Silly question: which way.....

[Monday]

....does a coaling stage face?
I have a Bachmann Scenecraft coaling stage. It has a low side and a high side. I have always assumed that coal was tipped from a road truck into the low side and taken out to tenders/bunkers alongside the high side. But is that correct? What if the coal is delivered by rail? And how did it get from the stage to the tender/bunker anyway - by shovel?
Discuss, do not write on both sides if the paper at once.

[stuartp]

I assume it's this one - https://www.modelrailwaysolutions.co.uk ... e-oo-scale

Low side towards the track. Stocked up by parking a coal wagon alongside and shovelling the coal out by hand, replace the coal wagon with a loco and start shovelling again to refill the tender. No road vehicles involved. At some locations you might gave a small crane (nothing fancy) to lift snall tubs onto higher tenders but still a lot of shovelling.

[Bigmet]

...And how did it get from the stage to the tender/bunker anyway - by shovel?

The Great Eastern was a great exponent of these, located on an 'engine dock', a short siding at the platform end to enable the locos on the Jazz* to quickly take on some coal before going out on the next suburban turn. (There would be a water crane too, located to enable the tank to be topped up while the engine was standing at the coal dock). Shovels, baskets and short ladders were the tools to lift the coal off the dock floor and into loco bunkers, all by muscle power. There were alternatives, such as using the loco coal wagon that made the deliveries as the coaling stage.

*https://www.lner.info/forums/viewtopic.php?t=941

[Mountain]

It is the opposite way to what most people think as I did see an example once in a magazine article about it, and how many modellers get it wrong.

But I have to say, think of it this way. Coal comes off a railway wagon. It is placed on the loading dock. It is bagged while on the dock and then it goes onto the back of a coal lorry or a horse drawn coal cart to go to the customers. Now the primary consideration where speed is needed is getting the coal out the railway wagon because if this was not done on time the railway companies issued fines, because they need the siding space to be cleared and also they need the coal wagon back in time for its next journey, and these fines can be pretty pricy! So the major concern was for the coal wagon to be emptied of coal.
Often coal scythes were at ground level but some were at platform height. Their purpose was to make their jobs easier, so the coal scythes would normally have their open side facing away from the railway, but I have seen them the other way around when the loading of the lorries was done on the track side after the wagons had been removed.... So I guess it is whatever makes it easier at the time. One thing to remember is that there needs to be an easy way to get the coal off the railway wagon as this is the one that needs to be unloaded relatively quickly and coal scythes at ground level would face with their open ends away from the railway to assist in this, as it did not matter so much if coal fell outside the scythes on the road side as it could simply be shoveled up, but on the railway side, shoveling coal from the track was a pain!
Getting prototype photographs is the best plan to give you an idea of how it was done, and which side they would load the road vehicles. If they loaded them up on the rail side, there needed the ground level to be at the height of the rail, which did not take too long if the coal scythes were in regular use! One thing that was very noticeable both with the track and surrounding area was that it was black with coal dust and fine coal pieces they would not bother about. They got everywhere, and where the coal depot was in my area, after it had closed it took 30 years for the ground to be covered again in green.

[Monday]

stuartp - not that one but very similar. I think the Lucston stage is Bachmann’s current offering, mine’s a bit older. Noted re the shovelling!
Bigmet - yes a laborious process. Took a trip last week on the Bodmin & Wenford. It’s a Y-shaped route with Bodmin General at the base of the Y. The train takes the first leg to Boscerne Junction, back to BG, then the other leg to Bodmin Parkway (originally Bodmin Road) and back to BG. The loco runs round its train at each stop and takes on water twice at BG during the run round. So 2 hours for 6 miles!
Mountain - I think you have hit on my confusion. What you are describing seems to be a coaling stage (haven’t heard the term scythe in this context before) for coal sales rather than for coaling locos. In this case I can see the low side facing the road/yard with the coal stock bagged at platform height for convenient loading onto a lorry or cart. Or as you say, it could be the other way round.
So it looks like whichever way you do it, there is always an excuse!

