Life on the Old Railways

by Tom Quinn

  Despite the unsocial hours and the grime of these early days, Sandy stuck at it, and like so many railwaymen, he benefited from the shortage of men caused by the war in that promotion became more rapid and seniority began to seem far less important than ever before. Before this, but particularly during the depression of the 1930s, a young worker might easily have found he was cleaning for ten years. However, there was a tradition of self-improvement in Scotland – as there was in England – as Sandy recalled:

  ‘We ran what were called workers’ improvement societies, and these were designed to help railwaymen know their stuff for when the time came for them to take whatever tests were necessary for promotion. Since you didn’t get the chance of promotion that often, it was a good idea to be well prepared for when any opportunity did come along. Engine cleaners like me went to these classes so that they could become firemen, the first step up the ladder. Firemen and drivers did all the lecturing in their own free time and they were never paid, but what they did helped others enormously. Drivers also went along to keep up to date with new developments, and the classes really were excellent.’

  The inspectors in Sandy’s day all wore bowler hats as part of their uniform and he remembered the grilling he received when he went to be examined for firing. He was tested on everything from the use of the injector to protecting a train that had been derailed or stopped for some other unscheduled reason. ‘Protecting your train changed out of all recognition when steam ended. In the old days you had to put detonators on the track for three-quarters of a mile in front and three-quarters of a mile behind.’

  That was the distance it was felt another train would need in order to stop easily before reaching a stalled train. With a modern express the stopping distance is about one and a half miles simply to allow for the greater speed. But as Sandy recalled, walking along the track, perhaps on a dark, wet night, laying detonators was not a job for the fainthearted.

  Detonators might have been crude by modern standards, but in fact Sandy remembered using them on only two occasions. In later days special clips were used instead, and as the train went over them the driver received a warning that there was a problem up ahead. ‘A detonator was just a gunpowder charge; it was small and round and you really only got them a lot where engineers were working, and in fog near signals. If a distant signal was against you there would be one detonator; three detonators meant a danger signal. Each signalman had a sign a specified number of yards from his box, and if he could no longer see it because of fog, he telephoned for the fog signalman. All engineers might be mobilised for this work, and they all had their allocated places for when the need arose. It was the same with snow duty – this was considered an emergency, and every man was allotted a set of points to clear, because these got horribly jammed by snow. In really bad weather you might have to stand all day by a set of points.’

  One of Sandy’s favourite memories was of going home at the end of his first day’s firing. He had enjoyed himself immensely and couldn’t wait to get back on the footplate, but his enthusiasm was based on a slight misunderstanding, as he remembered: ‘When I got home I told my parents all about it, but when they asked me if I was now looking forward to being a driver I said “No” because I’d noticed that the coal shovel hadn’t been out of the driver’s hand for a minute all day. But it was only that drivers were helping young lads – young lads like me – when we were on our first firing turn. Anyway, I quickly got the hang of it, and even now I can shovel either left- or right-handed.’

  Sandy started his firing career on Drummond engines, which had to be fired with one hand; the fireman’s other hand was needed to hold the firebox door open. This difficulty, and others associated with the sheer arduousness of the job, ensured that there were always a few people who never really got the hang of firing: ‘They could get by, but they were never much good because you needed rhythm and strength, and you had to know when to give the fire air and when not. You always knew when a fireman wasn’t up to much because you’d see the driver looking at his work-sheet and then you’d hear him say “Oh, God!” or something similar when he saw who was firing for him.’

  At Kittybrewster all the engines were Drummonds. These locomotives were distinctive because they had all their motionwork inside; they were therefore very much like the earliest Stephenson engines. In the south of England, by this time, more modern engines were in use, with the motionwork on the outside. The old Drummonds looked like engines from the dawn of the steam era.

