Life on the Old Railways

by Tom Quinn

  ‘Another incident I remember well involved the royal train. It used to come through regularly, but on this particular occasion Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip were on a three-day visit to the Worcester area. They were sleeping on the train and we had to stable it on a branch line just the other side of Worcester itself; it was about midnight, and we were at the branch line waiting for the train to arrive. It came into view, and then at that very minute we heard three shots. Immediately all hell broke loose – the train stopped and everyone seemed to panic. The three shots were to signify danger: we knew they weren’t gunshots, they were detonators, but that might mean another train was on a collision course.

  ‘Anyway we discovered that a platelayer had put the shots down because a horse had jumped on the line. So we got a tow-rope and set off after the horse which, luckily, we found quite quickly. But heaven knows what the royal party must have thought when they heard those bangs!

  ‘Each region had its own royal train in those days. The other royal train I remember particularly was the King George VI which carried the body of the king from Paddington in 1952. I remember the men lining up along the trackside and all along the platform with their caps off. Mind you, that train wasn’t the King George VI at all – the real King George VI was being repaired at the time, so we took the name-plate off it and put it on another train. I don’t think that’s ever been revealed before. We nearly had a problem, too, because that engine had to be kept ready to go for a long time, with plenty of steam and so on – but it was also important that it didn’t make too much noise; and as the delay lengthened, we thought we might have to let her get rid of some steam, and that would have made a terrible racket. Anyway, we got the band to play again (and loudly!) and we put more water in, and that just about did the trick until we were ready to go.’

  Bill had nothing but praise for the men he worked with over the years – ‘the drivers were a great bunch, to a man,’ he recalled – and whether a problem arose with a royal train or a humble freight wagon, someone could always be found to sort the situation out. But the railway organisation was subject to human error: ‘Most accidents that I can recall – and there were regular freight derailments – were due to human error. The worst I remember happened on Sharnbrook Viaduct near Bedford, when the signalman let a one-hundred-wagon coal train through and it ran into another coal train. The loco and tender and thirty wagons swept over the side of the viaduct, and the driver and fireman were killed; it was a terrible mess. However, when you think that the whole system in the steam days was run using only men and mechanical aids, it is a tribute to their skill that so few accidents actually did occur.’

  Grease for Goods Wagons

  The ingredients consist of palm oil, soap, soda, tallow and small quantities of the finest castor oil. They are turned by the barrowload into a huge boiler. This boiler is jacketed with steam and the inner liner is perforated so that jets of live steam can be admitted all round. More water is added to bring the mixture to the required consistency – thicker or thinner according to the weather and the time of year – and then the whole is made to boil freely after which it is drawn off into shallow vats and left for a day or two to cool and harden. Finally it is dug out and placed in casks. For the use of its forty-five thousand wagons the Caledonian railway manufactures some six to seven hundred tons of grease per annum.

  W. M. Acworth, Scottish Railways, 1890

  Early Engines

  Early railway engines differed in appearance from modern locomotives in that their bodies were lower and their smoke stacks were narrow, and as tall as would go through the tunnels. The driving wheels were also as high as possible, quite eight feet. The railway engine of the period may be seen in Turner’s painting ‘Rain, Steam and Speed’ or in Frith’s ‘Railway Station’.

  J. W. Robertson Scott, The Day Before Yesterday, the autobiography of the founding editor of The Countryman magazine, 1951

  FROM FIREMAN

  TO FOREMAN

  RAY BEESON

  DRIVER ON THE SOUTHERN RAILWAY

  Ray Beeson, who was born in 1935, started his working life as an engine cleaner at Guildford station in Surrey in 1950. ‘It was just a job,’ he remembered, ‘and there was certainly no family interest in the railways; but once you’d joined you knew you were part of something a bit special.’

  Ray’s father was a policeman who didn’t want his son to follow him into the force: ‘I suppose that, apart from being steered away from the police, it was just luck or fate that took me to trains,’ he recalled. He grew up at Chilworth, in Surrey, and trains ran past the end of the family garden so the sound of the railway may well have worked its way into his subconscious. He always found this idea vaguely amusing, but could never quite bring himself to reject it outright.

  ‘I left school in 1950 and the railway seemed a good, secure job. I started as a cleaner because that was the first rung of the ladder, but it was an important job. In those days trains had to be spotless before they went out and, nationally, I should think thousands of us were employed in this way since cleaning was a job done almost all by hand; we did it all with paraffin and oily cloths, and no part of an engine was left untouched. When you first started you had to clean up under what we called the motions – the wheels, pistons and so on – and it was absolutely filthy work; but if the driver came along and saw that some part of the engine wasn’t clean he’d make you go back and do it again. No driver wanted to take out a dirty engine. You had to do the outside as well, of course. The length of time it took to clean each engine would obviously depend on the sort you were dealing with – the biggest at Guildford in those days was the U-class, and the smallest was the M7 tank engine. We had C3s, too – we called them Charlies, and they went from one to forty. Qs were really just wartime engines, and weren’t meant to be used once we’d stopped fighting the Germans; but they were actually kept in regular service for another twenty years after the war ended. They were very powerful because they’d been made to pull tank trains. On average we reckoned to clean two locos in an eight-hour shift; that would be a team of half a dozen of us, so you can see, it was a thorough business.’

