The Railways

  The four-aspect system has since spread across much of the network, and the quadruple cycle of changes in the wake of each passing train can now be watched from many platforms that command a long straight view of a busy line. One early showpiece for colour lights was the main line between York and Darlington, conversion of which began in the 1930s. Signals were placed every three-quarters of a mile over the thirty miles between York and Northallerton, where the new signal box had sixty-four miles of track under its control. By this date, advanced installations allowed a single switch or button to control all the signals and points on any permutation of route, rather than them having to be changed laboriously one by one.

  The freedom in placing colour-light signals also allowed line capacity to be increased by multiplying the number of block sections. Ultimately, line speeds in force determined how short these sections could be; a train travelling at the maximum speed for the route had to be allowed sufficient notice to stop in time. By introducing an extra warning phase, four-aspect signalling therefore allowed capacity to be increased (more sections) without slowing services down.

  These changes converged with other technologies. Signalling could be made to work automatically, each train triggering a danger signal as it entered a section and restoring the clear aspect as it left. Liverpool was again the pioneer: the first signals that operated in this fashion were the electrically powered semaphores supplied to the new Overhead Railway in 1893. Track could also be made sensitive to the movements of trains, typically by means of track circuiting. The circuit works by passing a small electric current through one rail, so that the wheels and axles of trains bridge the electrical gap to the other rail. This explains why small lengths of wire may be seen welded from rail to rail across joints of the older type, the bolts and fishplates of which are unreliable as a means of transmitting current. Another method uses sensors to count the axles of trains as they pass. Not only can the track be made sensitive to traffic; trains themselves can be protected against the risk of passing a signal at danger, by means of automatic warning or train protection systems. Most of these work by sounding or displaying an alarm signal within the cab, followed by an automatic application of the brake if the driver fails to override the warning in time. The Great Western began to install its version in Edwardian times, and was always justly proud of it.

  These technologies have now been developed into a more sophisticated system of pan-European train control in which operating instructions and route information are conveyed electronically to displays in the cab. This method has been adopted on the Cambrian Coast route on an experimental basis, although on the Continent its usual application is on high-speed lines. Further advances in technology promise to allow trains to move safely at maximum speed without depending on fixed block sections at all, by means of constant automatic monitoring of their performance and location – the so-called moving block system. A version of this has been in use for two decades on the Docklands Light Railway in London, and more recently on the Jubilee Line of the Underground. As the system spreads to main lines, the signal-free look of the original Liverpool & Manchester will become a reality once more, with electronic monitoring in place of the vigilant eyes of drivers and lineside policemen, at maximum speeds many times greater than those of the 1830s.

  Increasingly separated from the need to oversee the tracks, and with the capacity to follow the movements of trains over ever larger areas, signal boxes have become ‘power boxes’ or ‘signalling centres’, closer in character to air traffic control towers than to the vigilant cabins of the Victorians. The change of name reflects a genuine enhancement of function, for each of these buildings combines the duties of signal boxes of traditional type with the more strategic responsibilities of the railway control office, as developed early in the twentieth century. Control offices were set up to address a crucial weakness of operation via individual signal boxes, which was the lack of anything like a nerve-centre. Messages and instructions could pass up and down the line briskly enough, but too often reflected decisions made without full knowledge of the wider state of traffic. Telephones allowed a more strategic approach, linking the boxes to centres of shared knowledge and command. These were developed to great effect from the late 1900s on the Midland Railway and the Lancashire & Yorkshire, two lines with heavy goods and mineral traffic, under the influence of recent American practice. This freight moved chiefly in slow consignments in the intervals between the faster services of the passenger timetable, with regular diversions into passing loops, as the long stretches of track parallel with the main running lines are known. The early control offices left passenger services to the management of the signalmen and the disciplines of the public timetable, and used telephones to gather information concerning the state of the remaining traffic. Instructions could then be sent to the boxes to prevent excessive delays to consignments detained in loops and sidings; trains could be rerouted to save mileage or to avoid congestion; they could be terminated in order to send the wagons forward by a later service; relief crews could be directed as required; and so on.

