Narrow gauge track amidst Swindon Works sidings.

[Davexoc]

To add some reference to where it was, this view from 1980 was taken just west of the weighbridge. The cutting area is off to the left some way.

Some of the milk tanks are still there, as is the little shed...

 

[JimC]

Timber treatment of some kind seems likely. The CCA process of timber treatment was invented in the 30s for example. 

[Later] So from the drawings in the book referenced above the building the line serves probably wasn't there in 1920, was there in 1955 for the OS map, and was gone by 1979, and judging by the trees had probably been gone at least five to ten years. Something to do with the timber yard seems inevitable. 

Edited August 11 by JimC

[Enterprisingwestern]

 

Swindon Works tea urn filling shed?

 

Mike.

[Wickham Green too]

Well, they'd need a special facility - there wasn't a ready supply of 'kettles' at that time !

[Halvarras]

I visited around the Con Yard quite a few times during the 1970s when it was full of Westerns awaiting the torch (sob) but don't recall this narrow gauge track, and I'm sure I would have if I'd seen it. However looking at the overall map I'm sure I simply didn't wander quite far enough north as the locos tended to gather in those widely spaced sidings below it.

 

I have only one book specifically on Swindon Works but it's the same one as @K14 and due to a bulging bookcase it's currently somewhere in the loft so no need to go up there on a hot August afternoon looking for it.....!

 

Overall impression to me is that something which could fit on very small wagons or trolleys required processing during passage through that building and then returned externally via the loop from whence it came - or loop first then through the building. Treatment of timber for a specific purpose, possibly using chemicals best kept well away from the main buildings? But getting the timber (or whatever) to and from the facility doesn't seem to have been as easy as one would expect with all that standard gauge track around it but not conveniently close to it.......in other words I agree with Mike @The Stationmaster's take on it 🙂! Still a mystery at the moment though......

[Davexoc]

Looking at that aerial shot and zooming in, it does look like there was a raised area around the turntable, to the right of the white roofed? vehicle. So was this the loading/unloading point?

You can see the vent shaft to the left and the little building to the right.

 

[009 micro modeller]

1 hour ago, Halvarras said:

Overall impression to me is that something which could fit on very small wagons or trolleys required processing during passage through that building and then returned externally via the loop from whence it came - or loop first then through the building.

That’s what I thought as well, so timber would make sense. Was I closer than I thought with the autoclave idea? It’s the apparent need to use something other than standard gauge and the seeming difficulty with transshipping from standard gauge that seems odd though.

[JimC]

1 hour ago, 009 micro modeller said:

Was I closer than I thought with the autoclave idea? It’s the apparent need to use something other than standard gauge and the seeming difficulty with transshipping from standard gauge that seems odd though.

 

A CCA treatment plant, for instance, consists of a pressure vessel in which the timber is placed and impregnated with that very nasty mix of copper, chrome and arsenic containing chemicals.  If we hypothesise a system where the timber was treated on the trolley, then a standard gauge plant would need to be very large indeed! Also the trolleys would inevitably be contaminated with all those toxins, so it would make sense to keep them within a very controlled environment. There are houses there now, wonder what the soil is like! Although I expect if it was a CCA plant the ash or whatever the sidings were laid on is in landfill somewhere, not under the houses.

[Nearholmer]

Sprig tramways like this were very common indeed in industrial premises, railway works included, before things like fork-lift trucks. I’ve seen several sleeper-creosoting plants, and it doesn’t look like one to me, so the simpler drying kiln suggestion seems more plausible. Could even be something odd like a seat-cushion fumigating plant!

 

Wolverton Works had a nice set of 18” gauge lines in use until at least the 1980s, they may be still, serving the woodworking shop, and linking on to the boiler-house that fed the generating plant, where every tiny bit of scrap timber was burned. You find tiny tramways doing things like carrying stone blocks to saws, shifting scenery into theatres, moving exhibits around museum galleries, etc ….. any place where either heavy or bulky stuff had to be shifted in tight spaces.

