by Geoff Body
The divisional operating assistant at the time was the excellent operator Peter Rayner, who was especially supportive. He had taken charge of the accident site and undertaken extensive research with the engineers there, as well as at Wolverhampton power signal box and with all the staff of the various departments involved.
The cause, as concluded by my local departmental inquiry and confirmed by the IOs, was that the second of the red colour light signals had been passed at danger irregularly and that the EMU driver was responsible for this major accident. But why would an experienced driver do this? The reason could only be a matter for conjecture. Perhaps he was just anxious to recover lost time. Perhaps he might have misread the colour light signals ahead, as there was one some 700yd beyond the one he passed that was irregularly showing green. The IO recommended a change to the signalling interlocking to ensure that in such circumstances the signal should show a red aspect.
The IOs always had the benefit of the report of its departmental inquiry produced by BR, and these were always held very shortly after an accident and received by the HMRI before their own inquiries. The divisional operating superintendent or his assistant chaired these inquiries, supported by the divisional civil engineer, mechanical and electrical engineer and signal and telecommunications engineer. Their reports were extremely detailed and comprehensive, covering the evidence of the witnesses, its analysis and conclusions as to the cause of the accident and who was responsible for it.
My future association with the Inspectorate was somewhat limited – informally when I was at BR headquarters and also when I was divisional manger at King’s Cross regarding the plans for the electrification from Royston–Cambridge and Hitchin–Huntingdon. I also had the pleasure of some unofficial discussions with IO Major Peter Olver who, when I retired from BR, offered me the opportunity of joining the Inspectorate, which I had to decline because of other formal work commitments.
Working with the Inspectorate and its highly competent staff was for me, and I am certain to all my operating and engineering colleagues, a very fruitful, valuable and enjoyable experience.
LODGINGS AND DIGS
Many railwaymen in relief or similar jobs, Geoff Body among them, had to find accommodation away from home
Prior to moving to London when appointed as head of the cartage and terminals sub-section in the office of the London (suburban) district goods manager I had to find lodgings while the house hunting went on. How I came to lodge with a couple in Palmers Green I cannot now recall, but they were nice folk – she outgoing and motherly and he a bit severe (he became the head of a print chapel, a somewhat contentious business in those days). Each day I caught a train from Palmers Green to Gordon Hill and carried out a small ritual en route.
My landlady had, I thought, asked if I liked bread and butter pudding, which I did. But she was in fact asking about my regard for bread pudding, for which I had none. Thus it came about that instead of a favourite pudding with my evening meal I was handed a large, wrapped lump of bread pudding as I left the house each morning. Safely on board my regular train, down would come the carriage window and out would go the bread pudding. What the local lengthman made of this phenomenon I shall never know, but my landlady would have been heartbroken had I spurned her goodwill – or known what I was doing with it! Lesser of two evils.
On beginning my TA training I again needed lodgings and our local Methodist minister kindly offered to arrange something with his opposite number in Spalding, my first posting. The latter had clearly twisted the arm of a couple of maiden ladies who obviously did not relish my presence and, I suspected, bolted their doors and crossed themselves before retiring in the same house as this unwelcome visitor. Fortunately I got on well with the Spalding goods agent – an able, likeable man of classical tastes – and I was invited to move my lodgings to his home.
Next I was off to Whitemoor yard, which fixed me up nicely with the Brands – she a kindly soul, he a dedicated and skilled top link driver. They even provided me with a bicycle – essential for getting around the area, especially when on shifts. My hosts were used to us two men coming and going at almost any time – he to take up his rostered loco diagram and me to start an early, late or night turn.
The last lodge came with the advent of my Cambridge training period when, and again I cannot remember how, I finished up in the garret of an elderly couple, who were both pleasant but somewhat Dickensian in demeanour and lifestyle. Their pleasure and practice was to feed me promptly after I got in and then take what change they could from me in games of rummy in which they spared no quarter.
After training, I was posted as assistant stationmaster at Clacton and I was able to have my family in ‘digs’ with me for the summer season, marking the end of the ‘lodging’ years. Thousands of railwaymen had similar experiences while many others stayed nights in hostels as part of an overnight turn. Such places were rarely built for any real comfort but I did have the opportunity to acquire fifty-nine chamber pots when the guards’ hostel was closed during my time as assistant yardmaster at Temple Mills, Stratford. Properly planted they would have graced any garden.
BRITANNIA BRIDGE DRAMA
The dramatic 1970 fire on the bridge over the Menai Strait had many repercussions, as Brian Arbon relates
I had only been the assistant shipping and port manager at Holyhead for a few months when I took a phone call at home during the evening of Saturday 23 May 1970. It was from the shift manager at the port who said that there was smoke coming from the Britannia Bridge, which ran over the Menai Strait, and the Down mail train had been cautioned, but there was nothing to worry about.
BR shipping services and the railway ports had only recently been detached from railway regional control and combined into a new and separate Shipping and International Services division. Whilst it concerned us at Holyhead, a ‘minor’ fire on the railway was the responsibility of the divisional organisation at Stoke, not us. So I went to bed and slept undisturbed.
