Operation of goods yards

[MedinaOhio]

I've begun writing scenarios for RW3, and I need a little help understanding UK railway practices.

In routes depicting older railways, every station (it seems) has one or more "goods sidings" or a "goods yard," and I've read various articles which will state that such-and-such station "closed to public goods" on a particular date. However, I've never quite understood how they worked. If you'll pardon my cluelessness, I have a few questions to ask.

1. Here on this side of the pond, most freight sidings are built to serve a particular customer, but we have something called a "team track" which is just a bare siding for use by customers who don't have their own sidings. There also used to be dedicated freight stations in most cities and towns which handled "LCL" traffic ("Less than Carload Lot") in boxcars. (LCL was the stuff that today goes by FedEx or UPS; it pretty much left the rails by the mid-60s.) Did a station's goods sidings or goods yard function like a North American team track, or like a freight station, or some combination of the above?

2. Would these sidings be switched by a dedicated freight train--what we'd call a "local" or a "peddler"--or would any passing freight train potentially work these sidings?

3. What commodities would you see going in or out of a goods yard?

4. When did this sort of traffic disappear? (Or did it?)

Thanks.

[douglee]

Hi ???? Sorry I missed your name.
This subject is never ending there is probably a case for any and every situation.
The period is important Pre-Grouping and Grouping there were mainly Private Owner wagons based at a particular station or group of stations. As well as railway owned for general goods.
Post Grouping the railways were 'Common Carrier' so had to accept whatever was offered. This meant freight to stations could be and was absolutely anything.

Wagons were often bulk loaded by the larger manufacturers and dispatched to specific locations. Or delivered to the station by private transport for loading.
Part loads were collected by the Railways own staff/vehicles or taken to the station them selves and loaded into wagons going to the same destination these wagons were made into trains to main goods yards, re-marshalled into trains for delivery to the appropriate station, In some cases wagons were unloaded consolodated and reload into more logistically derived routes. At the destination the train loco shunted the yard at every stop it made. The wagons were then unloaded and delivered by railway staff/vehicles or could be collected.
Only the largest stations had dedicated shunters.

Large businesses brick, cement, steel etc. may have had private sidings and their own locos (which were not allowed on the main line) complete trains were collected and taken to one customer or distributed as above to stations.

By the late /mid 1970's General Goods had all but gone. Parcels hung on curtsey of Royal Mail but now that has disappeared.

There is also the make up of the trains to consider another subject altogether. Or I'll be here all day.

Any questions come back.
Good luck
Doug

[Dave4468]

A few more little things.

For 2 in Britain we had the pick up goods services which basically would see on train start at station A with its load, head to station B, drop off wagons from A that needed to go to B, pick up new wagons at B that need to go to station C and D. Go to C, drop of wagons from A and B that needed to go to C and so on. These generally happened on smaller lines (I believe) and would be hauled and shunted by the same engine. This practice stopped as roads took over transporting small loads short distances like this. There was later on the Speedlink services where small loads from various satellite yards would be collected and taken to a single bigger marshaling yard and then dispatched off from there. Thats gone now as well lasting till the early 1990s.

In modern Britain I believe this sort of thing has pretty much stopped. Most goods services now leave from one big terminal (container port/land port/quarry etc) and go to another without picking up and dropping off.

[Rockdoc2174]

While the railways had common-carrier status they had to be able to accept, transport and deliver absolutely anything to anywhere by law so if someone wanted to ship a punnet of strawberries from Land's End to John O'Groats there would have been a system to price that.

Pick-up goods trains were not only confined to country branches. They appeared on main lines as well, picking up and dropping off the odd wagon at whichever goods yard at a local station had a need. I don't believe the crew necessarily knew what they were picking up. I have an LP of a guard asking the signalman at Dent, on the Settle & Carlisle, what was to be picked up. In an incredibly-broad accent the conversation goes:

"There's t'mill-yard goods at t'far end."
"Aye."
"That plough and then next to t'van, they want that back."
"Want that back?"
"Aye. That's all."

The same scenario would have played out all the way down the line until they reached a main yard, where the train would have been broken up and the wagons shunted to make up trains going in the right direction for their destination. The final destination would usually have been recorded on a thick paper label that was put into a clip on each wagon's chassis. It wasn't designed to be fast and it took a lot of people to make it work.

It was the Beeching review that saw the end of these local yards and common-carrier status and a move to freight concentration depots. Taking small loads and making them into wagon loads was uneconomic because it was labour intensive at every stage.

Keith

[loverswalk]

The average goods yard that could be found at the small branch station to a large inner city location would have a goods yard consisting of a siding(s) dedicated to inbound coal traffic where the local coal merchant(s) would unload PO coal wagon(s) into sacks for onwards delivery to domestic or industrial customers (Leek on the North Staffs had a discharge facility that fed a conveyor that passed under a road and fed the adjacent Leek Gas works). Another siding would be set aside for the transfer of traffic directly from the back of a horse and cart or Lorry into an open wagon or van, a hand crane mounted on a stone base could also be found ajacent to these sidings for the lifting of heavy items from the cart/lorry into the wagon or vice versa.
More often than not a cattle dock for the transfer of livestock would be available and depending on the size of the yard it would have it's own siding or be located at the buffer stop end of the siding mentioned previously. Goods sheds were also widely found in goods yards and varied from small open sided wooden buildings with the wagon protected by a canopy to large brick/stone built buildings that had 1 or more covered roads for the transfer and storage of recieved sundries traffic. Shunting at these yards was undertaken either by capstans/horses, a shunter equipped with a pinch bar or the trip engine when it called.
As already mentioned in previous posts these locations would be served by a Trip freight which would arrive and shunt the yard postitioning wagons within the yard and then departing with loaded or empty wagons for transit to the marshalling sidings at the end of the journey.
I've tried to cover everything but knowing me I may have missed something out.
LW

[BrianB]

There's heaps of information here :

http://myweb.tiscali.co.uk/gansg/

[MedinaOhio]

Thank you all for your generous help straightening me out. That "Goods & Not So Goods" website is a magnificent resource.