  For a man who joined the railways with no real enthusiasm for trains, Ray developed something of a passion for them. He was also remarkable for his detailed memory. He liked to recall, for example, the resident tube cleaner at Guildford who jealously guarded his own special iron rod with a brush on the end. “It was as if it was his best friend!” he remembered. Though it is now long gone, the Guildford shed once housed around thirty locomotives, used both for freight and passenger work. Ray quickly realised that here in the shed, as elsewhere, seniority was the only route to promotion, although he was quite happy to bide his time.

  ‘It took me ten years to progress to being a fireman, but that was pretty standard in those days. You started by getting just a few turns as a fireman, and then when you’d done enough turns, they made you a passed cleaner, which in my case meant I was working roughly 50 per cent of the time as a fireman and 50 per cent as a cleaner.

  ‘The fire was always lit by the time the firemen arrived, but it wasn’t the sort of fire that you could use to get the train going; it was really just a little bundle of flame right inside the door that just kept the thing warm and gave you a start. I always used to begin by opening the door and simply spreading around what little fire there was; that was the first step on the way to building up your steam. It used to take about an hour to get up sufficient steam to move the engine, but during this time there were lots of other things to do: it was a routine of checks and procedures. You’d get oil for the driver, and you’d check the smokebox, making sure it was nice and tight – if it was loose you’d hear a sort of suction noise and it would be difficult to make steam. You’d watch the pressure gauge until it reached somewhere between 120lb and 2201b per square inch, though on engines for the big Channel packets you might have to get up 2401b or more. If I remember right, it was 1801b on the U-class and about 2201b o
n the Q-class. Q-class engines were used for goods work where, typically, you might be working with sixty-five wagons behind you. Keeping an eye on your steam was vital because you were on a booked time – if your steam wasn’t sufficient to get you going at the right time, then all the other trains behind you could be disrupted.

  ‘Firemen signed on at the same time as their drivers, and we always did eight-hour shifts, with a start at 2am, or 4am, or the early shift which was one minute past midnight.’

  Passed cleaners were frequently expected to change back and forth from cleaning to firing from day to day, but once they’d reached a stage where they were no longer doing any cleaning – in other words, by the time they were fully-fledged firemen – they were treated with more consistency, particularly when it came to shift working, as Ray explained: ‘A fireman could expect to start at the same time each day for at least a week, unless he had to cover a rest day or something.’

  Ray thought there many misconceptions about the role of the fireman, particularly the idea that the job meant hours of unrelenting shovelling on the footplate. He recalled that there was nearly always time to stop and think when you were firing: ‘If you knew what you were doing, I suppose you could describe the job as keeping the fire topped up, once you were underway, and how frequently you had to top up would depend on the weight of the load and the quality of the coal. There were times, though they weren’t too frequent, when you were pretty nearly shovelling for all you were worth – the Waterloo to Basingstoke, Bournemouth and Salisbury run with ten coaches is a good example; on that run you were pushed to get the odd minute between bouts of firing.’

  The fireman at Guildford, as elsewhere, had a wide range of duties, but they were all concentrated on enabling the driver to do his work; it was very much a team effort, as Ray remembered: ‘I don’t know what people did in other areas, but teamwork was definitely the key word on my patch. When it was foggy, for example, and you couldn’t see the semaphore signals, you’d both of you, driver and fireman, be desperately keeping a lookout. It was all right on the mainline, or at least it was better, because they had coloured lights, but on the less important lines – say, Woking to Basingstoke – it was all semaphore which was a nightmare when visibility was poor.’

  For Ray, one of the great pleasures of the footplate was simply the sense of speed, the warmth on hot days, and the exhilaration of firing on crisp, frosty mornings: ‘On a bright winter morning it was wonderful when you had time to look about a bit as you steamed along – though of course that was only true when you were going engine first; if you were the other way round – that is, tender first – you’d be so cold that I can assure you there was no pleasure in it at all!’

  In summer the footplate could be unbearably hot until the train had picked up sufficient speed to pull a breeze through; but winter or summer, Ray was always astonished, particularly in his early firing days, by how well the drivers knew every inch of the road: ‘They always knew exactly where to start braking on every gradient.’

  The process of bringing the train to a halt was also a big part of the fireman’s job; with loose-coupled freight wagons, which had no brakes of their own, Ray would start braking using the turned handbrake on the tender. ‘That would bring the wagons together, so you’d have captured the whole weight of the train ready for the driver to put the engine brake on.’

