Inside British Rail E-Book

Stephen Poole

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 582

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Beschreibung

Stephen Poole joined British Rail in 1973, working for three of its Regions and then for three of its Business Sectors in the run-up to privatisation. He experienced stations, depots, freight, parcels, yards, signalling, catering, major projects and business development. Using his extensive knowledge of the workings of British Rail, he paints a vivid picture of its inner life, set against the backdrop of political, industrial and social change that dominated the last twenty years of the nationalised railway. Inside British Rail is both a celebration of the determination and camaraderie shown by staff working in an industry that was struggling to survive, and a nuanced assessment of the difficulties, both internal and external, that contributed to its demise.

Leseprobe

First published 2018

The History Press

The Mill, Brimscombe Port

Stroud, Gloucestershire, GL5 2QG

www.thehistorypress.co.uk

© Stephen Poole, 2018

The right of Stephen Poole to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the Publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 0 7509 8709 7

Typesetting and origination by The History Press

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Contents

About the Author

Author’s Note

Introduction

Acknowledgements

1 Computers, Engines and Ivory Towers

2 Go Anywhere, Do Anything

3 Cash, Mangoes and Football

4 Creating Our Own Jobs

5 King Coal and King Arthur

6 Striking Off

7 Runaways and Other Misdemeanours

8 Files and Affectations

9 Sailing into Stormy Waters

10 Shunting and Sorting

11 The Old and the New

12 Exile on the Marshes

13 Winding and Flagging

14 Found in Possession … Out of Hours

15 Passing Times and Pulling Cords

16 Sit, Sleep or Stand?

17 Spotting the Enthusiasts

18 Footing the Bill

19 Holding the Purse Strings

20 Red Posts, Pubs and Sightseeing

21 Officers and Gentlemen

22 Old Boys, Sherry Parties and Mushy Peas

23 ‘Line-Cred’

24 Hoses, Holes and Harrowing Times

25 Hours and Hours

26 Nightwork

27 The Press Gang and the Ferry Man

28 Games of Monopoly

Conclusion

Bibliography

The Author

Stephen Poole was born in Norwich. In the 1960s he travelled to school in Hampshire behind steam engines and has been hooked on railways ever since.

Over a period of twenty years he worked for the Southern, London Midland and Western Regions of BR as well as for the Railfreight, InterCity and Network SouthEast business sectors, never staying long enough in any one job to become a true ‘insider’. This gave him an insight not only into the internal complexities of the nationalised railway in its last two decades but also into the context in which the railway operated in terms of social, industrial, financial and political change.

After being made redundant as privatisation loomed, he worked for Eurotunnel and then as HM Inspector of Railways for the Health & Safety Executive and the Office of Rail Regulation. He now works independently, giving advice and guidance on railway safety and logistics as well as representing freight interests on the European Railway Traffic Management System project.

He now lives in York, having moved on average every six of his sixty-three years. When not visiting his daughter and granddaughter in Wales or his son in Leeds, he can often be seen in places all over the UK in the company of his real ale drinking friends. He now aspires to be a novelist and to live near the sea.

Stephen Poole appears in The Nation’s Railway: The Golden Age of British Rail (BBC4 Timeshift series).

Author’s Note

Seventy years ago the ‘Big Four’ British railway companies were taken into state ownership and then around fifty years later the nationalised British Rail was fragmented into more than ninety-five private companies. Both occasions, the second more politically motivated than the first, had lasting repercussions for users and for the working lives of railway people.

And twenty years on from privatisation the railway industry, its users and its staff still suffer from political, organisational and financial upheaval and controversy. The nationalisation versus privatisation argument rages on. The franchising concept causes problems for investment and attracts criticism of short-term profiteering at the public expense. Costs of major projects such as Great Western electrification and HS2 are soaring and require teams of experts, lawyers and consultants to establish and then manage the aspirations, responsibilities and liabilities of the multitude of separate companies involved. Some franchisees still run the dreadful ‘Pacer’ units, which BR had introduced as a temporary expedient in the 1980s, while others ‘sweat the assets’ of trains built by BR in the 1970s. Journey times on some routes are greater than they were under BR and fares are sometimes punitively high despite the substantial and creditable growth in passenger numbers.

Bold improvements such as London Overground and the Borders Railway have been public sector initiatives. By contrast the private-sector companies show little or no interest in providing a range of BR’s former activities such as parcels, Motorail, mail on passenger trains, wagonload freight, out-of-gauge loads, cross-country sleeper trains and overnight seating trains, as well as shipping, hovercraft and hotels.

So it may be opportune to take a look back at how things really were in the days of state ownership. This book is a revision of Behind the Crumbling Edge, my 2002 book, which was enthusiastically endorsed by the former Chairman of BR, the late Sir Peter Parker. In it I give an insight into a great variety of BR activities, told mainly from my personal experience as a railwayman from 1973 onwards.

My 2002 text remains unchanged, other than for a few minor corrections, updates and explanatory notes. So the book is essentially still my take on the railway industry as it was in the immediate post-privatisation era, but put into a 2018 context.

Stephen Poole

Introduction

One word sums up what was happening on BR in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s: ‘reorganisation’. This was the inescapable word for anyone who worked for the railway in the last decades of BR and one that eventually culminated in the breaking up of the nationalised network just short of its fiftieth anniversary into twenty-five passenger train companies, a track authority and more than seventy other companies to look after freight, engineering, catering, research, etc. I was greeted with the word even at my first interview for a railway job, back in 1973. The Field Organisation Report, devised by McKinsey and Co. Inc. on behalf of the British Railways Board, was due to be adopted with the consequent abolition of the South Eastern Divisional Manager’s Office at Beckenham in south-east London. I was being offered a job there as a clerical officer and at my interview it was made clear that, as the last one in, I would be the first one out in the new, slimmer organisation.

