From Wikipedia: "In 1881, British railway entrepreneur Sir Edward Watkin and Alexandre Lavalley, a French Suez Canal contractor, were in the Anglo-French Submarine Railway Company that conducted exploratory work on both sides of the Channel.[34][35] From June 1882 to March 1883, the British tunnel boring machine tunneled, through chalk, a total of 1,840 m (6,037 ft),[36] while Lavalley used a similar machine to drill 1,669 m (5,476 ft) from Sangatte on the French side.[37] However, the cross-Channel tunnel project was abandoned in 1883"
@@tbjtbj7930 I worked at a Mcds for a bit and during training they were always on about the "gold standard" I just assumed they wanted me to make the food good....Turns out I was getting a lesson in old UK economic policy.
What a wonderful idea. If you standardised these 'containers' they could be used the world over to carry just about everything. It could revolutionise shipping, road freight, ports, railways...
BR eventually went over to four-wheeled covered vans and dropped the use of conflats. The conflat wagon went all the way back to when the gentry could place their chaise upon a very similar four wheeled 'carriage truck'.
It does seem to be one of those cases of “ The future is already here - it’s just not very evenly distributed” from the 1930s. It took another 50 or so years and another continent for that particular future to emerge though.
Scene: It's 2124, and someone has just discovered a Maersk conex forgotten in a corner of an abandoned railyard here in Maine. People are shocked and astonished. Why, Maine is _miles_ away from Denmark.
Funny you mentioned it has caused a bit of a stir in the British press. Here in Belgium it was - to my knowledge - only picked up as an article on the regional section of the national broadcaster in Flanders and in one Dutch language newspaper. I certainly didn't know. The reason that archeologists have been digging around is because the ring road around Antwerp is being extended. The dig is happening in a part of the port of Antwerp, where a tunnel will connect two parts of the ring road. At the site used to be a castle Noordkasteel.
Its simple ..Its May 1940, and some railway workers in Belgium decided to bury a freight wagon as a time capsule, and give a future newspaper something to write about, and keep the British Royal family off the front page!..There..solved it for you!
The cost of return shipping was higher then the value of the container. I worked for a company that got to keep a shipping container because the logistics of the return got too complicated. I hoped that I could get it, but one of the bosses needed a safe shed in his cabin to lock up his expensive toys
Almost certainly shipped from Harwich to Zeebrugge, or waiting to do the reverse, quite probably one of the train ferries onto which whole goods trains were loaded. These ferries operated from Harwich Town Port, rather than Parkestone Quay and were imaginatively named ‘Train Ferry No.1’, ‘Train Ferry No. 2’ and, yes, you guessed it ‘Train Ferry No.3’. LNER took the service over completely in 1932. The service stopped in May 1940 due to a small matter of the Benelux countries experiencing a sudden, uninvited visit by the Wehrmacht. Alternatively, the container could have been unloaded quayside at Parkestone Quay (I remember the rail lines on the dockside and facilitating cranes dating from the pre-war period before RO-RO ferries were a thing) and hoisted on board one of the LNER ferries (the GER fleet passing into LNER hands in 1923), notably commissioning three new ferries in 1926; the SS Vienna, SS Prague and SS Amsterdam. As well as Dutch and Danish ports, Zeebrugge and Antwerp were served also. Perhaps some British folk thought it wise to return to the UK and the container ended up stuck in Antwerp as heavily armed Germans turned up rather abruptly in May 1940?
Not really, no. Britain at the time made use of much shorter freight stock than the US. Its a type BK full-length container, that is the same length as the standard covered van of the time. They were invented to try and reduce handling of the goods when being loaded and unloaded from the railways; the type BKs in particular had the same fixings you see in removals vans to this day to keep stuff upright etc. Jago does show some half-length type A containers to illustrate matters in the video, so I understand the confusion.
Excellent video..'A couple Summers Ago' I worked for a store in Watford and arranged some furniture for a customer in France via the juntion station who offered this service and ,at the time, better priced than by lorry.However.....it sadly went missing and after much investigation was 'discovered ' in a waiting room two stations up from its destination and used by staff !..
In the shot, under the LNER name, we can see REMO... I suspect this is an LNER removal wagon that got to Antwerp as part of ammunition trains and was damaged and dumped after one if the bombing raids by the Germans either during the evacuation or by V1 and V2 rockets in 44/45... Given, it's in LNER pre-war red, I suspect the former
And now the true train history buffs appear. I wonder how much time and effort it would take the newspapers to dig out this information before going to press? Obviously more than they are willing to spend.
I can see tommorows headlines. McDonalds are surprised by the numbers of Oxbridge history studens voming in t ask abot Ramsey Mcdonalds politics, the students didnt go away empty handed though, they were given a Ronald McDonald colouring book. Thanks for this short vid, Jay go go go .
Bit of a theory on why it was underground: it could have been used as just as filler in the ground during construction (albeit of questionable stabillity). There’s a similar story of an entire tank engine underneath concrete in new zeland because it was dumped in to fill it out.
Plenty of British locomotives and rolling stock were shipped to Belgium and the Netherlands after liberation in 1945. There's a particularly beautiful ex-British steam loco in the Dutch national railway museum in Utrecht.
Not to mention that the Belgian railway museum has the only surviving example of McIntosh's "Dunalastair" 4-4-0s for the Caledonian Railway - they were so successful that the Belgian State Railways wanted some. McIntosh let one of the Glasgow manufacturers use the drawings for the first 5. That was around 1900.