  Ray remembered one or two notorious parts of his patch: ‘One or two areas were terrible – Virginia Water Bank between Reading and Feltham was really extremely difficult, and there was a very steep section between Reading and Redhill known as Dorking Bank. It was places like those two that made it absolutely essential you knew the road and your engine; if you didn’t, you would almost certainly get stuck on that Reading to Redhill section, with all the timetable consequences that that would entail for your passengers and all the passengers in the trains behind you.

  ‘There were different skills, too, with passenger as opposed to freight working: with freight you had to start braking a lot earlier because of all those loose-coupled wagons with no brakes, whereas passenger trains all had continuous brakes on all carriages. The guard at the back of the train would know all the gradients, too, and his brake van would come into operation.’

  The area Ray covered was Guildford to Salisbury via Waterloo, but it included Southampton, Redhill and Bournemouth; it was the heart of the Southern Region. After a number of years firing – he could never recall quite how many – Ray became a passed fireman, to all intents and purposes a driver. A few years later he took over as relief foreman at Guildford locomotive shed. ‘That meant that one day I would be working as foreman and the next I’d be back driving.’ As it turned out, Ray was the last foreman at Guildford loco shed before it closed for good.

  ‘People at Guildford didn’t like change, and it was particularly unsettling when Guildford closed as a depot and we all went to Woking. Southern Region was unusual in that we’d had some electric trains since as early as the 1930s; they were clean and efficient, but they didn’t have the character of steam. I drove some of these early electric trains – you just had to push a button and that was it. With steam it was more unpredictable even though we knew what we were doing; it relied more on intuition and judgement, and of course things did go wrong occasionally, however good you were. Sometimes you just ran out of steam, and you’d then have to stop, build up your steam again and then off you’d go.’

  Ray was always keen to explain how the safety systems worked in the steam era: ‘If your steam pressure got too low the brakes came on automatically, and if your water got too low a lead plug would be melted by the heat of the fire and whatever water was left would crash down on your fire, put it out and the whole thing would shut down, thus avoiding an explosion. This was very rare though – it never happened to me, and I was never involved in a crash, either.’

  During his time as a driver Ray worked passenger and freight trains, and he never forgot the working practices of the past. ‘Well, it all became so much a part of your life that you knew it without thinking about it. We were in rostered links, twelve pairs of men in each link, and each week your link would do a different shift and work on a different line. The top link did all the best shifts, and you only got into the top link through seniority; so the longer you were around, the better your chance of moving up – but it was very much a question of dead men’s shoes because you only moved up when someone else died or retired. But at least it was the same for everyone, so there were few complaints. The only alternative was to try to get promotion by going to another depot. People didn’t get made redundant in those days and some people were happy to stay where they were; others wanted to move and get on, and you certainly got the chances if you did that.

  ‘Some men were desperate to work the electric trains, but not me! I was more than happy with steam. Kids were always coming up to the cab and asking for a ride, and we used to let them come with us – and unless you’ve travelled on the footplate as a child it’s impossible to imagine the excitement of it. It was all more relaxed in those days – you wouldn’t dream of giving a kid a ride in the cab today. You’d be sacked. We had some lovely runs, too – I always enjoyed Redhill to Reading because it was such beautiful country.’

  The latter part of Ray’s career included stints as a relief train crew supervisor, and station supervisor at Woking where he was responsible for platform safety and for looking after the platform staff. He then became a train crew supervisor looking after crews, finding engines for them, organising special trains, and finding cover if a driver went sick. ‘I enjoyed that because I was back working with the blokes who actually drove the trains. My last job was as relief stationmaster: I covered Woking, Surbiton, Basingstoke, Guildford and Haslemere whenever the regular stationmaster was ill or on holiday.’

  Ray spent the last few years of his career helping with the rebuilding of Guildford Station, a job which he knew would make him surplus to requirements once it was completed. ‘I’d taken
on the job of assistant stationmaster, but the new station didn’t need an assistant, so I suppose I built myself out of a job! I had a few other jobs before I finally retired; I was what was called a ‘task force manager’, supervising men who cleaned the stations in my area.’

  Like many railwaymen, Ray had vivid memories of the fuss the imminent arrival of the royal train in the area would cause. As Ray recalled: ‘There would be armed police on every bridge under which the train had to pass, and absolutely everything else moved out of the way long before the train got anywhere near us – nothing was booked to move in the area. We also always had a standby engine waiting along the route in case the royal train broke down. Sometimes a spare engine would follow the royal train all the way.

  ‘But my happiest memories are of firing and driving steam engines; they gave you a real sense of achievement, and if you wanted to get home at night it was up to you and your skill. You couldn’t just press a button. Mind you, when I was depot foreman I also enjoyed that. We used to wear a trilby and a blue smock – but that’s now gone the way of steam, too!’