Construction Equipment and Plant Manufacture
See also Appendix One - Roads and road traffic - Roads and Road Works for more on the plant used for road building and maintenance.
Steam road-rollers were first used in France in the 1860's and introduced into Britain by Aveling & Porter of Rochester in 1866. Diesel and petrol road rollers appeared in the 1900's, the steam type were generally more robust however and the last were only retired in the 1970's. Petrol and paraffin engined rollers were built by a number of makers, to many and varied designs often incorporating a steam engine like flywheel on the side of the engine. Later diesel powered roller appeared, which were slightly less variegated in appearance and lacking the heavy flywheel. If considering a roller for a wagon load a typical weight for a road roller would be about eight tons.
Fig___ Steam rollers
Lincolnshire is well known for its road rollers.
Excavation machinery was regularly moved from job to job by rail, and was typically delivered from the manufacturer on drop-centred wagons. Early machines ran on rails but by the time of the First World War caterpillar tracked chassis were in use and this soon became the norm.
One point to note is that, prior to the 1950s, plant was operated by wire ropes or chains and pulleys, the work done on hydraulics during World War Two then came to fruit and from the later 1950s hydraulic rams became the norm.
Fig___ Typical 1930s diesel excavator
Larger caterpillar tracked cranes were often built to take a range of jib types. A good example is the Thomas Smith & Sons (Rodley) Ltd 'Three Twelve' convertible excavator. This Leeds firm offered the same basic diesel powered crane with a long lattice jib to carry a drag-line in a sand quarry, a conventional excavator, a short heavy jib with a simple scoop excavator and a pile-driver.
The sketches below are based on a model diesel shovel I made many years ago, they are however loosely based on several prototypes and are intended to make construction as easy as possible. The cab shown is simply a cut-down Peco refrigerator van body with some windows added by cutting holes and using Downsglaze printed glazing. When in use these machines often had the side door open, this is easy to represent; cut away the inner door from the van side and add a rectangle of 1mm scribed card over the remaining door with strapping detail from 10x20 thou strip. The inside of the door would be unpainted, I would suggest a mix of 'dark earth' with a little black added. The doors would be closed if the vehicle were being transported by rail.
The chassis is made up of several layers of 30 thou card the wheels were cut from tube and filled with Milliput (pressed with a finger whilst wet to give a dished-in outer face) and the tracks were paper, parallel lines were drawn for the individual plates using a ball-point black pen (pressing hard to produce indented lines). The paper was then tinted dark grey with water colour and strips cut and glued on with Evostick.
The boom and bucket arm on the forward acting digger (below right) were made from two lengths of Plastruct H section, the length attached to the bucket being small enough to pass through a hole in the web of the main boom. The main boom was sanded down top and bottom to taper toward either end. The bucket is a 12mm length of Plastruct square section tube reference STFS-12 which is 9.5mm square. Cut one end to the profile shown and notch the lower edge to accept short lengths of 10x20 thou strip which represent the 'teeth'. Cut a square of 30 thou card for the door on the rear of the bucket. The big pulley on the end of the jib was the smallest press stud I could find (I had trouble gluing on the cable to the outer rim of this). I used lengths cut from small bolts to represent the pulley wheels, the groove in which allows fishing line cables to be glued in place. The winding drums inside the body were also cut down lengths of slightly larger bolts.
Fig ___ Simple model diesel excavators
After the Second World War British industry tried to adapt to peacetime needs, but they had been focused on war production for five years and before that they had been through a serious economic depression. The equipment was often old and worn out and the new technologies developed during the war required investment, but it was the countries who had seen their industrial base destroyed who built new plant, the British tried a make do and mend approach
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The bulldozer shown below is the Vickers Vigor, built using tank parts. The hydraulic rams are mounted on the side of the engine casing, the dozer blade being supported on heavy rear-hinged arms. It was both fast and powerful but it suffered from reliability problems and foreign makes soon came to dominate the heavy construction equipment scene.
Fig ___ Vickers Vigor bulldozer
Some Notable British Plant Manufacturers
Note: This area is difficult to summarise, several firms were bought out, changed their names, split up and merged several times during their existence. In 1919 a group of fourteen firms merged to form a company called Agricultural & General Engineers Ltd (AGE). The idea was that this company would be big enough to take on the Americans, however each firm continued to trade under their own name. AGE was badly managed and collapsed in the early 1930s. The individual firms were then sold off, many being bought out by their original owners or by their former rivals.
