The Great Western's Last Year E-Book

Adrian Vaughan

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

Seitenzahl: 461

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

Despite being one of the best-known and admired rail companies in the country, by 1947 the GWR was at the lowest ebb of its entire history. Worn out by war, there had been no maintenance for six years and the government couldn't supply the steel it needed for repair. The latter half of the 1940s presented a multitude of challenges to overcome, some due to the recent war and others individual to the GWR: the staff coped with rationing, a desperately cold winter and a blazing hot summer, and dealt with floods, collisions, broken rails and failing locomotives. The incredible strength of character and can-do attitude of GWR workers kept the railway running through it all. This history, taken from GWR papers and illustrated from them throughout, reveals the details of every day, as well as the problems and difficulties the staff faced. Above all, it shows how well they overcame their problems with only muscle power and a steam crane to help – and, of course, no health and safety regulations and arguments to slow them down. Adrian Vaughan's unique history of this famous rail company shows just how special the GWR was right through to the end of its very last year.

Leseprobe

CONTENTS

Title Page

Acknowledgements

Introduction: The Transport Bill

JANUARY

FEBRUARY

MARCH

APRIL

MAY

JUNE

JULY

AUGUST

SEPTEMBER

OCTOBER

NOVEMBER

DECEMBER

Appendices

I      The Board of Directors of the Great Western Railway in 1947

II     Officers of the Great Western Railway in 1947

III    Sample of Locomotive Statistics

IV    Locomotives Converted to Oil Firing

V     Engine Failures, as far as known, August–December 1947

VI    Best Kept Length of Permanent-way for 1947

Sources

Copyright

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Kind permission to scan images in the Great Western Staff Magazine was granted by British Rail (Residuary) Ltd, for which I am very grateful. The Trustees of Pendon Museum of the Vale of the White Horse very kindly sent me the full set of 1947 Great Western Railway Magazines, enabling the best possible results of 1947 paper and newsprint images. The use of these images was vital to the authenticity and relevance of the book’s illustrations. I must acknowledge the kind assistance I have received from some friends: Allan Pym, still a mechanical signalman on Network Rail, who helped me with diagrams of track layouts; Mike Christensen OBE for his help with financial matters on the GWR; Mr Michael Page, ex-Western Region Cardiff Divisional Signal & Telegraph Engineer, for his information regarding his father, F.H.D. Page, Chief Signal & Telegraph Engineer of the GWR; David Collins, last Chief Signal & Telegraph Engineer of Western Region for his replies to my questions. I must also gratefully acknowledge the help I received from Mr Chris Turner of Didcot and from Mr Steve Cooper, a Trustee of the Great Western Society, who took the photograph of the 1942-1947 GWR coat of arms used on the front cover. And finally, I must acknowledge my debt to my editor, Christine McMorris, for her care in helping me prepare this book.

No 2931 Arlington Court at Platform 2 Exeter St David’s on 13 September 1947. (R.C. Riley, Transport Treasury. Ref: RCR 1473)

INTRODUCTION

THE TRANSPORT BILL

The Railway Companies’ Statement

The Bill for the Act of Nationalisation of the British railway system passed its second reading on 18 December 1946. There was the final reading to come but the Labour government had an overwhelming majority of seats in parliament, nationalisation of transport having been the policy of the Labour Party since 1900, and that policy forming part of the election manifesto of 1945 so overwhelmingly voted for by the electors – nationalisation was a foregone conclusion. The headline on the first page of the Great Western Railway Magazine for January 1947 was:

The Transport Bill

All four companies opposed the Bill, and as it also proposed the nationalisation of road freight and passenger haulage, the Road Haulage Association became an unlikely ally of the railways.

Some of the points of objection noted in the Statement were:

i.      The Bill provides for the nationalization of transport with no assurance that a practical scheme will be evolved by the (British Transport) Commission which will provide a more adequate, efficient and co-ordinated service than can otherwise be given and which will meet the needs of industry and the travelling public and be acceptable to them.

ii.    The Bill makes no provision for the co-ordination of transport. The scheme submitted to the Government by the railways and road hauliers for the co-ordination of freight traffic throughout the country has not received the attention it deserves. It ensures for traders to use any form of transport, including their own. It avoids the dangers and abuses of monopoly and it safeguards the nation’s transport from the dangers of political pressure.

iii.   The Commission are to be subject to general direction by the Minister. This means political interference when political expediency demands it. The Commission are subject to direction by the Minister on nearly every matter. They are not to have independence or freedom.

v.    The Commission will not have to prove annually before a Statutory Tribunal – as the Railways have had to do since 1921 – that their management is economical and efficient.

ix.   The financial terms for the acquisition of the Railways put forward in the Bill are unjust and would cause widespread hardship to the many people who depend for their livelihood on the income from railway stocks. In 1945 £42 million was paid in interest and dividends. Even between the years 1928 to 1938 which included many years of acute depression, the average annual amount paid in interest and dividends was £35 million. Compare these figures with the £23 million which is the annual amount payable if the stock to be issued by the government in exchange for railway stock carries 2.5% interest.

The Statement was brought to a proud and defiant conclusion as follows:

When presenting the Transport Bill to the House of Commons on 16 December 1946, the Minister of Transport rejected the request for a public inquiry and after three days debate the Bill was approved and committed to a Standing Committee. Although the Minister of Transport paid tribute to the magnificent work done by the railways during the war, the Chancellor of the Exchequer – having stated that he would devote himself to the financial side of the measure – went out of his way to make an unwarranted attack upon the railways, which he described as ‘a disgrace to the country and a poor bag of assets’. Railwaymen throughout the country cannot but resent these disparaging remarks. Prior to the war the British railways compared favourably with those of any country in the world. It was the efficiency of their pre-war organizations and the high standard at which their lines and rolling stock had been maintained despite long periods of trade depression, that enabled the railways to meet the heavy demands of war.