I took the risk, I took the job. I survived and hung on through many reorganisations, with their consequent displacements and relocations. From this apparent misfortune I was able to experience the enormous diversity of railway activities described in this book – freight, passenger, parcels, sales, sleeping cars, track maintenance, traction control, etc. But much of that was only after the momentum for real change had actually been established, which was not until the 1980s. I quickly learned in the early days, by contrast, that while the railway management of the 1970s could talk ad infinitum about reorganisation, they were thwarted in its actual implementation because the railway was hampered with so many departments and tiers that all needed to be consulted about everything. It was also bogged down in a quicksand of trade union negotiation procedures that ensured any initiative was either stifled or was out of date before it could be implemented. So it was that the very things that most needed to be changed were the very things that stopped change from happening. But I don’t think the railway was alone in this and neither was it necessarily a sign of an ailing, monolithic nationalised industry. It was part of British corporate life at the time.

Endless rounds of correspondence between the numerous departments; meetings up and down the unwieldy hierarchical and cross-functional tiers; and negotiations with trade union representatives at three or more levels all simply resulted in ideas going round and round until they were submerged in a quagmire of complexity and meaninglessness. Indeed, the Field Organisation itself, with its eight ‘Territories’ (to replace five Regions and twenty Divisions), foundered in the morass and was eventually put to rest in 1976. In that way the Divisional Manager’s Office at Beckenham was saved – and managed, in fact, to hang on for another eleven years after I was told it was about to go. On the stairs of Euston House one day in 1974, when the Field Organisation was still thought likely to take over, John Palette was pointed out to me by my boss as ‘Territorial Director, North-West (Designate)’. Years later, when I next saw him, he was presiding over the largely unreformed Southern Region from the wood-panelled general manager’s office at Waterloo, much as if Sir Herbert Walker’s Southern Railway of the 1930s and ’40s still existed. Indeed, the Regions contrived, right up to 1991, to cling to the railway grouping heritage of 1923 that Field was supposed to have abolished and which nationalisation, or so one might have thought, was meant at the very least to have undermined. No wonder that Dr Michael Bonavia described the Regions as ‘immortal’ in his November 1976 Modern Railways article on the subject.

‘Field’ epitomised the railway organisational debate, which is as relevant now in the privatised era as it was then: should the railway be run on geographical principles, such as McKinsey’s proposed Territories and the actually implemented Areas? Or should it be run on the basis of the historic lines of route, such as the South Eastern Division of the 1970s (and again of the early ’90s) and the revived Great Western of InterCity and of First Group under privatisation? Or should it be run on functional lines, as with the separated businesses of Railfreight, InterCity, Red Star, etc. and now of Network Rail and the Train Operating Companies? Or, finally, should there be a combination of two or more of these systems? All have been tried, with varying degrees of success as the emphasis, largely politically led, has changed.

‘The politicians could never make up their minds about railway organisation,’ wrote Sir John Elliot in his Foreword to A.J. Pearson’s Man of the Rail.

That was in 1967 but it holds true just as much today. The decisive Parliamentary victories of 1945 and 1979, one Labour and the other Conservative, each resulted in fundamental changes in the social, industrial and financial climate of Britain. How could the railway industry, dependent as it was upon Treasury largesse, hope to escape the effects of this? Of course, it couldn’t – and now, as we enter a new millennium, we have the effects of another landslide victory for Labour, with its tighter regulatory stance and the advent of the Strategic Rail Authority.1 And so the story continues.

Although the railway of the 1970s was impeded in changing itself in the ways I have described, things did change eventually. And the pace of change accelerated with the years, affecting each and every person who worked in the industry as management faintheartedness and political whim were gradually transformed into management brutality and political dictatorship. Very many things changed: some discreetly and some with all the subtlety of battlefield surgery. Political shifts, modernisation, rationalisation, accountability, the retail culture and staff productivity were just some of the broad headings of change. As an indication of the scale of change, over the last twenty or so years of BR, the annual turnover more than quadrupled to just over £4,500 million, despite the disposal of so many subsidiaries, while staff numbers declined by around 50 per cent. Passenger miles increased by 8 per cent to nearly 20,000 million per year while freight tonnage decreased by 30 per cent to under 140 million tonnes per year, but with a decline in the number of wagons to just 20,000 – a reduction of 92 per cent. First Railfreight and later InterCity freed themselves from the need for Government subsidy and BR ended up requiring a grant of £1,617 million for other passenger services in its last year, a figure increased to the £1,813 million paid by the Government to its private sector successors in 1996/7. Even InterCity’s successors received more than £300 million of taxpayers’ money that same year – in other words £300 million more than BR had required.

To achieve this scale of change, the railway reshaped itself, or was reshaped, sometimes with breathtaking arrogance, sometimes with all the loose hilarity of a TV sitcom and sometimes with a whimper, almost unnoticed. Decay and improvement, stringency and extravagance, despair and hope: they all ran alongside, amongst, above and beneath each other, strands of each fluttering in the wind and, occasionally, falling off at the fringes. In February 1977 the Chairman of the British Railways Board, Mr (later Sir) Peter Parker told the Government’s Select Committee on Nationalised Industries of the ‘crumbling edge of standards’ on the railway. In this book I look not only at the ‘crumbling edge’ but also at the day-to-day realities of the writhing body behind it that struggled at times just to carry on.

Ever since being told in 1973 that my position on the railway was insecure I sat on the fence, dodged from department to department (sixteen jobs in twenty years) and observed what was going on, never quite feeling that I was a lasting part of it. This book is a fairly informal look at how things actually were and at how the concepts appeared to an ‘outsider’ on the inside. It is not meant to be a comprehensive account of any one or more aspects of the railway, but I hope it gives an idea of what was really going on day by day and night by night far from (but still, inevitably, touched by) the ideology, dogma and aspirations of the politicians, media and image makers. I hope it also shows that the railway was, and to some extent still is, far more diverse and complex than those same people could possibly imagine.