Aveling & Porter Based in Rochester and famous for their road rollers.
Horse-drawn road rollers appeared in the 1830's. Steam road-rollers were first used in France in the 1860's and introduced into Britain by Aveling & Porter in 1866. In 1919 they joined the AGE organisation, which failed disasterously in 1932.
Aveling Barford In the early 1930s, following the collapse of the AGE consortium Aveling merged with Barford & Perkins to produce Aveling Barford, mainly to build road rollers. In the post war era they changed to making diesel rollers. (see also 'Appendix One - Roads and Road Works' for more on road rollers).
Aveling Marshall was formed in the mid 1970s when British Leyland, bought Marshalls (by then a road roller company) and Aveling Barford. The road roller interests were merged and all branded as Aveling Marshall, Aveling Barford dealt in 'Site' dump trucks and dairy equipment.
Barfords This company was, in the 1920s, Barford & Perkins, they joined the AGE group and survived its collapse but merged with Aveling Porter to form Aveling Barfords. In 1950 Barfords was again split off as a separate company, this time making dumper trucks. The firm is based at the Aveling works in Grantham and (I believe) still in business.
J. C. Bamford Ltd Set up after World War two this is the firm that built the iconic yellow and black JCB backhoe loader (introduced in 1953). The name changed to J. C. Bamford (excavators) Ltd in about 1960 I believe.
Chaseside Based at Blackburn this firm produced a range of cranes and 'front loader' bucket devices, initially cable operated and using the Fordson tractor as the drive unit. They started producing hydraulic equipment in the 1950s but were taken over by JCB in the later 1960s. Production moved to Rocester (Staffs) in 1969 and the Caseside name was then dropped.
Fig ___ The 1937 Chaseside loader and 2 ton crane
Coles Cranes Ltd Established as Henery J Coles in 1897 this company had a complicated history involving a number of factories, the larges being in Sunderland (operating from 1939 until closure in 1999). In 1939 they were bought out by Steels & Co. Sunderland but the Coles name was kept. During the War the armed forces standardised on Coles cranes, and they also found favour with the railways. In the post war era they took over a number of firms, notably R. H. Neal but foundered in the mid 1980s and were taken over by an American firm called Grove. This firm then bought the crane interests of Krupp and thereafter closed the Coles operation down in 1999.
R.H.Neal & Co Ltd Established in the 1920s and based at Ealing in West London they produced a range of builders equipment such as cement mixes. From 1930 they were increasingly associated with their range of cranes, from the 1940s they made only their range of cranes. In the 1950s they began making the hydraulic Pelican grab (under licence from the New Zealand firm that developed it), designed for unloading minerals from railway wagons, Neal's used the Fordson tractor as the basis for their version and this proved very popular with British coal merchants.
Fig ___ Pelican loader
Ruston Based in Lincoln this firm went through a series of partnerships, for a time they were Ruston Proctor, then Ruston Hornsby and from 1930 Ruston-Bucyrus Ltd. made excavators whilst Rustons concentrated on railway locomotives and large diesel engines. Ruston & Hornsby also built road rollers at Grantham but following the collapse of AGE in 1932 they handed over the Grantham works to Aveling barford and switched production to Lincoln where they concentrated on excavators, cranes and engine building.
Thomas Smith & Sons (Rodley) Ltd Set up in 1918 to make steam cranes for mining they went on to produce a successful range of diesel excavators (one of which is preserved at the Welsh Slate Museum).
Foreign Makes of Construction Plant
Caterpillar Tractor Company This comoany was formed in the USA in 1925 by merging the tracked tractor business of the Holt Manufacturing Company with their long time competitor and one time arc enemy C.L.Best (I believe because of fierce cometition from Fords). Holts built their first tracked machine in 1904, C.L.Best began building them in 1913 (mainly for logging use). One of the machines designed by Best's in about 1919 became the successful Caterpillar 60. Note these early Caterpillar machines were originally painted in shades of grey (I think they were yellow by the later 1930s).
Fig ___ 1920s Caterpillar Tractor
In 1928 Caterpillar took over the Russell Grader Manufacturing Co. and have expanded into every area of construction plant. It was really the post war road building era when the Caterpillar range appeared in large number in the UK, since then they have taken over several British firms and now operate a number of former British owned factories in the UK
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