Thanks - looked up the Utrecht engine and it is WD Austerity 2-10-0 73755 Longmoor, which was the 1000th British Army locomotive to be shipped to Europe, ironically on 9 May 1945, the day after the war ended!
Could it have been left there during WW2? Antwerp was a major supply port during the last phase of the war when the allies were making their way across France, Belgium and the Netherlands towards Germany.
Pretty good chance of that. Just because it says LNER doesn't mean it was put there by the LNER. if its just the container thats used to transport something on a 6x6 invading Europe days and days after DDay, then there's a really good chance it stayed loaded in the LNER container instead of transmitting it into something military owned. Then once it got there, it takes logistics, fuel, planning, and costs to send it back. Like so many other things in the wars, it probably just got "lost"/ left behind and then forgotten. As would any other 2 foot shipping container today. Its just a crate, leave it behind, no ones going to remember or ever find it, if they do, we'll be long gone and they'll never know
My guess is that the container remained in Belgium as it would have cost more than it was worth to ship it back, and was subsequently buried to act as a rudimentary air raid shelter.
I might pop into McDonald's and ask them about the farm that belonged to Old McDonald... though I fear I'd discover there are no cows left to moo-moo here OR there these days.
I would strongly hesitate to call today's media 'journalism'. It's absolutely garbage, and yet most of the public fall for whatever lies and distortions of the truth that the media spout. It's a mixture of manipulation and distraction.
Back in the Twenties (100 years back) a newspaper criticised the LNWR was using an 'experimental locomotive' on a passenger turn involved in an incident. The engine was a Prince of Wales class that was named 'Experiment', one of the early names from railway history. There was a coach named that on the Liverpool and Manchester in the 1830s.
In the USA there are trucking and storage companies that offer containers for moving of people's personal belonging. They drop them off in your driveway, you load them up, they are picked up and travel mainly by truck to the intended location (ABF and PODS are two of the brands here).
When I left school in 1970 I got a job with British Rail as a Junior railman, as I was 15 years old. I worked in a large railway goods and we had lots of these containers which where put on to Conflats or also known as container flat wagons. They where kept on the Conflat with two chains at each side, these were screwed up tight so the container would not fall off during transit. We had lots of these railway vehicles coming and going every day. Each container had a letter code which were A, B, BD, BK. A Containers where smaller, you could get two A containers on one Conflat wagon. I've even seen A containers put into metal open open wagons so. A big gantry crane which covered three sidings was used to lift the containers on / off wagons. When the containers were taken off the Conflat they where loaded onto a flat trailer and driven away by a three wheel Camel lorry unit unit, which I think was electric powerd. Happy days indeed.
PECO model railways sell these containers in N scale but they are blue. Catalogue No. NR-214 for two containers Catalogue No. NR-23 for one container on a "conflat wagon" Although the colour is different the logo on the side matches very well the one in Antwerp I think.
Thanks Jago for dispelling a mystery that had not been bothering me at all, as I managed to detach myself from the Lügenpresse a decade ago after their lies about the events in Odessa.
it's what happens when we have two generations of youth who've become so accustomed to being able to look everything up on the internet that they become baffled when they can't find anything about what they're looking for
What, because some people have dug up something boring, and the newspapers went out and made it into a minor story mostly made out of gossip without bothering to ask any experts? I can tell you with certainty that that's always happened, ever since the dawn of broadsides! Indeed, before the RUclips age at best a correction like this would have gone through some buried letter to the editor (who if they did publish it wouldn't check for credentials and would just go for the most incendiary one), not a proper channel where a historian can speak on their own platform, so in some sense it's an improvement. This kind of comment about the current generation's standards regressing has also always been a thing since the dawn of time, and every single time you see it it's just as funny as the ones by people who will praise that generation for being better 50 years later.
@@randomguy555 social media usage is conclusively linked to cognitive decline among all demographics across continents - I am involved in one such research that's been tracking it yearly for the past seven years in a certain very large geography with a sample size of above 30,000 students aged 15 to 18
Not only not a mystery, but not a wagon either. As others have commentated, it was probably left there because the cost and logistics of getting it shipped back were too much, and it might well have been shipped by boat direct to Antwerp originally rather than going all the way by train and train ferry.
They still do this today. In Canada it's called "Intermodal". When I worked for an electrical wholesaler, it was the cheapest (and slowest) way to ship parts from Eastern Canada to Alberta. Many's the time I've been stuck at a level crossing on the way to work watching what seemed to be an endless string of Intermodal containers on flatcars headed to the container yard in West Edmonton. As long as your timelines aren't too tight, it's still a popular way to move stuff across Canada.
LNER It’s my proud boast that I travelled from Norwich to Liverpool Street in 1944. Plenty of unscheduled stops that worried my parents more than me. Darkness most of the way.
Lovely, Jago. I just love your sense of humour - asking McDonalds indeed. Your explanation, left behind in 1939, is actually a very likely one - a number of French, German and Italian wagons found themselves on the wrong side of the water here, for exactly the same reason. Both the Great Eastern, Hull & Barnsley, SECR and other lines with train ferry services to the mainland had wagons which regularly went across the Channel, even before the Great War. European stock built for the same traffic were built to fit our loading gauge, of course. Did you notice the lettering on the container on the poster? "British Railways" as a title was in use in the mid / late 1930s as a joint marketing phrase, well before nationalisation.
In Europe it's very common to see wagons and coaches from other countries all over the place - and trains made up of stock from several different countries, especially cross-border trains.
There were several films made in Britain during the war which were set in Europe and feature genuine Continental rolling-stock. Presumably the stranded foreign stock was much in demand by film companies wanting to add authenticity.
