Mineral wagon
As a step further towards the old open access arrangements some of the early long-distance railways contracted with a single transport agent to handle all their goods operations, with the agent not only providing wagons and vans but warehousing and handling at each station and conveying the goods to and from the railway at each end of the journey.
This led to frequent delays and breakdowns due to broken couplings, faulty brakes and hot boxes - the latter caused by the crude grease-lubricated wheel bearings often used on private owner wagons - and problems caused by the simple dumb buffers that were near-universally used up to the time of World War I.
To combat these issues the Railway Clearing House (an organisation originally set up to share out revenue from joint services between companies) introduced minimum standards for private owner wagons in 1887.
Although the 1909 design standards were supposed to be fully enforced by 1914 the advent of World War I meant that they were suspended and many non-compliant wagons actually remained in service until well after the Grouping of 1921.
This reliance on a large number of small, simple wagons introduced a great deal of inefficiency to railway operations.
The North Eastern Railway leveraged its geographic monopoly over a large coal-producing area to encourage major collieries in its territory to accept the NER's own design of 20-ton[which?]
Other railways offered financial incentives such as lower carriage rates for larger or more modern wagon types but the take-up remained very limited.
It wasn't until the 1960s that Merry-go-round trains changed a system for transporting coal that was fundamentally different from that introduced in the 1830s, with specially-designed hoppers that could carry twice the load at twice the speed of the old mineral wagon.
[2] Both the LNER and London, Midland and Scottish Railway (LMS) had taken an additional 5,000 wagons from the MoT post-WW2, and once these were absorbed by BR were given the prefix "M".
Known as a "London Traders" flap, there are conflicting ideas about its function, but it is generally thought to have been provided to make it easier for coal merchants to unload the wagon by hand.
[2] This included a late-1950s order towards the end of their construction, when Pressed Steel was commissioned to build 27,500 wagons split across 4 lot numbers.
The wagons of even small local merchants could sometimes range widely over the railway system depending on where the owner had sourced his next shipment of coal.
Mineral wagons fitted with continuous brake gear (which could be controlled by the driver on the locomotive) were virtually unheard of prior to the 1930s.
Due to the lack of stopping power, and because coal was a low-value bulk good that did not lose value with time as it was transported, mineral trains travelled at low speeds - rarely more than 25 mph (40 km/h) and often significantly less.
The basic design of the wagons, with two axles and a short fixed wheelbase plus the widespread use of wheel bearings lubricated by grease or tallow in the pre-1914 era, also discouraged travel at higher speeds.
These ran from Annesley, a collection yard for the collieries of Nottinghamshire served by the ex Great Central Railway, to Woodford Halse and then onwards to major destinations across southern England.
Two batches of 16-ton wagons were bought by CC Crump in 1971, hired to ICI in Runcorn for the transport of soda ash, and subsequently scrapped in 1979.
[2] The rusty BR survivors were transferred to Departmental use, under TOPS codes ZHO (unfitted) and ZHV (vacuum braked).
Used by civil engineers for general works, the greater weight of stone necessitated holes being cut in the wagon sides to avoid over-loading.