  ‘I remember how I used to get my engine ready in the mornings,’ remembered Sandy. ‘I’d set the gearing so I could oil everything without moving it. A bit of fire was always left for kindling so I’d stoke that up a bit; I’d take the ash out of the pan. I’d then get coaled up; then onto the turntable; then fully clean the smokebox and ash pan. Then the driver would bring the engine out into one of the roads. The whole thing might take a couple of hours. On the older engines you had a long shovel for starting the fires, while on more recent engines you would have drop bars which made the job easier. At Kittybrewster firemen and drivers had to do all the preparatory work; at bigger depots like St Margaret’s, in Edinburgh, they employed fire droppers, men whose job it was to get the train up and ready from cold.’

  At Kittybrewster Sandy worked on trains that covered the area to Elgin, Peterhead and Ballater. There was freight and passenger work, and from the ports at Peterhead and Fraserburgh tons of fish to be moved. The fishing season lasted six weeks, but with the extra work that they created, these six weeks were the busiest in the year for the railway workers.

  Sandy was a passed cleaner until 1946. He then moved to St Margaret’s depot in Edinburgh and became a permanent fireman. ‘You were never absolutely safe as a fireman though, because if you made a mistake or were slack in your timekeeping you could be put back as a cleaner for six months as a punishment. At first I worked in Edinburgh only in the summer on a relief basis, and it was a real eye-opener after Kittybrewster because it was huge. It’s gone now, but I believe it was one of the biggest railway depots in Europe – certainly it vied with Stratford in East London for the title of biggest depot in Britain.’

  In Edinburgh, Sandy was dealing with freight and passenger work, but after just one week he was sent out to the docks at nearby Leith. Here a lot of the work of moving goods around the dockyard was still done by horses, and the steam engines were rather primitive with only hand brakes rather than steam brakes: ‘The noise of the steam brakes would have frightened the horses,’ recalled Sandy. ‘I knew horses were important at Leith when early on in my time there one of the drivers shouted “Whoah!”at me!’

  It is not often realised that well into the 1950s, LNER still had about 500 cart-horses at work in Edinburgh. They pulled unusual three-wheeled wagons that had been specifically designed to turn in restricted spaces.

  ‘Lots of the lads on the engines had worked with these horses,’ remembered Sandy. ‘Every team of horses had a tracer boy who sat on one of the horses to help encourage them up steep inclines. Most of the stuff we shifted here by horse or engine was coal, but we also dealt with what we always called the ham-and-egg boat from Denmark. And in the docks, each shunting engine had a shunter walking in front wearing a red hat; this was to warn the unwary and prevent accidents.’

  The engines employed at Leith Docks were known as saddlebacks, so-called because their water tanks were built around the boiler. Coal for the saddlebacks was kept in a trailer which, unusually, was made from wood. Sandy reckons the engines and their trailers would have been almost a century old at the time he was using them, but they were ideal for the job. ‘The engines I’d worked on at Kittybrewster would have been even older,’ he remembered. ‘I believe they’d been made before 1850, although of course they’d have had new boilers and other repairs over the years. One chap who was a regular at our improvement classes used to say that the only original bit of a Y9 – the engines we had at Kittybrewster – was the whistle!

  ‘Yo
u have to remember, too, that there were no electronic controls in those days, and very few mechanical ones – you had a steam pressure gauge for the boiler and a vacuum gauge to tell you about the brakes, and that was more or less it. You watched the water level in the feed gauge, and if you lost sight of the water you were in trouble, because if you were toiling with a lack of steam the water might go down and you’d singe the boiler.’

  Work at the docks was never ceasing, yet despite shifts that started at lam and 2am Sandy stayed, until his two-year break for national service. He did this appropriately enough, in the Railway Regiment; by the time he returned, the railways had been nationalised. One of the great benefits of this major change was a new agreement with the unions to shorten the working week. Sandy was passed for driving in 1958, but almost from the day he’d started work until he became a driver he’d continued to go to the local improvement classes. ‘They were really part of my social life, apart from all the other benefits,’ he recalled.

