Life on the Old Railways

by Tom Quinn

  East Winch was a quiet station as far as passengers were concerned, but like every other station in the land it was run according to a long-established set of rules, ones that applied in principle whatever the size of the station: ‘I always remember the massive books of commercial instructions we kept in the little stationmaster’s office,’ remembered Rod. ‘For example, the coaching arrangements book was like a bible, and it provided guidance on just about everything you can imagine. I don’t remember referring to it that often, but you always knew that when you did need it, whatever your query, you would find the answer in there. And that was true even though much of the information it contained dated back half a century or more.’

  Every week amendments would arrive and with solemn application Rod had to paste them into the book. ‘Most of my work was to do with freight, and the book listed a number for every possible cargo, from diamonds to coal; and if a new cargo came along, that had to be allocated a new classification. The basic rule was: the higher the number the more valuable the cargo.’

  At East Winch, much of the freight was agricultural produce. In Rod’s day the railways carried a total of 300 million tons of freight a year. ‘The local firm, which had a private siding at East Winch, was called Bull and Northcott; they didn’t pay much, but day in and day out their grain was forwarded at the rate of about two or three wagonloads a day. And if you multiply that by all the thousands of tiny rural stations up and down the country doing similar levels of business, you can see why the railways could survive in small, out-of-the-way places.’

  There were six steam trains each way every day at East Winch when Rod began work there in 1948. Only one or two stopped, and only one or two people would get on or off when they did. ‘I suppose the real trouble with East Winch was that it was some way out of the village,’ remembered Rod. ‘In the early days this didn’t matter – the train was the only means of movement and people didn’t mind the walk – but once the buses started going right into the village, the railways lost passengers.

  ‘But all railway work was a matter of pride in my early days: for example at East Winch there was an extremely corpulent passenger guard, but he was always as smart as a sergeant major; you never saw him looking anything other than immaculate. He was a bit of a character, too; when his train arrived at our little station he would step down from the brake van, stand to attention, then announce in a booming voice: “East Winch, or any other Winch”!’

  After six months at East Winch, Rod went into the booking office at Swaffham which was much bigger, although still only a small country station. Swaffham, a well preserved, largely Georgian market town, was almost entirely reliant on the railway because road connections to other parts of the country were pretty much what they’d been in Victorian times, and the train was still the fastest way to get about. It was also the best way to move parcels around. ‘The parcel traffic at Swaffham was considerable,’ recalled Rod, ‘and of course many families in the area still took the train for their annual holidays or to see relatives.’

  Those were the great days of the excursion train; they were run to resorts along the west Norfolk coast at a time when private cars were still the preserve of the few, and the train was a vital means of mobility, in Norfolk as elsewhere: ‘In an agricultural area like this wages were low, and people really looked forward to their trips to the sea so the excursion trains were packed. These days everyone goes by car and there’s no train even to Swaffham, and I think the sense of community died a bit when cars started to be used because people became more independent.’

  Rod stayed at Swaffham booking office from 1949 until 1955, with a break of two years when he was in the Air Force from 1950, while he did his national service. ‘Swaffham seemed very busy to me after East Winch; the trains were always full, or so they seemed, and we had more unusual traffic. I remember in about 1953 there was a spate of flying accidents at a nearby RAF base and we had to organise coaches to take the bodies for burial. That was a particularly poignant business, but there is something dignified about doing this sort of work with a train. More stately, I suppose, than a car. The dead airmen were always loaded into a single carriage and always accompanied by an officer.’

  Much of the work at Swaffham was inevitably seasonal. In the autumn, wagons would be loaded down with Brussels sprouts; in summer it would be wagonloads of tomatoes. And there were other, more unpredictable cargoes: ‘I remember the Royal Norfolk Show was held at nearby Narford Hall and we had the whole of the cavalry regiment bringing their horses by rail. The horses were terrible passengers – they banged and kicked like demented things in their boxes.’

  At East Winch the stationmaster had to rely on just one porter, who did all the shunting work, two signalmen and a crossing keeper. At Swaffham by contrast there was a stationmaster, two signalmen, four goods porters, a passenger porter, a goods shunter, two station foremen, four motor drivers, a checker, two guards and two porter guards. ‘The modern railway wouldn’t even recognise the names of half those jobs,’ remembered Rod, ‘but there was work for them all at that time, which meant that the railway was a big employer round Swaffham. Train journeys seemed more affordable than they do now, even allowing for inflation. We didn’t have many special tickets, inter-city savers or what have you, just singles and returns, cheap day returns, and half- and full-day excursions. I remember a single from Swaffham to King’s Lynn, a journey of fifteen miles, cost 2s 3d in the early 1950s.’

