None this had any appeal to Beerbohm, who preferred the idea of life in a caravan; as he pointed out, at least you could then be sure that your residence was not the one in which the Balcombe Tunnel murder was committed. But thousands disagreed, and they came increasingly from further down the social scale. The time between the wars was the heyday of shacks and plotlands everywhere, before the Town and Country Planning Act of 1947 made it illegal to set up such settlements without official permission. Cabins and bungalows could be bought in kit form, but how much easier to start with a cheap but sturdy oak-framed carriage body. Encouragement came from articles in magazines such as The Woodworker, which showed how they could be adapted. The Sussex coast was especially favoured, partly because its railways had plenty of spare carriages displaced by new electric trains. At Lancing an entire holiday park was cobbled together from carriage bodies with little built-on porches, since boringly replaced by static caravans. Larger homes could be made from two bodies placed side by side under a shared roof, or even raised up to form a second storey, as at Sutton-on-Sea in Lincolnshire. Many owners also chose to add pitched roofs, lean-tos and verandas, and these survivors are not so easy to spot. Some of those at Dungeness give themselves away only by a humped or double-humped outline to the roof.
Carriage bodies were relocated inland too. The Great Western donated one to its Methodist stationmaster at Challow in Berkshire for use as a chapel, whereupon it was re-equipped with pews and two harmoniums. One of the most poetic survivals sits behind a thick roadside hedge at Shirwell in the hills of north Devon, masked in corrugated iron. This carriage was one of a group built by the Great Western to enhance its royal train in the Diamond Jubilee year of 1897. Its social decline began with demotion to ordinary first-class use, followed in 1933 by the sale of its body to a skittle club for £28. Stripped of its compartments and given a new floor, benches and oil lamps, the carriage was ready to receive visiting teams. But many of the finishes and fittings were left gently alone, from gleaming gilded mouldings to the frail silk pulls of the window blinds. In 1984 this royal body became one of the handful to win official protection as a listed structure.
Still more common, though harder to find than they used to be, are the bodies of goods vans. If every wooden-bodied carriage was a chalet in waiting, a goods van made a cheap and sturdy garden shed, or farm store – farmers being one of their steadiest customers. Among them was the Pennine smallholder Hannah Hauxwell, the subject of television documentaries in the 1970s and 1980s. The second of these films, Too Long a Winter (1989), ends with the outdoor auction of Hannah’s farmstead, including ‘the body’; the crowd of sharp-eyed Yorkshire farmers know what the auctioneer is talking about. Without the magic ingredient of home ownership, van bodies were less likely to be looked after in their new locations. The corner of many a field contains one of their rusting skeletons, the planking having rotted away from the lightweight steel frame.
Being smaller than carriages, van bodies could be transported even further from the railway network. One did duty for some years as a bothy, two-thirds of the way along the punishing final stage of the Pennine Way, its only cargo an unappealing stash of dried emergency foodstuffs left behind by walkers about to re-enter the domain of real food. Van bodies have even made it to the rail-less Scottish islands, that empire of outdoor abandonment; one may be seen peacefully disintegrating by the roadside on Hoy, southernmost of the Orkneys. This example came from a standard Southern Railway van, built probably at Ashford in Kent, where many of the Dungeness carriage bodies also originated.
The evolution of railway track towards the continuously welded, concrete-sleepered type has reduced the burden of maintenance on the permanent way. Many procedures have been mechanised, and tasks that once took hundreds of man-hours can now be managed swiftly by means of specialist rail-mounted machinery. Working from the parallel track, the ‘Slinger 3’ train introduced in 2002 can raise 900ft of old track in a single lift under the charge of a single operator and collect and place the replacement sleepers and rails ready for welding and fixing. Other machines ensure that the tracks are correctly aligned and the ballast repacked (‘tamped’) under the sleepers, by means of retractable vibrating probes. These tamping machines have a long history, with Switzerland and Austria in the forefront of their development. Even in 1948, when public spending on imports was minimal, British Railways was permitted to buy twelve Matisa tamping machines from Switzerland, as 60,000 permanent-way staff struggled to catch up with wartime arrears of maintenance.