  After his national service ended in 1949, Sandy returned to St Margaret’s in Edinburgh where there were more than a thousand footplate staff. Yet despite these apparently large numbers the men were so busy that their engines were kept almost continually fired up, and three shifts every twenty-four hours kept drivers and firemen permanently on the go.

  ‘Mostly we used three-cylinder K3 engines (LMS men called them Moguls), but we also had V2s and J37s with old Stephenson link gears. The J36s we used were called Ypres or Mons Megs because they’d been used in the Great War. Firing was different according to the engine you were on, because each had a different-sized firebox. For instance, older engines had very deep fireboxes because they always used cheap coal from the Lothians and you needed a lot of it to get sufficient heat. Then the engines used for the north-east runs had shallower fireboxes because they used superior coal from Yorkshire.’

  According to Sandy, firemen and drivers were experts on coal and could spot the good from the bad in a second. ‘I recall one old driver called Jimmy Allen, who was normally a quiet bloke, looking with disgust at a particularly dreadful batch of coal. He picked up a great big lump of it and took it to the engineer’s desk, plonked it down on his desk in front of him and said, “See if that’ll burn in your fire, because it won’t burn in mine!”

  ‘During the war years getting good coal was the biggest problem for the railways – when you got the odd bit of good stuff it was time to celebrate. For passenger trains and inter-city runs it was a bit different, of course, and their coal was generally much better because they had such long runs to do. Even if the train was nearly empty, passenger work was always seen as superior to freight work.’

  Sandy recalled that a fireman would at least have tried his hand at driving by the time he got his first real turn as a summer relief, and some firemen would have gained considerable experience if they’d been firing for a driver who enjoyed taking a turn with the shovel, as many apparently did. Other drivers, of course, never touched the shovel. Each fireman fired for different drivers, but always for the same driver in his link, except on rest days. On a short journey it didn’t matter that much how good the fireman was, but his ability was crucial on a long journey, as Sandy remembered:

  ‘That’s why you might see plenty of fat drivers, but you never saw a fat fireman! Apart from anything else they had to climb up the tender regularly for the water bag, and on longer hauls they operated the scoop that picked up water from a trough between the rails. It was all hard, physical stuff. In the steam days there was no front view from the loco, which is why the fireman was also expected to help with keeping an eye out for signals.’

  Sandy recalled that though drivers generally had little formal education, many enjoyed a reputation for intuitive brilliance, and there is no doubt that, in different circumstances, they would have been destined for much higher things: ‘In those days there was no higher education for most people, so it was impossible. On the other hand, when I started out there were plenty of older drivers who could barely write their names, but the union representatives were very good and always helped these men.’

  Sandy’s first driving turn was on a K3 freight loco to Tweedmouth. ‘I remember I felt ten feet tall. It was my proudest moment.’ After that he did a lot of driving, mostly summer relief work when the regular drivers were on holiday. One of the problems with firemen working with younger drivers – those who had been promoted quickly because of the war – was that the latter were less inclined than their older colleagues to let their fireman have a go at driving.

  ‘Older drivers were so much more relaxed about the whole thing that they’d be more likely to let a young fireman drive more frequently. The other side of the coin, however, was that some firemen working with a made-up driver – that is, a driver who was covering in summer – would try to grab half the driving. This could be a problem where you had a fireman who was perhaps only a few months younger than the driver.’

  Inevitably, driving was the ultimate aim of the fireman, and below him, of the cleaner; but once he’d reached the senior position on the footplate he had to take into account the traditions associated with particular jobs and particular engines: ‘Mostly, drivers worked on the left side of the footplate and firemen on the right, although on some engines that was reversed. When I started firing, most of the drivers I worked with had been drivers during the Great War, and very few ever left to try other jobs; they knew that if they then wanted to come back they would have lost seniority. Firemen learned the roads as they fired so there was little need for formal training.’

