> "Ken Parkes" wrote
>
> > I've been looking at an on-line collection or Scottish town OS maps from
> > the late 1800's. I was struck by the number of wagon turntables in goods
> > yards. Switching to the 1930's series the tables are missing and I can't
> > recall seeing any working tables in the 1950's when I began to get
> > interested in railways. Such complete abandonment suggests Railway
> > Inspectorate interference. Anyone have any knowledge, or hunches? >
> They were certainly in use in England into the 1960s and I suspect only
> disappeared when the yards they served were closed during that period of
> concentrating freight traffic into large marshalling and hump yards. >
> Also the increase in wagon lengths had an impact.
>
> John.
>
>
They were used as a compact form of pointwork - if I can put it that way :-) In stations like some of the stations on the Bristol and Gloucester railway, access to several roads in the yard was via a wagon turntable which was connected to the main line. To do a similar setup with standard pointwork would have taken up a lot more space.
In other cases, sidings were run at 90 degrees to lines and fed by wagon turntables and you could get very complex systems set up in quite small areas.
And I think that turntables might also have been required to actually turn wagons since I think I remember some old Victorian wagon designs where access was only possible from one side.
The turntables on the B&G line lasted well into the 20th century principally because there was not the space to re-design the stations. Shunting of wagons would have been done by man or horse or winch, and if modernisation hadn't got rid of them, be sure the Health and Safety people would have got them in the end :-)
Wagon turntables were generally arranged so as to enable single wagons to be run off a siding into a building such as a warehouse or factory, which in turn could have other turntables inside to connect with lines within the building. Working wagon turntables on a model railway layout could be difficult to do, not so much with the operation of the turntable, but with getting the (unpowered) wagon off the turntable into the building. A blast of compressed air, perhaps? Regards, Bill.
I think they were generally found where two lines intersected at a right angle. They were used to transfer wagons from one line to the other (turning them through 90 degrees), rather than to change the orientation of the wagon per se.
But there were some types of wagon that were end-loading, so there might have been occasions when they had to face in a particular direction.
They were much used on the internal narrow-gauge lines of Welsh slate quarries. The last quarry with a working tramway was, I think, Maenofferen at Blaenau Ffestiniog that worked until about 1976. I'm sure I have found disused examples in such places in recent years, but I can't remember exactly where.
I don't know when they were last used, but I remember seeing some still set into the paving around the Hull dockyards (no longer a railway site). I'd expect that dockyards were probably the biggest users of them as they enable wagons to be rotated 90 degrees and pushed into warehouses running alongside the tracks - and warehouses and railway tracks were a big feature of dockyards!
David Mann has a working turntable on Ryder Place (O gauge), controlled by a length of coathanger wire. The it's a matter of hooking onto the coupling and manually hauling the wagon onto the lift. Once up the lift the wagon is hooked behind the horse and hauled across the bridge to the other warehouse. See the Gauge O Guild Gazette vol 14 no 11.
In the early days pointwork was problematic to build and maintain and hence not common practice (Brunel had to add an extra quarter inch to his gauge to allow for the new pointwork on existing lines) so turntables were preferred, as noted by others they allowed a single siding to feet a number of off-shoots, they were widely used in the goods handling yards and even on private sidings asociated with the early lines but as ways of making points evolved the railways changed to useg points instead.
In industry they allowed a railway wagon to be turned through an angle to move into a building, so a single siding with several turntables could feed a series of lines inside the building.
Possibly one of the last uses would have been in 1987 when the wagon tipping hoists in the south wales coal ports were closed down, the turntables were required to get the right end of the wagon onto the hoist. They could handle wagons of up to about twelve foot wheelbase but anything much longer would require a hefty turntable and that brings with it the problem of a short but heavy wagon parked toward one end of said turntable strressing the bearing.
They could however be used with bogie stock, providing the bogie could turn through a sufficient angle, the first bogie is positioned on the plate and turned, the wagon is then moved until the second bogie is in position and the plate again turned.
Working examples have been built in O, OO and N, ons simple dodge is to use a stiff wire hook to pull the wagon off the turntable and into a building (or push it back out again) by its coupling
What I have on the subject . . .
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Thanks for the responses. If John T. is right it seems that OS simply stopped drawing the tables:(( Having sent the post I went to bed and sat reading a library copy of John Thomas's North British Railway Vol.1; it has suddenly turned up after a ten year plus absence. And there was a plan of Glasgow Queen Street in 1860 with carriage turntables to house the carriages in a range of bays at right angles to the running lines,behind the platform, with accesses cut through the platform to swing and remove the carriages. The logistics of putting trains together must have been horrendous. It occurrs to me that with pinpoint bearings it might be possible to move wagons on and off tables by tilting the table slightly (a gimbal arrangment for the pivot), and using electro-magnets to hold the wagon stationary, or brake it. Well that's the hard work done, will someone now refine it please?
There was an OO motorised van with a horse attached, this was in the
70's I believe, as I remember it the legs on the horse could swing and small threads (possibly single hair) was attached to each so the dragged over the ballast to give the impression of walking. In N you would probably need push rods from a cranked axle to operate the legs. But yes magnets are useful things
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