[Kevin WS]

The first piece of rolling stock I decided to tackle was the “Loco Coal Wagon”.

“Loco Coal Wagons” were owned by the railway companies “Loco Dept.", and the stock was purpose-built normally to the Railways own design – they were larger and higher spec’d than the general “Traders” wagons (which used by actually small traders)

The wagons were then used by the railways to run to collieries to obtain and distribute the coal supplies they needed – not only for locos but also to generate gas at railway stations, for heating at stations and signal boxes. and so forth.

Coal was usually brought from collieries in block trains (although the collieries only had small yards), and then redistributed as required around the network. Bear in mind the intensity of the L & Y operations (see my first post), and it becomes clear why individual or pairs of wagons would be used to redistribute the coal as part of a goods trains run to save costs.

Annual returns had to be made by railways to the Board of Transport – in these, Loco Coal wagons were classified as 'service stock’, while “Traders” wagons were classified as ‘revenue earning stock’.

Picture 1 is of a similar 12 ton Loco Coal Wagon – courtesy The Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway Society.

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PART 1

On to the build...

“Micromodels” vary in their degree of difficulty, but with care and patience assembly is quite feasible for modellers.

I will do a walk-through for this model as it is fairly representative of the "Micromodel" method of assembly for railway models, but only will only explain in detail in certain areas – since a lot of the assembly methods and approach are similar for many of the wagons.

The coal wagon shares a sheet with a low-sided wagon and is made up of a total of 21 parts (17 on the card and 4 that have to be scratch built).

Picture 2 - This shows the card with the parts for this wagon separated.

Picture 3 – The first step is to cut out the two parts that make up the wagon body – the outside of the body and the inside with the load.

PART 2 below is a continuation of this section of the build.