Thornton was hardly small, but in national terms it was only of middle rank among marshalling yards. Bigger installations tended to divide their traffic flows into separate yards, in the ‘up’ and ‘down’ directions, and were correspondingly longer and more complex. At Millerhill east of Edinburgh – another yard built in conjunction with a new colliery – the up and down sectors each boasted more classification roads than the whole of Thornton Yard. Others among these double leviathans were Toton Yard in Nottinghamshire (seventy-two classification roads), which handled over 2 million wagons a year in its 1940s heyday, and Whitemoor in the Cambridgeshire fens (eighty-six classification roads), the first in Britain to be built complete with retarders, which could handle 8,000 wagons daily. Work at these yards went on round the clock, aided by the glare of giant lighting masts.
The handling technology continued to evolve after Thornton Yard opened. One weakness of the retarder system was its inability to do anything for wagons that were moving too slowly rather than too fast. By deconstructing the retarder concept into multiple little wheels (‘dash pots’) installed all over the yard, where they could boost as well as slow down the passing vehicles, every wagon movement could be controlled almost as precisely as if a locomotive were in charge. Tinsley Yard, opened in 1965 between Sheffield and Rotherham, had 23,500 of these miniature power units. Here the unaccompanied wagons glided along their appointed paths with eerie steadiness, amid the strange nagging sounds made when the dash pots engaged with their wheels.
Innovative systems of communication were also developed. Thornton depended on the compilation of ‘cut cards’ at the point where incoming trains entered the yard. Duplicate copies of these were shot through pneumatic tubes to the inspector’s office and the control tower, which was effectively a specialised signal box from which the correct sequence of changes to the points could be set. At Tinsley, the cut cards and pneumatic communication tubes were set aside in favour of a Telex-like system of electronic signals for encoding on punched tape at the control tower. The tape was then fed into a machine, which read the information and set the points automatically.
The railway network sometimes seemed awestruck by what it had created at these automated marshalling yards. Like battleships or nuclear submarines, they had a totemic as well as a practical value: irrefutable evidence that the network was committed to a more efficient future. One new yard or another, with its retarders and control systems, makes its predictable appearance in many of the upbeat British Transport Films of the era. But the full network of automated hump yards never materialised. Too many big yards had already been built for working by older methods, and the publicity films had less to say about these. Some had humps but no retarders; other yards were laid out entirely on the flat, so that wagons had to be pushed into place by a locomotive, or even drawn by a horse. This ‘flat’ type was described in the 1930s as operating at only one-third of the speed of the hump variety. Non-automated yards were often small, but some were very large indeed. Crewe Basford Hall Yard, where the sidings added up to thirty track-miles and the total of wagons handled reached a peak of 46,000–47,000 per week in the late 1930s, was shunted on the flat right up until closure in 1972.
At non-automated yards there was a greater need for manpower on the ground, both to brake the wagons and to direct them along the right road in the first place. Some yards did this by keeping men on duty at the points, as in the earliest days of the railways, to set the route correctly as the shunted wagons rolled towards them. If the yard had a hump, the men would look out for the track numbers that had been briskly chalked on to the front ends of each wagon or cut of wagons before they began rolling downwards. Even an advanced yard such as Tinsley still needed railway-men to inspect each incoming train from the trackside and uncouple it into wagons and cuts before it was sent over the hump. Manual recoupling was required again before the newly reformed trains could leave the yard. Nor could the automated hump method deal with fragile or dangerous payloads, such as glassware, eggs or munitions. The same ban applied to the glass-lined tank wagons used for the bulk conveyance of milk, and to any outsize loads at risk of shifting, such as heavy castings and forgings. All these wagons had somehow to be got through the yard’s mazy tracks separately, whether or not they were destined to rejoin a hump-shunted formation before final departure. That meant yet more uncoupling, shunting and recoupling; more hard and often dangerous work.
To understand the shunter’s task, it is helpful to remember the situation of the Victorian railway traveller in the years before continuous brakes. Controlling the movement of a passenger train depended on the cooperation of the locomotive crew and the guard or guards in their vans or brake compartments. The carriages between had no brakes that could be applied or released remotely, whether the train was in motion or at rest. Victorian goods wagons were just the same. Unlike passenger carriages, however, techniques for braking wagons evolved with extreme slowness. Edwardian wagons were braked in just the same way. So were most of those built between the wars, and most of those built by British Railways. As late as the mid 1970s, when the national fleet stood at 240,000 wagons, more than half still had no more than a handbrake to control them. No other railway network with a comparable density of traffic persisted with unbraked wagons for so long.
