The Railways

  The long loose-coupled trains assembled by the shunters required considerable skill to operate safely. Responsibilities were split between the locomotive driver and the goods guard, who travelled in a brake van at the back. It was the goods guard’s job to help the driver to slow or halt the wagons by braking his own vehicle, which was heavily weighted by means of cast-iron ballast within the underframe, and to release the brakes when required. The trick was to stop short of applying the brakes so tightly that the wheels of the van locked and began to skid, causing damage to tyres and rails. So that the guard could keep watch, the little timber cabin of the brake van was provided with sideways lookouts and a balcony at one or both ends.

  There might be up to seventy three-link couplings between brake van and locomotive, sometimes more. Every one of them was subject to the same process of slackening and tightening that made fly shunting possible. The difference in length between a fully extended coupling and one hanging slack between two buffered-up wagons was about a foot. It follows that a very long goods train might vary in length by 70ft or more. The greater the dead weight of the train, the more its couplings were vulnerable to sharp tugs, especially when the engine accelerated too quickly from a standstill. When restarting a train, the driver might therefore choose to ‘set back’ or reverse a little way first. The total load could then be taken up gradually once the train began to make headway and each coupling was pulled taut again. Only when the whole train was rolling slowly would full power be applied.

  The wagons were also subject to a sort of time delay when power or braking was brought into play. Caught between locomotive and brake van, the individual vehicles moved at different speeds according to the degree of slack in the couplings and any time-lag between the application of brakes at one end or the other. Gradients complicated matters further: as the locomotive and leading wagons began to slow down in response to the start of an ascent, the wagons immediately behind were liable to catch up and bunch together, even as the tail end might still be dragging the brake van down a descending stretch of the line, its brakes still firmly on. Thus the entire train stretched and compressed like a caterpillar.

  On descending gradients there was also a risk that the wagons would pick up so much momentum that the combined braking power of locomotive and van could no longer control them. The safe negotiation of a steep gradient might therefore entail a stop at the summit to allow the guard to pin down some of the wagon brakes too. This was standard practice at the top of the Lickey incline in Worcestershire, the most demanding gradient on any British main line: two miles at 1 in 38. (Conversely, trains climbing the other way had to be shoved from behind by up to four extra steam locomotives, a practice known as banking.) When the descent was complete the goods train had to stop again while the brakes were released from the trackside, one wagon at a time. On hilly lines the toll on the brake blocks of goods trains was especially severe. Those used on the heaviest engines on the Somerset & Dorset Joint Railway sometimes needed replacement after a single fifty-two-mile trip. Coming down a steep gradient with an unbraked night train, Catherine-wheel sparks flew out from the cast-iron blocks pressing against the hard steel tyres of these engines. The effect was described as lighting up two fields’ width on either side.

  Those who have known Britain’s railways only in the era of smooth continuous brakes would be staggered by the amount of noise this type of train could emit. They got even noisier with the years, as the introduction of more powerful locomotives allowed trainloads to become heavier. In 1906 a veteran goods guard on the LNWR named William Ellison recalled that working trains a quarter-century before that were thirty wagons long; the new engines then coming into use could handle up to sixty. Another change concerned the type of buffers used to keep the wagons apart. At first these were simple wooden blocks, called dumb buffers, like those used for generations on the very basic wagons employed on colliery waggonways. As late as Edwardian times there were still plenty of coal trucks of this type thumping against one another, but the majority were already equipped with the familiar round- or oval-headed buffers of forged steel. To absorb the shocks of impact, the sliding shanks of these buffers were held in place by springs or rubber blocks (and later by hydraulic reservoirs) that fitted within the underframe. Arnold Bennett described the sound of one such train in his novel A Man from the North (1898): ‘The coupling-chains rang with a merry, giant tinkle, and when the engine brought its load of wagons to a standstill, and a smart, metallic bump, bump, bump ran diminuendo from wagon to wagon, one might have fancied that some leviathan game was being played.’

  Which leaves out the distinctly un-merry squeals after stopping, as the springs within the buffers sought to equalise compression between the wagons, not to mention the loud repetitive clanks when the train moved off again and the couplings were jerked taut one by one. The resulting racket was not limited to industrial areas – audible miles away, the clan-gour of freight working and shunting was once carried on the wind to villages and suburbs through much of Britain, especially at night – but it was especially characteristic of the communities created or fostered by the industries that depended on the railway and had grown up with it. From another workaday corner of England, D. H. Lawrence used the ‘sharp clinking of the trucks’ as off-stage mood music for Paul Morel’s nocturnal reveries in Sons and Lovers (1912), set in Nottingham and its coal-field. From a later generation, the noise echoes through a courtship scene between Albert Finney’s belligerent factory worker and his future fiancée in Karel Reisz’s film Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960), based on the novel by Alan Sillitoe.

