by Geoff Body
About a fortnight later a stranger alighted on the platform from the train and came into the office. He introduced himself as from ‘Scientific Services at Alexandra Palace’ and produced from his briefcase the jagged glass neck of our pickle jar, complete with lid and label. ‘This was forwarded to us from Doncaster,’ he said. ‘Can you tell me what this once contained?’
FILMING GAFFER
Chris Blackman was twice a reluctant film-making aide and both times his reluctance proved well founded
The Willesden-area movements inspector’s duties covered all safety concerning line matters, attending emergencies and mishaps, visiting signal boxes and other locations and biennial examinations of signalmen and other grades. Additionally, investigation of train delays and irregularities, SLW and weekend engineering work were all part of the regular routine. I was never bored! The last line of the official list of my duties was ‘other duties as directed’, a wonderful catch-all as far as management was concerned.
Eric Ball, the area manager, sent for me one day to ‘direct’ one of those ‘other duties’.
‘We’ve got a film company who want to come and do some filming on a railway location,’ he said. ‘I’ve agreed that they can use South West sidings as there is no other activity in there during the daytime. Just keep an eye on them, make sure the sidings are secured, and that they don’t do anything silly. Oh, and by the way, Chris, I remember doing a few of these filming larks in the days when I was a DI – you can be sure of getting a nice fat tip. Good luck.’ With that he gave me the details and an instruction to ring the company straightaway.
The following week, as arranged, I turned out at 8.30 a.m., ensured that the sidings were secured out of use and an appropriate entry made and signed in the signal box before walking over to meet the film crew at the street entrance to South West sidings. Their plan was to film the pop star P.J. Proby singing one of his ditties whilst strolling along the sidings. I never bothered to ask them why!
The crew assembled all their kit, the make-up girls laid out their stuff on a table by the buffer stops, and we awaited the arrival of the star who rolled up in a limousine looking as though he had just got out of bed. While the make-up girls fussed around, the crew tried to lay out their little tramway for the camera. It wouldn’t fit properly along the siding track, so I sprang into action, having decided to be supremely helpful and to justify the handsome tip that Eric Ball had said was sure to come my way.
‘If you like I could arrange to get a platelayers’ trolley for the cameraman,’ I said. They agreed this would be more than welcome. I trotted off to fetch such a trolley, assembled it with assistance from the local p-way ganger at the top end of the sidings and pushed it gently down towards the buffer stops where Proby was still being attended to by gushing make-up girls. The camera crew were delighted. ‘Joe’ was deputed to push it and naturally I said I would help him, particularly as I would have to be responsible for stopping it in an emergency – well, at least chucking a sprag into the wheel.
By now it was mid morning and the summer sun was shining brightly. I removed my jacket, bottles of water were distributed to the crew and I was left in the dry!
Then the filming commenced. Music sounded – Proby’s latest hit, apparently – and the audio technicians announced they were satisfied everything was working OK. Proby took up position in front of the buffer stop and the cameraman fixed his camera on the trolley and climbed aboard. At the command ‘Take 1’, Joe and I started to push towards the other end of the siding and Proby’s latest hit could be heard all the way to Wormwood Scrubs. Remarkable voice I thought, before I realised that it was purely a recording and the great P.J. Proby himself, ambling along some 10yd behind me, was simply miming. After adjustments and several takes, the crew broke for their lunch and I dived out to the chippy; the sun by now was even hotter than the chips.
After lunch there were some more takes and Joe found a deputy, but I was left to sweat it out in the heat until the director announced he was satisfied. Proby went off in his limousine, the crew jumped in their van and I was left penniless to return the trolley and stow it next to the platelayers’ cabin.
Eric Ball thought the conclusion was hilarious. When he sent for me the following week he could scarcely keep a straight face. ‘We’ve had a message from that film company to say that they would like to do another day’s filming next Wednesday as the camera wasn’t working properly, and all the film has been lost.’
I remembered I had something else scheduled for Wednesday …
Some time later I was summoned to see Eric Ball for further direction. This time a different film company wanted to film scenes in a railway carriage the following Tuesday. Before I could utter a word Eric added that he had already checked to see that I had no other duties scheduled that day. I accepted with good grace that I had been outmanoeuvred! Eric handed me the papers and said that he had instructed Stonebridge Park Maintenance Depot to clean and prepare three coaches for the day.
When I turned up on the Tuesday, Stonebridge had done a splendid job on the three coaches placed at the buffer stops end of the siding and had clipped and scotched the entrance points to prevent any movement towards the vehicles. The coaches were a Tourist Standard Open (TSO) (sixty-four-seat second-class open), an FK (first-class corridor coach) and a BSK. Excellent, I thought, they will have the choice of first or second class and compartment or open saloon stock.
I met the crew, who turned out to be from an Italian film company. With the help of their interpreter I gave them a safety briefing, assisted them as they climbed up into the BSK, walked them through the train and then enquired where they wished to start. They looked aghast! There were mutterings to the interpreter – were there other coaches they could use? I explained that we had prepared coaches with a variety of layouts and classes from which they could choose something suitable. More mutterings, but much louder and with some irritation – clearly the coaches were not suitable.