 

 

Edited August 11 by Nearholmer

[5944]

On 09/08/2024 at 22:10, K14 said:

"The Great Western at Swindon Works" by A.S. Peck has several plans of the area & the 1920 plan shows that it was inhabited by a Timber shed (the main building under discussion) with a Logging Sawmill (inc. Traversing Crane) to the West and a large timber stacking yard to the South. The building to the North is marked as a Timber Drying Kiln.

Timber for cab floors, works trolleys, that sort of thing possibly?

[Halvarras]

27 minutes ago, 5944 said:

Timber for cab floors, works trolleys, that sort of thing possibly?

 

It looks like it would be for that kind of small-scale timber.

 

1 hour ago, Nearholmer said:

 Could even be something odd like a seat-cushion fumigating plant!

 

Something like that did cross my mind - reason is, seat cushions would (I imagine) be light enough to be placed on a trolley say four at a time then wheeled into the building for treatment. Trans-shipment to/from a standard gauge wagon wouldn't be necessary, perhaps hand carts would be sufficient. Mind you I'm probably underestimating the weight of railway carriage seat cushions but, considering the coal-shifting abilities of steam loco firemen back then, never mind the heavy lifting in the Works itself, yer average railway bloke was probably up to it 😜!

 

Except that, wasn't the carriage shop at the far end of the Works site from this location? Wouldn't have been very efficient, unless the chemicals used were a bit nasty and there wasn't anywhere suitable for such an operation at the more cramped East end. Beginning to feel I'm overthinking my way into a corner now though 😞!!

[009 micro modeller]

1 hour ago, Nearholmer said:

Wolverton Works had a nice set of 18” gauge lines in use until at least the 1980s, they may be still, serving the woodworking shop, and linking on to the boiler-house that fed the generating plant, where every tiny bit of scrap timber was burned.

Is that shown on a map anywhere?

 

2 hours ago, JimC said:

 

A CCA treatment plant, for instance, consists of a pressure vessel in which the timber is placed and impregnated with that very nasty mix of copper, chrome and arsenic containing chemicals.  If we hypothesise a system where the timber was treated on the trolley, then a standard gauge plant would need to be very large indeed! Also the trolleys would inevitably be contaminated with all those toxins, so it would make sense to keep them within a very controlled environment. There are houses there now, wonder what the soil is like! Although I expect if it was a CCA plant the ash or whatever the sidings were laid on is in landfill somewhere, not under the houses.

The sort of autoclave setup I looked at photos of when I was doing some research for potential micro layout ideas a few years ago is something like this (photo at top of article): https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/autoclave-timber-impregnation-wood-treatment-rakesh-verma

 

They can also be used for bricks etc.

 

Definitely fits @Nearholmer’s definition of a ‘sprig tramway’, some of them having the wagons moved by a pusher wagon being driven by a chain between the rails, but equally and more straightforwardly could be hand-worked like the Swindon line. I’m not sure that an autoclave like this would normally be double-ended though (as implied by the Swindon track layout) but it would make sense to have pre- and post-treatment sides of the building, with wagons/trolleys making their way through with the stuff being treated onboard and then returning (empty?) via the other (outside) line. This might allow, for instance, a stockpile of untreated wood (or whatever) on one side, unloaded from standard gauge wagons as convenient, and a stockpile of treated wood on the other, again able to be taken away by standard gauge as needed. The photo and map seem to show a point on one side but a wagon turntable on the other, which makes me think that maybe the operation required wagons to be handled singly on one side (where the turntable is) but in batches (obviously I hesitate to say ‘rakes’ on a hand-worked line as that might imply ‘long and coupled together) on the other.

 

Theoretically, I can just about imagine a situation where a train of narrow gauge wagons starts out on the side with the point.  A train of (say) three or four wagons could be loaded up with untreated timber (from a stockpile) and rolled forward into the treatment plant. There it stays until the treatment is complete, before continuing through to the output side. Here the timber could be unloaded to a ‘treated’ stockpile. With a small team of workers, some of them could start unloading the wagons with one person running the wagons round back to the start point (via the turntable), one by one as they become empty.

