Scrap metal yards
Scrap metal has been reprocessed since the mid 19th Century and more recently it has become a major business as it is often cheaper to recover special steels than it is to produce them. Up to the 1920's separating the metal involved hacksaws and hammer and chisel work. Oxy-acetylene cutting gear was developed in the very early part of the century but it took a while to become common in scrap yards (see also Lineside Industries - Industrial and agricultural vehicles and equipment for more on welding and cutting).
Scrap metal merchants received a lot of waste material from local engineering works this might include (depending on the nature of the works) three plank wagon loads of rivet hole punchings, swarf from machine tools and hammerscale from a forge. A lot of this material went direct to steel works but a proportion was dealt with by the scrap metal trade, mostly delivered by road but usually shipped out by rail. Rivet punchings can be represented by fine sand painted black with traces of rust in N. Swarf is light stuff, some coiled in a spiral like a watch spring but most in a long helix like a coil spring. This was piled just above the top of the side on 16 ton mineral wagons, quite shiny when new and difficult to represent in N although the grey type of anti-static foam which is quite an 'open' material, with a rinse of very thinned matt aluminium and light grey paint is acceptable. Hammerscale is the flakes of metal that fall to the floor whilst the metal is being worked (notably in a forge), this was dense and heavy so again a three plank wagon load, very fine sand painted black with traces of rust.
They would also receive odd bits of metal recovered from decommissioned plant, mainly sections of plate and girders. A proportion of the recovered materials would go out by road to local firms but sorted material was also shipped out by rail for reprocessing. This would have been a loose jumble prior to the widespread introduction of the hydraulic crusher in the 1970s.
Scrap yards make for interesting traffic, including old railway stock. Many were rail served and scrap remained a regular (if not very valuable) cargo for the railways well into the 1980s and probably still today. Scrap was carried in standard open wagons, usually mineral wagons, and elderly vacuum braked wagons remained in this traffic after most of the system had switched to air braked stock. BR re-bodied some twenty one ton mineral wagons specifically for scrap traffic in the 1960's, fitting only a single door on each side, toward the left hand end. Standard Railway Co built a fleet of similar looking scrap carrying wagons on a 15' wheelbase air braked chassis and coded POA in the late 1970's.
n the 1980s Mr R. Snelling of the N Gauge Society produced a range of resin kits including a one piece loaded body kit for one of these wagons as shown below.
Fig ___ Air braked scrap wagon model
The British Steel Corporation (formed in 1967) ran regular loads of scrap by rail to both Scunthorpe & Sheffield and in the 1980s Sheerness Steel commissioned Procor to build them some large bogie open wagons capable of carrying both scrap and finished steel product. The Sheerness works is laid out in such a way as to facilitate this double use of the rolling stock, most steel works are not laid out in the same way and hence the scrap vehicles are not used to carry finished goods. (I believe the Sheerness works closed in 2002, part of the collapse of Allied Steel and Wire)
By the 1980s air braked HBA hoppers were being converted for 'shredded metal' and re-coded HSA (I cannot see any visible changes to the wagons in photographs). Some PO designs were used, examples from the air braked era have been illustrated in the section on Railway Freight Operations - Metals Traffic. Available models include the NThusiast Resprays long bogie air-braked JXA Sheerness Steel Wagon (NTR.1) and Bernard Taylor (Taylor Plastic Models) offers a kit of the PNA/SSA four wheeled scrap wagons to fit the Taylor-Farish air braked chassis.
A scrap yard requires a weigh bridge as almost everything arriving and departing is valued by weight. The example shown below is at the entrance to Davidson's yard in Broadheath (they deal in all forms of scrap both ferrous and non ferrous).
Fig ___ Scrap yard weigh bridge photographed in 2007
Scrap yards usually featured at least one crane usually with quite a long jib and at a larger yard there was often a gantry crane. Note there were steam powered cranes mounted on railway chassis and equipped with electro-magnets in use at scrap yards in the 1930's. Pre war equipment was all cable-operated, hydraulics only really developed during the war, and hydraulic equipment only became dominant in the 1960s. By the 1970s the hydraulic crane was commonplace and cranes equipped with hydraulic grabs as well as magnets were in widespread use, the example shown was photographed in Bennett Bros car breakers yard just South of Manchester by Mr Ian Mackay in 2007 (car breakers are considered in more detail below). The inset (top right) shows the grab in the open position.
Fig ___ Scrap yard crane photographed in 2007
The sketches below are based on a photograph of a rail connected scrap yard photographed in the early 1980's. Clutter in the scene would include large piles of partially sorted material, a crane (often rail mounted), oxy-acetylene cutting gear and some covered storage for the weather sensitive or particularly valuable items. From about 1970 a crusher may have been on site to compress recovered material such as car bodies for shipping to the customer.
Fig ___ Suggestions for a scrap yard
Since the 1960's scrap cars have come to dominate the market in terms of volume, such yards feature wheel-less cars piled anything up to twenty foot high so you would require a plentiful supply of vehicles (Pola offer a car scrap yard in their N range which comes with a full compliment of partially broken up cars). Firms dealing in scrap vehicles are often located alongside the railway but seldom these days rail-connected. The sheer number of cars being scrapped, and the complexity of recovering the different materials from them, lead to the establishment of breakers yards, who take in old cars and recover the materials (and often the parts) used in them. This material is then sorted and placed in sheds for sale with the unsaleable scrap metal shipped direct to the scrap merchants as pre-sorted scrap in bulk.
The car-crusher was invented in the 1940s (building on the refinement of hydraulic systems during the war) and introduced in British scrap yards in the 1960s, the 'car crusher' is usually a 'bailer', so called because it crushed the material into a rectangular block resembling a bale, there is an alternative that simply crushes the car flat but these seem much less common. These are not only used for crushing cars, they can be used for any material that would benefit from 'baling', this means the material does not need to be strapped down to a pallet and is less likely to shed bits when on the move, for example one firm handles the aluminium 'litho' plates from a printers, forming these into bales which are easier to ship to the recycling plant.
The example below is in use at the Bennet Bros car breakers yard just south of Manchester (the photos were kindly taken by Mr Ian Mackay as he passed the yard on the tram). The photographs show the crusher in both closed (upper) and open (lower) positions. This machine is being used to crush general segregated scrap into blocks about five feet long by about two feet square.
Fig ___ Car crusher photographed in 2007
The advantage of the car breakers is that they require very much smaller premises and have comparatively little 'stock' on site, the cars are brought in, broken down, elements such as the body are crushed and the lot is shipped out. For a layout set from the later 1960s these offer a minimum space alternative to a proper scrap metal merchants.
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