  The Lancashire & Yorkshire’s system reached its culmination in 1915, when a circular control room opened at Manchester Victoria station. Here was a thoroughly twentieth-century space: a forerunner of every kind of technocratic headquarters, from the ops room of the Battle of Britain to the lair of a Bond villain. The upper wall displayed a huge map of the company’s network, with coloured lights representing the locations of trains. Below the map were seventeen desks, one for each sector, each with its own map. Little pegs inserted in holes in these maps, together with tiny hand-written information cards, recorded precisely which train was where. In the middle of the room was a cluster of desks, and here sat ‘the chief controller, three deputies, a coal-traffic controller, six controllers for train crews’ relief and about three relief controllers’. There was also a control master, to keep the controllers under control.

  Control systems of this kind proved their worth during the Second World War, when they helped to allay the convulsive effects of air raids and the constant challenges of congestion. By that time the largest individual signal boxes had effectively assumed some of the functions of sector control offices. The Northallerton power box, opened on the day war broke out in 1939, operated in its first years with the windows bricked up in case of air attack; the combination of telephony, track circuits and automation were already sufficient for it to function without a direct view of the lines a few feet away.

  Like control offices, power boxes of the Northallerton type used panel displays studded with little coloured lights to indicate the state of traffic. The position of each train was shown by leaving a bulb unlit, to guard against the risk that a failed bulb might fatally conceal the true situation. Electric panels of this kind are in turn being replaced by electronic information, carried on the screens of visual display units. Like libraries and dealing rooms in the electronic age, the interiors of power boxes and their successors depend on shade rather than floods of sunlight, so that their internal illuminations are easily legible. The latest type is represented by the signalling centre recently installed at Didcot, on the Great Western main line: a long, low, neutral structure, its windows few and small, its working relationship with the railway not at all obvious. As modernisation proceeds, this nondescript building will gradually assume responsibility for nearly all the former Great Western lines in England, so that a journey from Penzance to Paddington will proceed under its guidance and supervision throughout. The size of this intended empire, and those of the thirteen similar buildings from which the integrated national network will be controlled, is recognised by another new name, that of Rail Operating Centre. Like a threatened species, the mechanical signal box will survive in the artificial reserves offered by preserved railways; the electrical and early electronic equipment that followed the mechanical era will quietly disappear.

  Anyone curious about these lost technologies will find them documented with inspiring devoti
on online at www.signalbox.org. Such labours of love reflect the special intimacy between the signalling staff and the systems under their control. A signal box was no place for the woolly minded or the inattentive. Dickens was spot-on: his haunted signalman is thoughtful and self-reliant, a former student of natural philosophy whose life had taken an unexpected turn.

  To sign up for duty at a one-man box was therefore to embrace a distinctive way of life, closer in some ways to the isolation of the lighthouse than to the companionship of the footplate or the ready exchanges of the station platform. Physical skill was needed to operate the levers correctly, remembering and judging the force required to overcome the different sprung weights and loads for each. Besides the responsibilities of traffic, the condition of points and signals had to be kept under review; in cold weather, they might require testing hourly to guard against the effects of frost, snow or ice. Each box also maintained a written register of movements within its territory, of which meticulous record-keeping was expected. A desk or flap table for this purpose was usually among the furnishings within the cabin. The space was regarded as the signalman’s own territory, even to the extent of allowing unofficial comforts such as an armchair or lengths of carpet to be brought in, but was generally kept clean and uncluttered. Sanitation took the form of an earth closet in the country (until the arrival of the ‘portaloo’), or a proper water closet in plumbed-in areas.

