Life on the Old Railways

by Tom Quinn

THE BLOOD

  JIM McCLELLAND

  DRIVER ON THE LONDON MIDLAND & SCOTTISH RAILWAY

  Between them, half a dozen members of Jim McClelland’s family completed 361 years of railway service; his own career lasted forty-eight years. ‘My father and grandfather were railwaymen,’ he recalled, ‘and my father’s seven brothers were all railwaymen.’ And so were Jim’s wife’s family; her father had the job of filling the seat warmers, tin cans of hot water placed under the seats in the days before technology made such work redundant.

  ‘My father started work in 1909, working for what was then known as the Portpatrick and Wigtown Joint Railway Company; that was long before the Glasgow and South West took over, and then the LMS. The line was always known as the Old Paddy because it ran the boat train to Stranraer.’

  Jim was born at Newton Stewart near Stranraer. He left school aged fourteen, in 1944, and despite his long family connections with the railway he got his first job in road transport. ‘There were lots of jobs going and not enough people to do them, and the first one I liked the sound of was as a lorry boy; but it was an absolute dead end of a job,’ he recalled. After that shaky start his father suggested he get a job cleaning engines at Newton Stewart.

  Jim’s father had been a porter signalman, and his grandfather a ganger and platelayer, whom Jim still remembers: ‘Old Sam was a grand chap, a real old-timer who would have started on the railways in the 1880s, I believe. And his father – my great-grandfather – actually helped build the first railways. It was a family story that great-grandfather had helped build the Cree Viaduct foundations: they used sheep’s wool which was apparently just the thing for creating firm foundations in boggy areas.’

  On Jim’s first day at Newton Stewart he already knew most of the other lads. His pay was just 38 shillings a week: ‘That was for a cleaner, but it was a hell of a job, more like heavy labouring with a bit of cleaning thrown in! I remember moving these absolutely filthy coal boxes – they weighed about ten hundredweight each, and all we had to help us was a hand-crane. Dirtiest job you can imagine. You swung the boxes up over the loco driver to the fireman who tipped the contents into his tender.’

  When Jim’s career started, cleaners were not allowed any firing turns on mainline trains till they were seventeen, but they were allowed to fire on branch lines. ‘I can remember the very first engine on which I fired,’ says Jim. ‘It was No 17375 and it was a very old engine indeed. It had a big old brass handle to put the water on. You had to be careful with the water pressure on this one, because if it got too high and there was a blow-off you then found you couldn’t get the injector on. It was just a peculiarity of that old engine.’

  Jim’s first firing turn came about as a result of another man’s misfortune: a regular fireman had been hurt and Jim was chosen to fill in for him. This was on a branch line, and he was firing for an elderly driver who clearly wasn’t that impressed by his new companion: ‘As luck would have it, on my very first day the flippin’ injector got stuck and I remember that old driver slapped my hand and said, “I’m like a schoolteacher to you”. He showed me what to do from then on. The problem with the injector was that I was trying to be too quick.’

  By tradition the driver always stood on the left-hand side of the footplate and the fireman on the right, but for Jim, a right-handed fireman, this meant working in an awkward position; however, it was something he simply had to get used to. He also had to get used to the rigid demarcation within the ranks of the engine cleaning staff: ‘When you were cleaning an engine there was a system to it. The senior cleaner did the tender, the next man down in terms of seniority did the boiler, and the most junior did the motions, which of course was the dirtiest job of the lot. Just after the war, when I was about sixteen, there was a great shortage of men, and this meant that even as a junior cleaner I was working at the same level with men who’d come back from fighting and were maybe twenty-five years old. This was a situation that had never really existed before on the railway, and some men found it difficult to cope with.’

  After a few months Jim was made redundant at Newton Stewart, and was posted to Stranraer where he was to remain for eight months during 1947. He then returned to Newton Stewart and worked there until 1955 when the shed finally closed; Jim moved to Carlisle where he was to remain for the rest of his career.