The next morning, Whit Sunday in those days, the fire was the first item on the national television news. Robert Stephenson’s wrought-iron tubular bridge, which had carried trains between Anglesey and the mainland since 1850, had been put out of service by a raging fire. How could a metal bridge burn so fiercely? Trains ran across the bridge in tubes, which were rectangular in section and fabricated from wrought-iron plates riveted together. These would not have burned but, to protect the flat tops of the two tubes, later engineers had built a pitched timber roof over the whole length of each tube. Even later engineers had periodically coated this with tar, allowing the flames to roar through the void beneath.
Despite the best efforts of the Caernarfonshire and Anglesey fire brigades, the bridge’s height and construction and the lack of an adequate water supply meant they were unable to control the fire, which spread all the way across from the mainland to the Anglesey side. The fierce heat caused the wrought-iron plates to expand and rupture at the rivet holes. This weakened the bridge and initially it was feared that the tubes might collapse into the Menai Strait below. It subsequently turned out that the fire was accidentally started by boys trying to smoke-out roosting pigeons.
An official LNWR illustration of Robert Stephenson’s original Britannia Bridge of 1850.
And to think I slept through all that! Once I took in the BBC News I hurried to the port to find that the overnight passengers to and from Ireland had been dealt with and things were at something of a standstill whilst everyone involved worked out what to do next.
The wires must have been buzzing between our shipping division in London and the railway divisional office in Stoke and all levels above, but for the next few hours I fielded calls from one journalist after another wanting to know what we were doing and intended doing.
The immediate first move was to transfer the Dun Laoghaire passenger ships to operate from Heysham and divert the London boat trains there. This was not so long after the Beeching Report and, given the obvious huge cost of rep
airing the bridge, the immediate fear of the strongly unionised workforce was that the railway across Anglesey might be closed for good and employment at Holyhead greatly reduced. So they wheeled out their big guns.
The local MP, Cledwyn Hughes, was Minister of Agriculture and in the Cabinet. His constituency agent was a member of our clerical local departmental committee (LDC). Three of the four members of the dockers’ LDC were town councillors and two of them were also county councillors.
That Sunday they were also busy planning. A very high-powered visit to the bridge was organised for the next day, Whit Monday, with three Cabinet ministers present. George (‘Order! Order!’) Thomas, Secretary of State for Wales, and Fred Mulley, the Minister of Transport, flew in to nearby RAF Valley; I’m not sure whether Hughes came with them or was already home for the weekend. My boss, the shipping and port manager, was ordered to be there as part of the welcoming party but later found it impossible, in his venerable Wolseley, to keep up with the police-escorted high-speed convoy on the way back to Holyhead.
A ‘town meeting’ had been hastily arranged for the evening at the British Railways Staff Association (BRSA) Club and the National Union of Railwaymen branch chairman was able to assure everyone in the packed hall, to great acclaim, that there had been conversations with Downing Street (where Harold Wilson was destined to have just nineteen more days in office). The bridge would be repaired and as a result Holyhead’s future as a railway port was guaranteed. In such secretive ways are major decisions often taken, but at least we knew where we stood.
Holyhead, and indeed Anglesey, was cut off from the rest of the railway network system for over a year and a half until the bridge reopened as a speed-restricted single line on 30 January 1972. Early on during that period the stranded locomotives were taken back to the mainland on low-loader lorries. They passed close in front of the Edinburgh Castle pub, just outside the dock gate, to the shocked amazement of one late-lunchtime drinker who staggered out just as a main-line diesel passed right in front of him!
The Irish passenger services continued to operate at Heysham, but the car ferry was unaffected, as Anglesey still had one mainland connection over Telford’s suspension bridge, which opened for horse-drawn traffic in 1826. In an effort to retain as much rail traffic as possible, cattle and containers were moved by road over this vulnerable link to improvised railheads at Menai Bridge and Caernarfon where, fortunately, the redundant tracks had not been lifted. I was able to walk across the main bridge on top of the tubes and saw for myself just how much damage had been done by such a relatively trivial action.
Meanwhile, at Holyhead, a major project to introduce an ISO container service across the Irish Sea was under way. The plan was to build a new berth with two ship-to-shore container cranes and an adjacent Freightliner terminal, also with two cranes. This was to be the principal transfer location between the new port terminals in Dublin and Belfast and the Freightliner depots at Willesden, Birmingham and Manchester Trafford Park. The maritime link would be provided by two new cellular container ships: the MV Rhodri Mawr and the MV Brian Boroime.
The enforced lull in activities enabled us to reorganise and retrain the staff as crane and lorry drivers to operate the whole shebang. Quite a few who did not feel up to these new tasks took voluntary redundancy. We also used this slack time to invite Freightliner staff from the terminals we would be serving to come and see us and get to know the people they would be in daily communication with once the Britannia Bridge reopened.
To celebrate the reopening, the first mail boat to sail back into Holyhead was greeted by fireworks and the town band at 12.15 a.m., with a temperature of -10 degrees, the spittle freezing in the musicians’ instruments as they waited to strike up; a rather different extreme to the bridge inferno.
