Perth New Yard

Last updated

Perth New Yard
Location
Location Perth, Scotland
Coordinates 56°24′32″N3°27′18″W / 56.409°N 3.455°W / 56.409; -3.455
OS grid NO102251
Characteristics
Owner British Rail
Network Rail
OperatorBritish Railways
Railfreight
EWS/DB Cargo
Type Marshalling yard
Roads36 (at opening)
Routes servedSee text
History
Opened12 March 1962
Closed2008
BR region Scottish Region

Perth New Yard (also known as Perth North Yard, Perth Marshalling Yard, and Perth Muirton Yard) is a former railway marshalling yard in the city of Perth, Scotland. The yard was built in the early 1960s to gather traffic from around the Perth area and goods wagons from the lines radiating from Perth. It was latterly used as an engineering and wagon storage depot until it was finally closed in 2008. Though abandoned, the site is registered with Canmore, the Historic Environment Scotland.

Contents

History

In the middle of the 19th century, Perth was described as a "railway frontier town" as it was served by four different railway companies, and even with the grouping of 1923, it was still served by the LNER and LMS. [1] This left a legacy of engine sheds, wagon repair locations, and goods depots. [2] With Nationalisation came the 1955 Modernisation Plan, which called for centralised goods sorting, [3] and Perth New Yard was one of four main yards in Scotland to handle the wagonload traffic business, the others being Millerhill in Edinburgh, Thornton Yard near Glenrothes, and Mossend near Glasgow. [4] [5] The schematic for Perth New Yard was unveiled in 1955, detailing a diversion of an adjacent watercourse known as Perth Lade. [6] Perth New Yard was located 1 mile 7 chains (1.8 km) north of Perth railway station on the lines towards Pitlochry, Forfar, and Crieff, and was intended to replace four yards in the Perth area and prevent extra shunting at Aviemore. [7] [8] [9] It was approved in October 1956, opening to traffic in March 1962 with six reception lines, 30 sorting sidings, and a 70-foot (21 m) turntable at the south end, to a cost of £820,000 (equivalent to £18,611,000in 2021). [10] [11] [12] [13] [14] To the north of the yard, lay the lines to Crieff, Aberfeldy, Inverness (the Highland Main Line) and the Strathmore line, which ran from Stanley Junction on the Highland Main Line through Forfar to Kinnaber Junction, near Montrose on the line to Aberdeen. [15] The Strathmore line was closed to passengers in 1967, and then to all freight through Forfar in 1982. [16]

Initially the yard served a total of 55 locations by outward workings, but these flows dropped in number as the local terminals were closed. As a result of this, Perth New Yard was one of many of the new marshalling yards that were criticised as being white elephants as their intended traffic streams shrunk with the modernisation and contracting of the railways. [9] [17] By 1968, all the traffic that the yard at Perth had been built for had disappeared from the railway system. [18]

All trains entered the reception sidings which were located closest to the running lines of the Highland Main Line on the eastern side of the yard complex. [19] Each train had a cut card created [note 1] detailing what each wagon was carrying, and where it was going. [10] This was fed into the office of the yard inspector and the hump control tower, and the train was pushed to the headshunt at the northern end of the yard adjacent to the Almond Valley Line to Crieff. [9] The train would then be propelled southwards over the hump, and the wagons would pass through the Westinghouse retarders, and then into one of the 30 sidings to become part of a consist sent to one of the 55 destinations served by Perth New Yard. [10] The speed over the hump was 1.25 miles per hour (2.01 km/h), but wagons could reach 4 miles per hour (6.4 km/h) as they ran downhill into the sidings. It was important at Perth that the latter speed was not exceeded, as it would spoil some of the commodities handled at Perth, specifically the whisky. [21] Signalling at the yard was controlled by the hump tower, but was mostly automated with six computers covering the distribution of wagons. The computers in the relay room had special stabilisers fitted so that they had a constant flow of voltage. In addition to this, the relay room had a maintenance panel through which humping operations could be simulated to check that the points, lights and retarders were all working as they should. [22]