In giving this insight, I do not attempt to exhaust one subject at a time or, indeed, at all and nor do I stick to a chronological account of events. The reason for this is at the essence of what I am trying to show, which is that no one topic is capable of being isolated from others. In a complicated, vast and multi-functional industry things cropped up at different times, in different places and in different contexts, each time giving a different slant on interweaving arguments, both old and new.

_______________

1 2018 update: The Strategic Rail Authority was very short-lived. The Labour Government lasted longer but did not reverse any of the privatisation measures.

Acknowledgements

I gratefully acknowledge the help of the following: The librarians at the Chartered Institute of Transport Library, Ashford Railway Library and University of Kent Library; John Bateson and Mike Denny of Roundel Design; ‘High Speed Jim’ Evans; Allan Barter; Brian Garvin; Bob Fridd and others who have helped with information and encouragement.

1

Computers, Engines and Ivory Towers

In the early 1970s BR had bought and installed, at a cost of around £10 million, a computerised vehicle management system developed by the USA’s Southern Pacific Railroad. TOPS (Total Operations Processing System) was a fairly crude, punchcard system that the SP had found difficult to implement because they had so many handover points to and from other operators who either used different control systems or had none at all. In 1979 I visited the Freight Office of the SP in Austin, Texas, and found that they were still using TOPS as it had been when sold to BR several years earlier. Indeed, I was able to load the ‘consist’ for a train to Llano into their machine without difficulty.

Britain’s railway system, having only the Harwich and Dover trainferries as outlets at the time, was better suited to TOPS and huge developments in its scope were made over the years. The Western Region had a further advantage in this respect: it had a busy freight network with only one outlet, this being the West of England line beyond Exeter. This was therefore an ideal proving ground for TOPS and, as a first step towards eventual national use, all freight movements in this area were put on to the new system. In 1975, at the time TOPS was extended to cover locomotive control and maintenance, I was working as an Assistant Traction Controller at Western Region HQ, Paddington. Our system of colour-coded tickets (one for each ‘nag’, as we called them at the time), upon which we recorded by hand every locomotive movement and the hours taken, as well as faults and other peculiarities, was supplemented and eventually replaced by TOPS. On the night shift for a couple of weeks we were accompanied by the TOPS Implementation Team, who showed us how to use the new system and invited us to devise our own TOPS enquiries and procedures to make the system work better for us. Broadly speaking, the implementation of TOPS led to the conclusion that the Western Region had been over-maintaining lots of its locomotives because we had been putting too many hours’ use on the tickets. Traction maintenance on the WR was based on hours in traffic. Over-maintenance, extravagance and slow realisation of cost-saving possibilities will be a recurring theme in this book.

Locomotive control on BR in the 1970s was a very chaotic affair, with the five Regions having different systems, different fleets and huge jealousies – and all this a mere twenty-five years after nationalisation. Amongst loco controllers, the Eastern Region had the best reputation for actually knowing where all its engines were, but against this they had a strange system of giving them ‘A’ exams (known on the WR as the ‘tickle brush’) every three days, almost regardless of how much or how little work each machine had done. Owning Regions had the power to insist that their locomotives be stopped for examination when due, whether on or off the home Region. On one occasion the Eastern Region Traction Controller at York instructed me to ensure that one of his Class 45 locos, which had been standing at Bristol Bath Road for two days, be given an ‘A’ exam before being used again. Since its previous exam it had only run from Newcastle to Bristol. Of course, one may well ask why an expensive machine had been standing idle for two days.

Over-maintenance and over-provision kept a whole range of small depots in existence, some at relatively obscure places such as Worcester and Newton Abbot. The resulting amount of locomotive ‘downtime’ was phenomenal, especially on a railway such as the Western with no electrification and therefore needing fuelling time for its fleet as well as maintenance time. For years the Western resisted all pressure to electrify and even now the only wires are for the BAA-operated Heathrow Express and the Eurostar depot.1 The Great Western itself remained for years as resolutely ‘diesel only’ as it wanted to be in 1954 when, in assessing the requirements for modernisation, all the Regions expressed ‘a distinct preference for electric traction instead of diesel, with the exception of the Western ...’ (A.J. Pearson, Man of the Rail). The Western somehow carried the day, though, with the 1955 Modernisation Plan being mainly based on diesel traction. In capital terms diesel was, of course, the cheaper option.

The implications of lasting Regional independence and self-assertion were numerous and largely counter-productive. We had our fair share as Traction Controllers. The Western had persisted with the installation of GWR Automatic Warning System (AWS), which was not the same as the BR AWS being introduced on the rest of the railway. This meant that many Western diesels were route-restricted. In particular, the GWR AWS equipment fitted under the engines played havoc with the fourth-rail return feed on lines shared with London Transport. These locomotives were slowly being refitted with standard equipment and the GWR AWS magnets on the track were all removed by late 1975. By how long and at what cost the national implementation of this vital safety equipment was delayed by the Western’s early intransigence is a matter of debate. Nevertheless, credit is due to the GWR for starting the implementation of AWS even if the particular form caused problems. Their system had its origins before the First World War while, in contrast, the Southern Region of BR had no form of AWS until the 1970s.

We guarded our own Regional locomotive fleets jealously, even though most machines could in fact travel anywhere on the railway. A favourite trick when traction was short was to send a type of locomotive on an inter-Regional working that could not be driven by the receiving Region’s crews. In that way the traction always came back home and the other Region had to find power for the next leg of the working. Accordingly, we would put the diesel-hydraulic Class 52 ‘Westerns’, which could only be driven by Western crews, on services to Birmingham while the London Midland would send Class 20s in pairs to Severn Tunnel Junction or would let the cumbersome sixteen-wheeled Class 40s come creeping in on overnight freights via Craven Arms, in the knowledge that Western crews were not trained to drive them.

