station on the Mid Hants Railway
As explained in Beginnings, the first railways were wagonways which allowed bulky freight such as coal to be pulled by horses down to rivers, canals or the sea for onward transport. What is considered the first proper steam railway - the Stockton to Darlington, opened in 1825 - did carry a few passengers, but was primarily a freight operation.
The Liverpool & Manchester Railway, opened in 1830, opened the railway's eyes to another lucrative source of business - moving passengers between big population centres. But freight continued to rule the roost to an extent unimaginable today.
It was a massive contributor to the income of the Victorian railway, being the only viable method for transporting most items to most places during that era. For many of the 150-odd British railway companies in the nineteenth century, particularly in the Midlands and north of England, it was in fact their largest source of income. As recently as 1931, LNER (the London and Northeastern Railway, one of four big companies the railways were grouped into in 1923) got two and a half times as much income from freight as from passengers. Only in the less industrialised south of England was passenger revenue more important.
Indeed, so dominant were the railways with respect to freight that parliament imposed on them an obligation of "common carriage": that is, they had to transport whatever was brought to them, from a small parcel to an elephant. They were required to publish tariffs to cover all possible types of cargo.
A 1952 video by British Transport Films - Farmer Moving South - follows a Yorkshire farmer as he moves to a new farm in Sussex. His entire possessions - household effects, cattle, pigs, hens, ducks, tractors and farm machinery - plus his workers and all their belongings, are loaded onto two charter trains, which do the move in one overnight trip.
Meanwhile in the Victorian era it was quite common for well-to-do Londoners to travel to the countryside for a weekend's fox hunting, taking their horse with them on the train. The novelist Anthony Trollope was fond of doing this. Livestock wagons were added to rural trains on market day, so that a farmer could travel to a nearby town, buy some cattle or horses, and bring them back to the farm the same day.
Pretty much every rural station had a loading dock for livestock, as well as a cargo shed and sidings for dealing with freight wagons. (Medstead and Four Marks station on the Mid-Hants Railway preserves this beautifully- see photos on this page). The shed was usually separate from the passenger station buildings and might have a siding running into it, so that goods could be loaded into wagons under cover. Once or twice a day a mixed goods train would trundle by, dropping off and picking up wagons.
These had to be shunted, loaded and unloaded by the station staff, who also had to book the cargo in and out and apply the correct charges to it. This was one of the main activities at rural stations. For example Pluckley – now a classic un-staffed rural halt, apart from a ticket office open for a few hours on weekday mornings – would have had in Victorian times a stationmaster, two clerks, two signalmen, two porters who doubled as shunters, and a plate layer or lengthsman who maintained the track.
on the Mid Hants Railway
A key cargo for rural stations - and indeed pretty much every station in the country - was coal, which was brought in by train to a local coal merchant, who then sold it to households. Milk also had to be sent from farms to towns and cities daily in big metal churns. These remained in use until the 1920s, and even after that milk was moved in glass-lined tanker wagons until road took over this traffic in the 1970s. Rural branch lines might only have five or six trains a day, but at least one would be timed to tie in with milking times.
Fresh produce was also important. Farmers had to send their produce on by rail, and food for shops came in the same way. In the 1920s up to 200 tons of fresh produce came into Paddington every day, along with 5,000 milk churns.
The railways enabled lots of specialisation to take place in agriculture. Previously, a lot of produce and products that one consumed might have been local, but with rail freight connecting the whole country, growers in Kent or the Vale of Evesham could specialise in plums, Cornish farmers produce broccoli, and the Scilly Isles ship daffodils all over the country.
The line from Taunton to Barnstaple in North Devon was for some reason an important source of rabbits (for meat and fur): special trains would run each night with space for up to 15,000 of the unfortunate creatures. From 1900 onwards, bananas could be imported from the Caribbean and shipped all over the country on specially heated trains. Grimsby handled a sixth of all the rail-borne fish in the country.