  ‘Newton Stewart was really just a sub-depot to Stranraer, although there were twenty staff – drivers, firemen, cleaners and a foreman who was a trained fitter. It was a small shed with some very old engines, whereas Stranraer was much bigger, with bigger engines to match. The engines at Newton Stewart were what were called Cale jumbos, that is, small locomotives used largely for freight and local passenger work. At Stranraer, Black 5s were used for the boat train to Glasgow and for journeys between Stranraer and Carlisle.

  ‘I couldn’t afford digs when I started work in Stranraer, so I travelled back and forth each day from my home at Newton Stewart. The lads I worked with were very helpful, and they juggled their shifts so that I was able to live at home and commute. That was what I always found about railway work, that people were always incredibly helpful. Anyway, I used to leave home at 4.30am and I wouldn’t get home again until 3.30pm the following day. To be honest, but for pressure from my dad I think I’d have left, because those journeys from Newton Stewart to Stranraer on top of a long day’s work were too much for me. I had no social life at all.’

  Despite these sometimes shaky early years, Jim was soon firing regularly, and he was becoming aware of the special role of fireman and driver in an industry that relied entirely on skills and experience: ‘A good fireman was aware that every locomotive had its own individual characteristics. Just take the variations in firebox design as an example – some locomotives had sloping fireboxes, others had long ones; the Duchess class had a very wide firebox and it was always the devil to fire it from cold.’

  The cleaners at Stranraer and Newton Stewart did the fire-raising: ‘We used small split sticks, just like you’d use at home on the fire, to get the thing going. At the small shed at Newton Stewart this was always a bit of a nightmare, because it always seemed to be freezing and there were no lights; you just had a lamp with a burning rag as a light, and with all the smoke, visibility was virtually nil. When the drivers arrived at twenty-past five in the morning you were expected to have got the pressure in the engines up to about 801b. The fireman who was to go out with the driver would then spend an hour really getting the fire going and the pressure up.’

  According to Jim, the locomotive men were always close, and friendships that were forged in these early days lasted a lifetime. Also the bonding seemed much stronger than it ever was in the days of diesel when, as Jim remembered, you were much more of a technician: ‘On steam you were part of a team, and even today when an old driver dies round here you can be sure the cemetery will be packed to capacity because old friends from all over get to know and turn up to pay their last respects.’

  Retired railwaymen in the Carlisle area, where Jim lived in retirement, kept in regular contact. When Jim retired, six other Carlisle men retired at the same time, and the little group met every month for years.

  ‘We always discussed the old days,’ remembered Jim. ‘Anyone listening to us would think we were mad as we even discussed the coal we used to use. But it was fascinating for us because in the old days every area had a different kind of coal, and you soon got to know where good coal was used and where bad. At Leeds we always got very good coal, but it was the sort of coal that expanded when burning so you had to be careful not to put too much on the fire. Sometimes you got another type of coal that burned well but didn’t last long. Coal, like the engines that burned it, had its own unique character.

  ‘When I fired on the Duchesses from Glasgow the coal was so poor I was shovelling all the time – you couldn’t stop for a minute, but of course every time you opened the firebox door you lost heat, so it was a bit like filling a bucket with a hole in the bottom: the faster yo
u fill, the quicker it runs out the other end. On the Duchess class the firebox had a useful flap that came halfway up the opening, so when you opened the door only part of the fire was exposed to the air and you could shovel the coal over the top of the flap. There was definitely an art to firing, and that art varied according to the engine you were on – even drivers sometimes missed their firing days, so much so that they’d insist on taking a turn with the shovel when they no longer had to.’

  By 1947, just a year or so after starting at Newton Stewart, Jim was a passed cleaner; but such was the shortage of men that he was firing virtually every day. After 365 turns he was given a pay rise; it then took four years before he got to the top fireman’s rate of pay. Throughout this period he was learning new routes and going through the meticulous procedures used to ensure that a man really did know what he was about: ‘All drivers were given a route card and asked to sign it – and woe betide you if you signed to say you knew the route and then there was an accident and it transpired that you didn’t really know the route well enough. In practice that never actually happened because no one would be mad enough to say they knew a route when they didn’t. If there was the least mishap there would be an enquiry and that card would be evidence.’