It is no fault of the railway that their permanent way and their locomotive stock, which, prior to the war, were the finest in the world, are now suffering from the effects of war strain. To make good the wartime depreciation of their assets the railways have set aside £148 million which represent the cost of making good the difference in the amount of maintenance work carried out during the war compared with a corresponding pre-war period, and that is without any allowance for abnormal wear and tear for which they are claiming a further £40 million from the Government.

But while the necessary financial provision has been made by the railway companies to restore the railways to their pre-war standard, it has not been possible to obtain sufficient materials and labour – and if there is any suggestion that more work should have been done, the responsibility for it not having been done rests with the government.

It may be assumed that the Government will make every effort to get the Bill passed during the present session of Parliament and, if eventually the railways are nationalized, there will be many members of staff who will feel sad that they will no longer be associated with a Company of whose achievements and traditions they may feel proud.

The Financial Times editorial of 3 September 1946 was in favour of nationalisation:

Open competition is too costly to contemplate and it is likely to lead to the breakdown of public services, and no effective middle course appears possible without subsidies. The complete co-ordination of transport by means of a scheme of unification is the only way to get the best possible service at the lowest economic cost.

There had not been ‘open competition’ between the companies since the 1921 Transport Act. From 1930 they were moving towards co-ordination and co-operation. Income from freight traffic was pooled, two companies with stations side by side, as at Oxford, would have one Station Master between them. Locomotive shed facilities would be shared should the need arise. The GWR had joint ownership of local bus companies: GWR and Southern or LMS and the original company; Thames Valley; Western National; Western Welsh. The companies were developing a co-operation with road collection and delivery services. These policies were still being acted upon and extended in 1947.

The Great Western was in a surprisingly good financial condition – given the abuse the company had suffered from various governments since 1914. The government took control of the railways during the Great War under an Act of 1871 which bound the government to pay compensation for all wear and tear caused by wartime use. Railway charges were not allowed to rise in line with inflation and, towards the end, the companies were spending 100 per cent of their entire government rent on operating. Sir William Plender, famous accountant appointed by the government in 1919 to investigate the railway companies’ claims, stated that, in return for the guarantee of full compensation, the companies had given land transport service to the government worth £112,043,808. On the sea and canals the railways had given a further ten to fifteen million pounds’ worth of transport. The total amount paid to the railways during the Great War was £95,313,607 which included an amount for renewals. This took no account of ‘extra wear and tear’, nor the cost of replacing all the additional fuel and materials used, nor for all the munitions that railway factories had turned out – all to be bought at heavily inflated post-war prices. Lord Plender’s report stated that ‘it is not possible to calculate what is owed to the companies but it is not less than £150,000,000’. (Command 1132 of 1921)

Then the 1921 Transport Act was passed, which obliged 120 railway companies to amalgamate into four groups. The Great Western therefore was obliged to take over sixty smaller companies, many of them insolvent or almost in that financial state. This meant re-laying their tracks and supplying them with modern locomotives and carriages. As all rates and fares were controlled by a court of law – the Railway Rates Tribunal – to raise or lower fares was a time-consuming process. This made price competition with the road haulier very difficult: road hauliers could quote any price they liked – on the spot – without reference to anyone. Section 58 of the Act stated that railway charges would be: ‘Such as will yield the Standard Revenue equivalent to the net combined revenue of 1913 together with a sum equal to 5% on capital expenditure.’ In spite of having ‘one hand tied behind our back and our ankles hobbled’ and being loaded with the costs of taking over impecunious railways, the Great Western managed surprisingly well.

In 1939 the railways came under government control again, for a fixed sum – a rent. This was insufficient and in fact they never received the full amount they were promised. But – as in the Great War – the companies served the nation admirably and by 1947 the GWR’s track, locomotives and rolling stock – along with the same assets that belonged to the other companies – were seriously in need of restoration and renewal.

The Minister of Transport, Mr Barnes, in bringing forward the Labour Party’s Bill for nationalisation on 16 December 1946 said:

If we allowed these separate undertakings to continue after the war in the scramble for capital, (they) would probably be handicapped. We cannot afford a continuance of situations of that kind. Capital must go where it is most needed, and where it will best serve our national resources. That applies to material, and manpower as well. Before I conclude this part of my remarks, in which I reject the demand for an inquiry, I emphasise that transport is not, of itself, a productive service. It is an overhead cost on the whole of British trade and industry. Parliament, in my view, in looking at transport, should look at it as a major overhead cost, and its organisation should be directed entirely from that angle.

Further, the Labour Party, the Trades Union Congress, the Co-operative Congress – [Laughter.] After all, these three bodies represent the majority of the people of these islands and in any case they are entitled to express their views like any other organisations. The point I was about to make was that these three great major organisations who have been speaking for the organised workers and consumers of this country for many years – [HON. MEMBERS: ‘Consumers?’] – Yes, consumers – have stated quite clearly in published documents, and in many other ways, their firm conviction that these transport services should come under national ownership. I am satisfied that every candidate of the Labour Party stated this issue at the last General Election. The Conservative Party have never laid their programme so clearly before the electorate as the Labour Party has been in the habit of doing. I do not consider that anybody can dispute that, as far as we are concerned, both the principle of nationalisation, and our clear intention, have been submitted to the electorate, and have received their endorsement.1

Mr W.S. Morrison, Member for Tewkesbury and Cirencester, opened the second day of debate on the Transport Bill on 17 December 1946. He pointed out that the Treasury took as the true value of the railway companies’ property the value of their shares on the stock market in 1946. Morrison showed up the fraud of taking share price because share value depends on the volume of trading, and relatively few railway shares were ever traded over the previous twenty-five years. The vast majority were held steadily by great organisations, such as hospitals, insurance companies and pension funds. The railway companies kept their dividends low in order to plough money back into the restoration of the business; the share value was also low. The actual value of the railway companies was in the land, ships, docks and harbours, the hotels, and all the other assets they held.

