More about freight
Fire!
One of the big hazards for early rail freight was fire, caused by sparks from the locomotive. They came up with the idea of tarpaulin covers for open goods wagons. But at first many goods trains carried a firewatcher, to spot any fires that broke out. Even passers-by could get roped into fire-fighting. In 1840, a member of the public spotted a fire among a wagon-load of barrels and bravely leapt in to quell it. Only later did he learn that the barrels contained a lethal combination of highly inflammable spirits and gunpowder! Barrels were the accepted way of transporting liquids by rail until 1865, when the first railway tank wagon was introduced. However, they did not become common until the mid-1880s.
Shunting
One often forgotten aspect of old-style freight services is shunting - assembling the wagons into a train, so that they all got to the right place. Somebody worked out that, for every 100 miles a freight train covered, 75 miles-worth of shunting was needed. Huge areas were given over to marshalling yards, where the trains were assembled. Dr Beeching recognised that this was very inefficient. He made the railways concentrate on their greatest strength, bulk container traffic.
The burden of being a common carrier
A major burden for rail freight was the common carrier requirement. The Railway and Canal Traffic Act of 1854 forced railways to carry any goods offered to them – unless they were too big to go on the railway or would damage the rolling stock. The Act also laid down maximum charges for moving different types of goods, based on the weight and value of the cargo. Very often this came nowhere near the cost of transporting low-value goods.
It was not until a century later – the Transport Act 1953 – that the railways were given the freedom to refuse unprofitable cargoes. By that time, there was no monopoly. Road transport, which was not bound by a common carrier requirement, had long been able to undercut the railways and poach much of their more profitable freight traffic. Meanwhile, the railways were still having to send pick-up goods services from one wayside station to another, collecting and dropping off unprofitable penny packets of freight along the way.
Containers and bulk traffic
By the 1960s, the best hope for rail freight was seen to be in a new type of traffic – containers. The first container service ran between London and Glasgow in November 1965. From 1968 the business was run by a separate company, Freightliners Ltd. Containers were not a new idea. Brunel himself came up with a very similar idea, to minimise disruption where goods had to be transferred between one gauge and another. The Great Western already had a large fleet of container wagons by the 1930s.
Most of the pre-nationalisation railway companies, private wagon owners and British Railways themselves were all highly conservative over wagon design. In the 1950s coal was still being moved in the same small, uneconomic wagons that had been in use fifty or more years before. On some branch lines, the light construction of the tracks made it impossible to run heavier wagons, or the loading equipment at the collieries was unable to handle the larger wagons.
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This project was developed by the GWS Education Team, with valued support from Wren and FCC Environment.