  In other respects the system used peer pressure to make sure the men were kept up to the mark. Drivers didn’t want their firemen to fail as drivers, for example, because failure was a reflection on them. To prevent this sort of problem arising they made sure the fireman had enough experience to get him through: ‘Drivers would let you have a go when you were a fireman – I had a go at driving while I was still a fireman, though always under the supervision of an experienced man, so it was always safe. To get ahead quickly it was also a good idea to sign up for a number of routes; that way you got a lot more driving turns, and eventually, when you’d done enough turns, more money.’

  Like many railwaymen, Jim was helped enormously by what were known as ‘mutual improvement classes’, where men who were already drivers would lecture on a variety of subjects, from the vacuum brake to the rules and the motion-work. It was up to each individual whether he attended these classes or not, and it was in their own time and entirely unpaid; but the inspectors always knew if a particular man had been attending, and you couldn’t pass up the ranks without being passed by the inspector: ‘He would test you on all the rules and regulations, and he was always very thorough. He took you on the footplate, asked you all about the layout, how the vacuum brake worked, how one should react in an emergency – they were all incredibly rigorous.’

  And it was the inspectors who had to pass the old steam drivers on the new diesel trains, as Jim recalled: ‘Some of the older men were terrible when it came to learning to drive diesel – you could see the look of despair on their faces. Their lives had been so tied up with steam that they could make nothing of this new-fangled system. Some adapted, but many left. And it didn’t matter that the new cabs were cleaner and more comfortable than the old footplate. It didn’t matter that a steam train driver’s work was very dirty work indeed.’

  As a driver, Jim worked routes all over the north west – down through Cumbria and on to Leeds in the south, and up to Stranraer in the north. He also worked with many drivers, and as he recalls, drivers were nothing if not individualists: ‘I remember working as a fireman with drivers who would never talk to you when the train was going in one direction, but would chat quite happily if it was going in the other direction. One old driver was particularly bad for this sort of thing; he’d never say a word on the way to Glasgow, but he’d talk you to death in the pub when we got there and stayed overnight – and then not a word again, on the return journey. But I can’t remember hearing about a single instance of animosity between a driver and a fireman – you just couldn’t afford not to get on with each other. A lot of people forget, too, that knowing a route meant more than knowing the gradients and signals and so on; you also had to know, for example, how many wagons you could get on a loop if you had to wait there for a signal.

  ‘A lot of my work once I moved to Carlisle was between Carlisle and Glasgow; we covered this area by a number of routes, and if you didn’t know a particular route you’d ask for a conductor to go with you.’

  When Jim was a young man it took years to be passed for driving mainline trains, but the rewards could be substantial: ‘Any routes that involved more miles than you were expected to do normally meant you were paid a mileage rate, and this meant you got extra money. London is a classic example – if you had two driving turns to London a week from Carlisle you’d earn £17, and in the 1950s that was a good bonus, a fireman’s weekly wage at the time being £9 9s. As a result there was a lot of competition to get the work.’

  Learning from more experienced men was excellent training, which may explain why there were so few mishaps in the steam days. But one incident involving the Earl of Tay’s engine, the Great Marquess, always amused Jim: ‘The earl wanted to see it before it was finally taken out of service at the end of the steam period, so it was brought up from the Severn Valley and we waited for it at a place called Long Preston. Water had to be put on it here, from a bridge. I kept my eyes open for the water tanker but it never turned up. So we asked a policeman to get the fire brigade out to supply us – and it cost a fortune!’