When it came to the nightly inter-Regional locomotive balance, which was struck between all Regions’ Traction Controllers and the BRB representative at 0600hrs each morning, we had to include in our favour all these locomotives that were of no use to us. In dire circumstances of imbalance we would be instructed by the Board to redress matters by double-heading trains out of the Region, but if in reality the imbalance consisted in part of engines we couldn’t use, the result was the cancellation of internal services. Thus the words ‘CAPE, no power’, meaning cancelled, would reverberate through the telephone and teleprinter lines of a Region that, on paper, had a surplus of power. The balance was struck not only in terms of numbers but also of types. So, for instance, in the case of the unusable Class 20s arriving at Severn Tunnel Junction, the Western would be shown as having two Type 1s when it should have had none. The balance would therefore be shown as +2.

The problems caused by the inter-Regional balancing mechanism were numerous. On one occasion while I was at Paddington the day shifts had failed to rectify a locomotive imbalance between ourselves and the London Midland Region, resulting in the Board intervening and instructing us to send the LMR the requisite number of engines before the end of our night shift. The LMR, being bigger and better organised than the WR, could generally wield more clout in these matters. In this case the only way to fulfil the instruction was by using freight services from South Wales, even though the surplus was in fact at the London end of the Region. So we had to decimate our internal night freight services at the same time as double-heading freights to the LMR. No one was in a position to take a strategic view of the benefits or otherwise of this upheaval as the Board’s representative on nights was only a recorder – a clerical officer employed to initiate pre-determined procedures rather than to make decisions in his own right. The next day what was by then an internal imbalance between South Wales and London was put right by double-heading passenger trains from Paddington, which should have happened the previous day. Whether the shortage of traction on the LMR would have led to a greater loss of revenue than did our internal cancellations was not considered. Operating at that time was distinctly separate from commercial considerations, the two only meeting reluctantly and at arms’ length when timetable and resource changes were made.

Western traction of the mid 1970s consisted of Type 2 (Classes 25 and 31), Type 3 (Class 37) and Type 4 (such as Classes 46, 47, 50 and 52). Additionally, there were some lingering oddments: the experimental 1961 Brush locomotive D0280 Falcon was seeing out its days as a merry-go-round pilot on the coal circuit at Barry Docks, for example. Amidst this diverse plethora of ageing machines, the prototype Advanced Passenger Train and the High Speed Diesel Train were being developed and tested. The prototype HSDT had established a new world diesel speed record in June 1973 of 141mph and was well on its way towards introduction on passenger services on the Western Region in 1976, under the brand name of InterCity 125. Preparations were being made at Paddington for the new position of HST Controller, the ‘D’ having mysteriously disappeared for some reason, possibly having been no more than yet another internal Western assertion of its ‘no electrification’ policy. The 125, with its distinctive nose cone, went on to symbolise British success in terms of engineering, design and commercial impact and survives today with several private operators. But it was more than just a nose cone: the 125 was a complete concept, incorporating line speed improvements and innovations in passenger coach design and comfort. In its first two years on the Bristol and South Wales routes, business rose by 33 per cent. In the meantime, though, our express passenger services struggled on with Class 47 and Class 50 engines, limited to 95mph and 100mph respectively, helped out, of course, by our exclusive fleet of Class 52 diesel-hydraulics and a few Class 46s. Classes from other Regions worked on to the Western as well: not only the LMR 20s and 40s already mentioned but also most notably 33s from the Southern and 45s from the Eastern.

The HST (InterCity 125) is a lasting testament to British design and engineering, as well as to BR’s ability to run national projects in a way barely feasible nowadays. In its original livery, a set waits at Plymouth. (Photo: Caley Photographic)

In the mid 1970s the Welsh coal, steel and chemical industries were still extremely busy and there was a huge tonnage of traffic each night trickling down the many freight-only valley lines and then trundling over the Regional boundaries. Yard Supervisors, through their Freight Controllers, were forever asking for specials to clear surplus traffic and in those days, as well as one or more engines being needed for each train, a Driver, Secondman and Guard were also required – a far cry from today’s single manning. Many engines could not run in multiple with each other and so if double-heading was needed, two crews were necessary and the engines had to run in tandem, both being driven separately. Of the entire fleet of Class 47 locomotives, in effect the BR standard engine of the day, only two were fitted for multiple working at that time. These two, based on the Eastern Region, were known unofficially as Tweedledee and Tweedledum. How frequently they were at the same place at the same time when double-heading was actually needed I wouldn’t like to say.

Until the virtual abolition of coal mining in the 1980s, huge tonnages of coal made their way down the numerous Welsh Valley lines for onward movement to many parts of the country. Here 37279 leads a coal train through Taffs Well. (Photo: Adrian Brennan)

In addition to these heavy traction and crew costs, the main freight route from South Wales was via Bromsgrove, where banking engines were needed for the notorious and spectacular 1 in 39 Lickey incline. Even sleeper trains needed assistance here, although most other passenger trains could manage the bank unaided. Two Class 37s from Cardiff Canton were employed at Bromsgrove on each shift as bankers – another expensive operation, at which no one apparently batted an eyelid.

About the only fully brake-fitted freight trains in the mid 1970s were the company block trains and merry-go-round coal trains. Most other freight trains were a mixture of unfitted or vacuum-fitted wagons, needing a brakevan at the rear. Some passenger trains were still vacuum braked as well and some were still steam heated. So as well as a multitude of classes of locomotives there was a great diversity of characteristics and staffing needs. A steam-heated passenger train needed the Secondman to operate the steam boiler. Many engines were stripped of their boilers, or never had them, the resulting space sometimes being occupied by blocks of concrete to aid traction. Others could provide vacuum braking or air braking only, some were permanently speed-limited and others would have one or more traction motors out of use, with varying degrees of permanency. So allocating and controlling these fleets was a complex affair, made even more confusing by the fact that proper class numbering was only just coming in.

