LMS Route: Stratford Midland Junction - The Shakespeare
Route
Burton Dassett Platform: smjbd8
View of Burton Dassett Platform's simple combined office and
storage shed facilities. The facilities at Burton Dassett catered for goods
traffic and workmen trains as this station had no scheduled services. Tarmac
were a major producer of road material with plants around the country that
required constant supply. The Edge Hills was once an important supplier of
aggregates to the Tarmac company as evidence in practically any photograph of
this location.
The birth of Tarmac Limited was at the Spring Vale Furnaces
of Sir Alfred Hickman and Co. in Bilston, near Wolverhampton. Initially the
company developed an invention of Nottingham road surveyor Edgar Hooley at the
very beginning of the twentieth century of a road surfacing material created
from waste slag recovered from iron and steel mills and pitch, a residue of the
coking process which was to revolutionise the construction of roads and any
other paved surface from private driveways to airport runways. The term
'Tarmac' is loosely and inaccurately used to describe any such material, since
the 1920's the development of asphalt and bitumen as by-products of the oil and
chemical industries rapidly replaced the composition of the road surfacing
material but the name Tarmac has indelibly stuck.
A very substantial fleet of railway wagons was developed,
and for that matter needed as the railway companies in 1922 refused to carry
the road-making material in their own wagons. Although a complete inventory of
Tarmac rolling stock cannot be assembled due to missing railway company wagon
registers, an estimate is that by 1920 the company operated some 1,000 wagons
and additional wagons were being built at an astonishing rate. By 1930 almost
2,000 additional new wagons had been built, those with timber bodies usually
re-inforced inside to deal with the loads that they would be required to carry
The company also owned 140 tank wagons for the transport of liquids from coking
plants and refineries. In the 1930's the company diversified into quarrying,
taking over several quarries in Derbyshire. Full details can be found in my
"Private Owner Wagons, a Fifth Collection"
The two wagons illustrated above are no. 1393, of which the
origin is unknown, and no. 1850, built in 1921 as one of a batch of 150 wagons
numbered 1802 to 1951 by the Midland RC&WCo. of Birmingham for the
Wolverhampton operation and registered with the L&NWR. The lettering style
of all of the timber bodied wagons was constant, black with unshaded white
letters. They could have been seen almost anywhere.
Keith Turton
back
|