This specialisation was not confined to agricultural products. The Huntley & Palmer factory in Reading became the largest biscuit maker in the world, and Colman's in Norwich became synonymous with mustard. All of this moved by rail, with any factory of any size having its own sidings with a direct connection to the railway network. Burton-on-Trent became a huge producer of beer, with the whole town covered by rail lines. St Pancras station in London was built with a warehouse on its ground floor (now the shopping area and Eurostar terminal) specially designed to accommodate the Burton beer barrels.
Newspapers, agricultural machinery, building materials and all kinds of consumer goods would also come into rural communities by rail. Some curious cargoes would sustain rural routes. The transport of horse manure from cities to the countryside to fertilise fields maintained many an obscure branch lines.
Parcels were another important traffic: you could bring a package to any station and have it sent to any other. These were often carried in the guards van on a train, and making sure the right parcel got to the right station was one of the original responsibilities of the people we now call "train managers". (They also applied brakes to slow trains down when approaching a station.)
Mail, of course, also moved by rail. Special trains ran in the small hours to move sacks of mail and newspapers, while also carrying a few bleary-eyed passengers who had to put up with lengthy stops at each station for the loading and unloading to take place. (These lasted into the 1980s.)
Bigger stations had ramped underpasses to allow trolleys of mail to get from one platform to another. One station that still has these ramps is Guildford. On station platforms there would be trolleys loaded with boxes and mail bags waiting to be dispatched.
At big main line stations, long trains of trolleys carrying mail and newspapers would dominate late at night, and fleets of vans would rush through the city streets late at night to deliver them to stations. Larger terminus stations in cities had a central road accessible to vehicles for such traffic, which also might double as a taxi rank: you can still see these at stations such as Paddington and Waterloo.
Town stations had big freight yards, and even places that now seem purely residential had a big range of industries. In Tonbridge in 1950 they included printing, tar distilling, cricket bats, water filters and sheepskins. These all kept a large freight yard busy, employing 150 men. (The area covered by the former freight yards is still evident to this day, with one part of it still acting as a depot for freight locomotives.)
In cities there were vast freight complexes. Every main line terminus had one, and some of them were very extensive - the enormous area north of Kings Cross, now redeveloped as Kings Cross Central, being one example.
Some of these city centre freight facilities were old stations from the early days of the railways that started out as passenger terminals and then were turned over to freight when a new station was built. Thus the original 1838 Paddington station, the impressive Nine Elms station of the same year (superseded by Waterloo) and the remains of the 1840 Bishopsgate station (precursor to Liverpool Street) survived into the 1960s as freight facilities. Camden Lock Market in London was once the cargo area for the London & North Western Railway.
Cargo even penetrated into the heart of the city. If you were waiting for a Metropolitan Line train at Farringdon any time up to the 1950s, you might have seen a freight train chugging through on the adjacent line, heading for the Snow Hill Tunnel and Blackfriars Bridge. As many as 90 freight trains a day still use this route in 1961, but by 1971 they had disappeared and the bridge they used had been partly demolished, leaving its red pillars sticking out of the water.
A cargo shed on the Isle of Wight steam railway So what happened to all this activity? The start of its decline was the rise of road trucks after the First World War. Surplus vehicles were released at the end of the war, and men who had learned to drive them in the army went into business as carriers. Not bound by published tariffs nor the obligation of common carriage like the railways, they could pick off the most lucrative business - and offer it a door to door service.
From the 1920s onwards the government also began to invest in roads, via the Ministry of Transport, created in 1919, while the railways struggled on as private companies, their infrastructure and rolling stock run down by intensive use during the war. They were forbidden from investing in trucking, except for local distribution.
The limitations of trucks kept things in check at first. Until 1964 they were limited to carrying 24 tonnes and until 1967 they could only run at 40 mph. But by the end of the decade trucks could carry 44 tonnes and go at 60 mph. They could now span the whole country.
The rail freight system, by contrast, was old-fashioned, slow and unloved. The 1957 British Transport film Fully Fitted Freight (available on YouTube) bravely tries to show it as still meeting every need, but the truth is that it just looks cumbersome and complicated. Brave attempts to create large automated marshalling yards in the 1950s ultimately proved to be dead ends.