The old numbering system gave little indication of type or capability – you simply had to know which loco was which and of what it was capable. Mistakes were made, perhaps inevitably, from time to time. Most mistakes resulted in cancellation or delay to services, while some meant that passenger trains ran without heat or at reduced speed, or that freight trains ran with reduced loads. Occasionally, though, a mistake would lead to unsafe working. On 2 June 1976 a passenger train had become derailed at Reading West Junction as a result of locomotive 50019 having a loose metal tyre, which had come adrift and had jammed in a set of points. After this, special attention was given to the examination of the fitting, profile and wear of tyres. One victim of this was 47257 of Cardiff Canton depot, which was limited to 40mph until its wheels could be refitted. Despite the restriction being shown in the Driver’s book in the cab and on our locomotive control ticket, 47257 was put on to a Swansea–Paddington express one day, the mistake only coming to light when the loco number was passed to Reading Control. The train was stopped on signals somewhere near Didcot and proceeded at caution to Reading for a traction change. An internal enquiry ensued from which I, as Assistant Traction Controller on the South Wales panel that day, did not emerge with credit. I had entered the detail of the trip to London on the locomotive ticket without query, despite it having the coloured tab attached to it to signify the restricted working conditions. Full implementation of TOPS, with the generation of automatic warnings, would have stopped this sort of thing. But that was still to come.

As Traction Controllers we soon realised that the new TOPS locomotive control screens could be used for more than they were intended. The freeform message facility, known as ‘ZZ’, could be used to send messages from and to any screen or printer and, once this had been discovered, it was widely misused, especially on nights. Being a novice to the system (as we all were, of course), one of our Maintenance Controllers, known as Pal, was rather laboriously working through a screenful of information one night, updating the records as he went along when his screen was suddenly wiped clear and the message ‘PAL FOR THE TWO O’CLOCK BREW’ flashed up instead. The night air of Bayswater was shattered by the cry of ‘Which bastard did that?’ So we learned that ZZ messages wiped off anything you already had on your screen. Perhaps a quarter of a century later it really wouldn’t hurt me to say, ‘Sorry, Pal!’

All these activities took place in the attic of the Western Region HQ alongside Platform 1 at Paddington, although we overlooked Eastbourne Terrace rather than the station. The room was a disgrace in terms of decoration and maintenance: the walls were streaked with yellow–brown smears from the combined efforts of nicotine stains and a leaking roof, the window frames were rotten and out in the corridor there were pigeons nesting above the holes in the ceiling. Very strangely for a Region so proud of its past and of its independence this same dingy, inaccessible and dead-end corridor served as a gallery for framed photographs of past general managers, whose stern moustached faces peered out in the gloom at the surrounding dereliction.

Our telephone consoles at Paddington Control, into which we plugged our individual head or hand sets, were decrepit in the extreme. It was rumoured that they had been bought from the Ministry of Defence at the end of the Second World War for scrap value, being clapped out even then. Incoming calls were indicated by small flashing lights of different colours and not by any sort of sound. By no means all of the Western Region was yet covered by BR Extension Trunk Dialling and it was sometimes necessary to go through two operators before you could be switched through to the person with whom you wanted to speak. Sometimes it was simpler to use outside lines. What a contrast this was from the Southern Region, which had installed its first proper switchboard as far back as 1925 and had direct dialling to all locations within its boundaries. But then, as I have said, the Southern had no AWS. The ways in which I found different parts of the system to have developed in different ways and at different speeds as I moved around over the years was always a cause of fascination to me, the more so as I had fondly imagined when I joined that BR was one railway.

When not required on the Traction desk, I was often asked to cover the Assistant Freight Controller’s job at Paddington. This post was unique as it was the only Milk Controller in the country and I think I was the last person to be trained in this role. To do the ‘milk’ you sat at a desk with a three-part slotted board in front of you, with a ticket for each milk tank wagon, rather like the traction control tickets. Colour codes indicated the ownership of the tanks and, although they could all be used as a common pool, the Controller would try to get the right company’s tanks to the right place at the right time to meet the producers’ stated demands. This avoided the payment of user fees from one company to another.

Milk trips ran from various dairies to the yards and the main trunk train ran up from St Erth to Acton Yard each evening, combining at Swindon with the South Wales trunk train from Whitland. In the early hours the trunk train was split at Acton and further trips took the wagons to the private sidings at the London distribution dairies such as Cricklewood, Vauxhall, Morden South, Ilford and Wood Lane – all now closed to rail freight. It would have been interesting to have assessed the ratio of train crew numbers to gallons of milk for these trips, but cost in those days did not seem to be a priority.

In the hot summer of 1975 there was a glut of milk in the West Country. We were able to make extra revenue by running surplus milk to Swindon and Carlisle on specials. Things became so bad (or, for us, so good) that the producers booked specials some days just to make space in the dairies. So we would send a Class 25 and crew to Chard Junction, for instance, take out the loaded tanks and return them, still loaded, later in the day. Eventually, of course, the milk went off, so then we were booked up to run specials to the creameries, one of which was miles along a freight-only line up in the hills beyond Carmarthen at Felin Fach. This was good for revenue and excellent for job satisfaction in that it took a lot of arranging. At that time, before anyone had worked out how much it really cost and before the words ‘resource attribution’ had been coined, there was still a great deal of flexibility in the system just waiting to be exploited in circumstances such as these.

The milk tanks, though, were outdated in comparison with the smart, chilled delivery vehicles of the road operators and when the decision had to be made as to whether or not to renew the fleet, the investment could not be justified by the Milk Marketing Board and the traffic was progressively lost to road. The milk-only branches such as Felin Fach and Hemyock disappeared and the regular milk contract ran out in October 1980. However, to bring the story more up to date, trial loads of milk tanks ran from Penrith to Cricklewood in around 2001, operated by Direct Rail Services. The advantage this time was that the milk was moved in piggyback trailers, which could then go to the London dairies without the need for the lightly loaded trip workings that made our operation both cumbersome and expensive, in terms of traction and crew resources as well as of infrastructure costs at the dairies.