In 1962, the yard was handling 1,300 wagons per day, but the seed potato season could add an extra 250 wagons per day onto that tally. [21] However, it soon ceased to be a marshalling yard with the hump closed in the early 1970s. [23] Instead it sent feeder services going to Mossend and Millerhill to connect in with other trunk wagonload services on what was the British Rail Speedlink network. [24] [25] A survey from 1984 stated that Perth yard would have been the gathering point for at least two local sidings which fed into the Speedlink network. [26] Typical traffic between 1981 and 1991 (when Speedlink was abandoned), was inward flows of confectionery from Rowntrees in York, agricultural lime, fertiliser from France to Forfar, and industrial and domestic coal. Outward cargoes were timber (to Workington in 1990), seed potatoes from Forfar, and whisky from the Inveralmond Distillery. [27] [28] [29] [30] The whisky was railed to various points in the United Kingdom (Ashford and Liverpool), but was also exported via the Dover Train Ferry. [31] The last two goods terminals not in the yard, the old North British terminal and the Rowntrees sidings, were closed in 1989. [note 2] [33] The whisky traffic was the last Perth generated freight to use the yard before Speedlink was abandoned in 1991. [34]

By the turn of the 21st century, the yard still had more than twenty sidings covering 36.6 acres (14.8 ha), but was being used largely as a civil engineering depot. [35] [7] [36] Some of the redundant infrastructure and engineering wagons were sold off to heritage railways in 2001, by the then operator of the yard, EWS. [37] However, some traffic was generated at the site as it was used for timber loading sporadically in the early part of the 21st century. [38] Engineering and infrastructure works ceased around the same time as the timber loading did, and the site was used to store redundant coal wagons, before complete closure in 2008. [39] The buildings on the site were demolished due to vandalism between 2008 and 2009. [39] With the railway connection locked out of use, the land of the yard was overgrown with scrub, black poplar and sycamore trees by 2022, [40] [41] [42] and Network Rail agreed to disposing of their 4 acres (1.6 ha) of land. [35] This was contested by one rail user, who wished to retain a loop at the location for charter heritage trains. [43] A compromise was reached whereby sidings were built south of Perth station which would allow the looping of trains there instead. [43] The site of the yard is registered with Canmore, the Historic Environment Scotland. [44]

Naming

When planned, and upon opening, the yard was known as Perth New Yard as it was a concentrated yard for marshalling wagonload traffic in one location, supplanting several other shunting locations around Perth as a consequence of the four different railway companies who all used Perth. [9] However, it has also been referred to as Perth Marshalling Yard, Perth North yard, and Perth Muirton yard, the last one being its actual location of Muirton in Perth. [43]

See also

Notes

  1. ↑ A cut was the term for when wagon is split from a main train consist as it was pushed (propelled) over the hump, which allowed the wagons to be cut from the main train consist, and the single wagon descended under gravity and the braking of the retarders to flow into a specific siding. The cut card gave the panel operations machine the correct time and placing to change the points controlling all the sidings, making sure the right wagon went into the right siding. [20]
  2. ↑ Rowntrees traffic from York ceased during 1987. It is unclear if the goods siding then fell into disuse and was closed two years thereafter, or whether other traffic was using it. [32]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Classification yard</span> Rail yard used for sorting and assembling rail cars into trains

A classification yard, marshalling yard or shunting yard is a railway yard found at some freight train stations, used to separate railway cars onto one of several tracks. First the cars are taken to a track, sometimes called a lead or a drill. From there the cars are sent through a series of switches called a ladder onto the classification tracks. Larger yards tend to put the lead on an artificially built hill called a hump to use the force of gravity to propel the cars through the ladder.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Railfreight Distribution</span>

Railfreight Distribution was a sub-sector of British Rail, created by the division in 1987 of British Rail's previous Railfreight sector. It was responsible for non-trainload freight operations, as well as Freightliner and Intermodal services. In its early years, the division was occasionally referred to as Speedlink Distribution. It was later responsible for freight operations through the Channel Tunnel.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Rail yard</span> Enclosed area designated for railways

A rail yard, railway yard, railroad yard (US) or simply yard, is a series of tracks in a rail network for storing, sorting, or loading and unloading rail vehicles and locomotives. Yards have many tracks in parallel for keeping rolling stock or unused locomotives stored off the main line, so that they do not obstruct the flow of traffic. Cars or wagons are moved around by specially designed yard switchers (US) or shunters, a type of locomotive. Cars or wagons in a yard may be sorted by numerous categories, including railway company, loaded or unloaded, destination, car type, or whether they need repairs. Yards are normally built where there is a need to store rail vehicles while they are not being loaded or unloaded, or are waiting to be assembled into trains. Large yards may have a tower to control operations.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Tinsley Marshalling Yard</span>