  The door of every box was marked PRIVATE, and firemen and gangers were expected to knock and ask permission before entering. Visits by firemen were common on lines without track circuiting, where a member of any crew held at a red signal was normally obliged to report to the box ‘to remind the signalman of the position of the train’ – according to the venerable Rule 55 in the little book of regulations supplied to all railwaymen. The visitor might hope to take away a container of boiling water for tea-making, for each signal box had a little stove for warmth and basic cooking; some coals might be dropped off in return, for the official allowance to each box was not always generous. In remoter locations, coal and water supplies were usually delivered directly from the rails, tokens of the mutual dependency between signalman and train crew.

  This was not a job that could be taken on without thorough preparation. At smaller stations, a porter with ambitions might learn the workings of the signal box by assisting at busy times, passing through the intermediate grade of porter-signalman before achieving full status. Larger boxes tended to recruit from among the company’s telegraph boys, whose training might include a stint at one of the signalling schools dotted around the network. In 1912 the Lancashire & Yorkshire equipped its school at Manchester Victoria with a splendid model railway for practical demonstrations; amazingly, this was still in use in updated form as late as 1995, after which the National Railway Museum claimed it. Back in the box, a young signalman might be inducted further by learning the ways of the log book and deputising for more senior men. The rigours of the night shift were reserved for fully qualified signalmen. One such stint was described by a Midland Railway signalman at a railwaymen’s meeting in November 1886: 148 trains past his box, populated by an estimated 2,000 souls, 3,500 figures written in the book, 1,600 bell beats and dial signals sent, over 500 pulls on the levers. His shift, which was not at all untypical for the time, had lasted thirteen hours.

  One of the best depictions of the signalman’s way of life comes from an unexpected source. Border Country is a novel by the critic Raymond Williams (1921–88), published in 1960. Williams was a key figure in the post-war history of the intellectual left in Britain. His career anticipated the classic route into academia of the grammar-school boys of the 1950s and 1960s, many of whom encountered Williams’s own texts along the way, especially Culture and Society (1958). His own upbringing was rooted in the working community of railwaymen: his father was a Great Western signalman at Monmouth, in the Welsh Borders. The signal box, not the ivory tower, was the formative vantage point for Williams’s world-view.

  The fictional Glynmawr signal box in Border Country is occupied every day except Christmas. Two of its regulars are single men lodging with the same housekeeper, who looks after their needs within the unsocial hours demanded by weekly changes of shift. The third signalman is the young hero’s father, who misses the birth of his son because he is detained in his box – as duty demands – until the last minute of his evening turn. The years pass, and when the boy sets off from the family cottage to catch the train that will take him away to university, his father works the lever to make the distant signal tremble: ‘an old game: originally a sign that he should hurry’. The signal is also a signifier: the railway is at home in the landscape, just as its workers belong with the community they serve. Later, the father having become too ill to work, his son goes to clear out his locker at the box, which is now due for closure together with the station it serves.

  On the wide shelf stood the three red fire buckets: the nearest filled with sand, with shreds of tobacco decaying on the moist yellow surface; the next with water, with a faint iridescence of oil. The third was the washing bucket, blue and milky, with a curd of lather round the rim. Beside the washing bucket was a yellow tablet of hard gritted soap, and the two pieces of cotton waste, tangles of multi-coloured threads. The atmosphere of the box began here: a faint, sweet smell of dust, soot, lamp-oil, food […] He saw the dusty, threadbare red and green flags, and the heavy black megaphone, with its brass lip. He saw the four telephones, and the notice board above the fire-place, with its grimed and yellowing schedules. He saw the high clerk’s stool; the open register with its thick, large writing; the round ruler and the white pen. He looked last at the grid, with its twenty-six levers, the shining handles and clips, the distinguishing plates in red, blue, yellow and black, the two check dusters to grip the polished handles; then the line of instruments above: the model indicator signals, the bells mounted in wooden clocks, with swinging notices in the face; the central master-key, with its looped brass chain.