  Jim worked the Mallard, a record-breaking train, from Newcastle to Carlisle on one occasion (as the traction inspector) and remembers how shocked he was when he spotted a man lying on the tracks ahead of the train: ‘We were just coming into Prudhoe when I saw him, and there was no way I could have stopped the train in time; but as we got near him he just casually rolled off the track, and we saw he’d been taking photographs! On another occasion we were on a special from Skipton to Carlisle – there’s a long drag there, and if you get through the second bridge on this bit you know you are going to make it. But before we got there we started to slip, so we walked in front and put sand on the line by hand before running back and jumping on again. I remember the poor old fireman wasn’t quick enough and he had to jump onto the first coach! That was on the Steam Special at the end of the steam era.’

  In 1960 Jim fired on the royal train to Stirling; he was carefully vetted in advance, and he can remember the secrecy with which the whole thing was conducted, including the selection of the drivers: ‘They really were very careful, but then I suppose they had to be. All I can remember about firing on the royal train was how easy it was – you had the very best coal, the best engine and a completely clear route. For my one stint I got ten shillings and a letter personally addressed to me from the Queen’s office thanking me for my efforts.’

  By 1981 Jim was an instructor for diesel and electric engines in the training schools, and by 1986 he was a full inspector. However, like most steam-train drivers, he always looked back with affection on those vanished days: ‘Diesel,’ he recalled, ‘is as good as steam in the practical sense, but there’s no sense of achievement with it. Steam didn’t end, up here at Carlisle, until 1963; I was on the second last steam train to leave the station, and the last was the old boat train to Stranraer.’

  Jim was involved in a very bad crash at Kilmarnock in the 1950s. He was firing for a driver who missed a signal, and two locomotives ended up smashed into each other and leaning dangerously over the edge of a bridge. The fireman on the other train was badly hurt, but Jim escaped virtually unscathed. Nevertheless, for every bad memory Jim had a thousand happy ones, as he recalled: ‘My best memories are of the first time I drove to Stranraer, which is a lovely route, and of my first driving turn on a big sleeper. That was a great responsibility – I remember it was the 6222 Queen Mary. The first driver had picked up the train in London, but they changed crews to take it from Carlisle to Glasgow. Another great memory is of the times I drove to Newton Stewart while my dad was in the signal box there.

  ‘I remember, too, when one of the Cockney lads – that’s what we always called the London drivers – brought a train up and stopped under t
he bridge here at Carlisle with all four safety valves ready to blow. The engine was full of water and the pressure mounting, and it was only a few inches from the valve to the underside of the bridge. Heaven knows what would have happened if she’d blown while she was in that position – as it was we moved her forward and out from under the bridge with seconds to spare.’

  But at the heart of all Jim’s memories were the demands of the engines on which he worked for so long, and the skills required to work them: ‘Just take the regulations for stopping. For a big old steam engine these were very different from those that would apply to a light, modern engine – the steam engine might take a couple of miles to stop, depending on the conditions and the experience and skill of the driver, and there was no dead man’s handle in those days. A modern train would probably stop in half that distance. Also, I knew of several instances where the driver keeled over and passed out, but luckily the fireman was always there to take over and bring the train to a stop.’

  Musrooms in the Tunnel

  There is another less necessary article of food than meat, which the North British Railways deals with in wholesale quantities, and that is mushrooms. It comes about in this wise. The old Edinburgh, Perth and Duildee line got into Waverley by a tunnel under St Andrews Square and Princes Street.

  It was about three quarters of a mile long and the gradient so steep as to necessitate the employment of a stationary engine. Of late years a detour out to the east has avoided the gradient and the tunnel has been abandoned. Two years back an ingenious Person conceived the idea of leasing the tunnel and growing mushrooms – the railway company were not too exacting about terms a9s they knew they would be paid to carry the materials for the hotbeds in and the mushrooms out. When I was there one bitter cold day last March, I found a huge fire of anthracite burning just inside the lower mouth of the tunnel. In this way the chill was taken off the air as it entered the tunnel. What used to be the up line is kept clear for mushroom beds. I learned that at the time of my visit in March the French growers had not yet got their produce into the market and that the Edinburgh Mushroom company could obtain 1 shilling to 1 shilling and ninepence a pound and even at that price had more orders than they were able to execute.