In his relief signalman days, Chris Blackman discusses a train-regulating issue in the Willesden power signal box. (Chris Blackman)
What did they want? As a musician I have a little knowledge of Italian, but limited to what is found in music scores. It doesn’t include detailed descriptions of railway carriages and their suitability or otherwise. Fortunately the interpreter then called for silence and explained, with much gesticulating, what was wanted. This differed markedly from the brief I had been given. The company wished to shoot a scene from pre-war Italy involving three gangsters; well, three at the beginning of the scene and two at the end. To shoot(!) this scene in a convincing way meant having a vehicle that could pass muster as a 1930s Italian railway coach; in other words, ancient and grubby!
Further gesticulations pointed me to a vehicle on the stop blocks of the adjacent siding – an old mess coach with ‘Condemned’ painted on the side. This, they said, was just what they wanted. Clearly Stonebridge Park’s efforts were going to be wasted and I mused that whilst Mussolini may have made the trains run to time he had obviously made no impact on cleanliness of rolling stock. So we adjourned to the mess coach. After a couple of hours they had done enough takes – quickly achieved with much loud shouting in Italian and occasional gunshots from the sound-effects man, accompanied by liberal spraying of tomato ketchup. By lunchtime they were finished – presumably the afternoon would be devoted to a siesta – and after much handshaking and smiles all round they left, but not before the director’s sidekick had thanked me profusely in broken English and pressed a bundle of notes into my hand. I escorted them to the gate, went back to clear up but decided that the ketchup merged satisfactorily with the other detritus left by years of mess from weekend engineering work.
On the train back to Willesden, tired but with a sense of anticipation, I reached into my pocket to fish out and count the bundle of notes for half a day’s ‘work as directed’. It consisted entirely of Italian lira!
I didn’t tell Eric Ball.
QUIC
K THINKERS AND SLOW THINKERS
Ian Body described the different reactions of two Worcester area signalmen
Relief signalmen have always been a breed apart; able to work a wide variety of signal boxes and willing to accommodate highly irregular rosters, even to the point of sometimes being paid for travelling back from one shift while in fact already having started their next one. But, like any group of people, they varied in speed of thought, as two examples demonstrate.
In the first it was a Thursday night at Worcester Tunnel Junction signal box which, at the time, was one end of a midweek engineering possession, the other being further north at Droitwich. I was the pilotman and was waiting to accompany the next northbound service while the detonator protection was being undertaken by a dependable relief signalman – although not one normally known for his exertion.
At this stage the engineer had dug a sizable hole in the Up line running towards Worcester, so when we received an unexpected two bells for ‘Train Entering Section’ from Droitwich at the pilotman end our laidback relief signalman did two things. Firstly he looked at me to see if my face was suggesting I was thinking what he was thinking and then he leapt up, burst out of the door, flew down the steps and fled northwards through the tunnel to put detonators down and frantically wave a red light to stop the southbound freight service heading towards a hole certainly large enough to derail it. He achieved this aim, we propelled the service back towards Droitwich and he spent the rest of the turn in the signal-box chair. And I don’t recall him breaking into a trot ever again.
At the opposite end of the scale, I had cause to carry out a signal-box visit to Norton Junction where the line south to Bristol branches off the Worcester–Evesham–Oxford route. As I reached the top of the steps I could clearly hear the radio covering a cricket test match (it was understood by all that radios were not permitted in signal boxes, as it was seen as a distraction).
As I entered I saw that the relief signalman, an esteemed member of the trade union’s Sectional Council, had thrown his copy of the Daily Express over the radio in a decidedly slow-thinking solution to this perceived misdemeanour. What followed was a box inspection, a cup of tea and some discussion of differing opinions on union matters, all with the background noise of the test match and the pretence of there being nothing under the newspaper. While it seemed of dubious value to make a major issue of the matter at the time, a pointed stare made my attitude clear and this proved something that did lend the management ‘side’ some degree of leverage at future union meetings for a while.
YESTERDAY’S TOOLS, YESTERDAY’S SKILLS
A chance remark led Bryan Stone to reflect on former railway practices and equipment
In 1969 I was ordered by BR to go to Switzerland where I would spend twenty-five years developing container-freight traffic in company with railwaymen and women from all over Europe. So it was that when Roger Kreutz, a big, practical SNCF operations man from Strasbourg, came back from a meeting in Derby in about 1971 he sought me out.
‘Bryan,’ he said, ‘I couldn’t believe it; there were goods trains coupled only with chains and with no brakes.’ Yes it was so. Today I wonder just what we were doing.
Let’s start with the standard goods wagons; four-wheeled vehicles on a 10ft wheelbase with spindle buffers and a three-link coupling on the drawbar hook. There were flatbed, five and six-plank, metal-body and enclosed van varieties, all braked, not from the engine but by brake blocks actuated from a side lever applied by hand. Steep gradients would have a notice requiring these brakes on the wagons of a loose-coupled goods train to be pinned down by pulling down the lever and inserting a pin through a rack to hold the brakes on. The process would then have to be reversed at the foot of the incline.
