Basilica Fields

GW goods wagons part 1; 5-plank open merchandise

Adrian — Sat, 21 Jan 2012 22:04:24 +0000

Some 1600 ten ton open merchandise wagons to Diagram 03 were built by the Great Western Railway in four batches during the years 1904-5 and 1912. These wagons were a development of the Diagram 04 introduced three years earlier and incorporated a 4⅛” wider top plank bringing the internal height to 3’3″ which remained the basic standard for GW 10 & 12/13T opens in all future builds. At the same time the width was made wider by 6″ bringing the inside and outside dimensions to 7’7″ and 8′ respectively. Many, perhaps most, of the 03s were fitted with the Williams patent sheet supporter to aid the wagons sheets protect the merchandise when in transit.

I recently completed a commission for an 03, built from a WEP kit and this was given a light weathering as if recently built. The running number suggests that it is one of the final batch, and as the wagon will fit into a c1912 scenario, I think the degree of weathering is appropriate.

As these wagons were introduced in 1904 it would be reasonable to incorporate a small number in amongst the larger proportion of 4-plank wagons running on the Metropolitan Line between Acton, and Smithfields through Basilica Fields on the Extended Circle around to the GW depot at St Katherine Docks. Of course they will have S7 wheels whereas this has standard 0 Fine wheels.

I’m not too happy with the photo as the light was fading so I used some artificial daylight to help but it mucked the colours up and I couldn’t fix it to my satisfaction on the computer. If I get some decent mid-morning light before the wagon gets delivered I’ll upload some better photos and hopefully show the folded wagon sheet inside too.

2011 in review

Adrian — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 12:26:28 +0000

Happy New Year to all of the readers of this journal. Many thanks to all of you who have commented on the posts, and who have responded with much useful information both on here and privately. I’m also very pleased that the content has helped so many of you in your own researches. The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys have prepared a 2011 annual report and I thought this might be an interesting diversion for about 30 seconds or so…

Here’s an excerpt:

The concert hall at the Syndey Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 23,000 times in 2011. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 9 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

Click here to see the complete report.

View of the Yard

Adrian — Fri, 16 Dec 2011 22:38:09 +0000

A quick, and very rough sketch to show the levels. That it looks like part of Ricey’s Cornfield Street is no accident – it fits the bill perfectly, so there’s no need to reinvent the wheel.

Rough sketch of The Yard

We’re looking south. In the foreground I’ve added the an impression of the far side of the brick lined cutting for the Met Lines (stage 3 of this segment) and the position of the future road bridge over it on the right hand side. On the viaduct at the back will be the quadruple tracks of the GE Main and Through lines with the beginnings of some sidings on the left (stage 2). These three stages will only encompass one half of The Rookery with about half as much again either side bringing the Rookery to about 20′ in length. However, what you see here shows the extent of the visible Met lines for this whole section as they disappear into cut & cover tunnels either side. Over the top on the right (west, towards The City) will be a network of grimy East End streets and courtyards with the main lines on the GE viaduct forming the backdrop. Beyond that is a goods depot and then Artillery Lane where the Met lines reappear. To the left the sidings eventually lead to a large coal depot. But that’s all some way off…

In the space in the left foreground are some dilapidated buildings of a small courtyard (H. Dowling & Sons, Decorators, perhaps?) accessed through the viaduct. It all looks to be a tight squeeze and that’s intentional; I want to impart a cramped, claustrophobic feel. I think a mock up will be essential so I can move things around if necessary to make the best of it.

Where angels fear to tread.

Adrian — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 21:31:49 +0000

Mad houses, poor houses, work houses, whore houses, slums, hospitals, feculent rivers, churches and cemeteries have all succumbed to the steady onslaught of the coming of the railways to East London from the late 1830s to the present day. As the Eastern Counties Railways and its successor the Great Eastern Railway marched inexorably onwards towards the City, they cut a huge gash through the densely populated streets where pickpockets, housebreakers and prostitutes live in great numbers alongside destitute street sellers and home-based artisans in Sweater’s Hell, each struggling to survive through every waking minute of every day on meagre pay and little food of the poorest quality. Rookeries abound; compacted courtyards and wretched streets of ancient, rotting housing stock are linked by a network of dilapidated low-roofed subterranean corridors and passageways vastly overcrowded by second and third generation Londoners and more recent migrants. Newer housing invariably contravenes building regulations and are almost always without foundations, often with windowless cellars or wooden flooring laid directly onto bare earth where entire extended families live in a single low-roofed room sharing one damp bed. Exteriors of cheap timber and ash-adulterated clay brick are held together with billysweet (a by-product of soap making from local factories) instead of mortar which never dries out, resulting in sagging, unstable walls sometimes faced with blooming plaster upon which badly pitched leaking roofs sit, supported by mouldering rafters. Damp and mildew seeps through the very fabric of the buildings, disease and sickness abounds. Mortality is high and never more so than during times of contagion, the death toll is often twice that of other poor areas outside of the Rookeries.