At Woodhall Spa in Lincolnshire (no longer on the railway map) is the Cottage Museum, a preserved prefab corrugated iron house. These buildings used to be quite common but there aren't many left. On its web site there's some advertising material from the manufacturer of the house, with pricing starting at £205, 'carriage paid to the nearest Railway Station'. So, in the past you could not only use the railways to do a removal; you could have an entire house delivered.
Containers were introduced on the 4 pre nationalisation railways in the late 1920. Unlike modern containers they couldn't be stacked one on top of another. The wreck appears to be plywood so it was built in 1935 or after they were special containers for house and furniture removals. The information panel can just be seen on the left of the body but the tare weight which would nail the build date can't be read on the video. the number might occur lower down. they are slightly less than half way down the body. the livery is slightly different to the 1935 picture i see in Peter Tatlows book but it is definitely not a wartime livery. suggesting it got left in Belgium pre May 1940. as you say equipment sometimes got lost and certainly equipment got captured by the Germans. for example a GWR Dean goods loco was found in Vienna in 1945.
The Conflat that conned a journalist,who had a hot box,that fanned an impossible story! Definitely,no connection! But there was a Container,wasn't there?? Send for Sherlock,221b Baker Street! Thanks Jago,this is a story,that will get plenty of legs,and laughs from any number of rail buffs,Thank you 😀,Thank you 😇 😊!
I didn't see the original news articles but the reason LNER (new) don't know about LNER (old) is pretty obvious, I agree. Doesn't stop it ending up in newspapers, of course.
Though you would think a company in an industry that captures the attention of the public as much as rail does would, upon adopting the name of an old company in the same industry, employ a historian for just such inquiries. Just seems like good PR.
I also see the need to bring back the ability to move furniture by trains. considering the container was created before the modern container shouldn't be too difficult to replicate.
I wouldn't be surprised if someone in the press asked a railfan or rail historian, got an answer that sounded too 'boring' for them, and proceeded to write the article with no mention that they'd even asked someone who actually knew the answer.
There's a 1965 photo of a BR 'traditional' container similar to that dug up in a German wagon book. It's being unloaded in Stuttgart from a Belgian wagon so it seems likely they went a deck cargo from an east coast port. As an aside a picture of the resident cat at the Antwerp depot of the LNER has showed up , obligingly sitting in front of a furniture container! There is one mystery though, how did the container come to be buried rather than scrapped, burned or used as a garden shed?
Classic media saying technically true things that heavily mislead. Yeah, LNER the modern TOC probably are baffled, but presenting that info like it is relevant or surprising to gin up the mystery narrative is very dishonest, because the very fact they asked implies it's the same company without straight up saying it.
Reminds a bit of how every so often someone on r/Cologne asked about fragrance-related hints - 4711 being the only correct answer on that sub of course.
Given the number of current shipping containers used for just about everything except shipping it wouldn’t be unexpected that an end of life LNER container would not be shipped back to Britain but sold to someone who needed some storage space or a shed.
Very informative video as always thanks Jago; although I am just a little surprised that you didn't use your time machine to jump back in time to check who left it there and why. Thanks for the McDonalds tip... last time I went into LNER ticket office in York, I asked for a Big Mac and Fries... your helpful comment explains the odd look I got as a result 😳
My late father was a furniture removalist and he acquired one of these type of containers, I remember seeing the folded-up box in our backyard in the early 1970s. I don't know where it came from, I don't recall any markings. This was in Australia.
LOL I like the line “you might as well go to McDonald’s and ask them about Ramsey McDonald’s politics. Good one. Might it not have had something to do with Charles Tyson Yerkees tho 😂
There's a lot that escapes people. Each of the Railways had counting houses used to account for their wagons on other systems. LNER used to run from Harwich IRC. So much equipment never ran on home metals and remained where they were, they were ultimately struck from the lists.
The news report shown here kept referring to the container as a 'train'. No surprise from me about the sloppy journalism there! This reminds me of when I went to a local-ish model railway exhibition many years ago and got chatting to a member of the German Railway Society and mentioned that I model in British-outline HO. He then showed me a page from their magazine that showed a historic photo of German rail wagons in the second world war. Some of them had been built to British loading gauge, obviously in preparation for the nazi invasion of Britain. It makes me wonder of the unearthed container was from one of these and perhaps painted in a counterfeit GNER livery? Just a thought.
There was a fair amount of cross Channel and cross Nordsee railway ferry traffic before the war, which required stock built to fit our loading gauge. Some German wagons thus got caught over here. Amusingly, an article in 'Model Railway News', back around 1943/4, reporting on a model train show raising fund for the war effort, illustrated two models, of German and Italian train ferry vans on display - their builder had gone down to the local goods yard where the originals were dumped, and measured them up.
News rags would prefer to frame something as a mystery rather than ask a qualified expert? Color me shocked. Jago, thanks for providing the history to this so-called mystery.
Having got hopelessly lost in the environs of Antwerpen only just last week, I bet I know where this was uncovered. Traffic around Antwerpen has always been a nightmare and my time spent in almost stationary traffic while trying to get to Rotterdam from the tunnel is endless. For some reason, my mates always said; "Avoid the Kennedy Tunnel" without explaining why. The one time I did use it - in the opposite direction - it was no worse than any other way, but I seem to remember paying a fairly stiff toll? Last week; no toll at all. Anyway, the Belgian authorities have decided to cure the problem once and for all and have dug up most of Belgium to build what amounts to Gravely Hills Interchange writ hhhhuuuuge! Both the satnavs we were using were woefully out of date, the Tom-tom by about 15 years and the installed Land Rover one by ten and they gave up and pointed us into a suburb of Antwerpen. Very pretty, but useless for getting to the bit of Germany we wanted. So, I reckon it was around there that old container was found?