Pinning down brakes often had to be done on the move when shunting. This involved running alongside the wagon and wedging the brake stick (a stout wooden baton about 3ft long) between the brake lever and the wagon spring and pinning it in position. Riding on the brake stick was forbidden, but often done.
Coal and similar bulk commodities were transported in loose-coupled trains whose wagons had what Roger had called ‘chains’ linking them. These were more properly three-link couplings with one end flattened so as to fit snugly on the wagon coupling hook. To couple up, a shunting pole was used to drop the outer link over the coupling hook of the adjacent wagon. Experienced guards and shunters could do wonders with these stout, wooden poles about 2in thick and 7ft long. At the end was a metal hook with a slight twist.
The actual coupling-up involved hooking the shunting pole into the end link of the coupling hanging from a stationary wagon and, as the next wagon approached, swinging the coupling up so that it dropped on to the hook on the moving one. The coupling was too heavy to lift, so swinging was needed with a well-timed twist to extricate the shunting pole. A miss meant the standing wagon moved away under the impact and having to ask the driver to close up again.
At Colwick yard one shunter brakes wagons heads into the sorting sidings while two others wait to do the same. (Bryan Stone)
Uncoupling was easier but also needed precise timing. You would rest your pole on the buffer casting – not the shank or the pole would get crunched as the buffer compressed – with the hook beneath the end of the coupling. Then, as the engine pushed and the coupling went slack, a tug on the pole’s outer end levered the coupling up and freed it to drop away. This meant that the uncoupled wagon was free to roll, which could be what you wanted if the points were set and the destination siding was clear. The handbrake could then be pinned down to hold it in place. If you forgot, and sometimes one did for there was a lot to think about, a wagon might set off on its own, bent on impact or finishing up in quite the wrong place.
Three link couplings had a lot of slack, with up to 3ft difference between taut couplings and the compressed buffers of closed-up wagons. On a sixty-wagon mineral train the total slack could amount to 180ft, and two people were acutely aware of this. One was the driver, who felt the slack taken up on starting and disappearing as wagons ‘buffered up’ on braking. The second was the guard, who also took careful notice of the slack, for as the locomotive gathered speed and its load gathered progressive impetus the guard’s van could be jerked into motion quite violently. Its occupant learned to listen to the slack being taken up and to brace himself!
There were many variations on this theme, including using the downhill energy of a train to help with the following climb and alleviating the consequences of a broken coupling, something that could easily result from ‘snatching’. In his 20-ton, four-wheel brake van the guard’s handbrake could not only help if a stop was required, or to hold a train in position, but it could be used to keep the couplings taut if the guard ‘knew the road’ and when to use it. It required great skill to work a loose-coupled train safely and cleanly.
Many wagons were in poor condition at this time. Even in the early 1960s some still had wooden frames and all were fearfully badly treated. By this time grease boxes were history, but oil axle boxes and journals were not above reproach. Trains were examined at stipulated places and the sound of the wheel-tapper’s hammer was a familiar one. He did much more, of course, especially with springs and running gear, dragging brakes and so on, and also minor repairs. Wagons could lose buffers, spring bolts or door fastenings, but most destructive were dry bearings. When the oil was low, a wagon would not get far before the bearing overheated and the ‘white metal’ surface melted. Soon the last oil would burn and the journal end in the bearing would get red hot, leaving a pungent trail of smoke and making an angry howl. If it was not spotted, a broken axle was highly possible and a derailment inevitable. Closing signal boxes at night in districts where stations were few, combined with old oil-box wagons and higher speeds, meant that hot boxes became a serious problem on some cross-country routes.
Not all trains were loose coupled. Increasingly there were fitted freights, with vacuum brake throughout their length, enabling the driver to run faster
and brake the train like a passenger train. A train divided as a result of a broken coupling meant that both parts came to a stop as the vacuum that held the brakes off was destroyed. Another variant was a partly fitted freight train – one with a ‘fitted head’ of vacuum-braked wagons behind the engine and the rest running unbraked and loose coupled.
One such train, an Up goods with a fitted head, was involved in a major freight-train pile up at Wood Green in June 1963. The rear end of the train was unusually heavy with several bogie-bolster wagons loaded with steel piles and some loaded steel hopper wagons, and these did not stop when the diesel engine D1509 did. Empty 6-ton, flat container wagons had been used to separate the steel-carrying bogie bolsters and cater for any overhang, one of which succumbed to the laws of physics and collapsed under the unsustainable pressure. The steel piles took off and became battering rams as they spread out on the adjoining platform of the station. Mercifully it was empty, but had one of the old wooden Quad-Art suburban coaches sets been there it would have been a disaster. As it was, the clearing up took two whole days.
To couple vacuum-braked wagons meant getting underneath to lift a heavy and dirty screw coupling and ensure the two vacuum pipes engaged properly. Even then there were often difficulties in maintaining the required vacuum pressure, but the dividends of more brakes acting on more wheels were high. One benefit was that some four-wheeled vehicles, lettered XP and carrying special traffics like fish, meat and livestock, could be attached to passenger trains. Valuable horses often travelled this way but such vehicles were not really meant for higher speeds and also required special arrangements to attach, detach and shunt them.