Some of the ‘freight-only’ lines were sometimes used for weekend passenger train diversions when the main lines were being renewed. The long, straggling Vale of Glamorgan route, for instance, would be used if the main line between Bridgend and Cardiff was blocked, while a complicated move into the hills at Tondu would be made if the line towards Port Talbot was closed.2 The winding, largely derelict and now closed route via Honeybourne to Stratford-upon-Avon would occasionally even be pressed into service if the line via Bromsgrove was out for engineering work. In the days before business sectorisation all these lines were seen simply as Western Region lines, for use as the Western saw fit, rather than being charged to the freight or passenger businesses. Overall business aspirations were subordinate to Regional interests in those days and, indeed, the Regions were the businesses, just as if there had never been such a thing as nationalisation.

Distribution logistics made the Western Region Milk Controller’s job interesting, but the grubby, unrefrigerated tank wagons were no match for the smart, chilled road competition. D1070 Western Gauntlet works a milk train through Plymouth. (Photo: Adrian Brennan)

The alternative routes existed mainly because of the heavy coal and steel traffic that originated at that time in various parts of Britain and which formed the mainstay of the railway freight system and, arguably, of the system as a whole. The severe contraction of the steel industry and the virtual elimination of the coal industry since then has resulted in the abolition of hundreds of route miles of railway, including many that were used for passenger diversions.

Apart from the milk, the other Western Region freight ‘institution’ was the Perishables, which also ran up from Cornwall to London daily, carrying produce from the mild climate of the Scilly Isles and the Penzance area for the London markets. The Assistant Freight Controller helped the Freight Controller in arranging the running of this train as well as the multitude of general and block services. Handwritten records were kept of loadings and timekeeping, of surplus traffic left behind, of specials arranged, of cancellations and of other information required from time to time by the daytime freight office. A ‘yard state’ of traffic on hand at each yard was recorded at the end of each shift so that priorities for the next shift could be established. At that time every railway Controller had his ‘sheets’, to be filled in during the turn of duty. Teams of Clerical Officers would then pore over these in the day, analysing loading patterns, creating timekeeping statistics and passing on intelligence to various managers. The only thing that no one ever knew then was how much it really cost to do anything – the locomotive fleet was common to passenger, freight, parcels and engineers’ uses. Track and signalling seemed to be retained if there was a demand, no matter how small that demand might be. And, somewhat strangely, this was despite the need for greater cost awareness highlighted by the controversy over the closures policy of the Beeching era. The Parliamentary Select Committee examining huge railway losses in 1960 had reported that ‘it appeared that neither the accounting system nor the costing techniques ... have yet been developed enough to show precisely where the loss is being caused’. So it was that on the basis of figures that were possibly spurious a lot of lines closed. Fifteen years later it was much the same, except, for some reason, the lines didn’t close.

Nobody asked why we kept the straggling country branch line to Hemyock and I am sure that no one ensured that the full cost of its retention was included in the rates charged for the milk traffic that occasionally used it. This was because no one really knew how much anything did cost in isolation from the mass. In an article in The Journal of Transport History (March 1993), R.J. Irving makes the point that ‘railway rates were not set on a product cost basis, and it was rare for the profitability of individual components of total railway business to be examined in anything like strict accountancy terms’. This was in the context of branch-line finances in the first decade of the twentieth century, but it seems to me that it applied equally to most parts of the railway seventy years later.

Similarly, we had lots of poorly used coal lines in the valleys. It some cases it was an all-day job for a crew and engine to traverse these lines, stopping to open and close rickety level crossing gates as they struggled along weed-strewn tracks, with probably only a few coal empties for a load. It seemed odd that after all the heartache of the heavy passenger closures during and after Beeching there were still so many lines left intact for occasional freight use. One might have thought that full costs would have been stripped out as soon as possible but this is something the railway was never very good at doing. Of course, some resources were removed. Loops and sidings slowly disappeared over the years as patterns of traffic changed but usually only when the mainline to which they joined fell due for renewal. This was then on the basis of saving engineering renewal expense by sacrificing operational convenience. Commercial justification for the retention of many of these facilities had ended years earlier but in the operations-led railway of the 1960s and ’70s they remained as refuges, recess sidings and emergency stabling points, being pressed into service maybe a couple of times a year.

During this era, loose-coupled freights still shunted at every yard and the sight of a full freight yard was taken as an indication that we were doing well. Only later came the realisation that a full freight yard indicated only that the customers’ traffic was standing still, that resources were idle and, consequently, that land, track, signalling, wagons and staff were all being used unproductively. Many railway people bemoaned the closure of freight marshalling yards such as Acton, Norwood and Feltham, overlooking the fact that freight should be moving and not hanging around in yards.

So much of the railway at that time existed for its own sake, or simply because it had always been there. The Regional Controls, such as the ones at Paddington and Waterloo in which I worked, were only there because there were Regions responsible to the Board for the running of the railway in their areas. But there were also Divisional Controls, which were more closely associated with the actual running of trains and which made arrangements during times of disruption. To some extent the Regional Controls merely relayed information to and from the Divisions, other Regions or the Board.

