The Milk Train

 

I decided the other day that what my collection of freight stock was missing was a milk train.  In reality, these could could be seen, from the thirties until the early seventies, transporting milk in tankers from country dairies to major cities.  Railway milk traffic went into decline during the sixties as more and more milk distribution switched to road transport.  Consequently, the trains became shorter and ran less frequently.  Nevertheless, they remained a prominent feature of the railways, particularly on the Southern Region, the area my layout is intended to represent, when completed.  Indeed, London-bound milk trains on this region were interesting, as they terminated at Vauxhall station, between Clapham Junction and Waterloo.  The station is built up on arches and inside theses arches were, at one time, large milk storage tanks.  Milk tanker trains were pulled into one of the platforms, where hoses were attached to their undersides and the milk drained down, via valves, into the storage tanks below.

Anyway, back to the model variety.  Real milk trains were extremely heavy when fully laden, had to transported quickly and smoothly, meaning that they were treated in the schedules like express passenger trains, usually hauled by large express passenger locomotives and having a bogied passenger brake, rather than a standard goods brake van, on the rear.  They also usually featured another van or vans, such as CCTs or GUVs marshalled directly behind the locomotive, (and sometimes in the middle of the train).  Now, I have plenty of express passenger locos, especially Merchant Navies and light pacifics, both of which featured prominently on southern milk trains from the forties to the sixties, a decent collect of passenger brakes and several CCTs and GUVs.  So all I lacked to make up a model milk train were the tankers themselves.  I recalled that, as a child, my Triang-Hornby clockwork train set had included a milk tanker.  It was basically their standard four wheeled fuel tanker painted white and marked 'UD', (for 'United Dairies').  You can still get these second hand at relatively low prices.  The trouble is that real milk tankers were specially built and, from the late thirties, ran on six wheeled chassis.  Moreover, they weren't painted white.  post-war they were painted silver and, after nationalisation new build wagons were blue, with the dairy name on the side.  The idea that they were white seems to derive from the silver colour, which faded quickly to a dull pale finish that looked white both in black and white photos and in colour films from the fifties that I've seen.  To further complicate matters, many existing milk tankers were never repainted either silver or white and retained their old liveries, getting dirtier and dirtier, their lettering fading until the dairy names could barely be read.

Six wheeled milk tanker models are made: Hornby Dublo produced one in a variety of liveries (including white) throughout the fifties and sixties, which was subsequently produced by Wrenn and is now available from Dapol.  From the eighties onwards, Lima also made a six wheeled model in various liveries, with a version of it currently being made by Hornby.  The problem is that both types tend to go for pretty silly prices on eBay (currently the main source of second hand model railway equipment).  So, I surprised myself by actually winning an auction, at a very reasonable price, for the job lot of three of the Lima type seen above, as a start to my milk tanker train.  Now, I knew from the description and eBay photos that they weren't perfect, with a buffer missing from one.  But when I received them there turned out to be other minor damage, possibly incurred during transit (almost certainly in the case of two broken couplings).  I was also surprised as to how lightweight and flimsy they feel compared with my older Hornby and Wrenn goods rolling stock, more akin to the Airfix goods stock which always felt too light.  Although described as being Lima, I'm pretty sure that they are the later Hornby versions - certainly thy are fitted with the lightweight version of the Hornby coupling (which I detest as it is too easily broken).  So, now it is a case of repairing damaged buffers and sorting out those couplings.  Still, they do represent a start to my milk tanker train, even though the dairy whose livery they carry operated mainly in the North West rather than the South, (tankers, though, could and did wander around regions and dairies, often without being repainted).  I just need another three or four to sandwich between a CCT and a passenger brake and I'll have a reasonable representation of a mid-sixties Southern Region milk train.