ANGLIA TRAIN PLANNERS
Chris Blackman’s search for timetable information revealed just how knowledgeable train planning staff could be
As operations planning manager for the Anglia Region, I soon discovered that the train planning staff there were a knowledgeable crew. Chris Hurricks was the principal timetable planner for the Liverpool Street–Norwich main line and branches, which included the line to Harwich (‘for the Continent’); indeed, his encyclopaedic knowledge seemed to stretch right across Europe as well.
Late one Friday afternoon I was clearing my desk in preparation for a week’s holiday in the Jura, and had it in mind to take the family for a day trip to Geneva in Switzerland and possibly up a mountain rack-railway line. I went to consult the Cook’s European timetable kept in one of the office cupboards, only to find it was locked. I looked around at the handful of staff still in the office.
‘I want to consult the Cook’s timetable. Has anyone got the key?’
‘Terry has, but, oh, he’s on leave this afternoon.’
Then, from the far end of the office, Chris Hurricks sidled up to me. ‘Can I help?’
I explained briefly what I wanted to know. Chris contemplated for a moment, and then advised that, if we were staying in the Jura, rather than drive to Geneva, it would be better to drive to the station at Nyon which was on the main line from Geneva and had plenty of car-parking spaces. From there I could catch one of the trains that ran every half-hour to Lausanne. Alternate trains went on to Montreux from where I could change to the narrow-gauge rack-and-pinion line up the Rochers-de-Naye mountain. At Montreux, he explained, the change would be easy to do because the narrow-gauge trains went from an adjacent platform. Moreover, I would not need to go up to the booking hall as there was a very convenient ticket office for the narrow-gauge trains on that very platform. He added that trains ran up the mountain every hour, with a connection off the train from Nyon. For good measure he gave me details of the time of departure of the direct train from Nyon to connect with the narrow gauge. Finally, he told me, quite accurately as it turned out, the price of coffee at the station at the top of the mountain.
This was twenty-five years ago – information provided quicker than I could have obtained today from the Internet. Never underestimate quiet professionalism or the degree and breadth of staff knowledge!
A LESSON TO BE REMEMBERED
Jim Dorward tells of a derailment that contained some valuable lessons
It is Thursday 13 March 1958. I am with a very experienced permanent-way engineer on the 8.21 a.m. from Perth to Edinburgh (Waverley) via Kinross Junction, travelling as far as Dunfermline (Lower) where we will change on to another train to travel further up the line to Inverkeithing.
My companion points out that this arrangement enables our original train to run through Inverkeithing without a stop, giving it a good run at the 1 in 70 rising gradient between there and the Forth Bridge. He adds that the value of this piece of train planning was underlined by an incident on Sunday 7 March 1954 when he and others from the Perth district engineer’s office were involved in the matter of a serious accident on the gradient.
The accident involved Class A4 4-6-2 No. 60027 Kingfisher while in charge of ‘The Aberdonian’ – the thirteen-coach 6.55 p.m. Aberdeen–London (King’s Cross). On this occasion the engine had considerable difficulty in battling with the gradient. Inside North Queensferry Tunnel, with the A4’s driving wheels spinning, the driver thought his train was moving forward slowly, but this was only an impression – the tunnel being full of noise and smoke – it was, in fact, almost stationary. The noise in the confined space must have seemed horrendous, making it extremely difficult to make a judgement about progress. Then, unknown to the driver, with the driving wheels still spinning, the heavy train actually started to move backwards down the gradient towards a set of catch points just outside the tunnel mouth. These points were, of course, there to deal with any runaway and thereby prevent a collision with another train.
The engineer then got to the reason behind his story. He said that the track had been renewed during an ‘Engineer’s Possession’ of the line, resulting in two significant features. First of all, the slightly curved top of
the new bullhead rails gave a smaller contact area, about the size of a thumbnail, under each of the A4’s six driving wheels, giving lower than normal adhesion. This was exacerbated by the loss of momentum when the train had braked slightly for the 20mph temporary speed restriction covering the new track. Secondly, the catch points had been clamped in the non-derailing position during the renewal work. After the clamps were removed, the slide chairs had to be cleaned and oiled before the line was reopened to traffic.
Probably as a result of the last coach of ‘The Aberdonian’ passing through the catch points in the normal direction at less than walking speed, and before the train started to slide back, the spring in the catch points was not strong enough to return the switch blades completely to the derailing position. Consequently, when the leading bogie of the now-slipping train returned to the points, this time in the facing direction, it was able to slip through a small gap between the switch and stock rails, thereby failing to head towards the buffer stop at the end of the short catch siding and remaining on the main line instead.
The North Queensferry Tunnel incident. (Jim Dorward)
The passage of this leading bogie must have nudged the spring into full operation, causing the second bogie to take the route into the siding. Not surprisingly, with the coach now moving along two different routes, a significant derailment became inevitable, and duly occurred, involving the last three coaches of the train.