Dr Richard Beeching (see The controversial Dr Beeching), in his infamous 1963 report on the future of the railways, recognised this, and predicted that everything but full trainloads of freight would switch to road. In this he was correct. Coal, aggregates and the new business of container traffic (only invented in the 1960s) remained on rail: the rest of the rail freight business just withered away. At the start of the 1960s there were some 5000 goods depots on the British Rail network, but half of them contributed just 3 percent of revenue. By 1973 they had been reduced to 542 depots, and all of these closed soon after. The railway was not relieved of the obligation of common carriage until 1968.
What happened to all the station freight facilities? Many got turned into car parks. The demise of freight coincided neatly with the increase in personal car usage. Up to the 1950s few people would have driven to a station, but from the 1960s onwards that became a more normal thing to do. The former goods yard was a convenient flat area near to the station that could be tarmacked over.
Other freight areas just became overgrown - you can still to this day see odd bits of wasteground near rural stations, covered in shrubs or low trees. Companies that had particularly depended on rail, such as builders merchants, also took over cargo areas. A good example of this can be seen by New Southgate station in North London.
For a period, former rail yards were also home to coal merchants. Some of the Underground stations on the Northern Line in London had coal merchants into the 1960s, and one survived at Pluckley station until the 2000s. Again, this was a business that had tended to be located next to a station, because that is how all its supplies arrived. With the decline of domestic fireplaces these business have now disappeared, however.
Back when freight yards were in operation, they were noisy places. Cargo wagons were loose-coupled - that is just attached to each other with a chain. This made connecting and disconnecting them easier, but meant that wagon shunting and handling was a noisy business, with each wagon clanking into the next one when they stopped.
This and the smoke of steam locomotives meant that no one wanted to live near a station if they could possibly avoid it. Houses that were near the station tended to be for poorer workers who could afford no better. Once the noise of goods yards was a thing of the past, however, having a house by the station started to be more advantageous, especially for commuters. So one often sees an area of modern houses by a town station, some of them probably built on former goods yards.
Some of those big 1950s marshalling yards also got turned into housing estates and others became retail parks. In the modern era supermarket superstores often find a convenient space to set up business in former station cargo areas. Other marshalling yards, particularly in the north of England, have gone back to nature. The ones near Stratford in East London got turned into the Olympic Park. The enormous freight area north of Kings Cross is now the Kings Cross Central area of flats, shops and colleges.
The former cargo shed at Pulborough station Old freight buildings do get preserved, however. It is a shame that plans to turn Nine Elms station - the original terminus of the London & South Western Railway before it extended to Waterloo - into a railway museum never came to anything in the 1960s, but, as already noted, Camden Lock Market in London preserves the London & North Western freight facility, while Central St Martins art college in Kings Cross Central, and its environs, inhabit a magnificent set of former rail freight buildings - including the Western Transit Shed and Coal Drops Yard, the latter now a shopping area. The Museum of Science and Industry in Manchester is set in the former freight facilities of various railway companies.
Fine town facilities that have been repurposed to new uses include the former cargo sheds at Eastbourne and Canterbury West stations, which have both found a new life as bar/restaurant complexes. In Eastbourne it is also easy to see from the right-hand side of a train arriving at the station how extensive the freight yard used to be. There is also a long list of well-preserved cargo sheds at rural stations in the south east, including at Pulborough, Edenbridge Town, Appledore, Shoreham (Kent) and Robertsbridge, to name but a few.
Meanwhile for a modern view of rail freight try anywhere with a view of the Gospel Oak to Barking line, a key link between the ports of Tilbury and London Gateway (near Southend) and the Midlands, which gets numerous container, chemical, aggregates and car transporting trains a day. Also the line between Basingstoke and Winchester, which has regular container trains to and from Southampton Docks.
These modern trains show that rail freight is not quite as dead as people think. It still accounts for around 10% of UK surface freight, and the government is keen to substantially increase this. Road congestion and a shortage of people prepared to drive lorries long distance, plus the fact that there is as yet no electric option for long distance heavy goods vehicles, has helped to tip the balance back towards it. The days of the freight train are not over yet.
