The idea of a standard wagon design stretches back nearly 200 years to the Great Northern coalfields. The need for a standard measurement for coal traffic saw collieries and merchants create the Chaldron wagon – a wagon type which could hold a set amount of coal for transport.
Early genesis of the type stretches back beyond the adoption of railway locomotives, but from 1820 the ‘modern’ Chaldron wagon, as modelled by Accurascale, came into being.
This new addition to the Accurascale range joins its now extensive ‘Powering Britain’ collection which follows the coal by rail story from the 1820s to the present day from the Chaldron wagons to the high capacity HYA bogie coal hoppers and the subsequently repurposed wagons for biomass traffic (IIA).
The Chaldron wagon had a long life span with many originally seeing work on the main lines of the North Eastern Railway. As loads increased some were modified with the addition of ‘greedy boards’ to increase their capacity but they were later relegated to internal user work for collieries, though the last weren’t stood down, remarkably, until 1978 at Seaham Harbour.
Accurascale’s new ‘OO’ gauge model of the Chaldron is a …