Morrison continued:

But having valued the railways we have to pay for them. We are told in Clause 93 (2), that ‘The British transport stock which is to be created and issued under paragraph (b) of subsection (1) of this section in satisfaction of a claim to compensation of any amount shall be such stock as is, in the opinion of the Treasury, equal in value at the date of the issue to that amount, regard being had to the market value of government securities at that date.’ ‘Regard being had to the value of Government securities at that date’ – we are completely away now from any regard to the value of the property that is being acquired – and the time when we shall calculate what is actually to be paid will not be the time when the undertaking is purchased, but will be after the Chancellor of the Exchequer has had a further undisclosed period for rigging the market in Government securities. In the absence of some further information from the Chancellor today, the recipients of this stock are being promised for their property no more than a pig in a poke. What sort of animal it will turn out to be when the bag is opened remains to be seen.

Returning to my main argument, which is the effect on the people concerned, I am assuming that the yield of this stock will be 2½ per cent. I have to assume that that is so. In round figures, the effect will be this. In 1945 the total yield of the four main line railways in interest and dividends was £41,499,262. The annual interest on the British Transport Stock which they will receive will be £22,694,593. The recipients then will lose of their income on the whole, £18,804,669. There are, of course, different reductions in different stocks, which I think is very unjust in itself, but the average overall reduction of income for the holders of these stocks – trustee stocks, a great number of them – is 45.3 per cent, very nearly half the income on the whole. This is a grave slice of the income of many a humble home. It is also a big slice of the resources of trusts, and I think it should further make hon. Gentlemen opposite question whether this bitter fruit can possibly grow from a sound tree. All the railway shareholders will suffer, but it is a further vice of this method of compensation that they do not suffer equally. By this ‘hit or miss’ method of valuation, grave inequalities are introduced as between the different classes of stockholders. They are all in the tumbrel together, but comparing one with another some get a first-class ride as opposed to a third-class ride in that gloomy vehicle. I will give some examples.

Southern Railways 5 per cent. deferred ordinary stock, which has paid its dividends constantly—with, I think, one slight diminution one year—as a result of rumours and fears was depressed into the 70s. If we take 75, the return was about £6 13s 6d per cent. The Government’s terms for this stock are £77 12s 6d, which at 2½ per cent. will give a yield of £1 18s 6d per cent; three-quarters of the yield is taken away and the holders are left to whistle for it. Take the holder of £1,000 of London Midland and Scottish 4 per cent debenture stock. The present income on that is £40. Under this Bill he will get £1,180, which at 2½ per cent. gives him £29 10s, a loss of 26 per cent of his income. On the other hand, £1,000 of L.M.S. 4 per cent. first preference stock has a present yield of £40, the holder gets £850, which at 2½ per cent. brings in £21 5s, a loss of 46 per cent of his income. Here are these three good stocks; the holder of one loses 75 per cent, the second 26 per cent, and the third 46 per cent. Surely, if nothing else will, this should demonstrate the inequalities which flow from taking six days’ Stock Exchange prices as the datum line for a transaction of this magnitude.2

The interest paid on British Transport Commission Stock was fixed at 3 per cent before the Bill became law.

The Labour government had stated in the party manifesto that transport nationalisation was their policy and the majority of voters had voted for that so there could only be one outcome. The de facto nationalisation of the railways from 1939 onwards enabled more traffic to be shifted than ever before and under extreme conditions, and so the policy seemed to a great many people to be a sound one. The government had had the benefit of free transport by taking over the railways but in so doing it had worn out four previously magnificently well maintained and managed railways. The renewals funds of the four disappeared into the Treasury. Private capital was not to be forthcoming to rebuild the private railways – only taxpayers’ money could be used to rebuild the nationalised railways – and that, the Labour government would be as reluctant to provide as the Conservatives.

The Great Western directors, knowing that the GWR would be taken into public ownership at the end of 1947, loyally and honestly continued to manage their railway with the same care and concern as if it would still be a private company in a hundred years. And they paid out a good dividend – also constrained by law – at the end of the year.

Notes

1      House of Commons, Hansard, vol. 431, col. 1617.

2      House of Commons, Hansard, vol. 431, col. 1785.

JANUARY

The Board of Directors of the Great Western Railway gathered in the Grand Boardroom at Paddington on 24 January. There were seventeen members of the Board1 and twelve were present: Deputy Chairman, the 3rd Earl of Dudley, the Hon. A.W. Baldwin, J.J. Astor, W.M. Codrington, Sir William Fraser, Charles Hambro, Cyril E. Lloyd, Geoffrey F. Luttrell, James V. Rank, Sir W. Reardon-Smith Bt, Sir George Harvie-Watt, Col Sir W. Charles Wright Bt. Five Members were missing: Viscount Wyndham Portal, Lord Dulverton, Captain Hugh Vivian, the Hon. Edward Cadogan and Mr Maurice Harold Macmillan. Viscount Portal is shown as ‘Chairman’ on the Directors’ Fees Ledger but he was not formally elected to that post until March.

At this meeting the fourth resolution to be passed was that, as there was £4,016, 8s 7d of directors’ fees unclaimed from the preceding year, ‘that money would be paid to the Chairman and utilised in the manner which was indicated by the Directors’. This was an annual ritual going back to 1922 when the decision was taken that directors’ unclaimed fees would go to the ‘Helping Hand’ fund for the employees. The Chairman’s annual fee in 1947 was £6,000. This fee had not changed since 1922. The Deputy Chairman was entitled to £3,000 p.a., also a sum unchanged since the same year.

The total gross remuneration allowed to the seventeen GWR directors in 1947, was £22,660. All fees had income tax deducted before being paid. No bonuses were paid to any board member.2 They worked for such small amounts as to be – almost – volunteers. These men attended board meetings regularly and divided themselves into sub-committees for ‘Finance’, ‘Labour’, ‘Locomotive & Carriage’, ‘Engineering’, and ‘Law & Parliamentary’. They directed a railway network and railway operation far more onerous, and far more complex, than that in use today, and they ran it at a profit in spite of receiving less money than they were entitled to as rent under the wartime Government Control Agreement.