 

I am having a think now about micro layout concepts involving similar ideas. It’s how to represent the unloading of the timber that’s the issue…

[009 micro modeller]

3 minutes ago, Halvarras said:

Except that, wasn't the carriage shop at the far end of the Works site from this location? Wouldn't have been very efficient, unless the chemicals used were a bit nasty and there wasn't anywhere suitable for such an operation at the more cramped East end. Beginning to feel I'm overthinking my way into a corner now though 😞!!

Would it be for carriages in for more serious repairs in the carriage shop though, or would it just be a case of them arriving periodically to have the cushions taken out and cleaned, then refitted and sent away again? Potentially a relatively quick process.

[JimC]

By this date there was a large scale fumigation plant in the carriage shop. By large scale I mean it could hold an entire carriage! There's a feature here.

https://didcotrailwaycentre.org.uk/article.php/488/tuesday-treasures-november-2021/

Page down to 23 November.

[Davexoc]

29 minutes ago, 009 micro modeller said:

Is that shown on a map anywhere?

 

I'm guessing its the bit marked 'Chy' on this map

 

https://maps.nls.uk/geo/explore/side-by-side/#zoom=18.0&lat=52.06425&lon=-0.81304&layers=258&right=ESRIWorld

[Davexoc]

Back to Swindon, looking at STEAM photo library, the line didn't exist until sometime during the '40s as it doesn't appear here

 

https://www.steampicturelibrary.com/favourites/swindon-works-map-c-1940s-9800195.html

 

And apparently the reason there are big gaps in GWR paper records

 

https://www.steampicturelibrary.com/railway-war/second-world-war/paper-recycling-cart-outside-general-stores-19931807.html

 

If you look around the collection, there were several NG systems dotted around the various shops for carting stuff around, it just doesn't show this particular one.

One thing I didn't expect to find in the collection though was yours truely, in the 1980/1 apprentice intake....

[Nearholmer]

1 hour ago, 009 micro modeller said:

Is that shown on a map anywhere?

Is what? The Wolverton system?

 

Dont know, but I took several photos, and got hold of a print from the local museum showing the interior of the timber shop in its heyday.

[009 micro modeller]

1 minute ago, Nearholmer said:

Is what? The Wolverton system?

Yes

[Nearholmer]

58 minutes ago, Davexoc said:

I'm guessing its the bit marked 'Chy' on this map

That’s it.

[Nearholmer]

Amazingly, I found the relevant pictures really quickly! Quality not great, because these are simple phone snaps of album pages.

 

Wolverton, not Swindon, and you can see that the 18” crossed a traverser shared with SG. The 18” wagons are “various”, but the most interesting is one with a cast bolster for long timbers, which I think is the same as wagons used in the system at Crewe.

 

You can also see that the task had been taken over by the SG, using what must originally have been hand-propelled bogies, but now with a rather neat SG Motor Rail loco, which was quite new when I took these photos, iirc built c1980.

 

Having now checked the 1938 25” map, it is traceable going from the woodworking shop to two other shops, as well as past the boiler house with its “chy”.

 

Edited August 11 by Nearholmer

[Will Crompton]

Some pictures of the Wolverton system here.

http://www.railalbum.co.uk/industrial-railways/br-wolverton-works.htm

 

As Nearholmer stated above, these sorts of systems did seem common pre-forklift trucks. I think I need one in my garden for bags of compost, large pots etc.

[Wickham Green too]

Would need a rack & pinion to cope with my garden ! 🙄

[Nearholmer]

Have you seen the sprig-tramway at St Michael’s Mount?

[The Stationmaster]

15 hours ago, 009 micro modeller said:

Would it be for carriages in for more serious repairs in the carriage shop though, or would it just be a case of them arriving periodically to have the cushions taken out and cleaned, then refitted and sent away again? Potentially a relatively quick process.

Coaches were fumigated with the seats in situ and full fumigation could be done at various carriage sidings/depots.  The main requirement at works would be for heavy cleaning but this site is long way from the nearest Carriage Shops.

 

I still think some sort of timber treatment but definitely nothing major - compare with what went on at Hayes for example where sonething very different, and larger, was used to treat sleepers.

[Will Crompton]

3 hours ago, Nearholmer said:

Have you seen the sprig-tramway at St Michael’s Mount?

I have now!

https://www.hows.org.uk/personal/rail/stm.htm