31/07/2026
Happy Friday everybody, and while much of England may be in a drought, there's no shortage of GNR pictures, documents and other historical items to look at! Here are two wagon labels, one from 1897, one from ten years later. From the earliest years of Britain's railways until the explosion in road haulage in the 1950s and 60s, the vast majority of freight - large and small - went by rail and wagon and luggage labels were part of everyday life. Here we have shipments of two of the main cargoes of the time, coal and grain.
Key factors in the shift from rail to road haulage included the opening of the M1 in 1959 and subsequent motorway expansions, allowing lorries to cut long-distance travel times drastically, and the repeal of the restrictive "common carrier" status for British Railways in 1955 and 1962, freeing the rail network from forced, unprofitable universal pricing, leading to the gradual closure of small local goods yards.
By the late 1980s, the shrinking rail freight sector was increasingly abandoning general merchandise to focus purely on bulk full-train loads (like coal and aggregates), leaving road transport in total command of general freight, and wagon labels became a thing of the past...