In 1929 the four railway companies in partnership had obtained parliamentary powers to operate passenger air services. The Great Western Railway inaugurated their first flights on 11 April 1933. The following year the GWR service was taken over by ‘Railway Air Services’ owned by all four railway companies. In 1946 the government brought into being the nationalised ‘British European Airways’ (BEA) and the railways’ liquid and physical assets were taken into BEA ownership as from 31 January 1947. At the January meeting of the GWR Board, the directors accepted the government’s offer of £550,000 for the liquid and physical assets of the Railway Air Services.

On staff matters, the directors noted that the General Manager, Sir James Milne, had met the representatives of the National Union of Railwaymen (NUR), the Railway Clerks Association (RCA) and the Associated Society of Locomotive Engineers and Fireman (ASLEF) and had agreed that the War Bonus be ‘consolidated into the ordinary weekly wage’. This was a technicality, adopted on 1 July 1946, which guaranteed that the amount an employee received each week/month would not go down. The Minute stated: ‘In the case of male adults the maximum rate of War Bonus is £73 p.a. for salaried staff and 28/- a week for the wages grades with appropriately lower rates for women and juniors.’3

All four railway companies were finding it difficult to recruit and retain clerical staff. The general managers of the four companies met and decided that, as from 1 January, the pay scales for clerical staff would be increased to a maximum of £293 p.a. (112s 6d per week) for males and 90s a week for females. And as a further improvement it was resolved that the maximum rate would be paid when the clerk reached the age of 28, rather than thirty-two as previously. The curious thing about lower pay for women was that they did not receive an equal reduction in the price of a bus ticket or a pound of tea.

‘Heads of Departments’ were awarded increases up to a maximum of £438 p.a. and they could apply to the Directors’ Finance Committee for consideration for higher pay up to £573 p.a.

Men working in the dozens of locomotive running & maintenance depots (R&M) asked to be put on a system of bonus payments – ‘payments by results’ – for faster repairs and maintenance. The precise method of working such a system was still being studied but while this was being worked out so that a satisfactory conclusion could be reached, the R&M men were to be paid 33½ per cent more on their existing wages as from 27 January.

The civil police were given a pay rise as from November 1946 and so the Railway Police Federation put in a claim for a rise. This was still under discussion in January.

Directors Lloyd, Baldwin, Hambro and Luttrell formed the Engineering Committee. Cyril Lloyd was the Chairman. They scrutinised and authorised Signal & Telegraph and Civil Engineering expenditure. In January the Signal & Telegraph Department spent £8,830 on maintenance or improvements throughout the vast network of the Great Western Railway. Bramley level crossing gates and three signals were replaced for £1,460; the telegraph poles and wires between Newent and Dymock and between Stow-on-the-Wold and Bourton-on-the-Water were renewed for £4,100. At Newport (Monmouthshire) a house, No 148 Caerleon Road, was purchased to accommodate a member of staff for £1,500.

On 4 April 1944 the bridge over the Wye at Chepstow had suffered severe buckling of one section of a plate girder in the land-span. The bridge was carrying a continuous stream of the heaviest traffic it had ever carried – and would ever carry – due to the wartime work of the South Wales steelworks. The bridge had a ‘fore and aft’ movement in it when 90-ton locomotives rolled to it at either end. The chains had to be wedged down tight against the upright supports, large wedges of oak had to be hammered in to maintain the tension of the chains, but with the extreme traffic some slack developed and the forward thrust – created by each heavy train moving onto the bridge at the permitted 25mph – exerted a sudden, fierce, end-on pressure on the web plates of the land-spans until finally one large sheet plate buckled inwards towards the track. The metal was by then 92 years old. A 15mph speed restriction was applied. In January 1947 a ‘partial reconstruction’ of the bridge was authorised at a cost of £68,000.

A total of £101,000 was voted to be spent on civil engineering projects, ranging from large projects like Chepstow, to £1,250 for the repair of a culvert at Dauntsey. However, there was such a great shortage of labour and materials that many of the works could not be started.

The winter period from December 1946, through January and well into March 1947 became increasingly arctic to the point where domestic houses and railway trains could be buried under drifting snow. Everything looked bleak and appeared to be grey or almost black. By this time I had started going to school, and remember the bitter cold and the darkness indoors because of the electricity power cuts, and have memories of our kitchen being illuminated by just a couple of candles, accompanied by the blue gas flame under a saucepan of cooking potatoes.

Lorry drivers employed by London-based haulage companies had gone on an unofficial strike as early as 5 January. This ensured that food supplies to the capital and food distribution throughout the capital were disrupted. Mr Attlee brought in the Grenadier Guards to move food from the docks to cold stores and to Smithfield meat market. This caused the Smithfield and Billingsgate meat and fish porters to go on strike. The staff of all four railway companies stayed at work throughout the entire winter – three shifts around the clock – and, as a matter of fact, there were no official strikes by railwaymen from 14 May 1926 until 30 May 1955.

Railwaymen and women of all three railway trade unions had been negotiating for a pay rise since early in 1946. One request was that the War Bonus supplement – money paid to keep up with inflation of prices – should now become absorbed into the normal wage. In July 1946 that and other increases were granted. Train fares and freight rates, meanwhile, were still held down by government decree to one third of the rate of inflation as they had been since 1939 – this was done as a subsidy to manufacturing industry and the general public.

In spite of the freezing cold and a shortage of engines, coal, carriages and men, the holiday and parcels traffic for Christmas 1946 was carried almost as if the war had not happened. No-one outside the railway thought this was exceptional service – that was what the nation expected of the railway. Between 20 and 29 December 1946, 473 long-distance trains were run from Paddington. On 24 December 41,160 long-distance passengers left Paddington in sixty-seven trains and over the whole GWR network, eighty-three extra trains were conjured up from somewhere to transport 53,700 military personnel who were on leave.

