Life on the Old Railways

by Tom Quinn

  After that grubby introduction he moved around through the various departments and workshops: machine shop, boiler shop, erecting shop, foundry. This was where the practical work was done, the work that kept the railway functioning. His next move was to what was then known as the progress office: ‘This is where the work was all planned, and it’s from here that the instructions and orders for work emanated. What struck me most about it was how meticulous and thorough everything seemed to be.’

  After a few months he saw a sign on a noticeboard inviting people to apply for what was called a ‘privileged apprenticeship’. Having only recently left grammar school he thought he might have a chance. He applied and was accepted. ‘Well, it was ridiculous really, because all the privilege part of it meant was that you spent two and a half days each week at technical college and got absolutely no pay for it!’

  During the 1920s and 1930s there was no set pattern of progress toward the goal of fully qualified fitter or engineer; it all depended on vacancies and seniority. It was only much later that a proper training course was instituted. But Bill enjoyed his new role: ‘Our chief engineer was Sir Henry Fowler, and I remember he got all us privileged apprentices together one day and said he’d agreed a big concession for us: instead of disappearing for two and a half days each week – unpaid, if you recall! – we would now be sent off to technical college one day a week. And the really good news was that we still wouldn’t be paid for it!’

  In Derby the atmosphere of the trains was everywhere – ‘they absolutely dominated the town,’ remembered Bill – and once you’d started work in the industry it would have been highly unusual to have opted out and tried something else: ‘Well, a lot of it had to do with the Depression in the 1930s. You were so lucky to have a job of any sort that you counted your lucky stars and never even thought about changing. Apart from anything else, in Derby there wasn’t much else to do anyway. When I started, the other problem was that the country was still on the road to recovery from the Great War, and when you did get a job there was no career structure or career planning involved as there is today; no one thought about such things.

  ‘My father first spoke to a local builder about getting me a job. At that time most boys left school at fourteen, but I’d won a scholarship to the local grammar school so I got another two years. The builder I might have gone to work for had a relative who worked on the railway, and he suggested I apply for the apprenticeship. I remember being asked at the interview what I eventually wanted. I said I wanted to be a draughtsman, but the man interviewing me put “fitter” on the paper. I don’t think he liked the idea of my getting a bit above myself!’

  Bill was apprenticed for five years, and he knew that to improve his chances of future promotion he would need to get a technical qualification: ‘You had to pass at a number of things,’ he recalled. ‘For example, technical drawing was a major part of the apprenticeship – I remember it took up about half our time, as well as three evenings a week. At the end of the five years I got what I suppose would be the equivalent of a BSc today. It was a pretty thorough course: we dealt with the mechanics of fluids, higher maths, the structure of metals – the whole lot. I got my college diploma and then joined the Institute of Mechanical Engineers, and, ultimately, I qualified as a fellow of the institute; that was a proud moment.’

  Bill’s engineering skills, although certainly comparable to those needed for general construction, were actually directed at fulfilling the needs of the industry that dominated the town in which he’d been brought up. It’s difficult to imagine, now that so much heavy industry has closed down, that Derby was almost entirely taken up with the railway in the early part of the twentieth century, and that by the 1930s some six thousand people worked in the carriage works, and another six thousand in the railways proper. But despite the demand for qualified people, jobs were still scarce.

  ‘A lot of apprentices were simply discharged at the end of their five years,’ remembered Bill. ‘You had no guarantee of a job at the end. Some of those who weren’t required went to Rolls Royce who were just starting up in Derby. I remember we all used to go into town on the trains which ran in from all directions. We lived in a village called Challaston a few miles outside Derby, and I saw the tram lines laid to my village and I lived to see them all dug up again. Challaston was on a branch line which closed in 1929, so for my first two years I went by train, thereafter on the tram. I was pleased about the tram coming really, because the train station was quite a way from my home – a lot of village stations tended to be quite a distance from the centre of the village. There were buses, too, and I think it was the buses that really killed the local railway.