Hierarchical jealousies were rife: station and yard staff largely despised and made fun of Divisional Controls and they, in turn, regarded the Regional Controls with disdain. Appellations such as ‘Fawlty Towers’ and ‘The Ivory Tower’ abounded. There were closely guarded communication channels – only a Regional office could speak to another Regional office and the only Regional office that could speak to a Divisional office was that Division’s own. So, for instance, if the Supervisor at Dover Town Yard had a special trainload of imported cars to go to Wakefield, which was quite a common occurrence, he would tell the Area 3 Controller at Beckenham Divisional Control. That Controller would arrange traction, crew and path, if available, and would tell the Regional Control at Waterloo. They would offer the train to the Eastern Region’s HQ Control at York, who would offer it to Leeds Divisional Control. Leeds would then offer the special to the Supervisor at Wakefield and the acceptance, or otherwise, of the special would make its way back to Dover by the same channels. Only then would wheels turn. The only function of the Regional Controls in this case would be to relay the message, reinforcing my point that they were only there because the administrative structure needed them for its own sake.

Some Divisions even had sub-Controls, adding another tier to every negotiation. The Western’s sub-Control at Plymouth largely survived because of the awful state of the telephone system west of Exeter that made it difficult for staff at the West of England Divisional office at Bristol to communicate with locations in that area. The Plymouth Controllers tried their best to make sure that activities in their area were not understood by anyone else and that nothing happened that might provoke intervention by Bristol or Paddington. In this way they perpetuated their own retention. Similarly, the LMR’s Stoke Division had a sub-control at Chester.

Rivalry between Regional Controls was common, too. I have mentioned the nightly locomotive feuds, in which the Eastern considered themselves to be the elite in one sense. Conversely, the Southern was universally ridiculed as the ‘tramway’ by the other Regions. In the eyes of the Western, London Midland, Eastern and possibly Scottish Regions the Southern had no proper locomotives and no real freight. On the other hand, Southern Region Controllers and Signalmen would laugh if they heard other Regions’ staff talking about the ‘rush hour’. Only Liverpool Street Control was considered by the Southern to know anything about a rush hour. Even outside the rush hour the Southern was much busier than the others in terms of total train movements: as Area 2 Controller at Beckenham in the late 1970s I had thirty-four passenger trains each hour starting, terminating or passing through my area. And that was the off-peak service, which was in addition to cement, coal and gypsum trains to and from Northfleet, Halling and Swanscombe, oil trains to and from the Isle of Grain, Cliffe aggregates trains, Hoo Junction wagonload services and other odd movements, such as Slade Green depot workings. The Area 3 Controller, whose post I covered regularly from 1976 to 1979, had the Dover–Dunkerque train ferry traffic to arrange as well as the distribution of coal empties to the Kent collieries. There were also parcel van train movements that peaked as Christmas approached, with specials being arranged and bay platforms at obscure stations being brought into service for just a few days each year for loading and unloading. Similarly, there were fleets of vans kept all year for the seasonal rush. So the Southern was, in actual fact, far from a purely commuter railway, just as the others were far from purely freight or InterCity.

More than 100 trains per hour were signalled over Borough Market Junction (near London Bridge) during the morning and evening peaks by one Signalman from this box. With this volume of traffic, the Southern defied other Regions to talk about the ‘rush hour’. (Photo: Brian Garvin)

Even within Regions there was rivalry. Whilst the other Regions poked fun at the Southern for its supposed lack of freight, the South Eastern and South Western Divisions of the Southern did the same with the Central Division, which really did have a negligible amount of freight, while the South Eastern jealously regarded the South Western’s operation as child’s play with all its flying junctions instead of the horrendous flat junctions every few miles that characterised the South Eastern. To this day, the commercial and operating aspirations of railway people are still governed to some extent by the legacy of Victorian railway construction, the well-engineered lines providing more opportunities for speed and for additional train paths, with the ones built by the poorer companies still suffering from congestion caused not only by volume of traffic but also by constraints of gradient, curvature, flat junctions, narrow track formations, small bridges, etc.

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1 2018 update: The Eurostar depot is now at Temple Mills in east London and GWR electrification is making limited and costly progress westwards.

2 2018 update: These two lines now both have regular passenger services again, but it is doubtful if this would have happened if they had not been retained for freight use in the meantime.

2

Go Anywhere, Do Anything

Our remit as Controllers in the 1970s was to attempt to run the full timetabled service and to provide resources for the clearance of surplus traffic. Nobody ever added the caveat ‘at a reasonable cost’. So it was that train crews were offered huge amounts of overtime while engines and stock ran large distances light or empty to carry out special movements. Staff travelled miles in taxis, maybe just to work one trip from Grove Park to Bromley North. Whilst covering the South Eastern Guards Controller’s job one afternoon I arranged to cover the last Charing Cross to Hastings service with an Orpington Guard on overtime, with a taxi to get him back from Hastings after midnight. Such extravagances took place every day. The Roster office gave the Guards Controller a daily list, known as the ‘board’, of duties they had been unable to cover. At the all too frequent times of chronic staff shortage the board could consist of more than forty trains and it was the duty of the Controller to attempt to cover these by juggling duties around and by offering overtime. Needless to say, there was a fair bit of sharp practice as well.

Some of us used to enjoy the logistical challenges this entailed. Moves could involve three-way swaps between Guards to get one of them to the right place at the right time. One day I arranged for Guards on up and down trains to change over with each other at Chilham, which is an unstaffed station in the Kent countryside, in order to avoid a delay to one of the trains at Ashford. Possibly that was the one and only time Chilham had seen a crew change. Much depended on staff passing on messages accurately and it may have been that the effort was at times out of all proportion to the benefit.

From 1976 to 1979 I was a Relief Controller on the South Eastern and we had a proud boast amongst ourselves that Relief Controllers would cover more Guards turns than the regular Guards Controllers, would run more specials than the regular Area Controllers and in general would get up to more jiggery-pokery than the regulars would to get things moving. One Saturday night I ran a special freight from Temple Mills to Dover Town. Because of engineering work it had to take a most indirect route, running round twice on the way. One of these runrounds involved the train being left in the platform at Swanley while the engine ran 5 miles to St Mary Cray Junction to cross over. This was the sort of move that the regulars rarely considered, simply saying that you couldn’t expect to run a freight train on a Saturday night.