  Sandy was probably one of the last drivers to be trusted under the old self-regulation system. On one occasion an inspector couldn’t be found to check that he knew a particular road, but when Sandy said that he knew it, his word was accepted.

  Steam trains continued to be used at St Margaret’s in Edinburgh until 1966, but by then diesel railcars had already been used for some time for short commuter work: ‘By the time I’d started to drive full time, most of the engines were British Rail Standards which no one liked – ironic, really, when you consider that they were supposed to combine the best features of all the old engines!

  ‘In 1962 I started on what we called the Blue Trains, in Glasgow. These were electric and though they seemed so exacting then, I think it was only due to the fact that we were so unused to them. Many of us, myself included, went to school to learn how to drive the diesels and most of the old drivers became good diesel men, but those early diesels were always breaking down, unlike the older steam engines which were incredibly reliable. I did a total of forty-nine years’ service and my career almost covered the entire period that the railways were nationalised. I retired just a couple of years before privatisation.’

  The Great Railway Hotel

  The passenger who is kept waiting at Perth Station Hotel must admit that there is not much fault to be found with the accommodation there provided for him. Even the very dogs are not forgotten and after their hot night in the train, should enjoy their roomy kennels with fresh water and clean straw. For their masters there are comfortable dressing rooms with baths all complete, while downstairs the breakfast, with its never ending relays of fresh Tay salmon, can fairly challenge comparison with the famous bouillabaisse of the Marseilles buffet.

  W. M. Acworth, Scottish Railways, 1890

  Highland Breakdowns

  A breakdown on a railway is always a serious thing, but much more so when the line is single. So the Highland appliances for dealing with the interruptions of traffic are of the most elaborate nature. At Inverness there is kept a steam breakdown crane which can lift a weight of fifteen tons and move itself while at work. The machine must have cost thousands of pounds, but as the use for it may obviate the necessity of throwing three or four damaged carriages over an embankment in order to clear the line, the money may prove to be well spent.

  W. M. Acworth, Scottish Railways, 1890

  A  PILLAR OF THE

  COMMUNITY

/>   ROD LOCK

  STATIONMASTER ON THE LONDON & NORTH EASTERN RAILWAY

  Rod Lock spent his childhood and youth hanging around the station at Swaffham, the small Norfolk market town where he was born in 1932. He was fascinated by trains and signalling, and by the calm authority of the stationmaster.

  ‘I knew I wanted to be a railwayman almost as soon as I knew anything,’ he remembered, ‘so as soon as I was sixteen I went to see the stationmaster at Swaffham and I became what was called a probationary clerk for six months. This was the first step you had to take in the clerical grades.’ At the end of the six months Rod got a good report and was offered a full-time job. He was responsible, under supervision, for all the clerical work. That meant invoicing and charging for passengers and freight.

  Until the 1960s throughout rural England the stationmaster was given the sort of status accorded to the local vicar and the postmaster; he was seen as a pillar of village life. This was especially so in Rod’s part of Norfolk where stationmasters sometimes worked in their spare time as parish clerks. The sense of public duty clings and long after retirement – Rod still had strong views about the railways:

  ‘East Winch, where I started all those years ago, survived the 1963 cuts – the Beeching cuts – but it ceased to exist in 1968 when the second major cuts were made. The King’s Lynn to Norwich line also went then, and I think that was very silly – East Winch, a tiny little out-of-the-way station maybe, but Norwich to King’s Lynn was a busy route.’

  Rod remembered his first stationmaster boss with great affection, largely because he did his utmost to ensure that the youngster learned everything he needed to know to get on quickly. He was a stationmaster of the old school, who always dressed formally and carried himself with great dignity. He was also very proud of his work. ‘He showed me all the little extra jobs that improved the station,’ remembered Rod, ‘like putting posters up regularly and keeping the platforms and station garden looking tidy. In those days cash prizes were often given for the best-kept station.’