  ‘I was one of the lucky ones, and when I’d finished my training I was asked if I wanted to go in what was called the Motive Power Department. I was accepted and went to London immediately for eighteen months.’

  In London, Bill continued his training. He was based in Camden, to the north of the City, and the next year and a half was spent doing three-month stints in different departments: three months with the fitters, whose job it was to examine and repair the locomotives; three months with the shed staff cleaning boilers; three months with the running foreman, the man who told the drivers where they were going; and, finally, three months on the footplate on shunters, local passenger trains and passenger expresses out of Euston.

  ‘I remember there was no difference in status between drivers of expresses and drivers of local trains,’ he recalled. ‘If an express driver pulled up alongside a shunting engine at Euston and the driver shouted over to the shunting engine driver, “What price your little loco!” the little loco driver would always shout back, “Same as yours – ninety bob a week!” I enjoyed those eighteen months enormously; I met some wonderful old Cockney characters and had some marvellous experiences on the footplate. The pay was rotten, of course – in fact it was barely enough to pay for my digs in Chalk Farm. If I remember rightly my digs were about thirty bob a week and my pay sixty-five bob.

  ‘Footplate work was undoubtedly the most interesting aspect of the work, but it was uncomfortable. I don’t think people realise this, and they certainly don’t if they never travelled on it themselves; you were more or less open to the elements, it was noisy and dirty, and it could also be very bumpy. But I remember how impressed I was when I saw the way a loco picked up water in a scoop while moving – although it didn’t always go as smoothly as it did the first time I saw it. One day for example I was on the footplate heading towards London when the locomotive failed and we had to change it at Derby. We got going again on a London North Western Prince of Wales, only to find that we were soon short of steam. We put the water scoop down and then found we couldn’t get it up again, with the result that we got half a ton of water over us – the whole footplate was absolutely soaked!

  ‘On another occasion we were going to what was then known as London Road Manchester (it’s now Manchester Piccadilly) on a Royal Scott-type loco called Girl Guide – I remember it was No 6169 – and we’d just stopped at the buffers at London Road Manchester. We were watching the passengers leave the station when a little old lady noticed the name of the loco and smiled up at us. “How nice,” she said, “I used to be a girl guide.” I remember the old driver mumbled after she’d left, “God help any girl guide who’s as rough as this old girl!” What he meant was that the Royal Scott was a good engine but it was bloody uncomfortable to ride in. A lot of London Midland engines were very rough riding. Great Western engines were definitely better; they had a few shortcomings but no Great Western man would ever admit it or tell you what they were!’

  After his eighteen months in London, Bill set off back to Derby to the old headquarters of the LMS for a period in what was called the shopping bureau. This was where the engines were repaired and where essential maintenance work was carried out, including major overhauls. The thing that struck Bill most was the skill of the men in the workshops:

  ‘I spent a few months here, and then
went back to Euston doing the same work, more or less. Seeing how those men kept the engines going was a lesson; they knew them inside out and would make light work of what, to a newcomer, looked impossibly difficult.’

  Next stop for Bill was Rugby: ‘They moved everyone a lot in those days, from the highest to the lowest. It would have been about 1935 when I got back to my home town, and there I came across a man in the works who was doing what was called a work study. Basically he was a sort of time-and-motion man, looking at how we did things, and assessing whether they could be done more efficiently. I was made part of the study and I had to time the fitters at their various tasks – and that didn’t go down well, I can tell you! I did nine months of that. It was interesting, though nothing compared to being on the footplate.’

  Eventually Bill was put in charge of a depot at Widnes, Lancashire, as a running shed foreman, a job that was later re-christened shedmaster. Nine months later he did the same job at Llandudno Junction, where he was made assistant supervisor:

  ‘I remember one Christmas Eve I’d got permission to go home on the two o’clock train once the afternoon foreman had relieved me. He turned up at two o’clock prompt and I went off to catch my train – only to discover that there was no locomotive to be found. This was particularly funny as I was supposed to be in charge of making sure that all the engines were where they should be at the appropriate time. I rang the controller, and more by luck than judgement, managed to get a freight train that was at Rhyll. We brought it down, turned it round and I was at home for Christmas – but only just!

