by Tom Quinn
I remember once the Duchess of Kent turned up with her little boy, who was rushing excitedly about all over the place. ‘Can I go on the engine!’ he kept asking her. She kept telling him no, but he was so insistent that I offered to take him. Bill the driver yanked him up on the footplate, and from then on whenever he was travelling he used to look out for me and then shout: “There’s my man!” On another occasion she had both her son and daughter with her. I was talking to her through the window and I could see the kids behind. I’d obviously started to smile because she said, “What are they up to now!” Well, they were pinching the sugar and putting it in their pockets. Kids are the same all over, aren’t they?’
Loos and Luggage
As there were no WCs, travelling with children could be a trying experience. Families would secure a compartment to themselves and carry a chamber pot, as some mothers still do for young children. At the opening of the Newcastle and Carlisle Railway there were brass bands on the roofs of two of the carriages of the processional train. The practice of carrying luggage on the roofs had not ceased in my childhood (the late 1870s), and the rails to which it was roped or strapped, survived for some years. On our local Maryport & Carlisle Railway, Mr. Carrick, who had been looking into the matter, reports speeds as: express goods 40 miles an hour, passenger expresses 30, ‘locals’ 25, ordinary goods 20, and, on a branch 15.
Heating Carriages
In cold weather iron foot-warmers were supposed to be supplied. They were about two-and-a-half feet long by three-quarters of a foot wide, and four inches deep, and were filled with what had been boiling water. They had handles at both ends, by which they could be lifted into the compartments by the porters. As there were seldom enough of the foot warmers for all the compartments in a train, it was usual to tip the man who looked after them. On a long journey the foot-warmers, when hot were not supposed to be good for one’s boots – for we wore boots then – seldom kept warm long enough. They might indeed become too cold for one’s feet to rest on them, and passengers made efforts at the stations stopped at to get them changed.
J. W. Robertson Scott, The Day Before Yesterday, the autobiography of the founding editor of The Countryman magazine, 1951
EIGHTY YEARS A
RAILWAYMAN
HARRY HORN
SIGNALMAN ON THE GREAT WESTERN RAILWAY
Harry Horn was born at Holsworthy in North Devon in 1904. He started work on the Devon railway in 1919 and almost eighty years later was still working, as a volunteer, on a preserved steam railway. The extraordinary length of his career can be partly attributed to sheer enthusiasm for the railways, and partly to good fortune: this was because, quite apart from living so long, he was also lucky in that the branch line on which he spent the last four decades of his official, paid, career just happened to be a line that local enthusiasts were prepared to save and restock with steam locomotives after it was axed by one of Beeching’s successors.
Harry’s career started when horses were still used in the shunting yards and when the motor car was still relatively rare in the Devon countryside. His first job was at Starcross on the Exeter and Newton Abbot line. He’d decided on a railway career after a woman ticket-collector friend of his father’s – his father was a farmer – suggested that he might have a chance. ‘Seven lads applied for that job,’ he recalled,’ and we were all about the same age, roughly fifteen. Jobs were hard to come by, too, and I think I only got this one because I told them that I could start mid-week, and apparently none of the others could.’
Harry’s first job was as a lamp boy at Starcross. At a time when all platform illumination was by oil, this was a heavy responsibility; it was also virtually full time, as the old one-wick lamps were primitive and had to be trimmed and attended to every day. Harry was particularly proud of the fact that it was a Devon railwayman who thought up an improved wick that dramatically reduced the amount of maintenance involved: ‘He had so many lamps to attend to that he began to think of ways of improving them, and eventually hit on the idea of making a slightly smaller lamp than the traditional sort, and with two wicks, a feeder wick and a main wick. This kind of lamp needed attention only once every few days, so it was a big improvement. I can’t tell you exactly when it was introduced, but it was some time in the 1920s.’
Harry’s duties at this first post included looking after the lamp houses where the oil and paraffin were kept. After a year at Starcross he moved to the station at Exminster, although he was still doing the same job: ‘I was there for a year, and then I moved again, this time to be nearer my father who had moved to Torquay and who had fallen ill. My brother and sister were still at school and so I applied for a transfer on compassionate grounds.’
Harry moved to what was then known as the receiving office, at Torquay; ‘This was where people enquired about parcels, tickets and reservations, and I enjoyed working there so much that I stayed until I was twenty. I think partly I liked the fact that it was so busy and the staff were so kind.’
From these early days until the end of the steam era, the predominant theme in Harry’s eyes was the decline in staffing levels; for instance at Starcross, a small country station, there had been a wealth of full-time station staff: a goods porter, a parcels porter, two junior porters and a pier porter, who helped those passengers getting off the trains and onto the ferry that plied between Starcross station and Exmouth. In the receiving office, too, staff levels had been high, with a head clerk, Harry, and in summer, an additional clerk: ‘It was very busy at Torquay in those days,’ remembered Harry. ‘We had holidaymakers from all over Britain and from overseas, as well as local passengers. I remember, too, the arrival of United States naval boats and how we couldn’t cope with the sailors. And we couldn’t believe how determined they were to travel all over the country; local people didn’t seem to have the same enthusiasm.’
