In BR days, the railway conveyed wheat and barley from numerous station goods yards and private sidings. The loading facilities ranged from fixed overhead hoppers fed from adjacent silos to simple sidings where grain was transferred from road vehicles to wagons by mobile conveyors. The granular nature of the product, whether malted or simply dried, meant that it could easily be poured into covered hopper wagons through top hatches and discharged by gravity through bottom doors.
East Anglia and Lincolnshire were well known for generating grain traffic, but there were facilities elsewhere, such as Wallingford maltings in Oxfordshire and Knapton maltings in North Yorkshire. The destinations for grain included flour mills, breweries and distilleries, the last-mentioned found largely in North East Scotland. BR also carried grain to and from ports such as Barry, Avonmouth, Tilbury and Lowestoft. For a time, there was even a train ferry flow of grain for animal consumption to Pinhoe