  By April 1955, aged twenty-three, Rod had been promoted to stationmaster at Walsingham, an ancient place of pilgrimage in deepest Norfolk. The bulk of the passenger traffic here consisted of pilgrims from all over the world. ‘It was quite a responsible job for a relative youngster,’ recalled Rod. ‘Twenty-three was considered young for a stationmaster, but I enjoyed myself immensely. There was something peaceful and rather special about being in charge of a small rural station in those days. We always seemed to get hundreds of delightful elderly ladies getting off to visit the shrines; on the few occasions I chatted to them it was always the same story: they were touring the whole country visiting shrines and various religious centres.’

  By this time Rod was earning £10 a week, a good wage for a twenty-three-year-old. He was in charge of two signalmen, a porter and a crossing keeper; almost all crossings were still manned in those days, and most crossing keepers lived in the crossing keeper’s cottage which was right by the side of the railway. This had been the tradition since the earliest days of the railway.

  At Walsingham the line closed at 8pm on weekdays, but rather later on Saturdays, which was the day the younger people went into Norwich for the cinema and the pubs.

  ‘I was still living in Swaffham when I worked at Walsingham,’ remembered Rod, ‘and I used to cycle the twenty-two miles there and back, and thought nothing of it. There was no traffic at all to speak of on the roads then, so on a summer’s morning it was a delightful ride, though winter wasn’t quite so much fun. My first summer at Walsingham I was relief stationmaster; I was on trial, if you like, and it was a bit of an adjustment being in charge of other men. I was also tested on my knowledge of signalling, something which, as stationmaster, you really needed to know about. However, I’d done a signalling course by correspondence, and was very pleased to get a first-class pass.’

  One of Rod’s regular headaches at Walsingham was cattle and other animals on the line: ‘Of course, animals are no longer a problem because Norfolk’s almost all arable now, but they used to cause terrible accidents – I remember a whole flock of sheep got into a cutting once and a train ploughed through the lot; the railway workers were dreadfully upset.’ He also had to deal with severe blizzards in 1958 when a number of trains were buried.

  After Walsingham, Rod served as a relief stationmaster all over Norfolk. Then in 1956 he was given a full-time permanent job as stationmaster at Narborough – again, a quiet country station, but like all stations at that time, well staffed with two signalmen, a porter and three crossing keepers
. Narborough was on the old King’s Lynn to Norwich line, now long gone. ‘It was busy in my time,’ remembered Rod. ‘I recall a big regular cargo we had to deal with was trainloads of practice bombs! They were past their expiry date and were destined to be dumped in the Irish Sea – where no doubt they are still languishing today.

  ‘We moved masses of things: carrots to the Midlands, props cut from the trees on the West Acre estate and destined for the Midlands’ mines, barrowloads of watercress for Covent Garden. You were at the centre of things, but always making sure that the station was run well and kept clean and tidy, and of course you always had to be there to offer help and advice to passengers – and anyone else, for that matter.’

  Away from dealing with the public Rod was continually immersed in paperwork, for until the advent of computers, every transaction, however apparently insignificant, was noted down on paper: invoices, destinations, weights, quantities. By this time his wages had increased to the magnificent sum of £12 per week, although as a result of a curious anomaly he was paid more as a relief stationmaster than as a permanent stationmaster. This encouraged a number of stationmasters to work permanently as relief men.

  In the early 1960s Rod married and began looking around for promotion. There was no chance of a higher stationmaster grade so he went into the traffic manager’s research office at Cambridge. ‘I used to cycle into Lynn from Narborough and get the 7.30 train. During that time I remember it always seemed to be winter – I often cycled through blizzards or heavy rain, and I had more than one tumble off my bike on that lonely road.

  ‘My new job involved looking at ways we could get more goods traffic back on the railways – but how could we when the roads were beginning to take off and Beeching was about to axe thousands of miles of line? So the job ended up as a contribution to the closure of lines: we’d look at a line, see how much traffic was carried, and then see where cuts could be made.’ Rod was always careful to emphasise that the railways were efficiently run in the pre-Beeching era, and that there was little waste and enormous attention to detail, so much so that if a station was £1 short in its accounting there would be an investigation. The problem was simply that the railways were increasingly under-used.

  By the end of 1960 Rod was working at Liverpool Street in London. He was in the traffic management office, and spent five years there dealing with signalling and the tenancy of properties owned by British Rail. It was all a far cry from that little station at East Winch where it had all begun. Later he worked at King’s Cross, and, finally, at Euston where he looked after what we now have to call the infrastructure. His last years were at the British Railways Board on the planning and investment side. He completed forty years in total, and retired in 1988.