Fifty years ago viaducts constructed from millions of handmade bricks rose up and bisected foetid communities; the resultant archways were quickly leased out as housing, workshops, warehouses and even public houses. Goods depots, factories and granaries, each several stories high, have erupted from cleared slums and link with the railways at viaduct level. An array of hydraulic hoists delivers wagons of merchandise into the deep Stygian gloom beneath via a viper’s nest of street-level inset tracks, each one dragged, shoved or otherwise coerced by horse, rope, capstan and pinch-bars over of ranks of wagon turntables into small dark unloading bays. Every two hours dozens of fresh wagons of steam and domestic coals are lined up on rows of tracks with hatches astride and between, their contents hurled into the depths below to be weighed and bagged. Six hundred and twenty five thousand souls live within a few furlongs of the railway, between them burning some 937,000 tons annually; every day ten 300-ton trains of coal from Yorkshire and Nottinghamshire are brought into the capital via the GN&GE Joint Line satiating their household needs.

As time passes, new depots arise and older sidings are ripped up, altered or allotted a new use. Here in the Angel Rookery, the old ECR Burial Street goods depot of 1840, built on the site of a disused cemetery, was largely swept away by the Great Eastern during widening of the viaduct and quadrupling of the line in 1891. The remaining few sidings at street level on the north side have been converted into a small locomotive servicing yard for engines shunting the nearby warehouses. The yard is accessed by way of a severe gradient from the main line, local crews bestowing upon it the grand epithet The Pipe to Hell. Some ancient squalid housing remains in Burial Street, a dirty, amputated stump of a road, no more than a shadow of its former self, their small rooms seething with damp, disease, death and worse…

Less than a decade ago the streets of the Angel Rookery were within the stalking grounds of Jack the Ripper. Some residents worry that one day he will return, and in quiet, unguarded moments, one can see uncertainty mixed with the suspicion of strangers in their eyes, sometimes a flicker of fear traces across their careworn features. Fables abound, mostly generational folklore handed down from the Irish, Jewish, Romany and Huguenot migrants to frighten the children at bedtime, but adults confide to me that at least the relatives of Jack’s victims had remains to bury, whereas the victims of other psychotic murderers or phantasms have no such remains to mourn over. From various sources I have collected the names of dozens of local souls who have vanished in recent years, and at first I greeted such tales with no small degree of scepticism – stories of children and adults, sometimes one walking alone, sometimes one in a group, simply disappearing into thin air, never to be seen again. One of the strangest and most recent of these events concerned an old man, a lunatic in his seventh decade who turned up on the doorstep of a house in Burial Street and claimed he was the child of the occupant and his wife in their thirties whose eldest son, a boy of seven, had disappeared last year. The old man’s disclosure obviously upset the couple, they angrily refuted his claims which grew louder and more passionate until chased away by a clearly unnerved crowd of locals who had gathered around. Later that evening the old man stole onto railway property and threw himself into the path of an oncoming train. One might easily consider such stories to be fuelled by alcohol, or inventions woven to cover infanticide, fratricide, or even an accidental death as five sixths of all infant deaths in these Rookeries are by suffocation from overlaying due to overcrowding in family-shared beds. However, so consistent are the stories, and so earnestly are they told, that even a man grounded in scientific principles might begin to wonder if something dark and sinister is indeed abroad.

Standing sentinel over the junction of Burial Street and Angel Lane is a lone remnant of the old cemetery rudely crushed beneath industrial progress. Myths surrounding it are legion; older children put the fear of God into their younger siblings who tremble at the stories, giving wide berth to the statue they are told moves and drags you silently into the ground to consume you alive. I am quietly amused yet nevertheless interested by these pagan fables, but sometimes a little less of the statue’s mournful face appears to be covered by raised hands. It is, of course, a trick of light and shadow created by the flickering of a spluttering gas lamp or from patterns swirling in the dense, greasy yellow-green fog of another pea-souper settling over the dismal East End. In the blink of an eye one can see that of course no such movement has taken place, but if the mind of a methodical scientist can be tricked, how much more so these poor, ignorant, uneducated souls?

Tonight I heard the tanks of a locomotive being filled with water and the clanging of mineral upon metal plate as the bunker was filled from wicker baskets of coal stored on the timber staging. I stood by the wall adjoining the public house near the sub-surface lines and saw a small black engine standing in a siding. One of the crewmen exited the grounded carriage, trudging towards it through the accumulated slush and climbed into the cab. Words were exchanged, conversation drowned out by a short blast on the steam whistle and followed by a staccato bark from the chimney. The exhaust gave way to near silence, just the quiet clanking of rods and the thud of wheels passing over rail joints echoing down Burial Street, before disappearing under the iron bridge leading to the rest of the world. In the distance and high above, the muted, heavy labouring of a heavy mineral train punctuated the air, brakes squealing in protest as it slowed towards the coal depot located a quarter of a mile away. In the brick-lined cutting below, an aspirating train filled with passengers burst from the gloom of a long tunnel, a cloud of sulphurous exhaust roaring into the moonlit sky caught me unaware, causing my heart to suddenly race. I looked at my pocket watch; the hour was late, and before returning to the warmth of civilisation and society there was a long walk across London ahead of me. Laughter and song spilled out from the Weeping Angel public house, light from the front window bathing the flagstones in a soft yellow glow. I stood and watched through the etched glass before crossing the muddy street towards the sorrowful angel, and for the first time in all my visits here, as I glanced up, the gas lamps in the street flickered and for a moment I thought saw the horror of blank eyes staring back.

