A photograph showing a Head Wrightsons scale car fitted with Timken roller bearings.
Photograph and details courtesy of Ken Pattison.
Picture Stockton Archive
A Pictorial History of Stockton-on-Tees
A photograph showing a Head Wrightsons scale car fitted with Timken roller bearings.
Photograph and details courtesy of Ken Pattison.
What exactly is a scale car?
A scale car feeds a furnace when it runs over the top of a furnace and drops the raw materials out of its hopper into the furnace.
The iron ore is loaded into the scale car hopper,then weighed then put into the transfer car which loads the furnace.
This was one of the early ones, the later version was painted yellow and black and the window panes in the cab were bullet proof but when you were fitting them if the edge of the glass got knocked they would shatter. Some of the painters who painted these cars were one armed Dick, Fred Smith and Kenny Rowntree.
It looks like Alf Briggs the electricians gaffer on the bridge. I worked on these scale cars from being an apprentice fitting all the keys in the levers and shafts that operated the doors and fitted the doors to the hopper, then we fitted all the hydraulics along with Peter Johnson’s men from South Shields and electrics with our own electricians, we also assembled the scale car body to the bogies with the platers(boilmakers). Some of the men that worked on these scale cars were fitters John Calvert, Kenny Vickers, Lenny Nicholson, Billy Hollis and Brian Howat and electricians ;Duke Kennedy, Des Preece, Benny Cross, Tommy Baker and Peter Ford.