© Peter Conway 2025 • All Rights Reserved
The railways enabled lots of specialisation to take place in agriculture. Previously, a lot of produce and products that one consumed might have been local, but with rail freight connecting the whole country, growers in Kent or the Vale of Evesham could specialise in plums, Cornish farmers produce broccoli, and the Scilly Isles ship daffodils all over the country.
The line from Taunton to Barnstaple in North Devon was for some reason an important source of rabbits (for meat and fur): special trains would run each night with space for up to 15,000 of the unfortunate creatures. From 1900 onwards, bananas could be imported from the Caribbean and shipped all over the country on specially heated trains. Grimsby handled a sixth of all the rail-borne fish in the country.
This specialisation was not confined to agricultural products. The Huntley & Palmer factory in Reading became the largest biscuit maker in the world, and Colman's in Norwich became synonymous with mustard. All of this moved by rail, with any factory of any size having its own sidings with a direct connection to the railway network. Burton-on-Trent became a huge producer of beer, with the whole town covered by rail lines. St Pancras station in London was built with a warehouse on its ground floor (now the shopping area and Eurostar terminal) specially designed to accommodate the Burton beer barrels.
Newspapers, agricultural machinery, building materials and all kinds of consumer goods would also come into rural communities by rail. Some curious cargoes would sustain rural routes. The transport of horse manure from cities to the countryside to fertilise fields maintained many an obscure branch lines.
Parcels were another important traffic: you could bring a package to any station and have it sent to any other. These were often carried in the guards van on a train, and making sure the right parcel got to the right station was one of the original responsibilities of the people we now call "train managers". (They also applied brakes to slow trains down when approaching a station.)
Mail, of course, also moved by rail. Special trains ran in the small hours to move sacks of mail and newspapers, while also carrying a few bleary-eyed passengers who had to put up with lengthy stops at each station for the loading and unloading to take place. (These lasted into the 1980s.)
Bigger stations had ramped underpasses to allow trolleys of mail to get from one platform to another. One station that still has these ramps is Guildford. On station platforms there would be trolleys loaded with boxes and mail bags waiting to be dispatched.
At big main line stations, long trains of trolleys carrying mail and newspapers would dominate late at night, and fleets of vans would rush through the city streets late at night to deliver them to stations. Larger terminus stations in cities had a central road accessible to vehicles for such traffic, which also might double as a taxi rank: you can still see these at stations such as Paddington and Waterloo.
Town stations had big freight yards, and even places that now seem purely residential had a big range of industries. In Tonbridge in 1950 they included printing, tar distilling, cricket bats, water filters and sheepskins. These all kept a large freight yard busy, employing 150 men. (The area covered by the former freight yards is still evident to this day, with one part of it still acting as a depot for freight locomotives.)
In cities there were vast freight complexes. Every main line terminus had one, and some of them were very extensive - the enormous area north of Kings Cross, now redeveloped as Kings Cross Central, being one example.
Some of these city centre freight facilities were old stations from the early days of the railways that started out as passenger terminals and then were turned over to freight when a new station was built. Thus the original 1838 Paddington station, the impressive Nine Elms station of the same year (superseded by Waterloo) and the remains of the 1840 Bishopsgate station (precursor to Liverpool Street) survived into the 1960s as freight facilities. Camden Lock Market in London was once the cargo area for the London & North Western Railway.
Cargo even penetrated into the heart of the city. If you were waiting for a Metropolitan Line train at Farringdon any time up to the 1950s, you might have seen a freight train chugging through on the adjacent line, heading for the Snow Hill Tunnel and Blackfriars Bridge. As many as 90 freight trains a day still use this route in 1961, but by 1971 they had disappeared and the bridge they used had been partly demolished, leaving its red pillars sticking out of the water.
From the 1920s onwards the government also began to invest in roads, via the Ministry of Transport, created in 1919, while the railways struggled on as private companies, their infrastructure and rolling stock run down by intensive use during the war. They were forbidden from investing in trucking, except for local distribution.