Tinsley was a railway marshalling yard near Tinsley in Sheffield, England, used to separate railway wagons from incoming trains and add them to new trains. It was sited immediately west of the M1 motorway, about one mile north of the Catcliffe junction. It was opened in 1965, as a part of a major plan to rationalise all aspects of the rail services in the Sheffield area; it closed in stages from 1985, with the run-down of rail freight in Britain. It was also the site of Tinsley Traction Maintenance Depot (TMD), which was closed in 1998; at its peak, 200 locomotives were allocated to this depot.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">SBB Cargo</span> Freight focused subsidiary of Swiss Federal Railways

SBB Cargo is a subsidiary of Swiss Federal Railways (SBB) specialising in railfreight and is operated as the Freight division. Swiss Federal Railways is a former state-owned and -controlled company that was transformed in 1999 into a joint-stock company under special legislation following the first Swiss railway reform and divided up into three independent divisions: Passenger, Freight and Infrastructure. The headquarters of Swiss Federal Railways SBB Cargo AG, the Freight division's official designation, are in Olten. In 2013, SBB Cargo had 3,061 employees and achieved consolidated sales of CHF 953 million. In Switzerland, SBB Cargo is the market leader in rail freight, transporting over 175,000 tons of goods every day. This corresponds to the weight of 425 fully loaded jumbo jets.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Dollands Moor Freight Yard</span> Railway freight yard near Folkestone in Kent

Dollands Moor Freight Yard is a railway freight yard near Folkestone in Kent, and was purpose built in 1988 for the Channel Tunnel. It is to the west of the Eurotunnel Folkestone Terminal, and just to the south of the M20 Motorway.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Swanbourne railway station</span> Former railway station in Buckinghamshire, England

Swanbourne was a railway station that served the villages of Swanbourne, Little Horwood and Mursley in north Buckinghamshire, England. It was on the mothballed Bicester to Bletchley line, roughly at the centre of a triangle drawn between the three villages. In summer 2020, the station was demolished to clear the route for East West Rail.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Tyne Yard</span> Railway freight yard in Tyne and Wear, England

Tyne Yard (TY) is a railway yard in Birtley, England, on the East Coast Main Line, operated by DB Cargo UK. The yard is the major freight yard of the North East, with the majority of rail freight movements in Tyne and Wear from around Great Britain passing through the yard.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Maschen Marshalling Yard</span> Railway marshalling yard in Lower Saxony

Maschen Marshalling Yard near Maschen south of Hamburg on the Hanover–Hamburg railway in Germany is the largest marshalling yard in Europe, its size only being exceeded worldwide by the Bailey Yard in the US state of Nebraska.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Feltham marshalling yard</span> Large railway marshalling yard

Feltham marshalling yard, also known as Feltham hump yard, was a large railway marshalling yard designed for the concentration of freight traffic to and from South West London, and for transfer to other marshalling yards in London. It was built on the Waterloo to Reading Line. It opened in 1918 and was closed by British Railways on 6 January 1969.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Bescot Yard</span>

Bescot Yard is a railway yard in Bescot, a suburb of Walsall in the West Midlands, operated by DB Cargo UK. The yard is the major freight yard of the region, handling all of the rail freight movements and most of the railfreight traffic around the West Midlands.

Speedlink was a wagonload freight service operated by British Rail from 1977 to 1991 using air-braked wagons.

In rail freight transportation the terms wagonload or wagonload freight refer to trains made of single wagon consignments of freight. In the US and Canada the term carload refers to a single car of any kind, and manifest train refers to trains made of diverse cars of freight.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Tees Marshalling Yard</span> Railway marshalling yard in Middlesbrough, England

Tees Marshalling Yard is a railway marshalling yard, used to separate railway wagons, located near Middlesbrough in North Yorkshire, Northern England.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Healey Mills Marshalling Yard</span> Disused railway yard in West Yorkshire, England

Healey Mills Marshalling Yard was a railway marshalling yard located in the village of Healey, south west of Ossett in West Yorkshire, England. The yard was opened in 1963 and replaced several smaller yards in the area. It was part of the British Transport Commission's Modernisation plan, and so was equipped with a hump to enable the efficient shunting and re-ordering of goods wagons. The yard lost its main reason for existence through the 1970s and 1980s when more trains on the British Rail system became block trains where their wagons required less, or more commonly, no shunting.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Intermodal railfreight in Great Britain</span> The movement of intermodal containers by rail within Great Britain

