Great Western Freight
The main original purpose of the Great Western Railway was the transport of goods between Bristol and London. The promoters were taken by surprise at the amount of demand for passenger travel the new line generated. As a result, freight traffic made a rather slow start. In 1850, ten years after opening, the Great Western’s receipts from goods traffic were still only a third of those from passengers (£99,850, compared with £295,100).
The railways not only moved manufactured goods and raw materials around more quickly and cheaply than ever before. They also transformed the lives of city dwellers. For the first time, enough food and fuel could be brought into cities to feed and warm the rapidly growing populations. The quality of people’s diets also improved, since perishable fresh food was also more readily available.
Private owners
From the earliest days of the railways, a large proportion of freight wagons were privately-owned. At first, anything with the right gauge of wheels could go on the tracks. This led to all sorts of problems – buffers that did not meet each other, couplings that would not couple and wagons that were too badly-made or poorly-maintained to stand up to the bumping that all such vehicles got. By the 1890s a national organisation – the Railway Clearing House – had developed a set of standards and testing for wagons. But as late as 1914, around a half of all freight wagons were still in private ownership.
Toads, minks and micas
The GWR started out with just a handful of types of wagon, but they soon found they were being asked to transport a host of different goods, each with their own requirements. To take just a few examples:
Milk was a huge line of business for the GWR, and was just one of the ways the railways transformed the diet of city dwellers. By 1900 they were delivering 2,500,000 gallons a year, generally in 10 or 17 gallon churns, but over the next twenty or so years this grew to 75 million gallons, delivered by 60 special trains, pulling 1,000 louvre-sided vans (milk tankers came in during the 1930s).
Some markets were seasonal or unpredictable in scale – such as fruit, cut flowers or vegetables. In some cases, their transport needs were flexible. Broccoli, for example, went in cleaned-up cattle trucks, but bananas needed to be bedded on straw, in specially heated and ventilated wagons. Iron ore could not be transported in coal hoppers, because it was a lot heavier. Others had safety requirements – gunpowder wagons really needed to be spark-proof, to name an obvious one.
The wide variety of types of wagon the railway used was difficult to communicate on the telegraph, so railwaymen adopted short code-names for them all. Hence brake vans, (where the guard sat, ready to apply the brakes if required), were called toads; covered goods wagons were minks; tank wagons were cordons; fish wagons were tadpoles; flat wagons were beavers; meat vans were micas, and so on.
Some of the GWR freight services were given their own (unofficial) names by the staff, often based on the cargos they carried. Thus the Spud came from Cardiff, the Carpet from Kidderminster, the Bacca from Bristol and the Sparagrass and the Sauce from Worcester.
For more information, try QR or visit www.DidcotRailwayCentre.org.uk/Stories
This project was developed by the GWS Education Team, with valued support from Wren and FCC Environment.