Page:The Working and Management of an English Railway.djvu/239

 where carts can approach them. Outward goods, collected in the town for forward transit, are brought in by carts, unloaded on the transverse stage, and trucked thence to the various stages alongside which the waggons have been placed for their reception. The narrow centre platform, having a line of rails on each side, and cranes suitably arranged, is appropriated to transfer traffic which can thus be easily removed from one waggon and placed in another.

A warehouse of this description and dimensions will accommodate upwards of forty waggons at one time, and in this particular warehouse about eighty are loaded daily, and ninety are discharged. Warehouses designed upon this plan are in use at Liverpool (Edge Hill), Bolton, Blackburn, Leicester, Derby, Chester, and other stations.

Fig. 32 is an illustration of a small wooden goods shed, suitable for a roadside station, where the traffic to be dealt with is purely local, and not of an extensive character. The arrangement, in this case, is so simple and obvious, as to speak for itself and to require no detailed description.

In goods warehouses where a small amount of machinery requires to be actuated, and the business to be conducted is not sufficiently extensive to justify the application of steam or hydraulic power, a gas engine is found to afford very satisfactory results, both as regards economy and convenience, as a means of actuating the cranes. For a machine of this kind no special attendant is required, as one of the ordinary warehouse porters can start and stop the engine when necessary, and clean and oil it in his spare time. The peculiar advantage of the gas engine is that it can be