Butterley Co 12 ton Patent steel
mineral wagon SIS 695
.
Above:
Butterley wagon restored in "Parkhall & Foxfield" livery and used for
locomotive coal
Although
it now looks rather like most other wooden bodied coal wagons at Foxfield,
this one has a particularly interesting history in the development of the
design. Originally it was a Butterley Patent Wagon, one of a quantity of
wagons built in the mid 1930s to demonstrate the advantages of all metal
12 ton capacity coal wagons for use by collieries and coal merchants, which
had traditionally favoured timber construction for around 100 years. The
Butterley Engineering Company in Derbyshire took out a patent on the design,
producing variations with side doors but with optional end and bottom doors.
All sections were rivetted together; welding was not yet common. Many were
painted in Butterley's own gloss black livery enlivened with yellow corner
plates and large yellow letters shaded red. Others were painted in the
liveries of operators who hired or bought them to try them out. The advantages
and disadvantages of steel wagons were weighed up and the two largest railway
companies, the LMS and LNER, started to produce new mineral wagons in steel
to somewhat similar designs for their own fleets during the early years
of World War Two. The Butterley Patent Wagon design was important because
it paved the way for literally hundreds of thousands of all-steel MoWT
and BR mineral wagons over the next twenty five years.
Above:
Butterley Patent Wagon number 3020, identical to ex Shelton number 695
when it was built
It
is not known which operator first used the wagon now preserved at Foxfield,
or which livery it carried. It would have been pooled in 1939 with all
the privately owned wagons and if it was ever repainted after that, it
would have appeared in BR grey, with a P-prefix number allocated at its
first general repair after nationalisation in 1948. Any trace of this number
has been lost with the passage of time. At sometime in its life, probably
in the late 1950s, it was sold out of service to Shelton steelworks where
it was renumbered 695 in the fleet of internal use wagons. Due to corrosion
the steel body has been largely removed and steel section stanchions bolted
on to support a more conventional wooden planked body. It is still possible,
however, to see the remains of the original body at the corners and around
the side doors. The underframe and running gear remain remarkably totally
original, including the Butterley cast axleboxes and the locking handles
for bottom doors. This wagon was chosen for preservation at Foxfield purely
by chance, as the wooden underframe wagons from among which it was selected
were in far worse condition. It arrived by road in September 1979 and was
restored to the livery of the Parkhall and Foxfield Colliery Company, number
4143. It is in need of further attention but is usually to be found containing
locomotive coal. In view of its hybrid construction its future may be restored
in the guise of a Shelton internal use wagon, or far more adventurous,
as a rebuild back to its Butterley condition as the sole surviving representative
of an important step in the development of the British goods wagon.
One
of the Shelton platelayers tool vans is
also a conversion of a steel underframe coal wagon of some kind, but probably
with a wooden body.