Mr Victor Collins, MP for Taunton, and from 1958 ennobled as Lord Stonham, appears to have been going around with his eyes shut in December 1946, and as a result felt his ego bruised at Paddington during the Christmas period. On 29 January he asked the Minister of Transport: ‘If he is aware that unnecessary hardship was caused to large numbers of Christmas period passengers by the inadequate arrangements at Paddington Station; and if he will make an investigation with the object of avoiding chaotic conditions during the periods of heavy passenger traffic.’

The Minister replied, perhaps a little wearily: ‘I regret that shortage of rolling stock and staff made it impracticable for the railway company to deal promptly with the heavy passenger traffic at Paddington during the Christmas period. The situation was aggravated by adverse weather conditions and may be regarded as having been exceptional.’4

During the first two weeks of January 1947 the income from passenger travel was 8.24 per cent down on the same period in 1946. Goods revenue was down 17.3 per cent but coal haulage revenue was up by 23.5 per cent. On 6 January 1947 the GWR was short of motive power for hauling coal and vital supplies of food from the docks and so seven long-distance expresses were cancelled for the time being:

12 noon Paddington–Kingswear

12 noon Torquay–Paddington

7.50 a.m. Birmingham–Bristol

2.15 p.m. Bristol–Birmingham

11.10 a.m. Wolverhampton–Weymouth

10.30 a.m. Weymouth–Wolverhampton

11.00 a.m. Plymouth–Penzance

On 9 January the government forbade the running of passenger trains for any special events in order to keep engines available for the haulage of coal and other vital traffic. A lot of coal was normally conveyed by sea from South Wales to the London power stations but severe gales in the Bristol and English Channels between 30 November 1946 and 9 January 1947 prevented sailings, and in that time of bitter cold and fierce winds the GWR worked an extra thirty-one coal trains – each a full load5 for a ‘28xx’ class engine – to the London Power Company at Battersea. Heavy streams of traffic were passing to and from the GWR and LMS to the Southern Railway over the GWR/LMS joint ‘West London line’. This route was a congested ‘bottleneck’ and an idea of the severity of the situation can be gained in that some north–south GWR freight trains which normally got onto the Southern Railway via West London were diverted to the fiercely graded, but double-track, Didcot, Newbury & Southampton route. Some LMS to Southern trains had to be diverted via the Birmingham–Cheltenham line so as to get onto the Southern Railway via Cheltenham Lansdown Junction, Andoversford Junction, up over the Cotswolds, Wiltshire Downs and Salisbury Plain to Andover and Southampton. This was a sure sign of desperation, as this was a single-track, steeply graded route which seriously restricted the tonnage engines could haul over it.

As from 27 January the 7.40 a.m. Penzance–Manchester train was temporarily terminated at Bristol Temple Meads, the 1 p.m. Cardiff to Brighton, and the 11 a.m. Brighton–Cardiff trains, both of which ran via Dr Days and North Somerset Junctions, Bath, Westbury and Salisbury, became temporarily ‘Saturdays Only’, to release motive power for coal trains.

Great Western engines before the war ran on fine Welsh steam coal but, from July 1945, the newly elected government decreed that this coal was reserved for export only. The GWR then had to find whatever coal they could get from dozens of collieries located in all the mining districts of England as well as South Wales. While a lot of it was good coal in general terms, on GWR engines the men would say ‘it burns like paper’. Some of it was only a little better than dust. Prices varied according to the amount purchased and the quality. Some 780 tons of ‘Glamorganshire Washed Nuts’ was to be supplied over a period of twelve months at £2 5s 8d a ton; 1,680 tons of ‘Opencast Small Coal’ from Monmouthshire cost £1 15s 0d a ton; 4,672 tons of ‘Washed Small Coal’ from Staffordshire cost £1 15s 11d; 2,999 tons of ‘Washed Small Coal from Glamorganshire’ was £2 1s 0d a ton. Other collieries from which the GWR bought coal included Donisthorpe Colliery, Ashby de la Zouch: 3,824 tons at 15s per ton, and 1,864 tons from Bolsover Colliery, Derbyshire, at £1 17s 0d a ton. In the four weeks ending 11 January, GWR locomotives burned 47,790 tons of coal.6

The GWR Chief Mechanical Engineer, Mr Hawksworth, and the Locomotive Committee directors realised that using what was, for their engines, inferior coals was a serious problem to be tackled at once. Their answer was oil firing. This was a well-known technique in North and South America. Fuel oil contains a greater amount of energy per pound weight than the best coal and its quality never varies, whereas being forced to buy unsuitable coal from non specific collieries was buying the unknown. In October 1945, 2-8-0 No 2872 (then renumbered 4800) was the first GWR locomotive to be converted to burn oil. No 2854 (4801) followed in November.7

This was a pilot scheme so some rough-and-ready means of fuelling the two engines would have been adopted. The oil that was used was a thick, viscous type that did not flow easily. It had to be warmed by heating elements within the tender. This was achieved by placing tubes heated by boiler steam in the engine’s tenders. The oil would also have to be kept warm in its storage tank before being transferred to the 1,800-gallon tank on the engine’s tender. An electric pump was used for the transfer. The Minutes of the GWR Directors’ Locomotive Committee show that the expenditure on permanent oil-fuelling facilities at Severn Tunnel Junction and Llanelly sheds was authorised on 28 March 1946.

The oil-burning engines were enabled to generate steam at a greater rate than ever before. And of course there was no great pile of cinders, ash and clinker to be removed and carted off to be dumped. The higher calorific content of oil over coal is well illustrated by an eyewitness account. When 2-6-0 No 6320 had an oil burner installed, in March 1947, my friend Ernie Nutty, who was a senior figure in the Drawing Office, rode on its footplate when it was used on an express passenger train from Gloucester to Swindon. He told me that 6320 was the equivalent of a ‘Castle’ class when climbing Sapperton bank. I do wonder what that treatment would do to the firebox over time. Five ‘Castle’ and eight ‘Hall’ class trains were converted during 1946 and 1947.

