The history of the local railways was as much about train operations as infrastructure. This covers not just locomotives and the ‘consist’ (or ‘formation’) of vehicles in scheduled passenger and goods trains, but also the control and staffing of everyday operations. In addition there were special services such as day excursions, holiday trains, military trains during peace and wartime, engineering trains, emergency recovery trains, etc. The British Railways Southern Region Carriage Working Notices (CWNs) set out the vehicles and formations from the 1950s and 1960s.
While the study is gathering information on train operations from the earliest days through to the closures, we hope to focus on certain periods. One is a typical weekday schedule through Wimborne in the latter years, specifically 1960, partly for modelling purposes to ensure a representative range of locomotives and rolling stock. Also of interest will be a record of the types of traffic and vehicles handled in the sidings at Wimborne, including passenger stock stored temporarily from services to and from the Poole-Bournemouth area, as well as traffic handled at the smaller stations.
We shall be looking for reader inputs from anyone who recalls operations in this period or who has carried out any research into them.
East Dorset Carriage Workings, Summer 1960
Providing passengers with enough seats, and of the right class, was always more of an art than a science. On the other hand long experience meant many traffic flows could be anticipated with some accuracy, which in turn allowed operators to allocate suitable coaching stock to trains on a regular basis. The Southern Railway and its nationalized successor, the Southern Region, developed this art to a degree unmatched in any other part of the country during the steam era. Coaches were formed into semi-permanent sets of varying lengths – e.g. in summer 1959, from two to eleven carriages – which were then allocated to individual services at the timetable changes in June and September. These allocations were specified in the Carriage Working Notices (CWN), while the make-up of each set was given in the Appendix to CWN.
So-called ‘loose’ carriages were berthed at strategic locations so that station masters could strengthen a train at short notice if more passengers than usual were expected. Sometimes strengthening happened on a fairly regular basis, even though it was not shown in the CWN. This happened at Wimborne – one or two coaches were often added to an early morning up train to cater for schoolchildren from Ringwood to Brockenhurst, being dropped off from a return service in the mid-afternoon.
Carriage sets often did not work out-and-back, from A to B. More complex circuits, with the sets returning to the starting point later the same day or later still, enabled a better allocation of capacity. Particularly in pre-computer days, devising these carriage diagrams was a highly skilled task, carried out by (usually) men hidden in backroom offices. These clerks sometimes spent whole careers moving coaches on paper from one part of the southern counties to another, and beyond. There is plenty of anecdotal evidence that occasionally they livened things up by pencilling in moves which were not strictly necessary.
Engine numbers were usually a spotter’s delight, but a keen observer in 1960 – many decades after Wimborne’s heyday – might have been surprised at the number of coaching sets to be ‘copped’ every day. Digging through the CWN for a weekday in high summer gives a comprehensive list of the type of sets and individual coaches allocated. Particular set numbers are now largely lost to us!
