cylindrical. This is due to the fact that the majority of the metal available was supplied in flat sheet. It’s not that they couldn’t curve plate – early locomotives had curved plates in their boilers after all – but it wasn’t cheap to do. This flat plate was cut to size and riveted together in the corners with ‘L’ section strips on the inside. Great – no worries, right? Well, no ... The issue is that with such a large surface area of liquid at the top, the effect of movement of the wagon will cause the liquid to move. A LOT.

This is bad as it causes the centre of mass of the vehicle to shift about quite a bit and makes the wagon very unstable. Not good for safe running. Also, there is a problem with liquids in square tanks. A fluid sloshing around in the tank will cause areas of very high pressure to build up in the corners. This pressure, if you are carrying something sufficiently volatile, can cause the liquid to auto ignite! Imagine being the first person to find this little nugget of information out …

There were two different solutions to the problems. A few wagons were built so that the sides and roof were made from one curved piece of metal but this was expensive to do at the time and these round-top wagons remained rare. The adding of baffles or anti-slosh plates was the obvious answer and it was the preferred solution. The only issue here was that it too added to the cost of building the wagon. Presumably not costing as much as your freight train rolling over and the subsequent repairs and clean up, one surmises.

The tank separated from the chassis

We have an example of this earliest type of tank wagon in the collection. This is a rectangular tar wagon (little chance of too much fast sloshing there!) that was once part of the internal user rolling stock of the massive Slough Estates Railway. It was built in 1898 by Charles Roberts & Company, works number 3462, to carry 15 tons and registered by the Lancashire & Yorkshire Railway.

The Roberts wagon works was located at Horbury Junction southeast of Horbury in West Yorkshire. It was established in Wakefield in 1856 but moved to the junction of the routes of the Manchester and Leeds Railway and the Sheffield, Rotherham, Barnsley, Wakefield, Huddersfield and Goole Railway** in 1873. Charles Roberts produced a wide variety of different railway vehicles and components. They were bought out by Procor of Canada in 1974 and thence became part of Bombardier in 1990, although this was its death knell as the plant was shut in 2005.

Ed Bull removing metal plates from the wooden chassis

It’s usually about now that I give you some fascinating facts about the wagon and its life on the rails. For that we have to go back 51 years to Great Western Echo winter 1973-4 edition, which reports on the arrival of the wagon at Didcot.

The Slough Estates Railway had converted the wagon to a weedkiller role. The photograph shows all the plumbing required to deliver a mortal blow to those pesky weeds which insist on growing in railway track. Slough Estates then donated the wagon to the Great Western Society when their railway closed in 1973. The Great Western Echo takes up the story:

‘The Didcot working party arrived at Slough one Saturday morning with a 10-ton lorry and some ropes. The hired road crane soon followed and lifted a short length of track and then the wagon onto the lorry, with deceptive ease. After roping on, the wagon set off down the M4 at 66 mph – never before had it travelled so fast, never will it again! Somewhere along the M4 a fifth gear was discovered on the hired lorry, hence the added speed! On arrival at Didcot – having only once attempted to go in a different direction to the lorry – the wagon was unloaded by the Society’s hand crane which had been brought across to the provender yard. This was slow and laborious by comparison with the morning’s powered crane, and the wagon remained a few minutes in suspended animation while the crane crew took a breather.’

The Slough Estates tank wagon arriving at Didcot in 1973

The wagon was repainted in a colourful Smith & Forrest livery in 1999, but the wooden chassis is now undergoing a thorough renovation.

The other private owner wagon in the collection is a very different beast indeed.

No 745 in one of the liveries it has worn since preservation

As technology moved on, the production of cylindrical tank wagons became both practical and cost effective. In fact, it became law for Class A liquids (the really flammable stuff with excitingly low flash and boiling points) in 1902. These tanks varied a little here and there. Some had flat ends but most had ends that were shaped for strength. There were two variations of this - domed and coned. The tanks were strapped down with a variety of different methods but they almost all carried on a fairly standard 4-wheeled chassis. Just like coal wagons, the economies of scale would only go so far while they were being privately owned in the steam era.