With the trials of the two engines working well, the Minister of Transport requested, in September 1946, that the other three companies should start converting their locomotives to oil burning. The government told the GWR that it would increase its imports of fuel oil from 280,000 tons to 920,000 tons by June 1948. And so, in September 1946, the GWR invited contractors to tender for the construction of oil-fuelling installations at fifteen major engine sheds around the GWR territory. Expenditure on oil-fuelling facilities for Westbury (Wiltshire) was authorised on 15 January 1947. Installation took several months owing to a shortage of contractors and materials. By the end of June 1947 the GWR had completed the installation of oil-fuelling points at the fifteen designated locomotive depots and had converted thirty-four locomotives.

On 15 July 1947 the Prime Minister, Mr Attlee, was obliged to lift the wartime prohibition on the convertibility of sterling into any currency. The reason for this was that the US government had agreed to loan Britain $3.5 billion – but only on condition that the pound sterling be freely convertible into US dollars. This resulted in all foreign governments, banks and individuals that were holding shaky British pounds using them to buy the almighty dollar. The fuel oil required by the GWR had to be purchased with the American dollar, and within days of lifting the wartime controls on sterling, the dollar was in very short supply in Britain – and dollars were required for other important imports such as food for the population and steel for the car industry.

On 20 August Attlee was forced – by the free market in currency draining Britain’s gold reserves – to revoke convertibility. The GWR had just then completed the conversion of three more locomotives to oil burning and these were the last. The process of re-converting to coal burning began in September and the last oil-burning locomotives on the GWR were re-converted in April 1950. The cost of constructing the oil-fuelling installations at the engine sheds totalled £127,938 but – wonderfully – all that cost was paid by the Ministry of Transport.

The GWR were not just short of locomotive power – at Paddington they were short of flesh-and-blood horse power. There were 216 horses stabled at ‘The Mint’ mews at Paddington and by mid-January 134 were off sick with influenza. The company’s vet was treating them and meanwhile motor lorries from other stations were brought in to continue Collection & Delivery (C&D) services.

At their January meeting the directors authorised expenditure of £578,100. This was for ninety new steam locomotives, comprising ten ‘Castle’ class for £106,700, ten ‘Hall’ class for £91,300, ten ‘Manor’ class for £88,300 and sixty small tank engines for £291,800.

The Company did not have the materials to start on this building programme in its entirety – the expenditure was authorised so that when they could get hold of some metals – which were expected to be acquired by 1948 – the work could go ahead at once. Also planned for 1948 was the construction of £244,000-worth of goods, wagons and 200 21-ton, locomotive coal-carrying wagons. Completion of a re-signalling scheme at Blaengwynfi was authorised at a cost of £138, and this improvement enabled the Blaengwynfi West signal box to be abolished. Other projects included the partial reconstruction of the rail-over-road bridges at Oxford and Reading stations, and £69,250 was allocated to repair the Landore and Chepstow viaducts, the latter costing £68,000. A house was purchased for renting to a station master, and electric lighting was installed at various places. The list of improvements is very long.

On the commercial side, the GWR continued to support the growth of industry within their territory. In January Viscount Portal opened the Welsh Industry Fair. Eighty-three firms attended and were visited by 39,000 people, resulting in £5 million-worth of orders being placed. The company leased their lands beside the railway for new industries in South Wales and around London. One hundred and fifty-seven sites had been sold during 1946, of which 118 were in South Wales. Factories built there were for producing tools, castings, glass bottles, tiles and concrete units. From Cowley, Oxford, Morris Motors sent away by rail 1,328 cars for export and 967 from the Austin works at Longbridge. The Gloucester Railway Carriage & Wagon Company sent off 135 tons of carriage underframes for the Sao Paulo Railway of Brazil. The Birmingham Railway Carriage & Wagons works at Handsworth sent away by rail thirty-three railway vans to Dover for Poland and Czechoslovakia. This was part of an order for 500, and they also sent 36 tons of steel tube.

The company prospected for traffic. The Mexican El Oro mining company set up a subsidiary called British Lignite which bought land around Bovey Tracey and Heathfield to quarry the brown semi-coal fuel, and the GWR were in great hopes of doing business there. The government was constructing, on the old RAF airbase at Harwell, the Atomic Energy Research Establishment and 8,000 tons of steel was on rail to Didcot for the building work. Local hauliers who had been acting as collection and delivery (C&D) agents for the GWR were bought-out regularly as indeed they had been for years before the war when the company set up their ‘Zonal’ road distribution network. In January Mrs Lewis, the GWR C&D Agent in Cardigan, sold her two lorries to the GWR for £624. Throughout 1947, with nationalisation getting closer by the day, the GWR developed their Zonal delivery system.

The Great Western’s gross income for the last three weeks of January was £2,374,000 which was £286,000 – 10.5 per cent – down on January 1946. Passenger traffic earned £187,000, down 15.34 per cent, general merchandise was down £141,000 (13 per cent), but coal haulage earned £42,000 more than in January 1946.8

I have the complete record for freight trains that ‘broke apart’ (partings or breakaways) for January. Sixty-two partings took place in the thirty-one days of the month. The frequency of these incidents must be due to years of poor maintenance of wagons and, especially, privately owned wagons. In the fifteen years I worked with trains on BR(WR), 1960–75, I only once experienced a coupling breaking: I actually saw it snap. A friend who worked on the Southern Region as a goods guard in the days of chain-link coupled wagons never experienced a coupling or draw hook breaking. Seventeen GWR wagons broke a coupling: eight were three-link couplings, one covered van had a stripped thread on a screw coupling, three had a broken drawbar hook (one of these was on a brake van) and five GWR brake vans had their ‘Instanter’ coupling break.