In the 1920s people tended to stay in their jobs; at the receiving office in Torquay the head clerk had been there for decades when Harry arrived: ‘They were great stay-at-homes, it’s true, but there were also some well travelled people. I remember one summer we took on a man who’d worked on the railways in Argentina, of all places; he was a curious fellow who was to reappear later in my career, though in tragic circumstances.’
By the late 1920s Harry had decided to put clerical work behind him and to try his hand at signalling. But he was a reluctant convert: ‘I started as a signalman at Brixham in 1928. So many signalmen seemed to be needed all over the South West – there were lots of vacancies, but I have to admit I didn’t particularly want to do it. I applied in the end solely because it was the only way I could see to get promotion. The truth is, after working in the busy office at Torquay I didn’t fancy the isolation – a signalman’s job is a very lonely one.’
Harry’s first job was part time, but within months the divisional inspector let him know that a vacancy existed for the summer on the mainline: ‘It was at Powderham Castle, a new box, and I was the first in it, though before I could take it up I had to go back to Starcross to learn all about mainline working; however, I’d already been voluntarily to classes at Exeter, so it didn’t take long for the inspector to pass me.’
Working at Powderham proved hectic: there were eight items to be noted down in the signalman’s book for each train, and like all signalmen, Harry had to check each train as it went past for badly closed doors as well as for anything untoward concerning wheels and windows. Very occasionally a serious incident would develop, and Harry experienced one, the memory of which stayed with him all his life:
‘On this particular morning the 8.45 Penzance train had just passed. After it had gone by I cleared back – that means I let the box behind know that the train had gone – and I then tried to put the signals back to danger. However, I discovered that two signals, the distant and the home, wouldn’t budge. I knew that the signalman in the next box and in the one behind were thinking I was only a lad, and that that was why I couldn’t put the signals to danger, and
they kept telling me just to try again. Well, I tried, but nothing happened, and I knew something was wrong. Then the telephone rang and the platform inspector at Exeter St David’s told me that the driver of the 8.45 Penzance train had just reported that he’d hit a man on the line near my box. After a huge fuss a van arrived and confirmed that a man had indeed been found dead on the line – and he was lying on the wires that I’d been trying to move. The curious thing is, that the man concerned – it was thought he had committed suicide – turned out to be the chap who’d worked that summer in the receiving office in Torquay, the one who’d once worked on the Argentinian railway.’
In 1929, after leaving Powderham, Harry moved to look after four lines at a place called Coagload Junction where the Westbury and Bristol lines converge before Taunton. A series of temporary posts followed, with occasional dramas to disturb an otherwise steady routine; such as the occasion a wagon taking hay across the line lost its wheel and was only just cleared in time to allow the next train to pass: ‘That was a very close shave,’ remembered Harry. ‘I had to send six bells, the danger signal, when one of the wheels fell off the cart halfway across the line; luckily by that time farmers were starting to use tractors for some work, and this farmer had one, and managed to pull the old wagon off the line with it.’
Harry started his first full-time, permanent job at Charlton Mackrell on the main line in 1934, and stayed for twelve years: ‘I became involved with the local church there,’ he recalled, ‘and met my wife who was related to another signalman. We were married in 1935, and lived at a place called Kenton Mandeville near Castle Cary. Then in 1946 I worked at Bishops Lydeard on the Bishops Lydeard to Minehead line. I was in lodgings for two years while I did this job, and then the station house at Stogumber became vacant. I suppose in some ways we got off quite lightly in this bit of Somerset during the war, but I remember the troop trains from Castle Cary coming along. The tracks used to be littered with the soldiers’ clothes – they were so filthy and torn they just threw them out of the carriage windows.’
High in the Quantocks, Stogumber is one of the prettiest stations in England, and it is the station at which Harry continued to work in retirement. With his wife Iris, he moved into the house in 1948: ‘There was no mains water or electricity then,’ he remembered, ‘and it stayed like that for twelve years! We had a deep well, and I can still remember that to fill the tank in the house we had to turn the handle of the well some six hundred times!’ Electricity and mains water finally came to this remote part of Somerset in the 1960s when the future of small rural railways was already under a cloud. But business was still fairly good, and at Stogumber, as at many stations, there was even a camping coach: a railway carriage parked up in a siding and fitted out with beds and a kitchen for rent to holidaymakers. These coaches were very popular, and certainly the one at Stogumber was generally fully booked throughout the summer.
‘At the time I was working at Bishops Lydeard, eight miles away, even though I lived in the station house at Stogumber; but I used to do this trip pretty quickly on my motorbike. Then I transferred to Williton, which was on the same line and in the same grade because it was only four miles away. I stayed there till 1969 when steam trains finally disappeared. We’d mostly used 45 and 55 type engines there, and they did everything, shunting, goods and passenger work. We had two goods trains a day carrying mostly animal feeds and suchlike, but there was also the boat special to and from Watchet. We were busy, too, with passengers, because the children went to school in Minehead and Taunton, and then there were excursion trains.’
