Tuesday, August 10, 2010

COAL COMFORT

The plan to create the new Brigg Town Green on the Paddock, near the railway station, makes mention of the nearby former coalyard being included.
The brick "coal drops" as railway folk call them were demolished about 12 years ago, since when nothing has happened by way of development. The demolition was a shame, as they were one of relatively few remaining examples of these interesting structures, once common on the rail network.
For the uninitiated, a siding ran off the mainline, beyond the station, allowing wagons to be shunted into the coalyard. The rails ran above the brick arches, from where the coal could be let out of the wagons for storage, prior to being bagged and loaded onto Brocklesby's lorries, for delivery to the public.
Many, many coal fires back then, of course, in Brigg - including on the extensive council estates.

1 comment:

Ken Harrison said...

You're being a bit presumptous, Nige.
Perhaps some folks don't know what these coalyards were like, but you've assumed that they know what 'shunting' was all about.
I recall when I was no higher than my dad's knee, sitting on a bridge's parapet with my brother and his gang watching little, 2x2 shunting engines sort out wagons and shunt them down the respective line in the shunting yard. (Each line of wagons had a guard's van - each with a chimney from a pot-bellied stove. One guard use to make our gang toast with lashing of butter.)
The main purpose, however, was to collect railway engine numbers and underline them in, I think, Allen's ABC of Railway Engine Numbers. (a very specific list of engine types and bogie combination ie 2x4x4 and sub-divided into their ident numbers) Each region, I think, had its own book. (It's possible that these books were the forerunners of the general, 'I-Spy' books - one of the first being about railways.)
The numbers were underlined using a fountain pen and a wooden ruler (which was used convex-side down to avoid ink smudges - biros were frowned upon at that time. All equipment was contained in ex-army, brown haversacks.
In the 50's this was a massive hobby - only challenged by stamp collectging, swapping comics and collecting football cards sold inside the wrappers of bubble gum.
((This was the time when Mars Bars were the size of house bricks and cost 4d (less than 2p) and you got 4 sherbert flying saucers for a 1p (costing a farthing each)))
It was common for lads to take themselves off with a bottle of lemonade, a hard-boiled egg and, if lucky, a packet of Smith's crisps (the one with a blue salt packet) to, for example, Crewe, and stand about the platforms for hours - you could do it in those days and I can remember, being no more than 7, being part of a gang (one of many) who roamed mainline rail stations.
(Most times, one had to get a platform ticket - but the size of train spotter gangs could confuse anyone wanting to inspect them - a common avoidance tactic was to claim that someone else had all the tickets and point vaguely at some innocent, snobby looking lad further along the platform and then mingle somewhere else on the station.
The whole train-spotting hobby came to an abrupt end when diesels were introduced - after which there was the emergence of the adult anorak group. But that doesn't explain why boys' stamp collecting reduced in popularity at about the same time.
However, the simple shunting engines continued and the distinctive clonking noise of shunting was a pervading sound near railway juntions....and then that too suddenly disappeared from town scenes.

ps My great-grandad was an engine driver and his son became the 2nd engineer on the ill-fated Titanic - his family couldn't accept that he perished and his mum use to put his slippers by the fire every night on the assumption he would return.