  Illicitly, under the approving eye of the duty signalman, the son takes a train through, copying actions he had observed all his life. He remembers to check that the train’s red tail lamp is in place, as every signalman must: a safeguard against the rear part having become uncoupled while passing through the section. The duty signalman explains that the best friendships on the railway are not made with colleagues working turn and turn about in the same place, but with those in the boxes to either side, thanks to the possibility of talking free of charge on the telephone in the empty stretches between trains. Communication becomes another form of comradeship.

  In the year that Williams’s novel was published, a Berkshire teenager named Adrian Vaughan began work as a porter at Challow station in the Vale of the White Horse, on the old Great Western main line. Fascinated by railways since childhood, he was already precociously familiar with signalling routines from unofficial visits to boxes. In a matter of months he had graduated to signalman proper, first at Challow, then at Uffington a few miles down the line. Vaughan has since become one of the eminent British railway writers of his generation, both for works of general history and biography and for three exceptional volumes of memoirs published in the 1980s.*

  Like Williams’s signalmen, Vaughan’s colleagues had a dual loyalty, as deeply rooted in their communities as they were committed to the disciplines of the service. Two of the older hands were active in their parish choirs, and exploited the telephone on night shifts to try out new hymn tunes on their mates. Another used the box to carry on an unofficial barbering service for locals, ‘poring over some grizzled old neck, busy with his clippers’. Other regular visitors included the village constable and a beery parish clergyman, after the pubs shut for the night.

  Operationally, these boxes still depended on the late-Victorian technology of absolute block. Vaughan celebrates the many ways in which the system fostered a working partnership between train crews and signalmen. When his employment began, the spirit of the Great Western still an
imated the railway, as though it were a regiment or a college of ancient foundation; senior colleagues persisted in referring to ‘the Company’, and some even wore their old uniforms and monogrammed badges, quietly tweaking the nose of public ownership. Ancestral loyalties were entrenched higher up, too: taking an examination at the old company’s offices at Swindon, Vaughan found his divisional superintendent sitting in a mahogany chair with the carved initials of the Bristol & Exeter Railway, with which the Great Western had amalgamated back in 1876. Allegiances and working methods belonged together; most of the trains passing through in 1960 were still hauled by Great Western locomotives, the exhausts ‘blossoming like a pure white flower’ against the sky.

  It could not last: colour lights were coming, with Reading power box set to take control. The mechanical boxes were doomed, along with their village stations. Relations with superiors became edgy after Vaughan and his colleagues began a quixotic private campaign against the new order. Their chief concern was that it would abolish the visual scrutiny of the trains as they passed box after box along the line, each with its signalman watching for carriage doors ajar, shifted cargoes, red-hot axle-boxes and other hazards that had escaped the train crews’ attention. Contact was made with the local MP and a man from the Daily Mirror, but the affair blew over without going public; automatic sensors were installed by the trackside to detect hot axle-boxes, so that the train affected could be signalled to stop. Its driver could then ask for advice using one of the telephones installed alongside the new signals. The Berkshire party felt vindicated – a victory for ‘the yokel signalmen of Uffington’.

  Knowing that the old ways were ultimately doomed, Vaughan compares himself variously to a Luddite, a monk turned out of the cloister and a Jacobite after Culloden. This devotion to obsolescent methods was far from unique, nor is it extinct: a BBC2 documentary broadcast in 2013 featured a signaller at Stockport No. 2 Box, for whom the lever frames and bell-codes still in use there represented the ‘organic’ atmosphere of the ‘proper railway’, as against the ‘sterile’ world of the power box. With the passage of time, the technology Dickens represented in the 1860s as subduing men to its own artificial element – the haunted signalman with his nerves twitching to phantom bell-signals, ‘Lamps’ with his oily skin and wick-like hair – has become aligned with the natural order. Given the choice between eight hours in (say) Arnside box on the brink of Morecambe Bay, watching the same grand cycles of tides and clouds that enchanted Ruskin, and a stint of equal length in front of the power-box panels at Preston (1973, replacing eighty-seven older boxes), we might feel inclined to agree.