  ‘My strongest memories are really of the early days, of the resourceful porters who would help with anything, who hated being idle and would sweep and re-sweep the platforms; there was a chap called Eric Bland at Narborough who used to bring flowers out of his own garden for the waiting rooms. I remember, too, the big old stationmaster’s houses, like the one at Dunham that had no water. Churns of water were sent regularly by train! And all the old stations had oil lamps in those days and they cast a weak orange glow that was almost magical.

  ‘The stationmaster’s uniform in those days was very smart, navy serge – a sort of stiff, hard-wearing woollen material – with a waistcoat and a hat. Every two or three years we got a new issue of clothing.’

  Rod was saddened by the decline of the railway, and he attributes much of it to changes in working practices. In his day, for example, one of the stationmaster’s most important jobs was to go round the farms encouraging them to put their business with the railway. The decline in freight traffic had the most damaging impact on the financial viability of small country stations. ‘It was a slightly mad time in many ways, because on some lines the number of passenger trains actually doubled when diesel first came; they thought the new trains would be more attractive to the public and that there would therefore be more passengers.’

  Another change that Rod recorded was the loss of the informality of some aspects of railway life. For instance, in the early days he would regularly go for a ride on the footplate if he knew the driver – but all that ended as diesel took hold.

  For Rod, the greatest thing about being a country stationmaster was being at the centre of the community, and being part of a meticulously run operation. Even ticket-issuing had strict procedures: ‘I remember we had to fill in the old green tickets by hand using an ink pen and we used a specially supplied dipping ink for this job; it was supposed to be security ink and therefore fraud-proof. And, would you believe, every single ticket issued was logged in another great ledger – we’d put down the date, price, time and destination. When the passenger handed the ticket in at the other end it was kept and could be compared with the ledger. An amazing system when you think about it.’

  One of Rod’s saddest recollections is the loss of so many of the old records. These were considered worthless and uninteresting, and he can remember a room at King’s Cross strewn with invoices dating back to the 1880s. This was in the 1960s before people even dreamed that such documents might be of enormous historical interest and value. But at the heart of Rod’s memories lay the sense that during the days of steam, the stationmaster was a vital figure in the running of a dense, complex and highly valued transport system:

  ‘A stationmaster’s days could be routine, it is true, but sometimes the unexpected happened. What we called the token instruments might fail, and then trains could move only with a pilotman’s authority, either by written instruction or by the pilot travelling on the train, until the token instruments were restored. It was usual for the stationmaster in charge of the affected box to act as pilotman. And while we’re on this subject, I have to say that the sight of a token being exchanged at speed and by hand never failed to impress me.

  ‘I remember having a go at this one night at Narborough with the 2.40am King’s Cross freight train. All I could see were two oil headlamps approaching at speed down the bank from Swaffham. Standing on the timber crossing opposite the signalbox, I held up the token with one hand while shining a lamp on to it with the other hand. The token was suddenly snatched from me by the fireman in a great rush of air and steam and noise as the train thundered by. Just before this he’d flung the incoming token on to the crossing which I subsequently found with the aid of the hand-lamp.

  Ticket Error

  My first experience of railway work commenced in the booking office at Ely Station and my first attempt at issuing tickets without supervision was made in the absence of the upper clerk who was training me. He was late coming on duty and in order to advance matters I booked the passengers who were waiting for the train. Unfortunately, I issued penny-per-mile tickets instead of the third class which in those days were, on some lines, obtainable by trains not appointed to call at every station. My instructor came in at the last moment and, discovering the mistake, at once rushed out to the platform and obtained, fortunately for me, the difference in cash from the passengers and exchanged the erroneous tickets for correct ones.

  George P. Neele, Railway Reminiscences,1904

  A Multitude of Lines

  But there were so many lines. Gazing down upon them from a bridge at the Junction, it was as if the concentrating Companies formed a great Industrial Exhibition of the works of extraordinary ground spiders that spun iron. So many of the Lines went such wonderful ways, crossing and curving, that the eye lost them. Some of them appeared to start with the intention of going five hundred miles, and gave it up at an insignificant barrier, or turned off into a workshop. And others, like intoxicated men, went a little way very straight, and slued round and came back again. And then others were so chock-full of trucks of coal, others blocked with trucks of casks, others were so gorged with trucks of ballast, others were so set apart for wheeled objects: while others were so bright, and others were so delivered over to rust and ashes and idle whe
elbarrows out of work, with their legs in the air, that there was no beginning, middle, or end to the bewilderment.

  Charles Dickens Mugby Junction, 1871

  A DAVID & CHARLES BOOK

  © F&W Media International Ltd 2011

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  First published in the UK in 2011

  Text copyright © Tom Quinn 2011

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