[captrees]

It's an excellent question, Monday. In 2021 it is hard to imagine all that shovelling. Especially up hill. Putting coal into a steam locomotive should be illustrated in our railway layouts. Looking at old photos and available models it all seems very confusing without actually seeing the job being done. Except on a grand scale where coal trucks are driven on a higher level, tipped, and gravity can be used, via a shute. So we are told of a thing called a staithe.

staithe noun. plural noun: staithes
(in the north and east of England) a landing stage for loading or unloading cargo boats.

To get the coal into the tender, the deck height should be as high as possible, and it would be difficult to shovel it over a wall. So the low side must be closest to the track. But how do you get the coal into the "staithe"?

I don't know. But I have left nothing to chance. In the photo below, (at Tebay.... the banking engine shed,) we have covered most options without resorting to too much shovelling. Out of picture there but just behind the loco shed is a big pile of coal, dumped there out of a truck on the adjacent siding. There's a crane hoist and bucket in the "staithe." There's a great big 1936 Ruston Bucyrus dragline standing by. And there's a front end loader of indeterminate age (stolen from a grandson) just there for good measure. I think that covers it.

[stuartp]

A coal staithe, as used by coal merchants, is a similar beast but for a different purpose and nothing to do with locos. They were used as Mountain indicates, to store coal before it was bagged and loaded onto the coalman's lorry (or cart). They were rarely raised though, usually just a sleeper wall at ground level. There is no right or wrong way round, there are examples if them both facing the track and backing onto it depending on the local layout.

Shovelling - the narrow flap at the top if a BR 16 ton mineral is a 'London traders' flap' designed to reduce the height which the shovel full of coal had to be hoisted over. Not to save the poor sod doing the shovelling mind you, it was to save his boss having to pay the extra allowance payable as a result of some local agreement for emptying high sided wagons.

[Monday]

Stuartp - thank you. Thise cosl sacks must have been >>10kg so no doubt a 2-man lift to comply with H&S at Work Act......?

[stuartp]

Where I grew a lot of people had coal fires. Coal was delivered in hundredweight sacks (112lb / 51kg) and I never ever saw a two man lift.

https://images.app.goo.gl/BtYneo1eehJguqxLA

https://images.app.goo.gl/odJFGcWwW3rUaxWv6

[Bigmet]

Where I grew a lot of people had coal fires. Coal was delivered in hundredweight sacks (112lb / 51kg) and I never ever saw a two man lift.

Quite so. My first paying jobnwhile still at school (i.e one that paid a real wage, Saturdays and school holidays) was greengrocery and the sacked bulk veg: taters, uns, carts, brass, snips; was mostly in hundredweights. We positively disliked the half-hundredweight sacks then being introduced by some suppliers (the rot began with Spanish onions is my recollection) because it's a sight more difficult to put both on singlehanded.

[Bufferstop]

Here is my take on it,

There's a platform with a simple chainwheel hoist, the bunker is high enough on the rail side for a delivery by wagon to be shovelled in aided by gravity, and low enough for a delivery by road, or from the bucket of a JCB,
There's an endless loop of chain hanging from the large wheel of the hoist, on the same shaft is a smaller wheel which raises the bucket high enough to tip over the side of the tender/bunker. Sorry about the quality of the image, it's one I rescued from Photobucket when they tried to hold us all to ransom.

[stuartp]

This is how it was done at Newton Stewart, coming soon (ok, not very soon) to a garage near me. It's basically a raised platform with a crane, coal offloaded from wagons into small tubs then craned into the tender. The only modernisation it saw was a corrugated iron shelter a few years after these 1940s pics to keep the man doing the shovelling dry.

https://flic.kr/p/GFuX7c

https://flic.kr/p/GFuWvc

https://flic.kr/p/GFuWD8