Twelve LMS wagons broke away: nine three-link couplings and three drawbar hooks broke. Six LNER wagons, working on the GWR, broke away, four due to a link breaking, and two due to a stripped thread. Twenty-six privately owned wagons broke couplings, had a hook break or a drawbar pulled out of the frame. One train parted because the link ‘jumped off the hook’. The owner of the wagon was not recorded.

Drawing of an ‘Instanter’ coupling copied from GWR General Appendix to the Rule Book 1936.

During the month there were the usual incidents of derailments due to passing a signal at danger, or misunderstanding a hand signal, or the signalman moving a set of points prematurely for a variety of reasons. These included pure mental aberration, or, because he could not see them and was waiting to move them, he misread the signs: a signalman in some circumstances had to listen and watch as best he could and interpret what he could see and hear, and then act accordingly. Sometimes he got it wrong.

At Honeybourne South Junction on 1 January the 3.30 Worcester–Paddington goods train was starting the climb of Honeybourne bank. There were seventy wagons hauled by engine 0-6-0 No 2884, with Driver Brown and Fireman Knibbs of Worcester, assisted in the rear by the Honeybourne banker, 0-6-0 No 2274 with Driver Brown, also of Worcester. A GWR ‘Fruit’ van from Evesham to Paddington, fitted with the vacuum brake and with the vacuum pipe connected to the engine, was coupled behind 2884. The pull of the engine and the weight of at least half the train behind – depending on how well the bank engine was doing its job on the gradient – proved to be too much for the worn thread. The nut was dragged off the thread and the driver was alerted to the breakaway by the very sudden acceleration of hard-working 2884, followed by a sudden stop as the vacuum pipes between engine and ‘Fruit’ van were pulled apart. The bank engine driver would have had a nasty shock as the whole weight of seventy wagons bore down onto his little engine. But breakaways were common enough between Honeybourne and Moreton-in-Marsh. The men were practised. When the train was stationary they used the tender’s coupling to re-couple to the ‘Fruit’ van and off they went – with just 12 minutes’ delay.

At 12.45 a.m. on 2 January the 10.25 p.m. (1.1.47) goods train, travelling from Worcester to Pontypool Road, was comprised of forty-six wagons hauled by LMS 2-8-0 No 8449. Driver Sale and Fireman Morris of Worcester were travelling on the Down Main, coming down the 1 in 90 descent from Colwall tunnel towards Ledbury. Approaching Cummings Crossing, the gradient changes to a short stretch of 1 in 124 uphill – but this was long enough to cause a tug which broke the drawbar on an ICI-owned wagon twenty-second from the engine. The guard realised at once and screwed down the brake on his 20-ton van, bringing the twenty-four rearmost wagons to a stand within the protection of Cummings Crossing’s signals. The signalman there sent seven bells – meaning ‘Stop & Examine’ – to Ledbury North, where the driver was informed that he had lost half his train.

The signalmen at Ledbury North End and Cumming’s Crossing ‘conferred’ and agreed how to clear the line. There was nowhere at Cummings to leave the defective wagon; it could not be pushed through to Ledbury because of the risk of another breakaway on the downgrade, and it could not be hauled to Ledbury because it had no drawbar.

The banking engine for the climb from Ledbury to Colwall was standing at Cummings and this was used to draw the rear portion through the crossover to the Up Main. The Ledbury signalman then set his crossover for the Up Main. He wrote out a Wrong Line Order ‘D’ permitting the driver of the front part of the divided train to return to Ledbury down the Up Main. The driver then ‘set back’ through the crossover, onto the Up Main, propelling his portion of the train uphill, through the tunnel, back to Cummings to meet against the rear part.

The bank engine could push the train up the 1 in 124 and on the 1 in 80 downgrade the train engine would hold the train under control. In this way, a very tricky, skilful, piece of driving, carried out in darkness, was accomplished. The wagon was put away in a siding at Ledbury by the bank engine and the train was re-coupled and went on its way.

On 2 January at 8.15 p.m. the shunters at Yeovil Pen Mill were working with the heavily delayed 8.40 a.m. Bristol East Depot–Weymouth goods train, hauled by No 5351. The train passed southwards through the station on the Down Main, stopped south of the Sherborne road bridge and whistled-up. The signalman pulled over point lever 31 and signal lever 32, and the buffers clashed and rang as the engine reversed its train into the goods yard.

The signalman was standing by, waiting to turn the points to shunt the train into the yard. He was in his box, which was at the north end of the station. It was dark, the island platform canopy prevented him from seeing what was happening, and there were no track circuit lights in his track diagram to show him the position of the train. He heard a whistle, took that to be his signal, and reversed the points, and derailed 5351, engine and tender. The whistle had come from another engine working at the north end of the station.

The signalman sent ‘Obstruction Danger’ – six bells – in both directions at 8.18 p.m. and then informed the Station Master. He set about organising single-line working over the Up line and the signalman called on Yeovil engine shed for the crane. Steam had to be raised in the crane which left the shed at 12.18 a.m. and arrived alongside the derailment at 12.23 a.m.

The breakdown gang had to separate the engine from the tender and then lift each back onto the rails. They worked all night and got the tender re-railed and struggled with the engine but it was well and truly ‘on Olde England’. A second crane was essential. The Bristol Bath Road crane was ordered at 9.50 a.m. on 3 January. Steam was raised and a hauling loco had to be found from scarce resources. The crane and tool vans left Bristol at 11.55 a.m. for the lengthy run to Yeovil arriving at 2.55 p.m. The engine and its tender were re-railed at 7.30 p.m.