  ‘Just before I left Llandudno Junction a chap rang from Crewe to tell me I’d been given a post elsewhere. For some reason, which escapes me now, he couldn’t tell me exactly where, but he explained that I would receive the details in a letter. The letter duly arrived and off I went to Mirfield in Yorkshire. I was to be shift foreman: my first proper staff appointment. All the others had been in the way of gaining experience and training. There were three shifts here, from midnight to 8am, 8am to 4pm, and 4pm to midnight, but luckily the running shed foreman did the midnight to 8am shift. I worked six days a week, but not Sundays.’

  Bill found that he’d been thrown in at the deep end: he spent every minute rushing around making sure all the locomotives were being properly serviced, and making sure the right drivers and firemen turned up at the right time, and all this had to be done to time. Mirfield had local passenger work to Leeds, Huddersfield and Holmfirth, and of course there were specials and excursion trains to organise:

  ‘I was there in 1937, the coronation year of George VI. The coronation was on the Thursday before Whit Sunday and it was a national holiday so we ran specials to Blackpool. On Whit Sunday morning I got a call to say we’d been asked to supply fifty specials for Blackpool on the Monday. “How many can you do?” I was asked. I finished by being able to offer about thirteen, but we had to use six double-home drivers – that is, drivers who lodged away from home. Also, from Mirfield there are twenty-seven variations of the route to Blackpool, if you can believe it, so I had to make sure that each driver knew the particular route he was going to take. It was a bit of a nightmare, but we got there in the end!’

  This was the sort of pressure on which Bill thrived, but in addition to problems caused by timetabling and organisation, there was the sheer graft of engineering work that had to go on twenty-four hours a day if the trains were to be able to do their job:

  ‘From an engineering point of view a steam engine presents interesting problems,’ says Bill. ‘From cold, it takes eight hours to get an engine ready to go. The reason is that you’ve got two to three thousand gallons of water to be heated before anything can happen, and that water has to reach boiling point under pressure before you can move anything. We had men called steam raisers to get the locomotives going from cold. The steam raiser was told what time the engine was needed, and it was then left to him to start work at a time that would ensure the train would go out on time. He’d start the fire by putting a bit of wood and a few rags in – it really was as simple a starting point as that, just like starting a coal fire at home. With a steam engine, of course, he’d keep adding coal until he had a hell of a blaze going and the water had reached the required temperature.

  ‘Once the water was boiling you could put on the blower to improve the draught; that made more heat, but burnt more coal. One trick on the midnight shift when you were firing engines for 6am was to put your hand on the ash pan – if that was warm you knew all would be well for the morning. At Mirfield we had sixty locomotives and one steam raiser per shift, but a good man could do a lot on his own.’

  On the London Midland, steam raisers were not employed, and the firemen were expected to fire the engines themselves. This was also known as fire-dropping. It was a very dirty job, and it is one of the reasons why Bill, like so many steam railwaymen, considered that the men welcomed diesel when it came in. Whatever the pleasures of driving steam trains there is no doubt that one or two jobs, like fire-dropping and boiler washing, really didn’t have anything to recommend them; indeed by the 1950s it had become increasingly difficult to get people to do this sort of work at all. In the 1930s when jobs were in short supply it didn’t matter how dirty the job was – you could always get someone to do it.

  ‘Boiler washing was a filthy job,’ remembered Bill, ‘but loco boilers were still always cleaned once a week or once a fortnight. On the Western Region we didn’t go in for water softening which some areas had. Where you used soft water it meant a loco boiler only had to be washed perhaps once a month. This was a big saving because it can take twelve hours to wash a boiler properly.’