New generations of these self-propelled, ungainly looking, bright yellow or yellow-ended maintenance machines can be seen at rest between duties in sidings and yards up and down the network. Like the combine harvesters that came into general use in the early post-war years, they have displaced a great deal of labour – a valuable saving at a time when shortages among the track gangs led to the recruitment of workers from Italy, as well as the continued use of female labour, as in wartime (nearly 500 women were still busy on the tracks in February 1952). Track of the traditional kind composed of bullhead rails, held in cast-iron chairs by means of wooden keys, demanded careful tending if it was to remain safe for fast, intensive working. Keys needed particular attention: by natural shrinkage these gradually lost their grip, allowing the rails to creep forward in line with the direction of travel of the trains. The remedy was to thump them back in place, or to renew them as necessary. The bolts securing each fish-plate were checked for tightness too, and pointwork received especially careful scrutiny. All such joints and points needed regular lubrication, as did the felt pads fixed by the track to smear oil or grease on the wheels of trains as they approached tight curves. Heavier work included levering (or ‘slewing’) tracks back into their correct alignment, the packing or tamping of the ballast firmly under the sleepers and swapping the position of rails to even out wear. All of this was achieved purely by muscle-power, applied via crowbar, shovel, pick, wrench and hammer.
The larger the railway company, the more complex the organisation required to manage the track. The Engineering Department of the Great Western was divided into eleven territories, each with between 250 and 450 miles of route to look after, within each of which were between 500 and 1,000 track-miles. Every division was composed of separate districts under the charge of a permanent-way inspector, each comprising some ninety miles of track, from main lines to sidings. The work was undertaken by around fourteen gangs per division, composed of a ganger, subganger and a varying number of lengthsmen or platelayers, whose ‘length’ worked out at an average two and half miles of route, or six miles of track.*** Awards were often made for the best-kept lengths, as though they were villages. Every day, each ganger or sub-ganger was required to make a walk of inspection along the entire length. Heavier work required the delivery and removal of materials by train, and the assembly of larger gangs: the Great Western allowed twenty-four men in order to lift one standard 60ft rail. Such trains might include a mess carriage and sometimes even bunks for overnight stays in remote places.
To help identify locations along the line, the permanent way was (and still is) divided by posts of timber, cast iron or inscribed stone, placed at every quarter-mile. These were made compulsory by statute in 1845. Henry Cole, always quick on the uptake, incorporated them in the diagrammatic Railway Charts which he published for sale to travellers around this time. The mileposts took many different forms, and it does not take much railway travelling to spot some of these even now. Where the fractions of miles are not shown, the posts use may dots, triangles or bars to indicate how many quarters should be added to the round figure. The North Eastern Railway’s territory can be identified by means of its rather fierce-looking quarter-mile posts with one, two or three triangular spurs around their cast-iron heads. The zero-point for measurements may still derive from nineteenth-century boundaries between companies, which may or may not correspond to the many sequences that start from London; the latter are helpful tools for the bored or impa
tient traveller who wants to monitor progress towards the terminus. Modern-looking posts may indicate that a line has been recalibrated in kilometres, a policy adopted on a national basis in 2013.
Track in tunnels was subject to regular inspection and maintenance too. Rails in a busy tunnel received more wear and needed more attention; but they were also harder to get at. Every passing train meant a break in the work, and a retreat to the recesses or refuges provided at intervals along the tunnel wall. A train passing at speed within the confined space produces a percussive effect, magnified by its own dimensions: expresses built to the maximum loading gauge packed the most punch of all, so that a hardened ganger of 1862 would have been stunned by what his successors routinely endured a century later. The upkeep of drainage within the tunnel, and the need for periodic inspections of the walls and roof, were extra complications. So much water used to drip and dribble into the Midland Railway’s Totley Tunnel that it was drawn off and conveyed miles away for use by locomotives, whose condensed exhausts then joined the run-off on the next trip through.
