Ex Devonport Dockyard

Diesel Rail Shunting Crane, 5193

Go to The Railways of Devonport Dockyard

The earliest record of a rail mounted crane in use in Devonport Dockyard is in 1890, with a vertical boilered 4 wheel self propelled crane supplied from Grafton's of Vulcan works, Bedford. Steam was to provide the motive power for all the rail cranes up to 1952, when Grafton's also supplied the last one. There could have been nearly 80 steam cranes over the years, with up to 10 ton lifting capacity. The last working steam crane in the Yard was built in 1940, Yard No. 176, and spent its life in South Yard and was not scrapped until 1976. These cranes had large timber buffers and conventional 3 link couplings, and were employed on sundry lifts of equipment and for unloading of the wagons, which they could shunt to the necessary location. The cranes in the South Yard were used in the timber yards, loading the logs onto bogie wagons, for movement through the tunnel to the Joiners' Shop in North Yard, or lifting timber out of the timber ponds onto low loader wagons and moving them to the timber stacks.

From 1952 onwards diesel took over as motive power, with T. Smith & Sons (Rodley) Ltd. supplying twenty-nine up to 1968, with capacities of three, six and two of ten ton lift capacity. Twenty-two alone being delivered between April and October 1956, for the sum of £192,589, which was part of an order for thirty-two cranes for the Home Yards and Malta. The last diesel crane in the Yard was withdrawn in 1990, from North Yard, but it had not been used for some time.

5193 was used in the North Yard around No. 5 basin, and was seen working there at least up to October 1981. She follows the standard Devonport Dockyard construction pattern for cranes, with the large timber buffers almost down to track level and 3 link couplings. The specifications say she is designed to shunt four ten ton wagons. To enable the cranes to lower loads into the bottom of the dry docks, a large amount of lifting cable is carried on the hoist drum, with much of it never being used now 5193 is on the Plym Valley Railway as our embankments are not that high. The jib is of the standard lattice girder construction, the same as supplied on the ten ton cranes we believe, although 5193 is only capable of lifting six. The crane operates without any outriggers, so the short wheel base and of course the four foot eight and a half inch gauge also limits the lifting capability. To ensure a rigid lifting platform, there is no springing on the chassis at all, the four axle boxes are bolted directly to the main frames, which means the crane does not like uneven track, as there is no movement of the axle-boxes to take up any dips in the track.

5193 is now used to lift all sorts of items around the railway from sleepers and rail, to wagon wheels and even wooden container bodies. The porta-cabin which is now the shop on the platform was lifted onto a wagon by 5193, up at the top of the site, and then shunted down into the platform by a locomotive and 5193 lifted the cabin into the final position on the platform. She has also moved large amounts of track materials in the past few years during the construction of the first section of our line and will no doubt see a lot more materials moved during the construction of the line back to Plym Bridge.

Go to Top

Crane at the South end of the line during construction of the line in Feb. 1998	Crane in use, clearing the public viewing area, north of the carriage sidings	Crane stored on No. 2 road ready for use
The crane helping to move materials around during the waterproofing of Bridge No. 1	On a wet day working up at Bridge No. 2	Receiving attention to the operating linkage under the cab floor after a partial repaint

Go to Top

The Railways of Devonport Dockyard

In December 1690 work started to build a stone dock at Point Forward, now in the present South Yard, on the River Tamar to the west of Plymouth. The first workers at the docks were accommodated in hulks moored on the river, as the nearest houses were in the town of Plymouth some two miles away, but by 1700 the first houses in the immediate area began to appear at North Corner, and by 1731 the size of the community was approaching that of a small town. This turned out to be an unwise location in which to build the accommodation, but it did lead indirectly to the need for a railway system within the dockyard. To the north the Ordinance Department acquired a 4 acre site in 1718 for the purpose of a weapons depot, which became known as the Gun Wharf and latterly Morice Yard, with storehouses, workshops, a powder magazine, cooperage and in 1723 a row of houses for the officers was built, which still exists today. Further expansion work continued on the yard and by 1837 the population in the area exceeded that of Plymouth, after Royal approval the Yard changed its name from Plymouth Yard to Devonport Yard in 1841.

With the rapid expansion of the Navy's steam fleet, further expansion of the Dockyard was necessary, but with the Yard now surrounded by civilian developments the only place to go was still further north up the Hamoze. A new site half a mile up-stream was purchased to form what became Keyham Steam Yard (North Yard). In the intervening area was access to the Torpoint Ferry, the Gun Wharf (run by the Army), a heavily populated part of the town and a hill jutting out towards the River Tamar, so from the earliest planning stages it was decided to build a tunnel between the two Yards, and also the Gun Wharf. Construction started in April 1855 and by April 1857 the workers in Keyham Yard could walk through the tunnel to collect their wages from the pay office in Devonport Yard.

The first tramway in the Yard was laid in 1860, when 6,750 feet of rail was ordered from Ebbw Vale at £10 per ton. This was laid to Brunel's broad gauge and ran from the boiler shop down to a 20 ton crane in the corner of South Basin. During the completion of the North Basin, between 1865 and 1867, the contractor utilised a standard gauge railway to move spoil to Keyham Lake and purchased an Aveling and Porter locomotive, which would appear to be the first purpose built railway locomotive in the Yards. In 1865 an agreement was drawn up for the Cornwall Railway to build a new broad gauge line from the end of Weston Mill Viaduct into the Yard, nearly three-quarters of a mile long. The Cornwall Railway was contracted to provide a shunting engine to work the lines until the Admiralty acquired their first locomotive in March 1869, again an Aveling and Porter design but further locomotives that followed between 1880 and 1884 were from Hughes and the Falcon Engine Company. In February 1899, Dockyard No.'s 1 and 2 were delivered from Messer's Hawthorn Leslie & Co.

