Rapido 967609 OO Gauge RCH 1907 Salt Van Saxa Salt No.217

When you think of salt, the first thing that springs to mind is sprinkling it on your chips, spreading it on your driveway during the winter months or rubbing it from your eyes after a dip in the sea. But salt is far more important than that, and has been utilised in a host of industries, and for many years it was primarily transported across the nation by rail.

The UK has been a major producer of salt for thousands of years, but Cheshire is the epicentre of the nation's production. The ancient salt marshes and rock salt deposits were rich pickings for entrepreneurial business owners. Its history is so ingrained in British culture that the towns where it is produced were mentioned in the Domesday book of 1086, being referred to as 'The Wiches'.

Salt is an excellent preservative, so it has been used in the transport of food both nationally and internationally and was sent in huge quantities to the deep water ports around the country for exporting perishables. Dairy salt was even exported as far as New Zealand right through to the 1950s. The export of salt helped put Liverpool on the map, hundreds of years before the Beatles even picked up a guitar, or Ken Dodd waved his tickle stick.

Salt was also used for making brine, so meat-based food producers used it regularly.

The chemical industry used it in industrial quantities, as it was a vital element in the production of bleaches, chloroform, and even PVC. Salt is also incredibly efficient at softening water, so it is used by papermakers of the southeast who reside in a hardwater region.

Of course, it is used as a consumable too, so it was delivered to bakers, biscuit makers, animal feed producers and table salt packers across the country.

Once it had been gathered and dried, the salt was either ground and transported in bags or moved as large bars called lump salt. Alternatively, common salt was transported loose, but this left it vulnerable to the elements.

To protect the salt in transit, most companies maintained a personal fleet of privately owned railway wagons, so that the load was protected from the weather, and to prevent spillage, these were usually vans or enclosed wagons. In part, this was due to the variable quality and condition of the covered vans that were owned by most railway companies. One leaky wagon could dissolve an entire shipment before it even arrived at its destination.

This is why many salt wagons adopted a peaked roof shape. Rain would run off instantly, thus increasing the protection of the salt further.

With the Railway Clearing House managing the flow of wagons between railway companies and standardising mileage rates, they were a logical party to be involved in the transfer of salt.

The RCH had implemented wagon design standards that railway companies and wagon builders had to adhere to if they wanted to be a member of their scheme. The 1907 variant used common underframe components across many different body styles and types, including salt wagons. Salt is well known for speeding up the effects of rust, so many of these salt vans had wooden underframes.

Several wagon builders would produce salt vans that had this underframe, and they soon became a common sight across the network. As these were privately owned, the majority of them would be emblazoned with eye-catching and brightly coloured liveries.

Surviving from the pre-grouping era, these wagons even managed to avoid the wagon pooling of WW2 and remained in their bright colours right through to the days of the Nationalisation of the railways, despite the majority of other rolling stock receiving a grey or brown livery.

The transport of salt by rail declined in the 1950s, and the last of the RCH 1907 Private Owner Salt Vans disappeared at some point in the 1960s, by which point BR were using their own fleet of box vans and other wagons to move the salt.