On 3 January the 12.45 p.m. Bodmin Road–Wadebridge passenger train left for Bodmin at 12.50 p.m. Signalman Blake at Bodmin accepted the train at ‘Line Clear to the buffer stops’ although there was a horse box standing against the stops. The train consisted of two coaches hauled by No 5531, driven by Engineman Drew. Signalman Blake lowered all his signals when the train left Bodmin Road and 5531 had an uninterrupted run into Bodmin station. If Mr Blake, knowing that the line was not clear to the buffers, had brought the train nearly to a stand at his Home signal before lowering it, he would have corrected his earlier error.

The train ran in smartly and stopped in the platform, the coaches were uncoupled from the engine and the engine ran forward towards the buffers so as to get clear of the run-round points. The engine had to be at the other end of the train to continue the journey to Wadebridge. The fireman on the engine did not see the horse box standing a few yards ahead of his engine and neither did Driver Drew because he was looking backwards to see when the engine was clear of the points, and so he hit the wagon with a mighty thump. Signalman Blake had to take all the blame because he had made two signalling errors. He was ‘spoken to’.

On 26 January at 7.58 p.m. the 12 noon Oxley–Stoke Gifford goods train, consisting of forty-one, equal to fifty, wagons, hauled by No 6961, arrived in the lengthy Up Goods Loop just behind Honeybourne Station North Box. The engine had to be detached to go and pick up wagons for Stoke Gifford – these were standing in the Up Sidings adjacent to the Up Loop. The guard screwed down the handbrake in his van and pinned down the wagon brakes on the three wagons next to his van. The engine was uncoupled and went away. The weight of the train then overpowered the brakes (which had been applied) and started to run backwards due to the falling gradient. The signalman ran out of his box, aiming to pin down some more brakes but was unable to do so, because the wagons were moving too fast. He dashed back to his signal box and up the stairs, panicking and not thinking properly. The wagons would soon reach the end of the Loop where the lie of the points would bring them into a dead end where the rails were covered in sand in order to slow down and stop wagons for just this kind of eventuality. But he pulled lever 42, which changed the lie of the points to make a route into the Sheenhill military stores depot. The 20-ton brake van, wheels locked but driven by forty-one wagons and gravity, crashed through the closed iron gates and smashed into a line of twenty-three loaded wagons, resulting in the derailment and destruction of four, with five more damaged. When the brakes on the runaway train were examined they were all found to be screwed down, or pinned down – hard. This just goes to show what the force of gravity, namely the weight of forty-one wagons, can do.

At midday on Wednesday 29 January, what had been the coldest winter for years exploded into a blizzard of legendary proportions. The heaviest snow and the lowest temperatures since 1891 commenced in areas of the eastern counties of London and moved westwards, with increasing severity. The London Division was the least affected according to the report Mr Matthews sent to Sir James Milne on 3 February. Matthews noted that the water troughs at Aldermaston were solid ice and water columns at Newbury were frozen. Not even the Didcot–Newbury line, which must surely have been snowed under, got a mention.

In some hilly places railwaymen crawled on all fours up steep pavements to reach their workplace. In country areas they struggled through snow up to their waists to get to work. Signalmen, trying to follow their usual route, found they were walking on snow at hedge-top height – I am not exaggerating. Long piles of coal were lit between rows of engines standing outside sheds to keep the frost away. The hose between the engine and the tender, carrying water to the injector, froze as the engine moved along the track, lineside water columns froze, water troughs were either emptied or turned to solid ice, signal wires were frozen to their pulleys, and even where the point blades were kept free of snow their driving rodding was apt to become encased in ice.

Coal was the bedrock of the British industry and domestic wellbeing. Even before the blizzard began barely enough coal was being delivered to the power stations. There was a serious shortage of coal miners. Snow over South Wales began on 21 January, frequently preventing miners from getting to work on time. Not all miners could travel to work by train. They had to queue for buses and even their vital work did not guarantee them a seat. The buses had difficulty on the hills. Miners were walking home across snowy hillsides. Then the blizzard of Wednesday 29 January burst over southern and western England and Wales. In South Wales 200 collieries were blocked in and thousands of loaded coal wagons were buried under tons of snow on the colliery sidings of the Welsh valleys. From Wiltshire westwards through Dorset to Devon the railway was badly affected but the railway passenger service continued to operate longer than public service road vehicles. At 4 p.m. on the 29th, the part GWR-owned Devon General bus company had to suspend its service but at that time the railway was still operating. The blizzard condition continued until 7 p.m. that evening, when it eased to the condition of ‘very heavy snow’ and continued to fall heavily until 3.15 p.m. the next day. The Moretonhampstead, Brixham and Kingsbridge branch trains continued running until the end of services on the 29th.

The main-line trains were kept running by calling out every permanent-way man on the main lines and branches to keep points clear of snow. Men struggled from their homes to their stations through the pitch dark and the blinding snow, and then worked all through the night of the 29th until 4 a.m. keeping the points and signal wires free. Engines with steam lances were also used.9 The Plymouth Laira and the Newton Abbot snowploughs were used to clear the main line and then attended to the branches. The Brixham line was reopened at 8 a.m. on the 31st and the Moretonhampstead reopened at 10.10 a.m. that day.

At 3.15 p.m. on 31 January, the engine of the 3.25 Brixham to Churston was derailed by deep snow covering the coaling siding. The Newton Abbot breakdown crane was ordered at 3.35 p.m., arriving at 4.15 p.m., and the engine was ready for action at 5.30 p.m. – and all that time the snow was reported to be ‘falling heavily’. Three return trips from Brixham to Churston were cancelled and the roads were impassable for buses. The last two round trips of the day were run, 20 minutes late each.

Notes

1      See Appendix I.

2      National Archives Rail 250/63.

3Rail 250/482.

4      House of Commons, Hansard, vol. 432 cols. 228–9, 29 Jan. 1947.

5      A ‘full load’, unassisted, from Severn Tunnel Junction station to Patchway, for a ‘28xx’ class 2-8-0, was ‘40 Class 1’ – 400 tons. GWR Working Time Table.

6Rail 250/672.

7      See Appendix III.

8Rail 250/469.

9