Loading goods into containers that can then be moved by road, rail or ship to facilitate international trade? It's certainly a good idea. I wonder why it didn't catch on? 😁
Clearing a house in Hackney many years ago I spotted its shed roof was a bit of LNER wagon canvas cover... so that was salvaged as well. Basically, a lot of railway stuff was reused for other purposes. I wonder if the discovery in the news also became a shed.
Jago, to add some foundation to future research you will now be itching to on this topic, after reading this information. The container may be an LNER BK type from between 1935 and 1940. See Peter Tatlow's 'A Pictorial Record of LNER Wagons, p72 & 73.
Look up "PODS" in North America. Same thing except I don't believe they ever move by rail, only truck. We had two of them for our recent ~2500-km cross-border move ... Neither of the PODS pods ended up in Belgium, I'm pleased to say.
Interesting to ponder how the railways of yore shipped freight internationally. As one who is from a certain country with a 5’ 3” track gauge I agree about the poor standard of journalism in these articles. On the topic of international cooperation if I may digress I am reminded of how a BREL mark 2 b or 2c carriage visited Vienna, Austria for some scientific research. This sort of carriage was operated by Northern Ireland Railways 1970 - 2000.
Considering that luggage trolleys turn up all over the rail system in this country ( I once saw a trolley belonging to Penrith, at Fenchurch Street!) I another surprised.
Was there anything inside ? I guess not. LNER: cue shot of behemoth LNER Sir Nigel Gresham locotive, the size of an ocean liner practically, oozing past the screen. I like it
Развлечения
I once found a Brussels Sprout abandoned in a field in England. How it got there all the way from Belgium is a complete mystery.
Take it to McDonalds and ask if they can explain it.
Wind power probably
I keep finding Belgian biscuits in New Zealand cafés. Quite nice with a cup of English Breakfast tea.
@@daddymuggle Now I'm wondering what on earth New Zealand cafés are doing in Belgium 🤔
@@clickrick it's a mystery. However, I now have an idea of what to call my establishment should I ever open a tea rooms in the UK.
I have to admit that I am disappointed this was not evidence of Watkins completing a secret Channel Tunnel rail link.
Lol
From Wikipedia: "In 1881, British railway entrepreneur Sir Edward Watkin and Alexandre Lavalley, a French Suez Canal contractor, were in the Anglo-French Submarine Railway Company that conducted exploratory work on both sides of the Channel.[34][35] From June 1882 to March 1883, the British tunnel boring machine tunneled, through chalk, a total of 1,840 m (6,037 ft),[36] while Lavalley used a similar machine to drill 1,669 m (5,476 ft) from Sangatte on the French side.[37] However, the cross-Channel tunnel project was abandoned in 1883"
"but how did it get there?!" *waits for Charles Tyson Yerkes to be implicated somehow*
Bearing in mind that there was a train ferry which ran between Harwich and Zeebrugge it sounds pretty unexceptional.
I'm quite tempted to go into McDonald's now and ask about Ramsay McDonald's politics.
Labour Party founder and leader who opposed Britain's involvement in WW1 and tried to sustain the gold standard. Would you like fries with that?
Their reply will probably be easier to stomach than their products!
@@tbjtbj7930 I worked at a Mcds for a bit and during training they were always on about the "gold standard" I just assumed they wanted me to make the food good....Turns out I was getting a lesson in old UK economic policy.
Reminds me of a headline in my local paper: ‘Shell found on beach’
Boom-Boom
What a wonderful idea. If you standardised these 'containers' they could be used the world over to carry just about everything. It could revolutionise shipping, road freight, ports, railways...
Nothing new under the sun eh?
BR eventually went over to four-wheeled covered vans and dropped the use of conflats. The conflat wagon went all the way back to when the gentry could place their chaise upon a very similar four wheeled 'carriage truck'.
u need a special shape for aircraft
@@johnjephcote7636Four wheeled covered vans had been around for a long time before this. The containers were used for a door-to-door removal service.
It does seem to be one of those cases of “ The future is already here - it’s just not very evenly distributed” from the 1930s. It took another 50 or so years and another continent for that particular future to emerge though.
Scene: It's 2124, and someone has just discovered a Maersk conex forgotten in a corner of an abandoned railyard here in Maine. People are shocked and astonished. Why, Maine is _miles_ away from Denmark.
Oh, that'll seem almost normal compared to the ones they'll find buried where some prepper has turned one into a bomb shelter.
Not Denmark, the Maersk in 2124 was founded in 2090 in Norway. Just to make things a little more confusing.
Funny you mentioned it has caused a bit of a stir in the British press. Here in Belgium it was - to my knowledge - only picked up as an article on the regional section of the national broadcaster in Flanders and in one Dutch language newspaper.
I certainly didn't know.
The reason that archeologists have been digging around is because the ring road around Antwerp is being extended. The dig is happening in a part of the port of Antwerp, where a tunnel will connect two parts of the ring road. At the site used to be a castle Noordkasteel.
Is that Dutch language newspaper _Het Nieuwsblad_ by any chance? I saw an article on their website.
Yep that's the one.
Good to know it was picked up as a regional news item, I did not even know this happened at all
Now I wonder if it has received more attention in the UK because it could symbolize Great Britain or the British Empire and that jazz.
