GWR Route: Banbury to Wolverhampton

Warwick Station: gwrw2627

An official photograph for the Great Western Railway Magazine (October 1928) showing a large consignment of crated Winget concrete mixing machines leaving Warwick for Liverpool Docks from where they were to be shipped to Nigeria in West Africa. In 1924, Winget Ltd moved from the North-East (where it had been founded by Mr John Faulder Burn in 1906) to Warwick, where a foundry and engineering works was established at ‘The Cape’. The company specialised in machines for stone crushing, brick breaking and concrete mixing, as well as their modular building system using concrete pillars and panels. The company flourished and subsequently moved to Rochester in Kent in the 1930s. From there its modular system was extensively used to build municipal housing in cities such as Wakefield, Glasgow, Hull and Norwich.

Each of the machinery crates weighed approximately 2 tons, 12 cwts and these can be seen loaded individually on to Passenger Train Well Wagons (telegraphic code Hydra). These wagons were designed to carry road vehicles, but their well usefully kept the large crates within the railway's standard gauge restrictions. These well wagons had; Mansell coach wheels, oil axleboxes and vacuum brakes, as they were intended to travel in passenger trains. They were painted brown with yellow ochre lettering. The goods train equivalent had the telegraphic code Loriot and generally had a greater carrying capacity. The well wagons seen in this photograph are a mixture of diagram G11 and G19 types, which both had a well loading area of eleven feet long by seven feet wide. The table below gives details of the three types of passenger well wagons (Hydra) available in 1928:

The ‘Leamington’ branded 12 ton goods brake van (telegraphic code Toad) No 56290 was built to diagram AA3 in Swindon Works as part of lot 174 (brake vans in this lot were all built between May 1897 and June 1899). These were the first of the classic style of Great Western standard brake vans, with external metal frames and a large single verandah. These diagram AA3 brake vans had the following dimensions:

Overall length: 20 feet
Wheelbase: 13 feet
Width: 7 feet, 6 inches
Internal height 6 feet, 9 inches
Verandah length: 6 feet

The brake van had eight clasp type brakes with sanding gear to assist adhesion. There were two sand boxes on the verandah and two inside the van. To improve adhesion, the weight of the diagram AA3 brake vans was gradually increased to 16 tons and 20 tons by adding scrap metal in to their hollow chassis. Once fitted trains became more common these brake vans were fitted with vacuum pipes (with the guard having a brake valve in the van), some also had a vacuum cylinder.

Robert Ferris

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