TOPS Wagonload

Dr Richard Beeching is probably best-known today as the author of the infamous report of March 1963 that argued for the wholesale closure of much of Britain’s passenger network. However, the report also dealt with the future of BR’s freight business. It was recognised that the bulk of traditional wagon-load traffic was no longer competitive as a result of the growth of the road haulage industry but the Beeching report did identify a number of freight flows for which the railway still offered advantages. One of these, in addition to specialist wagon load traffic, was when freight could be consolidated into a train load for delivery to specific customers or where only one commodity was conveyed in each train. The most prominent example of this was the advent was the merry-go-round train that provided a connection direct from the colliery to the massive coal-fired power stations that became a feature of the landscape from the early 1960s as older and less efficient plants were closed down. For this new traffic, new wagons were constructed or older vehicles were repurposed. Those that survived into the early 1970s were allocated codes under the new TOPS, Total Operations Processing System, an early computerised tracking system that was designed to improve efficiency and aid the railway’s efforts to compete with the road haulage industry. In the first of three heavily illustrated volumes devoted to these vehicles, David Larkin examines the types of wagons that were allocated prefix codes between BCO and HKV under the TOPS scheme. These included brake vans, hoppers, Conflats and many more that were used to convey such varied traffic as sugar, gunpowder and China clay.