@@MagereHein also in the Gazet van Antwerpen, but that's not that odd, they belong to the same group.
Its simple ..Its May 1940, and some railway workers in Belgium decided to bury a freight wagon as a time capsule, and give a future newspaper something to write about, and keep the British Royal family off the front page!..There..solved it for you!
The cost of return shipping was higher then the value of the container.
I worked for a company that got to keep a shipping container because the logistics of the return got too complicated.
I hoped that I could get it, but one of the bosses needed a safe shed in his cabin to lock up his expensive toys
Almost certainly shipped from Harwich to Zeebrugge, or waiting to do the reverse, quite probably one of the train ferries onto which whole goods trains were loaded. These ferries operated from Harwich Town Port, rather than Parkestone Quay and were imaginatively named ‘Train Ferry No.1’, ‘Train Ferry No. 2’ and, yes, you guessed it ‘Train Ferry No.3’. LNER took the service over completely in 1932. The service stopped in May 1940 due to a small matter of the Benelux countries experiencing a sudden, uninvited visit by the Wehrmacht.
Alternatively, the container could have been unloaded quayside at Parkestone Quay (I remember the rail lines on the dockside and facilitating cranes dating from the pre-war period before RO-RO ferries were a thing) and hoisted on board one of the LNER ferries (the GER fleet passing into LNER hands in 1923), notably commissioning three new ferries in 1926; the SS Vienna, SS Prague and SS Amsterdam. As well as Dutch and Danish ports, Zeebrugge and Antwerp were served also.
Perhaps some British folk thought it wise to return to the UK and the container ended up stuck in Antwerp as heavily armed Germans turned up rather abruptly in May 1940?
Ah yes, the small disagreement of 1939 to 1945. :^)
@@alexhajnal107 Erm I think you have spent to much time watch another brilliant RUclips surprising about cars and transport in the early 1920`s!
@@MrBreadman1966 I borrowed it from someone who gets up to shenanigans.
Also the Folkestone - Calais train ferries operating until the 70's.
Dover played the game as well.
Like a lot of old railway containers, it may well have ended up as a chicken shed, having the considerable benefit of being fox proof.
Yes, but why was it buried ?
@@sianwarwick633 Smell of the rotting chicken poo?
Even I (Dutch railway anorak) could have told them as I have a Hornby tinplate (and wood) model of such a removal container and conflat in O gauge.
ah yes.. Hanlon's Razor.... "Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity".
Essentially, this is whats called a LCL (Less than Car Load) container. For when it doesnt quite justify the use of a full railcar.
Not really, no. Britain at the time made use of much shorter freight stock than the US. Its a type BK full-length container, that is the same length as the standard covered van of the time. They were invented to try and reduce handling of the goods when being loaded and unloaded from the railways; the type BKs in particular had the same fixings you see in removals vans to this day to keep stuff upright etc.
Jago does show some half-length type A containers to illustrate matters in the video, so I understand the confusion.
Well, that explains my missing holiday luggage!
Excellent video..'A couple Summers Ago' I worked for a store in Watford and arranged some furniture for a customer in France via the juntion station who offered this service and ,at the time, better priced than by lorry.However.....it sadly went missing and after much investigation was 'discovered ' in a waiting room two stations up from its destination and used by staff !..
In the shot, under the LNER name, we can see REMO...
I suspect this is an LNER removal wagon that got to Antwerp as part of ammunition trains and was damaged and dumped after one if the bombing raids by the Germans either during the evacuation or by V1 and V2 rockets in 44/45... Given, it's in LNER pre-war red, I suspect the former
My thought also that it found its way to Antwerp after the British (or was it the Canadians) liberated the City and the port in 1944.
And now the true train history buffs appear. I wonder how much time and effort it would take the newspapers to dig out this information before going to press? Obviously more than they are willing to spend.
I can see tommorows headlines.
McDonalds are surprised by the numbers of Oxbridge history studens voming in t ask abot Ramsey Mcdonalds politics, the students didnt go away empty handed though, they were given a Ronald McDonald colouring book.
Thanks for this short vid, Jay go go go .
Ive asked numerous times what happened to the Old MacDonalds farm and none of the restaurant staff seem to know...
Bit of a theory on why it was underground: it could have been used as just as filler in the ground during construction (albeit of questionable stabillity). There’s a similar story of an entire tank engine underneath concrete in new zeland because it was dumped in to fill it out.
Plenty of British locomotives and rolling stock were shipped to Belgium and the Netherlands after liberation in 1945. There's a particularly beautiful ex-British steam loco in the Dutch national railway museum in Utrecht.
Not to mention that the Belgian railway museum has the only surviving example of McIntosh's "Dunalastair" 4-4-0s for the Caledonian Railway - they were so successful that the Belgian State Railways wanted some. McIntosh let one of the Glasgow manufacturers use the drawings for the first 5. That was around 1900.
Thanks - looked up the Utrecht engine and it is WD Austerity 2-10-0 73755 Longmoor, which was the 1000th British Army locomotive to be shipped to Europe, ironically on 9 May 1945, the day after the war ended!
Could it have been left there during WW2? Antwerp was a major supply port during the last phase of the war when the allies were making their way across France, Belgium and the Netherlands towards Germany.
