Recent content by Karhedron

I don't know of a rail-creamery at Leek specifically but Staffordshire is prime dairy country and the North Staffordshire railway certainly carried a lot of milk traffic.

You are right about Vauxhall. There was a Unigate bottling plant opposite the station. Those pipes on the platform used to run down under the arches and across the road to the bottling plant. Steam lines ran back the other way to clean out the tanks. Most bottling plants received milk from a...

I am currently writing a book about milk traffic on the railways and I can shed light on some of these questions. I don't claim that everything is definitive, one of the things I have discovered in my research is that milk traffic was rather poorly documented at the time and many records have...

Never one to ignore a challenge I did indeed put pen to paper. The result was not a book but at least an article on modelling milk trains and facilities in the December 2012 issue of Railway modeller. Baby steps.... :wink: http://www.pecopublications.co.uk/Railway-Modeller-December-2012.html

A few more photos that may be of interest. Melksham was not directly connected to the railway as far as I can tell but I think it still dispatched milk by rail for a while. And here is a nice shot of a T14 on a Vauxhall milk train around nationalisation. This is the earliest photo I have...

There used to be demountable road-rail milk tankers, you can see one in this shot here. Part of the problem was one of reliability. Whilst railways did their best to treat milk as urgent, there were still plenty of incidents where a failed loco meant that milk arrive late and spoiled or...

Not bottled milk, no. "Pintas" had no insulation so once bottled they relied on being refrigerated to keep them fresh. Bottled milk usually went out on milk floats for delivery to people's doorstep. There were plenty of bottling plants outside London to serve their own local areas. The...

That is right. The MMB retained a small fleet of tankers and gave them a fairly spiffy refurbishment. They lived on the siding at Lostwithiel for a while and can be seen nicely here. http://www.flickr.com/photos/geoffsimages/6933195671/

I have found some pictures of the creamery at Pont Llanio. Not in the best of shape now. http://www.derelictplaces.co.uk/main/showthread.php?t=18188 http://www.coflein.gov.uk/en/site/91430/images/MILK+FACTORY%2C+PONT+LLANIO/ http://www.geograph.org.uk/photo/535124

Another one for the Album here. The United Dairies depot in Forest Hill was converted from a former brewery that had been used by the Air Training Corps. http://www.flickr.com/photos/stevegrindlay/393322873/in/set-72157594541194225/lightbox/

Here is an interesting one I have come across. This is the former United Dairies depot at Finchley Central (now in use as a car wash). The line to Mill Hill East is the lower one while the High Barnet Branch is towards the top of the picture. I do not know if this facility ever had a rail...

Yes, they dropped down through the platform into the bottling plant which was located in the arches underneath.

I have come across a few more pictures to share. The first is milk tankers being unloaded at Vauxhall. Next we have the milk dock at West Ealing. And then the Express Dairies facility at Morden. This is parhaps the most interesting as it shows a great view of the covered part of the...

There is a shot here of the Unigate depot at Ilford. It would appears to still be in use in 1978 judging by the tankers in residence. http://www.flickr.com/photos/12064036@N04/3497767650/

Yes, thanks a lot for such a good list of facilities. Further to earlier comments I have tried to ge in touch with some of these companies (or their successors) to enquire if they have historical records that I could research. Hopefully now that the holidays are drawing to a close I may get...