Intermodal railfreight in Great Britain is a way of transporting containers between ports, inland ports and terminals in England, Scotland and Wales, by using rail to do so. Initially started by British Rail in the 1960s, the use of containers that could be swapped between different modes of transport goes back to the days of the London, Midland & Scottish Railway.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Basford Hall Yard</span> Railway yard in Crewe, Cheshire, England

Basford Hall Yard is a railway marshalling yard near the town of Crewe, Cheshire, England. The yard, which is 0.93 miles (1.5 km) south of Crewe railway station, was opened in 1901 by the London and North Western Railway (LNWR). Initially used to marshal trains, the site now acts as a hub mainly for Freightliner intermodal trains, but also houses departmental sidings as used by Freightliner Heavy Haul, and other operators. For a period in the 1930s, Basford Hall was the busiest marshalling yard in Europe, handing between 28,000 and 47,000 wagons every week.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Dringhouses Yard</span> Former Marshalling yard in York, England

Dringhouses Yard was a railway freight marshalling yard on the East Coast Main Line (ECML), south of York railway station in England. The yard was built during the First World War to help with the increase in traffic caused by the support to the British war effort. The yard was modernised in the 1960s, being fitted with a hump (knuckle), to ease shunting operations. It was closed to all traffic in 1987 after the loss of local railfreight traffic around York.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Milford Sidings</span> Railway sidings in North Yorkshire, England

Milford Sidings are a set of railway sidings in South Milford, North Yorkshire, England. The railways through the site were initially opened in 1834 and 1840, when transfer and marshalling yards opened too, which handled mostly coal. However, the current sidings were developed in the 1980s to function as layover sidings for coal trains to and from the Aire Valley power stations. The sidings have access to several railway lines radiating in almost all directions.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Washwood Heath Yard</span> Disused railway yard in England

Washwood Heath Yard was a marshalling yard, and later sidings, to the east of Birmingham, in the West Midlands, England. The site was first host to sidings in the late 1870s, which were upgraded to a hump marshalling yard by 1900 which survived until the early 1980s. Thereafter, the site was flat shunted, but moreover used as a layover yard, rather than used for the transfer or interchange of wagons between trains. It was run-down and closed in late 2008 due to the loss of most of the automotive traffic that it was latterly used for. The lines were removed by 2020.