The limitations of trucks kept things in check at first. Until 1964 they were limited to carrying 24 tonnes and until 1967 they could only run at 40 mph. But by the end of the decade trucks could carry 44 tonnes and go at 60 mph. They could now span the whole country.
The rail freight system, by contrast, was old-fashioned, slow and unloved. The 1957 British Transport film Fully Fitted Freight (available on YouTube) bravely tries to show it as still meeting every need, but the truth is that it just looks cumbersome and complicated. Brave attempts to create large automated marshalling yards in the 1950s ultimately proved to be dead ends.
Dr Richard Beeching (see The controversial Dr Beeching), in his infamous 1963 report on the future of the railways, recognised this, and predicted that everything but full trainloads of freight would switch to road. In this he was correct. Coal, aggregates and the new business of container traffic (only invented in the 1960s) remained on rail: the rest of the rail freight business just withered away. At the start of the 1960s there were some 5000 goods depots on the British Rail network, but half of them contributed just 3 percent of revenue. By 1973 they had been reduced to 542 depots, and all of these closed soon after. The railway was not relieved of the obligation of common carriage until 1968.
What happened to all the station freight facilities? Many got turned into car parks. The demise of freight coincided neatly with the increase in personal car usage. Up to the 1950s few people would have driven to a station, but from the 1960s onwards that became a more normal thing to do. The former goods yard was a convenient flat area near to the station that could be tarmacked over.
Other freight areas just became overgrown - you can still to this day see odd bits of wasteground near rural stations, covered in shrubs or low trees. Companies that had particularly depended on rail, such as builders merchants, also took over cargo areas. A good example of this can be seen by New Southgate station in North London.
For a period, former rail yards were also home to coal merchants. Some of the Underground stations on the Northern Line in London had coal merchants into the 1960s, and one survived at Pluckley station until the 2000s. Again, this was a business that had tended to be located next to a station, because that is how all its supplies arrived. With the decline of domestic fireplaces these business have now disappeared, however.
Back when freight yards were in operation, they were noisy places. Cargo wagons were loose-coupled - that is just attached to each other with a chain. This made connecting and disconnecting them easier, but meant that wagon shunting and handling was a noisy business, with each wagon clanking into the next one when they stopped.
This and the smoke of steam locomotives meant that no one wanted to live near a station if they could possibly avoid it. Houses that were near the station tended to be for poorer workers who could afford no better. Once the noise of goods yards was a thing of the past, however, having a house by the station started to be more advantageous, especially for commuters. So one often sees an area of modern houses by a town station, some of them probably built on former goods yards.
Some of those big 1950s marshalling yards also got turned into housing estates and others became retail parks. In the modern era supermarket superstores often find a convenient space to set up business in former station cargo areas. Other marshalling yards, particularly in the north of England, have gone back to nature. The ones near Stratford in East London got turned into the Olympic Park. The enormous freight area north of Kings Cross is now the Kings Cross Central area of flats, shops and colleges.
Fine town facilities that have been repurposed to new uses include the former cargo sheds at Eastbourne and Canterbury West stations, which have both found a new life as bar/restaurant complexes. In Eastbourne it is also easy to see from the right-hand side of a train arriving at the station how extensive the freight yard used to be. There is also a long list of well-preserved cargo sheds at rural stations in the south east, including at Pulborough, Edenbridge Town, Appledore, Shoreham (Kent) and Robertsbridge, to name but a few.
Meanwhile for a modern view of rail freight try anywhere with a view of the Gospel Oak to Barking line, a key link between the ports of Tilbury and London Gateway (near Southend) and the Midlands, which gets numerous container, chemical, aggregates and car transporting trains a day. Also the line between Basingstoke and Winchester, which has regular container trains to and from Southampton Docks.
These modern trains show that rail freight is not quite as dead as people think. It still accounts for around 10% of UK surface freight, and the government is keen to substantially increase this. Road congestion and a shortage of people prepared to drive lorries long distance, plus the fact that there is as yet no electric option for long distance heavy goods vehicles, has helped to tip the balance back towards it. The days of the freight train are not over yet.
© Peter Conway 2025 • All Rights Reserved
