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LMS: Birmingham New Street to Tamworth

Kingsbury Station: mrk1127

Looking from the down platform across to the station building whilst mineral wagons stand on the down line on 24th April 1952

Looking from the down platform across to the station building whilst mineral wagons stand on the down line on 24th April 1952. The wagons are British Railways 16 ton non-vacuum mineral wagons with a drop flap fitted above the central door and were designed to carry coal, scrap metal, rock-salt, stone and for various other tasks, including carrying ballast for track renewal which is their probable purpose in this view. By the end of 1948 British Railways had something like a million assorted 'unfitted' wagons and vans and about a hundred thousand 'fitted' vehicles. Roughly a third of the rolling stock was more than twenty five years old - that is it dated from before the 1923 grouping. There were in the region of thirty thousand 'service' vehicles in departmental use, about twenty thousand containers of various types and about half a million ex-private owner mineral wagons which had been bought from their owners after the end of the war. There were still about twenty thousand privately owned railway vehicles on the system, these being wagons and vans carrying specialist loads such as salt or lime or rail tanks for oil and other liquids. Most of these wagons were in a very poor condition by this time and many were still fitted with grease packed axle boxes.

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