Despite our efforts to run the full service there were some of us who had misgivings about the benefit to the railway of running an intensive rush-hour service, with the inherent poor stock utilisation and empty running outside the peak. Particularly annoying and counter-productive to the railway as a whole was the Southern’s notorious rush-hour freight ‘embargo’. Sometimes there could be several freight trains queuing at Factory Junction in south London for up to three hours simply awaiting paths on to the South Eastern. Occasionally crews would come on the phone to say that if they were given a run they would do their best not to delay anything and there were some of us willing to give them the chance. One day Derek Peard and I decided to let a late-running Burngullow to Sittingbourne china clay train have a run down the Chatham main line during the evening rush hour, but to protect ourselves we told the Signalman at Shepherds Lane to make sure that he put the train down the Catford loop rather than letting it run via Beckenham Junction, where it would have to go past the windows of the Divisional office and might be seen by someone who supported the embargo policy. Having fixed it so that the train would be given a good, clear run, we awaited news that it had passed Shortlands Junction and was therefore well on its way. We were somewhat concerned a few minutes later to see the Operations Officer walk into the Control and hoped that no one would call in with news of the freight in such a way that he might overhear. Imagine then our further alarm when we heard the repeated sound of a locomotive horn outside the window and the freight went rushing by, its relatively short wheelbase wagons banging on the track as it did so. Shepherds Lane had seen a clearer run for it down the main line and the Driver was ‘blowing up’ to thank us for giving him a run.

‘Something with a bad set of flats there, guv,’ said Derek as quick as a flash before we both answered imaginary inward calls to divert attention. Luckily the train was hauled by a pair of Class 73s on electric power, so there was no telltale diesel noise.

On another occasion the same two of us told the signalman at Factory Junction to give a Northfleet coal train a run. Unfortunately, just as the 2,143-tonne train rolled through Lewisham an up Mid-Kent line train was disgorging its passengers, including amongst them the deputy head of the Passenger Trains Office. He complained the next day and we were ‘spoken to’ by Ron Crittell, the Chief Controller.

Some crews clearly enjoyed risky and complicated moves, too. There was a nucleus of ‘go anywhere, do anything’ crews who could be relied upon to understand (or suggest) and carry out unusual moves. Some of these flew close to the wind in terms of missing rostered breaks, working excessive hours and stretching the point when it came to route and traction knowledge. One night an Ashford Driver had been working inter-Regional train ferry specials to and from Dover in order to clear surplus freight traffic. The early turn Motive Power Supervisor at Ashford was alarmed to realise that this Driver was still on his way back from Willesden more than twelve hours after signing on the previous night. Arrangements were made for the Signalman to put the train into the platform at Ashford with a red light against it while the Supervisor instructed the Driver to come off. So the Supervisor and a relief Driver were standing on the platform as the train crept up to the signal. The Signalman meanwhile had thought the train had come to a stand, thus fulfilling the arrangement, so he pulled off the signal for the train to proceed to Dover. With a big grin, a ‘Harvey Smith’ gesticulation and a blast on the horn the Driver opened up again, leaving his Supervisor and relief standing helpless on the platform. By the time he’d been to Dover and back again to Ashford to sign off he must have done more than fourteen hours. Meanwhile, though, other Drivers would have been lying low and getting paid night rate for doing very little.

This kind of unofficial flexibility, bending of rules or ignoring of procedures was more common than many people would realise. The railway was far from the rigid and unimaginative organisation of common perception. I am still not sure, however, to what extent the management at that time (or now) knew about the ways in which the railway was kept running or to what extent they were prepared to turn a blind eye, only too happy to have more done than was theoretically possible. The Clapham disaster of December 1988 certainly put paid to this kind of attitude, though, highlighting as it did the excessive hours of signalling technicians.

Sometimes ‘sharp practice’ would be done on the personal authority of a local manager, at that person’s risk. Following a derailment one day on the Sheerness branch, a string of wagons was moved along the running line entirely unbraked in order to clear the line. The manager who said to me that this was to be done made it clear that he would accept full responsibility if anything went wrong. Luckily for him the train did not run away. This same manager was later in charge of enforcing safety rules on behalf of the Director of Operational Standards at the Board.

From time to time there were mock incidents to test response times and communication channels. I was involved in these as a Controller and later as an Assistant Station Manager (ASM). One such was held at Lenham in Kent and was a mock nuclear accident. Nuclear flask traffic was a regular feature on the South Eastern Division, taking spent fuel from Dungeness Power Station and the naval dockyard at Chatham to Sellafield. The need to have clear reporting lines and rehearsed responses was vital, mainly to allay public disquiet. In reality it would take an unimaginable force to rupture a nuclear flask and, in fact, a new flask carrier had been derailed at Gillingham several times in 1977. The Lenham exercise was necessarily based on the so-called ‘worst case scenario’ in which a radioactive leak was supposed to have occurred. Of course at Lenham we only pretended there had been a crash – unlike the much publicised and televised British Nuclear Fuels stage-managed collision of July 1984, when they ran a Class 46 diesel at speed into a flask carrier in order to show how safe was the flask.

Another time we had a ‘fire on a passenger train in a tunnel’ mock incident. This was held in Greenhithe tunnel and tested the reporting lines between the railway and the emergency services as well as the procedures for stopping trains, discharging traction current, evacuating, providing line access for rescue, etc.

These mock incidents were good for highlighting preconceptions and misunderstandings on various sides, usually concerning the use of technical terms or jargon. One disadvantage of mock incidents, though, is that you can come away from them thinking that there is, or could be, a definitive way of dealing with the real thing. There never is, however, because each incident is different and the solution always requires the input of individual judgement, expertise and timing – not to mention temperament. It was on these occasions that the more imaginative ‘go anywhere, do anything’ people came into their own.