Wagon Repairs

[grcwmaaron91]

Hi everyone,

I did some research some years ago on wagon repair facilities in the UK most of which has sadly been lost due to various house moves but I do have this article sadly I can't remember where it is from.

It is from the Gloucester Wagon Company (1860-1887 before it's name changed to the Gloucester Railway Carriage and Wagon Company) Wagon Repair facilities before Wagon Repairs Limited (1918). It references to over 600 wagon repair places and mentions 15 of them.

Does anyone have any possible information or photos of these locations please?

Thank you in advance.

 

[Gloster]

I would suspect that most of the 600 were other companies with which GRCW had some form of reciprocal arrangement. Or they were just simply on a list so that any PO wagon owner who was told that their wagon need repairs in some far-flung corner of the land could look up and contact the nearest repairer.

At Lydney there were a couple of sheds behind the Up main line platform that GRCW rented from December 1897: the land appears only to have been taken over in 1910. It and an adjacent building (Standard Wagon/Albion Carriage/British Wagon) passed to Wagon Repairs in 1922 and continued until January 1965.

The above from R.A.Cooke’s Diagrams section 37, Forest of Dean

 

[Mcr Warrior]

I do have this article sadly I can't remember where it is from.

The exact same advert in question regularly appeared in various local newspapers in the mid/late 1880s, including "The Cornish Echo and Falmouth & Penryn Times" in November 1886, "The Exeter and Plymouth Express" in March 1887 and "The Salisbury and Hampshire Journal" in May 1887 (and no doubt numerous others as well) so just before the name change you mention?

 

[Gloster]

A further detail from Section 65 of Cooke, although it may be later than the mention in the OP’s cutting. In October 1913 it was agreed that the Chester Wagon Co., previously Percival & Co. (Premier Wagon Works) would be sold to GRCW; the Chester Coy was wound up soon after. The works, which by 1923 had passed to Wagon Repairs, was between the LNWR just east of Mold Junction and the River Dee, but could be reached both from the LNWR and from the GWR over the Saltney Wharf lines. (This does not exclude that the Coy had another site.)

 

[Mcr Warrior]

Was the "name change" referred to in the opening thread, (which it seems took place in the second half of 1888, rather than sometime in 1887), more technically the winding up of the old company (= "Gloucester Wagon Company, Limited and Reduced"), and then the simultaneous incorporation of a new one (= The Gloucester Railway Carriage and Wagon Company (Limited)")?

 

[Gloster]

Was the "name change" referred to in the opening thread, (which it seems took place in the second half of 1888, rather than sometime in 1887), more technically the winding up of the old company (= "Gloucester Wagon Company, Limited and Reduced"), and then the simultaneous incorporation of a new one (= The Gloucester Railway Carriage and Wagon Company (Limited)")?

Graces Guide says it was registered under the new name, but it may have changed from a private to a public company. The date is given as 14 September 1888. Gloucester Transport History gives the renaming as taking place in 1887.

 

[Mcr Warrior]

Gloucester Transport History gives the renaming as taking place in 1887.

Doesn't necessarily mean that the date they reference is correct, or, indeed, that it was just a 'renaming'. Something unusual certainly seems to have happened in late 1887, as there was an extraordinary general meeting held in Gloucester, in which a reduction in the original company's share capital, from £500,000 to £300,000, was voted through. Anyone able to provide some background info / context as to what the underlying issues were? Several years of poor trading? Substantial asset writedowns?

 

[stuving]

The relevant ordinary and extra-ordinary general meetings were on 28 August 1888. I can find nothing dramatic reported to explain this; it does seem that the directors felt they must adjust the declared capital of the company. However, they could not make the method passed by resolution in 1887 work. So they rescinded that, and instead plan B was to form a new company and wind up the old one. This is a short cutting from the much longer report in the Gloucester Citizen of 11 August 1888:

In 1902 there was a campaign of large display adverts in which it said the company was "established 1860", which was presumably not exactly true. And the authorised capital was by then "1,050,000" - which makes all that bother to reduce it sound like a waste of time!

 

[WolvertonWorks]

Apologies if this isn't relevant to this thread but on Saturday at the Northants Heritage Fair I purchased a second hand book An Illustrated History of British Railways' Workshops, subtitle Locomotive, Carriage and Wagon Building and Maintenance from 1825 to the Present Day by Edgar Larkin. The book was published in 1992 and this appears to be a 2007 reprint.

If there might be something of use to this thread that I can look up in the book please ask.

I bought it as my father, grandfather and great grandfather all worked in Wolverton Works - which I am pleased to see from the chronological list in Appendix I "Order in which BR's Main Works were built" shows Shildon as the first in1833 followed by Wolverton in 1838 - and as Shildon closed and Wolverton is still functioning makes Wolverton the oldest functioning railway works in the world I think

 

[Gloster]

There is a book British Carriage & Wagon Builders & Repairers 1830-2018 by Chris Sambrook. It is published by Lightmoor at £30.

 

[Mcr Warrior]

There is a book British Carriage & Wagon Builders & Repairers 1830-2018 by Chris Sambrook. It is published by Lightmoor at £30.

Bill Hudson Transport Books in Matlock (albeit no longer at the station) looks to have a copy of this second edition in stock.

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