The Minehead to Taunton line survived the Beeching cuts: ‘It was the only branch line he left in the West Country,’ remembered Harry. It was probably saved because of the popularity of Butlins holiday camp at Minehead, which clearly generated enough traffic to justify keeping the line open for passengers, if not freight; even so, it finally closed in 1971. By this time Harry and his wife had bought their house, so they stayed put and watched the railway where they’d spent their lives slowly become overgrown and derelict. ‘It was a very good thing, however,’ remembered Harry, ‘that for some reason they never demolished the old railway buildings or ripped up the track. But it was so sad for us when we recalled how, years earlier, it had been such a thriving line with a total of ten stations, and at each one porters, lorry drivers and stationmasters.’
Things began to change when the local undertaker bought the line, which subsequently ended up in the hands of the local council. Eventually, local enthusiasts, including Harry and his wife Iris, formed the West Somerset Railway Company (WSRC) and rented the line from the council. The final act in this drama came in the early 1990s, when the council decided to sell up to the WSRC: ‘I became shareholder, but I was never paid,’ recalled Harry. ‘We had paid staff, about twenty in all and about two hundred people volunteers. We got our rolling stock from a South Wales scrap yard, but it was similar to the rolling stock we had when I first came here.
This was all a far cry from Harry’s early days, when a signalman still tapped out his messages to other signalmen up and down the line using the old telegraph machine. Of course some inventions were never bettered, and Harry was particularly proud that the automatic train control system (ATC) was invented in the Great Western region:
‘That was a marvellous innovation and it was quickly adopted everywhere on the railways. And it was such a simple idea: they installed small ramps between the rails so many yards from each distant signal; the ramps were attached to a battery, and when the distant signal up ahead was at caution, the ramp was electrified. If the train ignored the signal for whatever reason and ran over the ramp, a charge was sent up into the engine and this automatically applied the brakes. So if something terrible had happened to the driver the train would still stop before the next signal. Once ATCs appeared in the Western Region, every region wanted them – that’s how good they were.’
Granite Plateway
To my mind, the greatest curiosity of all railway works is the granite plate-way which was built from the Haytor stone quarries on Dartmoor to Newton Abbot. This was strictly speaking a plate-way and not a railway although it was built as late as 1821 (which was after the invention of the latter). The difference is that in the plate-way (which was devised about the middle of the eighteenth century) you don’t employ flanged wheels. If it is made of iron, an L-shaped section was used. The trucks had flat tyres like road vehicles. The units of the runway were called plates and not rails, a name which we still preserve in ‘plate-layer’.
Edmund Vale, Curiosities Town and countryside, 1940
The Last Oil-lamps
Oil-lit semaphore signals lasted until the beginning of 1998 at two railway stations in Somerset. Since the stations opened in 1857 at Yeovil Pen Mill and Yeovil Junction, a railwayman topped up the twenty-four lamps with paraffin and trimmed their wicks every week. The lamps outlasted the steam era and British Railways simply because, like much of the technology from that time, they were well designed and did their job efficiently.
Julia Kehoe The Railway, unpublished thesis
WORKING THE
SADDLEBACKS
SANDY BEGG
DRIVER ON THE LONDON & NORTH EASTERN RAILWAY
When Sandy Begg left school at the age of thirteen, farming was the obvious job for a young man born and brought up at Kintore near Inverurie in rural Aberdeenshire. After all, Sandy’s father was a farmer and in the 1930s farms were desperately short of labour, particularly as motor tractors had hardly touched this corner of Scotland; Sandy’s earliest memories were of working with horses. However, his farm career lasted just two and a half years, and it ended because he knew that if he was still on the farm when he reached his sixteenth birthday he would not be able to leave at all: the war was raging, and emergency regulations had turned farm work into a reserved occupation. So he left, and put his name down for a job at the railway station at nearby Kittybrewster. Here, the Great North of Scotland railway had its rather unus
ual depot – unusual because it was circular to accommodate the turntable that had been built in the middle of the engine sheds.
Sandy remembered that when he started work at Kittybrewster it was traditional for the youngest workers to be given a job known in Scotland as a wakener: ‘We had to be up first in the morning to go round and wake up all the other railway workers. My patch as a wakener was the north part of Aberdeen, and all the men we were sent to wake had to be up before 6am so of course we’d start a good bit earlier than that. It was all on foot, too, so we covered a few miles – a bicycle would have been a luxury!
‘We knocked on windows rather than on the door. When we knocked and woke these fellows they’d always stick their heads out and ask about the weather. You might wake seven or eight men in a morning, and the biggest difficulty was planning your walk round because they all had to get up at different times and you couldn’t get round quickly because, of course, you were on foot. I worked at this for a couple of months, and was then put on cleaning duty – and even in cleaning, seniority was everything. This meant that the last in got the worst jobs and the worst shifts; but at least I suppose you knew where you were, and you knew your turn would come if you were patient enough.
‘The youngest cleaners did inside the gearing, and after a session doing that you were dirtier than the dirtiest train! The senior cleaner did the least dirty jobs. All I can remember about my earliest cleaning days is the sensation of oil trickling down the back of my neck!’