Then there was the smoke. Long and busy tunnels might remain smoke-filled for years on end, the combined exhalations of locomotive after locomotive drifting endlessly from the portals, or welling up from ventilation shafts to the fields or moors above. On a good day, the wind might blow helpfully through; at other times, a crosswind across the tunnel mouths could keep the smoke trapped inside for days. The tunnel inspector W. T. Thornewell, who worked in the Midlands from the 1920s onwards, remembered the environment in the worst of these long man-made burrows, with their ‘absence of all normal dimensions’:
All natural light disappears within a few yards and one is swallowed up in complete blackness, surrounded by thick eddying smoke … The area around our feet illuminated by the handlamps is very small, and the sooty blackness seems to swallow all light above rail level … On such a day the smoke will eddy back and forth all the time, playing games around our lamps if we lift them to eye level in a fruitless attempt to see more about us.
Men on tunnel duty received an extra allowance, but track work in general was not well paid. Those who undertook it were therefore less likely to spend all their working lives on the railway than staff in more skilled and better-rewarded posts. For the villagers of Bourne near Farnham, a district of Surrey that was distinctly poor in late-Victorian times, the London & South Western Railway’s ballast trains were one of the few sources of work of any kind. Up to forty men in the parish toiled at basic rates of between eighteen and twenty-four shillings a week, typically setting off at night, in open trucks and in all weathers. On the southern division of the London & North Western as late as 1908, some rural gangs even went back to the land during harvest time. Strictly this was against regulations, but as their Divisional Engineer tolerantly admitted: ‘There is nothing else for them to do after they have finished work at half past five. They are practically living in the middle of the cornfields and harvest fields, and they turn to and help the farmer, and get paid for it.’ He reckoned that only about a third of his platelayers were paid more than they had been getting before they joined the permanent staff, but that any shortfall was counterbalanced by the appeal of secure employment on the railway.
The working headquarters of most outdoor lengths was the plate-layer’s hut. There were thousands of these tiny cabins, mostly built to standard designs, which served the gangs as a place to shelter and to store tools and materials. Derelict examples survive in plenty, especially on the lines of the Southern Railway, which adopted a blockish design in prefabricated concrete, sent out for assembly in panel form from the company’s casting factory at Exmouth Junction. By contrast, the pitched-roofed versions on other lines, each with its chimney, narrow door and tiny window, typically looked like a child’s drawing of the smallest house in the world (the tinplate Hornby model version even added fictive climbing plants to the fictive brickwork of its walls). There was nothing especially homely about the interiors, however; nor were the huts necessarily given a sufficient allowance of coals. This helps to explain the railwayman’s joke about the bad track joint deliberately left in front of the hut, in the hope of shaking some fuel off passing tenders and wagons. A fire meant warmth, and the chance of tea or eggs and bacon. Hot water for washing too, a bucketful of which could be obtained by plunging in a fishplate that had been heated in the grate. This was railway architecture at its most basic; in the nineteenth century the huts were sometimes self-built from old sleepers by the men themselves.
Working on the track was dangerous as well as arduous. Detailed knowledge of train movement – unaccompanied engines, goods trains and empty workings as well as the advertised timetable – was vital. On lightly used routes this was not too difficult, but on busy lines the combination of unpredictable timings and momentary inattention could prove fatal. Many accidents to platelayers resulted from stepping out of the path of one train and into that of another on an adjacent line, which might be invisible and inaudible amid the smoke and noise. Fatigue, bad visibility or harsh weather, rough going under foot – all added to the risks. A full-time lookout equipped with a warning horn was provided only for larger gangs. In the early twentieth century about a hundred platelayers a year were dying on the tracks, representing around a quarter of all accidental deaths on the network. The Times for 14 May 1910 recorded the killing of four of a gang of five in just this way on the Great Western main line at Acton and the death of another platelayer on the other side of London on the same afternoon: brief, routine paragraphs, tucked in at the bottom of page twelve.