Most wagons of this type were relatively small and ran on four wheels mounted in a short rigid underframe. The basic forms of open mineral wagon and enclosed box van were fixed as early as the 1850s, although the average weight they could carry roughly doubled in the hundred years after that. Their construction also changed, as steel replaced timber for much or all of the fabric (although box vans mostly stayed loyal to wooden bodies to the very end). Also of pure Victorian descent was the type of brake used. These were operated by a long lever with a horizontal handle at one end, the handle usually being placed next to the right-hand axle-box of each wagon (a left-handed shunter was at a disadvantage here). The lever was held in place within a vertical housing made of two bars, with a toothed ratchet on its inner side. When the lever was disengaged from its housing, the handle could be forced downwards until the brake shoe or shoes pressed against the steel tyres of the wheels. To stop the lever jumping out of the ratchet, the bars of the housing were pierced with holes so that a fixing pin or peg could be passed through. On application, the brakes were said to be ‘pinned down’.
Especially in marshalling yards, the task of forcing down the brake handle often had to be done when the wagon was still moving. Men trotted between the tracks alongside these four-wheeled wagons as they rumbled along, judging the right moment each time to grab the brake handle, and the right amount of force with which to push it downwards. The pushing part was normally managed by means of the shunter’s brake stick, which could be braced against the underframe to obtain leverage. The greater the excess speed and momentum, the more urgently a wagon needed the shunter’s care, and the more demanding the job of catching up in order to slow it down. When a wagon was running much too fast, it could be stopped by placing a slipper brake or ‘skid’ – a small, curved-up strip of metal – on the rail in front, diffusing the momentum in scorching friction and showers of sparks. Hand signals were used to communicate with the driver of the shunting engine, who would whistle by way of response. At night, the same operations were carried out by means of hand lamps, used both for passing signals to the driver of the shunting engine (who would whistle by way of response) and for reading wagon numbers and destination labels. So the shunter working in darkness had to juggle with lamp and stick together.
A related tool was the shunter’s pole, six feet of ashwood with a steel hook at one end, used for coupling and uncoupling. The standard British wagon coupling took the form of a single short chain of three big, straight-sided links, dangling from a big hook on the buffer beam. Every wagon had one of these chains at each end, but usually only one of them was used to couple on to the next wagon along, leaving the other chain to hang free. To couple two wagons togeth
er, the shunter first caught the bottom link in the hook of his pole. He then used the pole as a lever against the top of the buffers, lifting the link on to, or off, the hook on the buffer beam of the adjacent wagon. One trick of the job was to use the pole to set the chain swinging to and fro first, so that the final heft was not quite so demanding on the muscles. This method of joining vehicles by means of simple chain links was known as loose coupling.
Men of the Lancashire & Yorkshire Railway demonstrate the hand signals for ‘caution’, ‘all right’ and ‘danger’, c. 1910
It was possible to join or detach loose-coupled wagons quite rapidly. On 4 November 1879, a train was received from Manchester at Ponty-pool Road Yard, an important centre for traffic in South Wales. It consisted of three wagons each for Swansea, Cardiff and Whitland, two each for Pontypool, Llanelli, Neath and Neath Abbey and one each for Aberdare, Aberbeeg, Bridgend, Briton Ferry, Carmarthen, Cefn, Ebbw Vale, Haverfordwest, Newport and Pontypool (Town). Within thirty minutes of arrival the complete train had been sorted and all the wagons for Aberdare, Neath and points beyond were already on their way. The only unusual thing about the procedure is that a detailed record happens to survive from this particular day.
The shunter’s prowess was sometimes displayed in officially sponsored coupling tournaments, a sort of railway equivalent of the village ploughing match. These could be quite elaborate. Fifty-three hopeful shunters competed in the Midland Railway’s yard at Spalding in 1890, overseen by timekeepers, a referee, a starter, a treasurer and a managing committee. Victor of the twenty-wagon contest was W. Coulson, who uncoupled his train in one minute and forty-six seconds. Christmas morning at Carn-forth in 1925 saw the Furness & Midland sidings busy with sixteen-wagon heats; here the winner was logged at an amazing 66.2 seconds. The mental aspect of the shunter’s task was cultivated in some of the railways’ staff magazines by means of spatial puzzles using imaginary track layouts, with brisk timings and minimum movements as goals.
Other variations on the job included ‘fly shunting’, in situations where the locomotive could not be positioned behind the wagons. Instead, the shunting pole was first placed in a position to uncouple the wagons before moving. Then the engine got up a modest speed, the shunter keeping pace alongside. At the right moment the shunter signalled to the driver to slow down and the momentum of the train pushed the wagons together, so that the couplings slackened. Now the pole could be tugged downwards to pull the coupling chain off the hook, releasing the rear portion. The locomotive and any wagons still attached to it then put on a spurt, opening up a gap ahead of the uncoupled wagons rumbling along behind. Once the locomotive and its wagons had cleared the points, the rear portion could be switched to a different track by another waiting railwayman.
All these routines were plainly hazardous, even in the best of conditions. Add the perils of working in darkness, fog or adverse weather, perhaps on uneven ground, struggling with incorrect or muddled instructions, often stiff with fatigue and with hands numb from the cold, and the grimness of the shunter’s job is abundantly clear. Yet the practices described represent shunting in what might be called its reformed state. The lot of the mid-Victorian shunter was in many respects worse. Efforts to amend these working practices became caught up in broader struggles, to do with workers’ rights of association, hours and pay. Much of the story shows the railway companies at their most flint-hearted.