Due to the tunnel between the two Yards only being 12 foot high, it meant that broad gauge trains could not be accommodated, so although studies were carried out to enlarge the tunnel, a standard gauge line was finally built by the Cornwall Railway around 1877. To allow pedestrians to walk through the tunnel, a raised walkway was built on the east side of the track, a facility which remained until rail services ended. When L.S.W.R. standard gauge trains finally reached Plymouth in 1876, via the G.W.R.'s line from Lydford and the Plym Valley into Devonport King's Road station, a third rail was laid on the Cornwall Railway's main line to a point roughly half way across Weston Mill Viaduct, so that standard gauge trains could enter the Dockyard.

Go to Top

In 1895 work started on a big expansion of the Yards, by some 118 acres, only 41 acres were above the high water mark, so a massive amount of work was required, by 1896 it was reported that 11 locomotives, eventually rising to 25 by 1899, were working on 25 miles of temporary track. On completion of the contract in 1907, 18 locomotives were auctioned off, some selling for around £200, along with over 500 wagons, 2 passenger coaches and a large amount of rail. Some 4,700 yards of permanent track had been laid in the new Yard extension, of which a 1,000 yards was on curves.

With the great upsurge in traffic generated by the First World War, eight new locomotives arrived between 1914 and 1919, built by Hawthorn Leslie, Avonside Engineering and five from Andrew Barclay. In 1915 platforms were built to enable long troop trains to work directly into the Yard, and 12 trains a day were anticipated. In the first two years of the war some 65,000 wagons had been handled in the Yards.

In 1955 the Admiralty ordered 10 new diesel "Planet" locomotives from F.C. Hibberd of London, so marking the demise of the steam fleet, many ending their days as stationary boilers. One of the roles of the railway within the Yards had been to provide a passenger service between the separated Yards, which probably started running between the Barracks platform and South Yard in the 1890's. In 1907 with the Yard extension completed, services ran every 30 minutes from No. 5 basin, in North Yard, to South Yard Camber with 3 intermediate stops, a journey of about 20 minutes. The train normally consisted of 6, 4-wheel coaches; 4 for the workman and 2 for higher ranks; plus a 4-wheel flat wagon to carry the workers toolboxes and other sundry items required by the passengers. Even as late as 1964, a survey shows the train was still carrying at least 20 passenger on all the journeys during the day through the tunnel, with over a hundred on board at the morning and lunch breaks, and the 1605 from South Yard almost full with 153 passengers. In the 1960's with the rapid increase of road traffic two bridges were built across the Torpoint Ferry approach roads, between North and Morice Yards, and Cornwall Beach, between Morice and South Yards, and marked the beginning of the end of the Yard's passenger service. No. 2 was specially steamed for the final service on Friday 13, 1966, the train being replaced by a bus service. The internal freight services continued and around 250 wagons were still being received from British Rail a month in 1976. The Falkland's War in 1982 saw the last extensive use of the railway for freight, when large numbers of wagons brought stores for loading onto ships. The last conventional freight trains ran in North Yard at the end of 1984, but reduced to very small loads, but the tunnel between the Yards had closed on 10 November 1982, when one of the Planet's, 4860, worked the last freight train through the tunnel.

Since the first locomotive steamed in the Yards in the mid 1860's some seventy locomotives have worked on the network, with all the Devonport owned locomotives being 4 wheeled, to enable them to operate around the tight bends, and standard gauge. Until the 1960's the locomotives were painted plum, or dull red, lined out in yellow. By 1976 the diesels were in dark green livery with black and yellow striped buffer beams.

In 1987 the Dockyard was privatised, and is now operated by Devonport Management Ltd. This has seen a new type of railway work in Devonport, with many Paxman diesel engines, from High Speed Trains, being overhauled in the Yard, but arriving on road transporters, along with other diesel engines. In October 1991, 47538 was loaned to the Yard as a test bed for class 47 engine overhauls, and moved by rail in the Yard by Planets 4858 and 4860, their last movements before withdrawal. Two air-braked Drewry locomotives arrived in 1993 to operate the air braked Nuclear Flask trains into the submarine re-fit complex. Other Railway work in the Yard has seen the Mark 2 Driving Van Trailers, currently used on services out of London Liverpool Street station, being refurbished and around 1,800 HST coaches were fitted with central door locking in 1994-5. The full 8 coach formation, without the power cars, was worked with a barrier vehicle at each end of the train out from Laira Depot top and tailed by a Class 47 and Class 08, as the loops at Keyham station and the exchange sidings in the Yard were too short to enable a single locomotive to run road the train. In 2002 the Yard re-wired and overhauled First Great Western HST power cars, with the units being transferred by road from Laira depot into the old Gun shop in the Yard, where two short lengths of track were specially built. Work has also been carried out on accident damaged Class 170 D.M.U.'s, with the damaged cab sections being rebuilt, again the unit was moved in and out of the Yard on road transport. The only rail borne traffic, is the nuclear flask train used to transport fuel for the Navy's submarines between Sellafield and the re-fitting complex in Devonport.

Go to Top