References

  1. ↑ Hume, John R. (2003). Simmons, Jack; Biddle, Gordon (eds.). The Oxford companion to British railway history from 1603 to the 1990s. Oxford: Oxford University Press. p. 376. ISBN   0198662386.
  2. ↑ Holland, Julian (2017). History of Britain's railways. Glasgow: Collins. p. 120. ISBN   9780008228965.
  3. ↑ Shannon 2006, p. 7.
  4. ↑ Allen, Geoffrey Freeman (1966). British rail after Beeching. Shepperton: Ian Allan. p. 249. OCLC   221275717.
  5. ↑ Rhodes 1988, p. 105.
  6. ↑ "Plan and section of proposed new marshalling yard at Perth (British Railways)". catalogue.nrscotland.gov.uk. Retrieved 7 June 2023.
  7. 1 2 Yonge, John (2007). Jacobs, Gerald (ed.). Railway track diagrams 1: Scotland & Isle of Man (5 ed.). Bradford on Avon: Trackmaps. 15D. ISBN   978-0-9549866-3-6.
  8. ↑ "Proposals For The Railways". hansard.parliament.uk. Retrieved 7 June 2023.
  9. 1 2 3 4 Rhodes 1988, p. 131.
  10. 1 2 3 Cooke 1962, p. 657.
  11. ↑ Rhodes 1988, p. 10.
  12. ↑ Rhodes, Michael; Shannon, Paul (1991). The Freight Only Yearbook. Kettering: Silver Link. p. 121. ISBN   0-947971-59-9.
  13. ↑ "Rail Services: "Basic Railway" Principle Volume 292: debated on Friday 24 May 1968". hansard.parliament.uk. Retrieved 6 June 2023.
  14. ↑ "Plans, sections, elevations and details of 70-foot articulated engine turntable for Perth and Thornton marshalling yards (British Railways)". catalogue.nrscotland.gov.uk. Retrieved 7 June 2023.
  15. ↑ Dunn, Pip (29 March 2017). "What if these lost lines hadn't closed at all". Rail. No. 823. Peterborough: Bauer Media. p. 74. ISSN   0953-4563.
  16. ↑ Mather, Michael (2017). Exploring disused railways in east Scotland. Stroud: Amberley Publishing. p. 25. ISBN   978-1-4456-5567-3.
  17. ↑ Hall, Stanley (2006). Railway milestones and millstones: triumphs and disasters in British railway history. Hersham, Surrey: Ian Allan. p. 125. ISBN   071103110X.
  18. ↑ Wolmar, Christian (2005). On the wrong line: how ideology and incompetence wrecked Britain's railways. London: Aurum. p. 31. ISBN   1854109987.
  19. ↑ Cooke 1962, p. 658.
  20. ↑ Rhodes 1988, p. 13.
  21. 1 2 Rhodes 1988, p. 132.
  22. ↑ Cooke 1962, p. 659.
  23. ↑ Rhodes, Michael (2016). From Gridiron to Grassland: the Rise and Fall of Britain's Railway Marshalling Yards. Sheffield: Platform 5. p. 179. ISBN   978-1-909431-25-6.
  24. ↑ Shannon, Paul (2014). Speedlink. Hersham: Ian Allan. p. 7. ISBN   978-0-7110-3697-0.
  25. ↑ Scott, Bruce W. (1980). The railways of Fife : a study of railway development in Fife and the adjoining counties of Perth, Kinross, and Clackmannan. Perth: Melven. p. 204. ISBN   0906664039.
  26. ↑ Allen, Geoffrey Freeman (1984). British Railfreight Today and Tomorrow. London: Jane's. pp. 100–101. ISBN   0-7106-0312-6.
  27. ↑ Shannon 2006, p. 27.
  28. ↑ Shannon, Paul (2014). Speedlink. Hersham: Ian Allan. pp. 19, 21, 23. ISBN   978-0-7110-3697-0.
  29. ↑ Rhodes, Michael (2016). From Gridiron to Grassland: the Rise and Fall of Britain's Railway Marshalling Yards. Sheffield: Platform 5. p. 181. ISBN   978-1-909431-25-6.
  30. ↑ Ellison, M. H. (1989). Scottish railway walks. Milnthorpe: Cicerone. p. 64. ISBN   1852840072.
  31. ↑ Ratcliffe, David (June 2010). "Modellers Guide to Whisky Trains". Rail Express. Kings Cliffe: Foursight Publications (168): xvi. ISSN   1362-234X.
  32. ↑ Shannon, Paul (2008). Rail freight since 1968: Wagonload. Great Addington: Silver Link. p. 57. ISBN   978-1-85794-264-4.
  33. ↑ Smith, W. A. C.; Anderson, Paul. Tayside's Railways. Manchester: Irwell Press. p. 49. ISBN   1-871608-73-2.
  34. ↑ Shannon 2006, p. 72.
  35. 1 2 Hammill 2016, p. 3.
  36. ↑ "Coaching Stock Depot Codes". railwaycodes.org.uk. Retrieved 6 June 2023.
  37. ↑ "Rolling Stock". keith-dufftown-railway.co.uk. Retrieved 6 June 2023.
  38. ↑ Baker, Suart K. (2004). Rail atlas, Great Britain & Ireland (10 ed.). Hersham: OPC. p. 85. ISBN   0860935760.
  39. 1 2 Hammill 2016, p. 5.
  40. ↑ Kelman, Leanne (2017). Brailsford, Martyn (ed.). Railway Track Diagrams Book 1: Scotland & Isle of Man. Frome: Trackmaps. 15D. ISBN   978-0-9549866-9-8.
  41. ↑ "Perth Lade Management Plan 2011 – 2031". perth-and-kinross.cmis.uk. p. 175. Retrieved 3 June 2023.
  42. ↑ Heaton, John (August 2022). "A brief fling...". The Railway Magazine. Vol. 168, no. 1, 457. Horncastle: Mortons Media. p. 29. ISSN   0033-8923.
  43. 1 2 3 Hammill 2016, p. 1.
  44. ↑ Historic Environment Scotland. "Perth Marshalling Yard (263345)". Canmore . Retrieved 3 June 2023.

Sources

This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.