This is the limited edition Bachmann tank wagon available to all Warley Show visitors and on sale at the Warley Show visitor information stand. It will be of special interest to those who are frequent visitors to the Severn Valley Railway:-
Nice looking tank very similar to one at the NVR but I doubt i'll buy one since it wouldn't fit my modelling era mind you neither do the bachman collectors club wagons usually
Dennis Lovett of Bachmann when chatting to our MRF group said this was another "Black Prince" example as some years Warley show wagons don't sell and some years they sell out on the first day. It seems totally impossible to predict demand for these things.
I wonder what the West Midlands Sugar Company would have transported in a bulk liquid tanker like this. Does anybody know?
I doubt if it it would have been Fuel Oil, because they would probably have burned coal on their steam process boilers. Could it have been a sugar solution, or some grotty waste product?
I've had a quick look through "Private owner Freight Wagons on British Railways" by David Larkin, and found photos of 2 similar tank wagons associated with sugar companies - "United Molasses", "British Sugar". There are 3 if "Manchester Refineries" is(was) a sugar company and not an oil company.
The United Molasses tank bears a single white six pointed star which may signify something. The British Sugar tank is remarkable for being clean which suggests that it may carry foodstuffs.
Molasses was a liquid by-product obtained during the refining of sugar, rather like treacle, I believe. I understand it is used to make at least rum and is also used for other foodstuffs. So these tankers moved the molasses from the suger refinery to other places where it was used?
>rather like treacle, I believe
I believe there is a north American idiom along the lines of "moves slower than molasses on a winter's day". I can certainly vouch for treacle thickening up in the cold. We had a physics lab at 9am and the task for one cold winter's morning was measure how fast a variety of differently sized ball bearings took to sink through a couple of litres* of the stuff. The second run at 10am showed a rather large speed increase which we put down to increased room temperature.
David
*How do you get the spell checker to use English rather than US spelling?
The software has a dictionary - probably American.
If you use Firefox, with version 2.0 you can install an extension that checks your spelling in any text box as you type. To this, you can install a en-gb British dictionary.
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