Pretty good chance of that. Just because it says LNER doesn't mean it was put there by the LNER. if its just the container thats used to transport something on a 6x6 invading Europe days and days after DDay, then there's a really good chance it stayed loaded in the LNER container instead of transmitting it into something military owned. Then once it got there, it takes logistics, fuel, planning, and costs to send it back. Like so many other things in the wars, it probably just got "lost"/ left behind and then forgotten. As would any other 2 foot shipping container today. Its just a crate, leave it behind, no ones going to remember or ever find it, if they do, we'll be long gone and they'll never know
My guess is that the container remained in Belgium as it would have cost more than it was worth to ship it back, and was subsequently buried to act as a rudimentary air raid shelter.
I might pop into McDonald's and ask them about the farm that belonged to Old McDonald... though I fear I'd discover there are no cows left to moo-moo here OR there these days.
Even if Old McDonald supplies McDonald's the burgers shouldn't be going "moo moo".
Could also have been used during WWII for equipment etc. as Antwerp was a major port late in the war.
or maybe before then, LNER did run ships to holland during the 1920's and 30's.
Thank you for debunking the crass journalism that is so prevalent today. 👏👏
Grub Street, of course, seize every chance to make a mountain out of a pimple - particularly if it gives them a chance to moan about Europe.
I would strongly hesitate to call today's media 'journalism'. It's absolutely garbage, and yet most of the public fall for whatever lies and distortions of the truth that the media spout. It's a mixture of manipulation and distraction.
Back in the Twenties (100 years back) a newspaper criticised the LNWR was using an 'experimental locomotive' on a passenger turn involved in an incident. The engine was a Prince of Wales class that was named 'Experiment', one of the early names from railway history. There was a coach named that on the Liverpool and Manchester in the 1830s.
In the USA there are trucking and storage companies that offer containers for moving of people's personal belonging. They drop them off in your driveway, you load them up, they are picked up and travel mainly by truck to the intended location (ABF and PODS are two of the brands here).
When I left school in 1970 I got a job with British Rail as a Junior railman, as I was 15 years old. I worked in a large railway goods and we had lots of these containers which where put on to Conflats or also known as container flat wagons. They where kept on the Conflat with two chains at each side, these were screwed up tight so the container would not fall off during transit. We had lots of these railway vehicles coming and going every day. Each container had a letter code which were A, B, BD, BK. A Containers where smaller, you could get two A containers on one Conflat wagon. I've even seen A containers put into metal open open wagons so. A big gantry crane which covered three sidings was used to lift the containers on / off wagons. When the containers were taken off the Conflat they where loaded onto a flat trailer and driven away by a three wheel Camel lorry unit unit, which I think was electric powerd. Happy days indeed.
"You are the flat truck to my container."
You mean we keep you up at night? 😆
he's been on the wagon ever since the beer reviews fell flat
The lack of curiosity or basic research which means "mysteries" like this get legs, never ceases to amaze me. Great video, but then they always are!
2:41 I love that wall, with its juxtaposition of British and international destinations.
PECO model railways sell these containers in N scale but they are blue.
Catalogue No. NR-214 for two containers
Catalogue No. NR-23 for one container on a "conflat wagon"
Although the colour is different the logo on the side matches very well the one in Antwerp I think.
0:42 They want all the answers but won’t go to the people who might have good answers.
York and shildon tend to have answers for train related things.
But they don't really want the answers. They want engagement.
@@SeventhSwell Exactly, answers would kill the story before it started.
I guess aliens did it
Thanks Jago for dispelling a mystery that had not been bothering me at all, as I managed to detach myself from the Lügenpresse a decade ago after their lies about the events in Odessa.
It's all about the drama, Jago. There's simply no excitement in the hum drum.
A hum and a drum is quite enough for me!
A nicely contained explanation of railway activites of yore.
Thank you, to all the other commentators, with a solid sense of humour. Your contributions have made my evening.
We've grown worryingly more clueless as a species this century than we care to acknowledge
it's what happens when we have two generations of youth who've become so accustomed to being able to look everything up on the internet that they become baffled when they can't find anything about what they're looking for
@@thesteelrodent1796 My impression is that we're generally as ignorant as we've ever been, but now it's easier to notice what we don't know.
@@thesteelrodent1796 exactly what I meant - they've even begun calling google search 'research'. Oh lord, the presumption...
What, because some people have dug up something boring, and the newspapers went out and made it into a minor story mostly made out of gossip without bothering to ask any experts? I can tell you with certainty that that's always happened, ever since the dawn of broadsides!
Indeed, before the RUclips age at best a correction like this would have gone through some buried letter to the editor (who if they did publish it wouldn't check for credentials and would just go for the most incendiary one), not a proper channel where a historian can speak on their own platform, so in some sense it's an improvement.
This kind of comment about the current generation's standards regressing has also always been a thing since the dawn of time, and every single time you see it it's just as funny as the ones by people who will praise that generation for being better 50 years later.
@@randomguy555 social media usage is conclusively linked to cognitive decline among all demographics across continents - I am involved in one such research that's been tracking it yearly for the past seven years in a certain very large geography with a sample size of above 30,000 students aged 15 to 18
Not only not a mystery, but not a wagon either. As others have commentated, it was probably left there because the cost and logistics of getting it shipped back were too much, and it might well have been shipped by boat direct to Antwerp originally rather than going all the way by train and train ferry.
Great vantage point, must have been amazing to be enveloped in steam and smoke from being that close to a working A4! 😍
I didn't know Ronald McDonald's father's name was Ramsay. I've learned something!
They still do this today. In Canada it's called "Intermodal". When I worked for an electrical wholesaler, it was the cheapest (and slowest) way to ship parts from Eastern Canada to Alberta. Many's the time I've been stuck at a level crossing on the way to work watching what seemed to be an endless string of Intermodal containers on flatcars headed to the container yard in West Edmonton. As long as your timelines aren't too tight, it's still a popular way to move stuff across Canada.