Our private owner tank wagon is of 1912 vintage. It was built by Hurst Nelson, who were based in Motherwell, Scotland. They built rolling stock for a wide range of different customers. They were also famous for building trams and trolley buses. Indeed, the vehicles they built for the Great Orme Tramway in Wales in 1902 are STILL in service today, having never been withdrawn. They also made vehicles for the Glasgow Subway and the London Underground. In a wonderful circular story, the rolling stock part of the company was absorbed by a certain Charles Roberts and Co. and we all know how that ended.

No 745 in the simple WW1 livery

No 745 was built as a Class B liquid container, which includes petrol, oil, paraffin and some paints. It was originally registered by the Furness Railway.

It has worn liveries in preservation that reflect its service history. Its first preservation livery was all black with the lettering ‘Royal Daylight’ in white. This was a brand of lamp oil from the days when turning the light on involved matches rather than switches. It went through a brief period wearing the plainer, light buff colour that represented it as it would have looked as a vehicle requisitioned by the War Department during WWI.

It now carries a Pratt’s Perfection Spirit livery and that was a brand of petrol back in the day. Both the commercial products mentioned here were marketed by a company called the Anglo-American Oil Co. Unlike the vast majority of the organisations we have talked about today, this little firm is still going today. They changed their name in 1951. You will know them today as Esso.

Indeed it was Esso who presented No 745 to Didcot in May 1972, and the wagon had remained in service for the company until shortly before that date, being one of two Esso wagons of the old type. The wagon had been renovated by Wagon Repairs at their Hamilton Works in Scotland before delivery to Didcot.

No 745 in the Pratt’s petrol livery which it received in 2021

That about wraps up the two private owner oil wagons that we have at Didcot. There are two other tankers in the collection. These however are even more relevant to our collection. They were built by the Great Western Railway and we will take a look at them and their compatriots next time.

* We have talked about the dairy side of things a while back.

** I’m glad I don’t have to write about the Sheffield, Rotherham, Barnsley, Wakefield, Huddersfield & Goole Railway (S R B W H & G R) too often. Even the abbreviation is an essay in itself! The line was actually leased to the Lancashire & Yorkshire Railway fairly early on. L & Y R – a much more sensible name …

01 NOVEMBER

Hallowe’en Special – Snake(s) in the Grass

This photograph from the Great Western Trust collection shows Snake after conversion to a tank engine and working at Oxford in approximately 1865

I have a second railway interest as well as the GWR. I really love the dinosaurs of steam. That early, heroic age where nobody was really sure what a steam locomotive was really supposed to even look like. If you put it on a map, it would read ‘here be dragons’! To truly look at this era, you really have to look before the start of the Great Western Railway but being started in the mid to late 1830s – early 1840s, it really does just scrape into that period. Such monstrous mutant engines as Hurricane and Thunderer are perhaps the zenith of this ‘wild west’ era of GWR locomotives.

There was a fair bit of experimentation by Brunel at the beginning and while the aforementioned pair are the most often quoted of the early engines, there were others. 19 in total were eventually ordered from a variety of manufacturers and were very variable in quantity. They went from potentially useful to highly unsatisfactory and in some cases, downright useless. Those on the latter end of this scale tended to have service lives just short of the lifespan of the average mayfly …

While the extremes of the new Going Loco sliding scale of utility (patent pending) are clearly where the headlines are going to fall, there were others. A pair of engines that were in the ‘started badly but got better’ camp were provided by the nowadays little known firm of the Haigh Foundry. Located in Haigh, Lancashire (obviously!). It was set up in the valley of the River Douglas in about 1790 by Alexander Lindsay (6th Earl of Balcarres), his brother Robert and James Corbett.

There was an attached Ironworks but that did not prove profitable. The foundry however went from strength to strength when Robert Daglish became its chief engineer in 1804. He is another of the lesser-known pioneers of the railway. Being a capable civil, mining and mechanical engineer like him at this time was exactly the right career to have. They produced all sorts of different industrial machinery up until 1812. It was then that the first of their steam railway locomotives were built.

They became a subcontractor, building 0-4-0 and 2-2-0 type engines to the designs of Edward Bury & Co. These, along with a couple of other in-house designs, meant that the firm were becoming well established when Isambard Kingdom Brunel came looking for a number of experimental designs to try out on his new Great Western Railway. The Haigh Foundry were contracted to build two machines and four other manufacturers (Charles Tayleur & Co., Mather, Dixon & Co., Sharp, Roberts & Co. and R & W Hawthorn & Co.) brought the total to the aforementioned 19.