Extract from the Journal of Doctor J. Smith, army surgeon (retired), entry dated 12th December 1901. Less than two months later the doctor himself disappeared, the last entry in his journal indicating that he believed he had solved the mystery of the vanishing residents of the Rookery.

100 Not Out!

Adrian — Fri, 18 Nov 2011 14:14:44 +0000

With this entry the Basilica Fields journal is one hundred posts old. Not only that, but in the last week it passed the 30,000 views mark. I am all astonishment; twenty one months of waffle, a little progress and lots of fantastic feedback. All in what is, to be honest, a very niche subject.

I wanted to mark this milestone with something a little bit special so I looked up all the possible prototype locos of the various companies which might have worked the Basilica Fields lines with a running number of 100. Two locos presented themselves, both Great Eastern tanks, and they ran consecutively – although there was, strictly speaking, a few months of overlap. The earliest of the two, an E10 class 0-4-4T, worked throughout the whole period covered by this project, whereas the latter, an M15 2-4-2T, appeared right at the end of the timeframe, therefore I’ve no expectation of it appearing on the layout.

Shortly after Massey Bromley took the post of Locomotive Superintendent at Stratford the E10 0-4-4T class appeared. The design was obviously that of his predecessor William Adams, essentially being an elongated version of his K9 class and very closely related to his 61 class. Sixty of the new locos were built between 1878 and 1883, the final twenty being fitted with the Westinghouse brake from new and the rest of the class fitted retrospectively shortly after.

Number 100 was the eighty-third locomotive to be built at Stratford Works, and was constructed under Order R10. The loco was ex-works on the 18th June 1879 and released to traffic two days later in the then standard Great Eastern livery of black, lined red – the class being the first to benefit from Bromley’s widened lining style compared to that applied by Adams. It had 8″ yellow numerals hand-painted on the buffer beams, and was fitted with a pair of Bromley’s new-style cast iron elliptical number plates on the side tanks.

In November 1894 No.100 was rebuilt with a new boiler pressed to 140psi, fitted with larger diameter cylinders and standard Holden-pattern boiler fittings. New round-spectacle front weather boards replaced the Adams-style square window type, and for the first time a matching rear weatherboard was fitted, finally enclosing the cab. It was painted in the then standard ultramarine blue livery (probably for the second time) with Holden’s enlarged ‘GER’ transfers on the side tanks, and fitted with Worsdell-style brass number plates cast with the legend ‘Rebuilt 1894′ on the bunker sides.

In July 1905 it was one of nine E10 tanks placed on the duplicate list to make way for two new batches of Holden’s version of Worsdell’s M15 2-4-2 double-ended radial tanks destined to take the 91-110 number series, the new No.100 appearing in October of that year. On the duplicate list the E10 received a 0 prefix and a new set of cast brass numberplates were fitted to ring the changes. However, the sands of time were running out for the locomotive and No.0100 was withdrawn from service in January 1906. Thirty nine of the class remained in service, their numbers dwindling over the next six years, and the last of the class, No.097, was withdrawn from service in November 1912 rendering them extinct.

The photograph is precious old, as Mr. Jonas would have it; no earlier than 1882 from the early-style low-slung Westinghouse brake pipe, but no later than c1885/6 from the early-style spoon-shaped lamp irons which were rapidly phased out upon Mr. Holden’s appointment as Locomotive Superintendent. Also fitted are early style clack valves and steam cocks on the boiler, along with the old sanding apparatus looking not unlike scaffolding climbing up the smokebox sides. I don’t think anyone could say that the Adams stovepipe was a thing of beauty; ‘characterful’ is probably as generous an adjective as one could muster.

The location had me stymied for a while, and even though I found an untouched version of this photograph in an early GERS Journal, the background is too indistinct to help. Given that the loco was working out of Fenchurch Street when the photograph was taken, I couldn’t correlate that with the design of any engine sheds on the routes out of the terminus. Initially I posted that I thought it was Epping goods shed, but Colin Dowling (Eastsidepilot) sent a photo of Millwall and it’s patently obvious he’s hit the nail on the head. The photo is reproduced here.

So there we have it, No.100 at Millwall in the early 1880s. The loco may well make it onto the layout too – it’ll have to be scratchbuilt, but will make a perfect partner for No.101 which was fitted with condensing apparatus for working the East London Line, but that’s a tale for another time…and no, not for the 101st post either…

Edited for correction; location now identified.