Spoil flows - recent changes and current workings
I thought it might be interesting to review the current commercial spoil services on the network (including HS2 spoil but excluding spoil off regular possession sites) after some recent changes. I might have overlooked one or two flows but anyway:
Spoil trains to Calvert (from Bow / Barking / Cricklewood) ceased at the end of July. The binliner flow from Cricklewood had stopped at the beginning of the year; I believe the last one ran in early March, although it had become less frequent towards the end of 2020. I gather from all this that the landfill site has now been closed and covered over / landscaped with spoil, leaving Calvert with its new role as a busy HS2 hub, currently receiving stone from Tytherington quarry.
The spoil trains from Bow, Barking and Cricklewood switched destination to Appleford, where there is a landfill site at Sutton Courtenay, which also receives containerised ash from Drax. The spoil services are run for FCC Environment under the category of "soil management solutions." There is more info here about where the spoil comes from, with a few pics -
https://www.fccenvironment.co.uk/waste-processing/soil-management-solutions/
Related to the closure of FCC's rail operations at Calvert, a new spoil unloading facility has opened at Tinsley, with the first train arriving on 1st September from Barking. There is already an aggregates facility (hopper discharge) at Tinsley, but the spoil terminal is a completely separate concrete pad some distance away, located next to where the main hump of Tinsley yard used to be. Pictures taken from Wood Lane bridge show the spoil terminal immediately to the west and the intermodal terminal to the east, and can be compared with old photos of the yard taken from the same bridge.
The Inaugural working of the London 'Spoil Train' into Tinsley Yard:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/vinc2020/51418734872/
Looking in the other direction towards the Intermodal Terminal:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/darrenjb/51313779286/
The pictures linked above of the first Tinsley spoil train are in a flickr album of Tinsley photographs (with extensive captions) by Dr. Anthony Oates -
https://www.flickr.com/photos/vinc2020/albums/72157713050743282/with/49693082078/
One caption mentions that the spoil is taken by lorry to the old Silverwood colliery site, which solves a mystery about where it was actually being dumped. By co-incidence, I'm in the middle of reading an excellent book about Tinsley yard (Tinsley and the Modernisation of Sheffield's Railways, by Chris Booth and Alex Fisher) which mentions the movement of spoil by lorry to local colliery tips when the site of the yard was first being excavated out...
The current service into Tinsley runs three days a week. I understand the spoil is being loaded in the "H group" sidings at Ripple Lane (the run round loop used to access the former Stora sidings). This is right next to the Barking Eurohub site previously used for spoil loading. The long-established stone terminal by the old Stora warehouse, together with H group sidings, have both been receiving aggregate from Peak Forest this year; I assume this is to provide extra terminal capacity for all the construction work in the area. Running overnight via the ECML, the Tinsley service reaches Doncaster Belmont around 7am and recesses for a couple of hours before taking the curve around to Hexthorpe and on towards Tinsley, using a motley collection of the older JNA and JRA bogie box wagons from the existing London spoil flows.
Apparently there will also be spoil trains from London to Peterborough (there have been WTT "ghost" paths in the system for some time). I don't know exactly where they will be unloaded - presumably in the existing yard. Like Tinsley, Peterborough seems a fairly unlikely location to be unloading spoil from London, but if the Tinsley spoil is destined for old colliery workings, I suspect spoil offloaded at Peterborough would end up in old brick workings somewhere in the surrounding area.
As if one new spoil flow from Barking through Doncaster was not enough excitement, earlier this year GBRF started running a service from a new Biffa terminal at Renwick Road to Roxby landfill site (on the branch from Scunthorpe). At first I thought the schedules originating from Renwick Road were just some anomaly in the timings (there is a Renwick Road Junction but no terminal I knew of with that name). After a bit of ferreting about on google, I was surprised to find this is a completely new terminal on the north side of the railway, to the east of the existing Stora sidings stone terminal, with the buffer stops of two new sidings on the eastern side of Renwick Road:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/sludgeulper/51131665906
On google maps, if you search for "Box Lane, Barking" you can see a patch of cleared ground (dates of imagery might vary between the 2D and 3D map versions) to the north of the railway and to the east of Renwick Road. The two sidings with their loading pad are here, with access joining on to the existing connection to the Stora sidings. This means trains need to enter and exit the terminal via Ripple Lane "H Group" sidings, similar to the trains accessing the existing stone terminal by the old Stora shed.
