Milk Tanks and Ferry Vans

[jwealleans]

Two questions which have come up in the last few days. Firstly, does anyone know what the colour scheme of the 'UD(W)' - United Dairies (Wholesale) - milk tanks which ran on LNER underframes was? There's a photo in Vol. 3 of Historic Carriage Drawings but no livery information. They look to have been dark blue or green (?) with lighter lettering - perhaps grey?

Secondly, talking to someone who used to work on the railway at Ipswich, it was mentioned that there were regular workings of ferry vans, both English and European, to Whitemoor via Thurston. I believe the LNER built some vehicles for this traffic - can anyone point me to any published information about them?

[Bill Bedford]

Secondly, talking to someone who used to work on the railway at Ipswich, it was mentioned that there were regular workings of ferry vans, both English and European, to Whitemoor via Thurston. I believe the LNER built some vehicles for this traffic - can anyone point me to any published information about them?

There was an article in BRILL in the mid 90s about the Harwich ferry service which had diagrams of some of the vans used. I have drawing for the ex-ROD vans used between the wars, I was going to make a kit of one of them but it proved too expensive and too specialised. I may be possible to revive the idea if enough people are interested.

[jwealleans]

Thanks for that, Bill - I'll get someone to look into the BRILL article for me. Was the drawing a published one, or one you've dug up in an archive somewhere? I haven't had the chance to try the Search Engine for it yet.

I'm not sure the club could run to a kit - at the moment I've only a vague idea as to the complexity of the vehicle involved, so I'm not sure what the possibilities are. Resin casting from a master springs to mind but then you've the underframes to sort out... I'll have to have a look at the vehicle(s?) involved and see where we go from there.

[jwealleans]

If anyone else is interested, the BRILL article is in Vol 2 pt 6, Aug/Sep 1993.

[AlanMoore]

http://alanmoore353.blokes.org.uk/p48724480.html

There was an occasional service containing transvesa ferry wagons to Chivers at Histon, Cambridgeshire delivering Seville oranges from Spain. The last train was in 1983

[jwealleans]

Thanks for that, Alan - I actually stumbled across that photo about three weeks ago. There's been much more discussion on the subject here.

[AlanMoore]

Thanks for that, really interesting info. Alan