Now, the issue with the odd machines produced as a result of these contracts wasn’t with the manufacturers here. They were all perfectly capable of designing steam locomotives that did the job assigned to them. No, the fault was Brunel’s. He was an outstanding visionary and civil engineer but, he seemed to have no idea with regard to the then current thinking on steam locomotive design. His specification went like this:*

1. At a standard velocity of 30mph (48kph) the piston must not travel at a rate exceeding 280ft (86.2 metres) per minute. The piston speed – the speed at which the piston moves back and forth in the cylinder – was already at twice this speed in contemporary locomotives. This makes it very difficult to move fast if your pistons can’t move equally fast. The only way you can easily do this and still reach the required top speed while limiting the piston speed is to make the wheels bigger. The bigger you make the wheels however, the harder it is to make the wheels turn. The rolling resistance goes up.
2. Boiler pressure should be 50lb per square inch.
3. The weight of the engine (excluding tender) must not exceed 10½ tons, and if the weight was over 8 tons, the engine was to be carried on 6 wheels. This is a real problem. 8 tons for a broad gauge engine is really low and would mean that something had to go somewhere. Usually that meant size of the boiler suffered to try and meet this requirement. A smaller boiler means a smaller steam reserve and if you are limited to 50psi as well then potentially you can get into trouble and run out of steam MUCH more easily. Particularly if the steam plant wasn’t particularly efficient. All of the engines that were supplied were over the weight limit in the end. He really was setting the engineers up for failure.

This drawing of Viper renamed Teign when working on the South Devon Railway was published in The Locomotive magazine in 1901

Haigh Foundry took a somewhat novel approach to trying to solve the conundrum of piston speed versus wheel speed. Other manufacturers had gone to extremes – with driving wheels that were over 10ft in diameter to try to offset the piston speed. Haigh took the drive from the pistons and ran it through a small gear train. This 2:3 gear ratio meant that the 14¾in x 18in cylinders only had to rotate driving wheels that were 6ft 4in in diameter instead of 10ft! The boiler was relatively small at 3ft 3in in diameter and 9ft long.

Haigh Works No 25 was delivered to the GWR on 30 August 1838 and was named Snake. Works No 26 followed on 7 September 1838 and was named Viper. Despite the innovative approach, the cards were somewhat stacked against the locos. The restrictions as well as the losses of energy caused by the gearing meant that they were not good engines. They were both heavily modified between 1839 and 1840. The gearing was removed and new cylinders fitted. This actually made them quite good engines.

Being so long ago, the exact chronology from here is a little hazy but the following things happened to both engines. Smaller 6ft diameter driving wheels were fitted. This was probably at the 39/40 rebuild but the records aren’t clear. They were both converted from tender engines to 2-2-2 tank engines and they also both served on the South Devon Railway. Which way round these two events happened isn’t clear either but the trip to the SDR was between 1846 and 1851. It is known that during their time there that Snake was renamed Exe and Viper became Teign. Their original names were restored when they returned to the GWR.

We do know that Viper was in traffic until January 1868, with her boiler subsequently used as a stationary steam plant at Shrewsbury. Snake was in traffic until November 1869 and that was the end of these slithering serpents. We shouldn’t be too hard on this pair really. They were two bad apples that really made it good in the end. They also possibly had the coolest names ever applied to steam locomotives!

Some sources give the exact fate of Snake as Unknown, probably scrapped. Which means maybe, just maybe, it might just be out there still, silently, patiently waiting for a victim to pass by, close enough to strike just like its venomous namesake …**

This drawing of Viper’s tender was published in The Locomotive magazine in 1901. The wheels were dished iron plates.  The brake blocks, two on the front axle and one on the rear axle, worked on the right hand wheels

* The website Richard’s Treasure Chest has an excellent section dedicated to Britain’s broad gauge era, where the information about the Brunel locomotive specification in this blog comes from. Follow this link to read more:

** Nah – definitely scrapped in my opinion, but I do like to lean into the Hallowe’en stuff!

Going Loco - Explore The Archive