There was a sensible piece about this new Biffa terminal on the Modern Railways website, although it's now showing as premium subscriber content (or possibly there is limit to the number of articles you can read for free) -
https://www.keymodernrailways.com/article/barking-base-biffa
There are some photos on the Railfreight.com site, although the text repeats (what I assume are) errors made on GBRF's own website, stating that the spoil will move to "sites at Roxby, Scunthorpe, Leeds and Manchester" -
https://www.railfreight.com/railfreight/2021/05/11/london-laid-waste-by-gbrf-and-biffa/
GBRF operate spoil trains from Leeds (Whitehall Road) and Manchester (Collyhurst) to Roxby (near Scunthorpe) using a set of GERS 44xx JNA wagons, and Roxby is also the destination of the trains from Renwick Road, but I think somehow this has become garbled into the Renwick Road trains operating to four different destinations. I was further confused by the Biffa website illustrating the news about the new Barking terminal showing it implausibly surrounded by a river, trees and fields, which confused me until I looked on google maps and realised it was actually a picture of Roxby...
https://www.biffa.co.uk/media-centr...ict-land-into-emission-reducing-transport-hub
The Renwick Road - Roxby service is operated by GBRF and uses a shiny new fleet of light grey JNA box wagons owned by VTG. It runs in an early morning path from Barking via Stratford and Canonbury and then down the ECML, reaching Doncaster Down Decoy sidings before 10am. It continues to Roxby a couple of hours later, with an evening return working, running maybe three times a week. The material in the wagons looks like normal construction spoil but has an unpleasant bin-train smell, and is perhaps the result of clearing old waste tips around London during construction projects.
Also running into Roxby are the regular nightly spoil/waste trains from Rossington. Eco Railfreight operate a waste transfer terminal at Rossington on the old colliery branch, complete with an 08 pilot loco:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/148388352@N05/50438893287
There are normally 11 wagons left in the terminal at any time (train runs with 22 MBAs) which is probably so that half the train can be loaded in the morning, and the other half in the afternoon after the return working arrives from Roxby at lunchtime. Like the Renwick Road trains, the spoil in the wagons appears to contain old rubbish, unlike most other spoil flows which convey normal mud and soil from building sites. A similar DB Cargo spoil flow in MBA wagons also operates from Angerstein to Roxby. There are some more views of the Rossington branch and its pilot loco from a Branch Line Society tour using their converted ferry van:
https://www.branchline.uk/fixture-report.php?id=1327
Back in London, GBRF operate spoil flows from Acton Yard (loaded in the Foster Yeoman sidings at the back of the yard somewhere) and Bow to Burton, which seem to run "as required." These were previously operated by DB Cargo, originally with JRA wagons but now with the more modern ubiquitous JNA type. A couple of pictures taken at Burton of these services:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/jimbo33201/51233048440
https://www.flickr.com/photos/92367454@N02/51415074133/
Also this summer, spoil movements have started from the new HS2 hub at the former Willesden Euro terminal, to the Barrington site near Foxton (which gives a slight sense of deja vu, as spoil trains have run between these locations before). There's a nice drone shot of the new terminal here:
https://www.railfreight.com/railfre...he-beating-heart-of-hs2-operations-in-london/
It appears that sidings 9-12 of the old Euroterminal have been relaid and set into a concrete loading pad. The "customs road" that ran alongside the building has gone, although the connection to it is still visible to the left of the loco. The other 8 roads of the original terminal are still there in the picture, with Acton Lane receptions beyond the fence (the hopper wagons are probably recessed while on Mendip/Freightliner sand traffic from Dagenham). That view of Willesden Euro can be compared to some older shots:
Entrance to sidings 9-12 are on the extreme left of this picture, two tracks splitting into four at the road crossing. A DRS 66 appears to be stood on the Customs siding:
https://www.kentrail.org.uk/willesden_euro-terminal.html
Buffer stops of what I think must be sidings 10-12, in 2011 before the removal of the cranes. On the right appear to be the cement discharge facilities for the trains that ran from Tunstead:
https://www.ukconstructionmedia.co.uk/news/cranes-hs2-logistics-hub/
This picture shows a cement wagon on what I think is road 10, with sleepers loaded to a wagon on the customs road by the shed. There is a single rail visible for the travelling crane - this rail is still visible in shots of the new terminal:
https://allanjenks.smugmug.com/Railway-Wagons/Wagon-Photos/i-3mXR46h
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Nearby at Willesden F sidings (used by DCR / Cappagh), there were movements earlier in the year of spoil (presumably cleaned/recycled ballast for re-use as commercial aggregate) from Westbury, which also ran from Westbury to Boston and Southampton I believe. Also the DCR flows from Carlisle Virtual Quarry to Leicester Humberstone Road and Boston are mentioned on the DCR thread as conveying spent ballast. There have also been one or two Worksop to Rossington movements that puzzle me greatly as to purpose or contents! I've not really been keeping up with which of these DCR flows are currently "live."
There are some short term flows which start and stop abruptly - this is a great drone shot of a Kellingley - Killingholme (Immingham) spoil train near its destination in 2018, showing how spoil from the old colliery was used to create car storage areas by raising the height of the ground:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/robmcrorie/45079328981/
It can be quite hard to keep up with some of these construction flows, especially with the general increase of activity surrounding HS2, but it's interesting to watch these developments in the Railfreight scene unfold, with some new flows and terminals.