Private Owner Wagons: A Twelfth Collection

In this 12th volume of the series, the author examines the fleets of a prestigious educational institution, a Midlands factory which made the guns for the finest fighting ships of the First World War and a little known Surrey coal factor with an intriguing collection of wagons which almost defied identification. Also featured are war-torn wagons of several lesser owners who may have been otherwise forgotten, obscure coal merchants from Northampton and Oxford and an otherwise obscure Dorset brewery. A number of Gloucester RC&WCo. photos are included, including several wagons they sold as secondhand to small operators established in the 1930s and whose history is little-known, but the wagons themselves may have survived the Second World War with much of their lettering intact. Also details of over 3,500 orders from the surviving order books for the period 1894 to 1923 for the wagon builder Charles Roberts have now been transcribed by the author.