The coming of fog or heavy snow meant a change in routine. The normal timetable would be suspended and everything slowed down. Signals became invisible at any appreciable distance and even the shifting sounds of passing bridges, trees and cuttings that allowed the driver to gauge his position on a familiar route were muffled or inaudible. The control of moving trains therefore required the creation of louder sounds, obtained by clipping detonators to the rails. Their deployment was not restricted to foggy days: we have met them used as warning signals on the clear summer’s day when Dickens’s train derailed at Staplehurst. The principle was the same: a flash-bang audible above the clamour of the moving locomotive, to tell the driver to slow down in preparation for a possible stoppage ahead. Further progress was controlled by the flag or lamp of the fogman at his post, who might be favoured by a little cabin and a brazier. Fog made any sortie on to the tracks doubly dangerous, and to reduce the risks a contraption was devised, operable from the trackside or from a signal box, that allowed detonators to be pushed on to the rail rather than being clipped on by hand. The sharp reports of these fog signals were once a familiar note within the railway soundscape; Edwardian toymakers even offered miniature versions with percussion caps, linked to little working signals, for model railways. Heavy snow might demand extra sorties on to the track to check that the point blades could move freely, unless these were favoured with automatic heaters. Platelayers were expected to be on standby for such duties as a matter of routine: at the home matches of Darlington FC in the 1950s, a man would go round with a list of staff required, and anyone who went to the cinema was expected to leave details with the traffic department, so that they could be summoned by flashing their names on the silver screen. Overtime payments were some compensation for the price of the wasted ticket; but it was a hard life.
Mechanisation, low-maintenance materials, the use of special test trains to detect imperfections in the track, the disappearance of fatal smokescreens laid down by steam locomotive chimneys, colour-light signals powerful enough to pierce fog, the use of road vehicles to take gangs to the lineside – all have reduced the exposure of railway workers to risk on the tracks in recent decades. High-visibility fluorescent clothing has played its part too. Trials began on the Glasgow suburban lines in 1964. It was soon clear that approaching drivers sounded their warnings much faster when the bright vests were worn by trackmen (the term which replaced ‘platelayer’ arou
nd the same time). Even so, it was several more years before lineside safety clothing became mandatory. A British Transport Film short of 1975, Operation London Bridge, captures the last years of the old regime. We see the track layouts at London Bridge station being overhauled by a combination of machine and muscle: the younger men with mid-length hair in oil-stained tanktops and flares, or working topless, the older men in suits and pork-pie hats, so that the workteams have a random look, as if they had just been press-ganged from the pubs of Bermondsey Street. Now, anyone who works on lines where trains are running must wear a hard hat and orange fluorescent clothing of a specified chromaticity, with sewn-on reflective strips of specified performance and pattern, all as directed in the latest issue of the Railway Group Standard document go/rt3279. Orange trousers were added to this compulsory wardrobe in 2008.
The prevalence of safety clothing in Britain, and safety culture in the workplace generally, sometimes attract journalistic ridicule. The truth is that rules and routines on the railways are the culmination of nearly two centuries of learning things the hard way. Some reforms were initiated or enforced by the management (the fluorescent vests), others came about by pressure from the trades unions, others still belong with broader changes to working conditions imposed by Parliament, such as those in the Offices, Shops and Railway Premises Act (1963). This legislation also saw the end of small local track gangs in favour of larger squads based at depots with proper facilities for washing and relief. Safety routines interlock, to guard against cumulative effects: a small one-off risk is a different matter from the same odds faced day in and day out, by many persons in many places. That is why the 1963 Act also required that handrails be provided alongside stairs in places of work, those on the railways included: not to be clutched nervously at every ascent and descent, but to be there for the one time in a thousand when someone stumbles.
The Railways Page 35