  After Mirfield, Bill was given a shed at Oldham in Lancashire: ‘More moving round the country,’ he remembered. ‘It never seemed to stop, and they’d almost expect you to go anywhere. At Oldham I looked after twenty-three locomotives. It’s difficult to say exactly how many loco sheds there were nationally at this time, but there would have been eighty or ninety districts, each with five or six sheds, so that gives you some idea. Most towns had their own locomotive depot.’

  From Oldham, Bill went to Manchester as a locomotive inspector; he was there from 1938 until 1944. During the war the railways really came into their own because there was no petrol for private cars: ‘Everyone relied on us, which is why, like many railwaymen, I couldn’t be released for war service because ours was a reserved occupation. Mind you, judging by the way railways were targeted by the Germans I don’t think we got off that lightly; the Manchester office got blitzed and an awful lot of depots were damaged in the war. Many were never rebuilt.

  ‘When we knew war was inevitable I was given the job of supplying every depot with what we called anti-glare sheets. These were blackout sheets, made out of canvas that had been treated with waterproofing; each one had to have fittings for the various classes of engine, and I had to make sure it all went smoothly. On the railways, as pretty much in every walk of life, the war created a great feeling of camaraderie.’

  Towards the end of the war Bill went as an assistant district locomotive superintendent to Gloucester; the job involved freight traffic to the ports, and he was there from 1944 to 1949 looking after seventy engines as well as several sub-depots. ‘I was at Gloucester in 1948 when nationalisation came and I can honestly say it made absolutely no difference to me; but on the dot of midnight on the day it happened, all the trains in the area blew their whistles. I remember my phone ringing at around this time, about a train that had been derailed on the Great Western. We were the London and Midland, but we had a crane that would be suitable for this particular derailment. When the person on the other end of the line asked for the crane he said he wanted it for the British Railways Board, and this sounded so strange because it was the first time I’d heard the name.’

  Bill reckoned nationalisation was a good thing in many ways; for instance, it helped speed up the exchange of information and ideas between different areas. Financially, however, it made little in
itial difference. ‘When nationalisation took effect the railways were very run down, largely because of the war and the lack of funds that resulted from it. Before that the government had always taken the profits the railways had made, but they never put anything back; to some extent that situation continued when nationalisation came, too, and the move from steam to diesel was all done on a shoestring. Some railways even toyed with the idea of running buses – they had quite a fleet for taking stuff from various depots. To my mind, rail never went sufficiently in search of business because for so long, and particularly during the war, they’d had a virtual monopoly on transport.’

  Nationalisation also meant that, at last, standard locomotives began to be built, and they were still being built as diesel trains began to come in.

  After various jobs in different parts of the country Bill ended up back in London; and then, in 1963, a decision was taken to cease classifying footplate staff as engineers. Instead they were placed under the control of operations, a recognition, it seems, of the difference between being a steam-train driver and a diesel or electric driver.

  ‘People were excited about the new diesel engines because of the novelty, but they created as many problems as they solved. Apart from anything else, there were so many different kinds of diesel engine, and there was no attempt to be consistent when it came to buying them. The last of our steam engines – I’d inherited some five hundred at Old Oak Common in West London in 1959 – ran from Oxford to Birmingham. In many respects I was sad at the end.’

  The most memorable event in Bill’s forty-five years’ service came on the day that Winston Churchill was buried in 1965. ‘That was an extraordinary day in every respect: so much meticulous planning went into it, but we only narrowly avoided a very embarrassing incident. I had the responsibility of making sure the funeral train stopped at precisely the right spot so that the bearer party could get the coffin out and down the ramp. The train stopped just right as it turned out, but when the guardsmen in the train tried to open the doors from the inside, their combined weight – they were all standing on the side of the train by the doors – tipped the coach over so far that the door wouldn’t open. Nothing happened for a few seconds, then the Duke of Norfolk marched up and asked what was going on. I’d hidden six platelayers nearby in case there was trouble, so they rushed up and moved the wooden ramp which had been jamming the doors. Once the doors were open, the ramp went back and the ceremony could continue. With the television cameras there and people watching all over the world, it was a tense moment!