Yes, but the staff at the local McDonald's really *should* familiarise themselves with the politics of Ramsay MacDonald.
LNER It’s my proud boast that I travelled from Norwich to Liverpool Street in 1944. Plenty of unscheduled stops that worried my parents more than me. Darkness most of the way.
Lovely, Jago. I just love your sense of humour - asking McDonalds indeed. Your explanation, left behind in 1939, is actually a very likely one - a number of French, German and Italian wagons found themselves on the wrong side of the water here, for exactly the same reason.
Both the Great Eastern, Hull & Barnsley, SECR and other lines with train ferry services to the mainland had wagons which regularly went across the Channel, even before the Great War. European stock built for the same traffic were built to fit our loading gauge, of course.
Did you notice the lettering on the container on the poster? "British Railways" as a title was in use in the mid / late 1930s as a joint marketing phrase, well before nationalisation.
In Europe it's very common to see wagons and coaches from other countries all over the place - and trains made up of stock from several different countries, especially cross-border trains.
There were several films made in Britain during the war which were set in Europe and feature genuine Continental rolling-stock. Presumably the stranded foreign stock was much in demand by film companies wanting to add authenticity.
At Woodhall Spa in Lincolnshire (no longer on the railway map) is the Cottage Museum, a preserved prefab corrugated iron house. These buildings used to be quite common but there aren't many left. On its web site there's some advertising material from the manufacturer of the house, with pricing starting at £205, 'carriage paid to the nearest Railway Station'. So, in the past you could not only use the railways to do a removal; you could have an entire house delivered.
Containers were introduced on the 4 pre nationalisation railways in the late 1920. Unlike modern containers they couldn't be stacked one on top of another. The wreck appears to be plywood so it was built in 1935 or after they were special containers for house and furniture removals. The information panel can just be seen on the left of the body but the tare weight which would nail the build date can't be read on the video. the number might occur lower down. they are slightly less than half way down the body. the livery is slightly different to the 1935 picture i see in Peter Tatlows book but it is definitely not a wartime livery. suggesting it got left in Belgium pre May 1940. as you say equipment sometimes got lost and certainly equipment got captured by the Germans. for example a GWR Dean goods loco was found in Vienna in 1945.
A quick but fascinating 😊
The Conflat that conned a journalist,who had a hot box,that fanned an impossible story! Definitely,no connection! But there was a Container,wasn't there?? Send for Sherlock,221b Baker Street! Thanks Jago,this is a story,that will get plenty of legs,and laughs from any number of rail buffs,Thank you 😀,Thank you 😇 😊!
This explanation is way too logical for the sensationalists in the news.
I didn't see the original news articles but the reason LNER (new) don't know about LNER (old) is pretty obvious, I agree. Doesn't stop it ending up in newspapers, of course.
Though you would think a company in an industry that captures the attention of the public as much as rail does would, upon adopting the name of an old company in the same industry, employ a historian for just such inquiries. Just seems like good PR.
I need to know more about the moving furniture trains now
Google "Farmer Moving South" and there a video can be found on the BFI website
I also see the need to bring back the ability to move furniture by trains. considering the container was created before the modern container shouldn't be too difficult to replicate.
Leave it to the Anoraks to Know what's Up. Good One Jago.
At one time the LNER ran a ferry service between Harwich and Antwerp.
I wouldn't be surprised if someone in the press asked a railfan or rail historian, got an answer that sounded too 'boring' for them, and proceeded to write the article with no mention that they'd even asked someone who actually knew the answer.
There's a 1965 photo of a BR 'traditional' container similar to that dug up in a German wagon book. It's being unloaded in Stuttgart from a Belgian wagon so it seems likely they went a deck cargo from an east coast port. As an aside a picture of the resident cat at the Antwerp depot of the LNER has showed up , obligingly sitting in front of a furniture container! There is one mystery though, how did the container come to be buried rather than scrapped, burned or used as a garden shed?
looks like "ballast" for a dock retaining wall or something like that
Classic media saying technically true things that heavily mislead. Yeah, LNER the modern TOC probably are baffled, but presenting that info like it is relevant or surprising to gin up the mystery narrative is very dishonest, because the very fact they asked implies it's the same company without straight up saying it.
This is a criticism of the reports Jago is referring to not of Jago
I loved the McDonalds comparison. I may just be borrowing that...
Idk why i really admire you have Footage of Doncaster train staion based on you mainly being a london based channels
Reminds a bit of how every so often someone on r/Cologne asked about fragrance-related hints - 4711 being the only correct answer on that sub of course.
Thanks for the nice shots of the Watercress Line. Nearly time for my annual trip to the Watercress Festival.
I was trying to figure out which line it was. Thanks
I've pretty much given up watching the news, so for me this was an interesting video! Thanks.
I think the news is so targeted that the algorithm doesn't send this to lots of people.
3:11 Coincidentally, Ramsay MacDonald's slogan in the 1923 general election was "I'm Lovin' It"
Given the number of current shipping containers used for just about everything except shipping it wouldn’t be unexpected that an end of life LNER container would not be shipped back to Britain but sold to someone who needed some storage space or a shed.
Possibly lucky not to have been used as firewood.
Always a pleasure to see you mention my home town. Apologies that our media didn't give you a more interesting reason.
Beautiful!
One of my passions is the interface between road and rail.