The simplest reform was the introduction of the shunting pole. A cheap and efficient tool, it was already in use on some lines by 1880 and appears to have become general by around 1900. Prior to that, coupling and uncoupling had to be done at close hand by getting into the space between the buffers. This put the men at risk of injury should the engine begin moving in error, anyone busy with couplings between the rails being invisible from the footplate. Worse still, fly shunting was sometimes managed by taking the shunter for a ride on the wagons, braced above the buffers and waiting for his moment to uncouple by hand, or even by extending a foot. Expedients of this kind were officially discouraged, but when the timetable did not permit the work to be done in the approved manner the men were tacitly expected to ignore inconvenient regulations of this kind.
A more persistent danger arose from where the brake levers were placed. Most early wagons had brakes on one side only, and it was cheaper to build them with a single brake lever on the same side. That was all right as long as the lever faced the working side of the tracks at sidings and depots. However, it was not possible to keep all the brakes facing the same way – especially so with wagons, which were frequently spun this way or that on the little turntables provided in goods yards and depots where space was too tight for full-scale points. The worker on shunting duty might therefore spend his shift repeatedly crossing and re-crossing occupied tracks in pursuit of brake levers. The same single-sided policy applied to the destination labels that were clipped to the wagons’ under-frames, for inspection when they were shunted and despatched. Every crossing of occupied tracks to attend to a lever or read a label increased the risk of harm to the shunter, against which a six-foot wooden pole was no defence.
Needless to say, the management knew all about these dangers. But whenever changes were proposed that would reduce the risks of harm in return for new investment or higher working costs, the companies preferred to dig in. Their defence of the status quo, regularly rehearsed, was simply that each man was responsible for his own safety, and by extension for that of his colleagues. The case of Hutchinson v. York, Newcastle & Berwick Railway Co. (1850) confirmed that the companies had the law on their side. This was the case which established the principle that the workforce of a company were all servants alike, in ‘common employment’. Confronted with an accident caused by negligence or human error, a company could therefore argue that responsibility lay with one or another of its servants, who might in turn be liable individually for punishment in the courts. In other words, corporate manslaughter did not yet exist as a concept in law. That the men’s working conditions could be hazardous or even lethal made no difference: the company could no more be held responsible for any error or oversight – even at the highest managerial level – than the Duke of Devonshire could be called to account for the misdemeanours of his head butler or under-gardener. Only where negligence by the servants of one company had caused death or harm to those of another could questions of corporate responsibility be invoked.
Nor did the Inspectorate from the Board of Trade have much of a hold on operational safety. Having established that certain standards had been met before any new line was permitted to open, the Board left the management to get on with the job, returning only in the case of serious accident. Official accident reports issued by the Board might recommend changes to working methods, but all through the nineteenth century these could not be enforced by law. Within the industry, the idea of direct external regulation was no more welcome than it would have been in Her Majesty’s army – an analogy that was often made. As for workers daring to go on strike, this was considered tantamount to mutiny.
This state of affairs began to alter only when the law was changed to permit the existence of truly independent trades unions. The crucial date for the industry was 1872, when the Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants was founded at Derby. Railway unions had been formed or attempted before that time, none of which endured. The ASRS broke the pattern, surviving to become the major constituent of the National Union of Railwaymen (itself now amalgamated with the RMT union). The founding location reflected the patronage of Derby’s admirable MP, Michael Thomas Bass (1799–1884), a man who might be called the Nonconformist Conscience incarnate. Moved by a developed sense of natural justice, Bass provided funds to the fledgling union, underwrote its mouthpiece The Railway Service Gazette and spoke on its behalf from the Liberal benches in Parliament. As the pre-eminent brewer of Burton-on-Trent his pockets were deep, and his commercial engagement with the railways made him too substantial a figure to dismiss. In the 1870s the Bass company
owned 69,954 trucks and despatched half a million barrels of beer by rail every year, most of them via the Midland Railway. (The brewery’s reach is indicated by its titanic maltings at Sleaford, and its mass works outings, as described in Chapter 11.) Given time, the railwaymen would doubtless have established a strong union without Bass’s help, but his early support was invaluable nevertheless.
The newly formed ASRS began immediately to gather information on casualties. The railways had recently been ordered to submit details of deaths and injuries among the workforce to the Board of Trade, but this coverage was far from accurate. Bass therefore commissioned and published a review, which identified chronic under-reporting: the Lancashire & Yorkshire reported seventy-three injuries during 1872, the ASRS counted 1,387.
However telling, such publicity was of little use without concrete proposals to make things better. The ASRS chose as one of its chief causes the installation of so-called automatic couplings. Already in use on some American lines, these locked into place when two wagons were pushed together, eliminating the need to send a man between the rails. Twice during the 1880s the union sponsored displays of various automatic designs from home and abroad, with other types of improved couplings. In the same year as the second of these shows, a parliamentary bill was introduced to enforce the use of couplings that could be operated without having to stand between the buffers.
The Railways Page 48