Very informative video as always thanks Jago; although I am just a little surprised that you didn't use your time machine to jump back in time to check who left it there and why. Thanks for the McDonalds tip... last time I went into LNER ticket office in York, I asked for a Big Mac and Fries... your helpful comment explains the odd look I got as a result 😳
My late father was a furniture removalist and he acquired one of these type of containers, I remember seeing the folded-up box in our backyard in the early 1970s. I don't know where it came from, I don't recall any markings. This was in Australia.
LOL I like the line “you might as well go to McDonald’s and ask them about Ramsey McDonald’s politics. Good one.
Might it not have had something to do with Charles Tyson Yerkees tho 😂
It might have cost LNER more to return the container than it was worth, and therefore scrapped it?
well it's a few planks of wood and metal, easily replaceable so probably was just abandoned and forgotten.
There's a lot that escapes people. Each of the Railways had counting houses used to account for their wagons on other systems. LNER used to run from Harwich IRC. So much equipment never ran on home metals and remained where they were, they were ultimately struck from the lists.
The news report shown here kept referring to the container as a 'train'. No surprise from me about the sloppy journalism there!
This reminds me of when I went to a local-ish model railway exhibition many years ago and got chatting to a member of the German Railway Society and mentioned that I model in British-outline HO. He then showed me a page from their magazine that showed a historic photo of German rail wagons in the second world war. Some of them had been built to British loading gauge, obviously in preparation for the nazi invasion of Britain. It makes me wonder of the unearthed container was from one of these and perhaps painted in a counterfeit GNER livery? Just a thought.
i thought it was a wagon transfered over on one of LNER's ships and just left on the continent.
There was a fair amount of cross Channel and cross Nordsee railway ferry traffic before the war, which required stock built to fit our loading gauge. Some German wagons thus got caught over here. Amusingly, an article in 'Model Railway News', back around 1943/4, reporting on a model train show raising fund for the war effort, illustrated two models, of German and Italian train ferry vans on display - their builder had gone down to the local goods yard where the originals were dumped, and measured them up.
Thank you, very interesting. Antwerp is my hometown and this has indeed been talked about between railway enthusiasts 😊
News rags would prefer to frame something as a mystery rather than ask a qualified expert? Color me shocked. Jago, thanks for providing the history to this so-called mystery.
Jago you did it again. The media had such a cool conspiricy going and you had to ruin it with facts!
As a previously practicing archaeologists the news always accuse us of being baffled. Its a bit exhausting
Jago is having a Hercule Poirot moment!
Having got hopelessly lost in the environs of Antwerpen only just last week, I bet I know where this was uncovered. Traffic around Antwerpen has always been a nightmare and my time spent in almost stationary traffic while trying to get to Rotterdam from the tunnel is endless. For some reason, my mates always said; "Avoid the Kennedy Tunnel" without explaining why. The one time I did use it - in the opposite direction - it was no worse than any other way, but I seem to remember paying a fairly stiff toll? Last week; no toll at all.
Anyway, the Belgian authorities have decided to cure the problem once and for all and have dug up most of Belgium to build what amounts to Gravely Hills Interchange writ hhhhuuuuge! Both the satnavs we were using were woefully out of date, the Tom-tom by about 15 years and the installed Land Rover one by ten and they gave up and pointed us into a suburb of Antwerpen. Very pretty, but useless for getting to the bit of Germany we wanted. So, I reckon it was around there that old container was found?
Great video!
Neither a mystery, nor a railway, nor a wagon.
Loading goods into containers that can then be moved by road, rail or ship to facilitate international trade? It's certainly a good idea. I wonder why it didn't catch on? 😁
Clearing a house in Hackney many years ago I spotted its shed roof was a bit of LNER wagon canvas cover... so that was salvaged as well. Basically, a lot of railway stuff was reused for other purposes. I wonder if the discovery in the news also became a shed.
I'm not saying it was aliens, but it wasn't aliens.
Thanks for this video jago, its funny that they decided to dig in that location but i guess that happens all the time
Jago, to add some foundation to future research you will now be itching to on this topic, after reading this information. The container may be an LNER BK type from between 1935 and 1940. See Peter Tatlow's 'A Pictorial Record of LNER Wagons, p72 & 73.
Finally someone actually putting out there that this isnt particularly mysterious!
Look up "PODS" in North America. Same thing except I don't believe they ever move by rail, only truck. We had two of them for our recent ~2500-km cross-border move ... Neither of the PODS pods ended up in Belgium, I'm pleased to say.
Full marks, Mr. Sensible-head!
My partner asked if it would have returned to the UK with a load of Suchard chocolate.
Interesting to ponder how the railways of yore shipped freight internationally. As one who is from a certain country with a 5’ 3” track gauge I agree about the poor standard of journalism in these articles. On the topic of international cooperation if I may digress I am reminded of how a BREL mark 2 b or 2c carriage visited Vienna, Austria for some scientific research. This sort of carriage was operated by Northern Ireland Railways 1970 - 2000.
Great video of the train at station.
Thanks for the heads up on this story
A very early approach to today’s standard shipping containers…
Considering that luggage trolleys turn up all over the rail system in this country ( I once saw a trolley belonging to Penrith, at Fenchurch Street!) I another surprised.
I have heard about that sprout in a field in the UK... and after a week or two it changed color to yellow
Sounds like a good swop. They get a clapped out LNER wagon and we get Belgium Beer and Chocolates
I’ve been to Belgium and the railways in Belgium are amazing and the trains are incredible. Have you ever been to The Netherlands Jago.
Was there anything inside ? I guess not. LNER: cue shot of behemoth LNER Sir Nigel Gresham locotive, the size of an ocean liner practically, oozing past the screen. I like it