  There were changes in how Britain’s railway wagons were worked between Lawrence’s time and Sillitoe’s. Before the First World War, every company-owned wagon that made its way on to another company’s territory had to be returned empty within a set period, or incur a demurrage charge. Any gains from this system in terms of fee income and efficient deployment were more than wiped out by the costs of operational complexity, paperwork and administration. When the railways were placed under the control of a national executive committee during the First World War, all but a few specialised vehicles among the company-owned wagons were therefore pooled for general use. The reform was estimated to have cut by two-thirds the number of wagon journeys that were made empty. The Second World War added to this pool the huge fleets owned by private companies such as collieries and chemical works, to a total of 563,000 wagons. These too had previously to be returned empty to their owners, so that half of their journeys were made without carrying anything.

  Private coal trucks were especially abundant, often boldly lettered and even brightly painted under the black dust – railway equivalents of the sign-writer’s art on hoardings, gable ends and the bodies of commercial vehicles. The poet Clifford Dyment (1914–71) remembered the cavalcades of these trucks that used to pass along the embankment at the end of his aunt and uncle’s garden in Derby: ‘Clay Cross, Langley Mill, Sherwood, they filed past, Bolsover, Stanton, Bolsover, Stanton, Hucknall, Hucknall, Hucknall, clattering, clinking empties travelling at speed, Mapperley, Butterley, Staveley, M.R. [Midland Railway], M.R., M.R., Shirebrook, Bul-well, Bulwell, and then the terminal brake van with its porch and cosily smoking chimney.’

  Some of these may have been among the same trucks that had made the clinking soundtrack to D. H. Lawrence’s early years in the next-door county, for economy required that colliery wagons be kept in use as long as possible. The collieries were charged less when coal was carried in their own wagons, which was another saving; the railways allowed the discount in return for not having to stump up the cost of providing the wagons themselves. Being exempt from the usual demurrage charges, coal trucks often doubled as warehousing on wheels, a practice adopted on a large scale in South Wales. Inland yards with a capacity of 12,000 standing wagons served Newport docks, where space was especially congested. Loaded or empty, colliery wagons spent so much time standing around that the Great Western estimated in 1933 that t
hose on its territory made a journey on average just once a fortnight. The fewer paying journeys made, the less incentive there was for the coal industry to build and look after its trucks to a high standard. A typical maintenance contract of the 1930s allowed a seven-year outlay of just five guineas per wagon, or less than a halfpenny a day.

  Advertisement by a wagon hire company, 1921, showing a typical coal truck

  This heavy traffic of private wagons was another retrograde feature of the British railway system. The wagons on almost every Continental system, like the passenger carriages, were owned by the operating companies. In Britain, the companies were legally required to accept privately owned wagons unless they were ill-made or in dangerously poor repair. It was not even necessary for a private concern to buy its own stock; wagons were built speculatively, and could be hired from one of the big independent workshops that flourished on the needs of an industrial economy dominated by coal.

  These private wagons persisted in using dumb buffers long after their abandonment elsewhere, and clung to the cheap method of lubrication by means of grease rather than oil. The grease needed constant replenishment if the wagons were to run freely, especially to replace what melted and slid out of the axle-boxes in the warmer months. At Netherfield and Colwick station, on one of the Great Northern Railway’s routes through the Nottinghamshire coalfield, the weekly summer consumption in Edwardian times was nearly two barrels a week, the equivalent of over half a ton of grease. Often the regreasing was skimped. A visitor to a Yorkshire marshalling yard in the 1930s was shown axle-boxes with grease ‘dried almost to the hardness of wood’. It took a lot of pulling to keep wagons of this type on the move; the visitor’s guide explained that a full-length coal train running entirely on grease-lubricated axles could not be shifted by a standard locomotive at all. Yet over two-thirds of the private wagons requisitioned in 1939 were of this type, as against just one in a hundred railway-owned wagons by the same date.

  When they did get under way, grease-lubricated wagons were restricted to a maximum of 30 mph, or their axles were prone to overheat. That was a respectable upper speed for passenger traffic in the 1830s, but as services became faster it was no longer possible to intersperse passenger and freight trains without clogging up the network. Some goods services could be run during the night, as the London & North Western began to do in 1846, but this was sufficient for only a limited proportion of the fast-growing sector. The usual answer was to provide for overtaking by means of passing loops or long sidings, where slow trains could take temporary refuge. (The modern traveller can deduce their sites from the long flat strips of waste land that suddenly appear and disappear alongside the running lines, often in places remote from any station.) A more thorough going and expensive solution was to double the lines completely, so that fast passenger and slow freight trains could keep out of each other’s way. In the 1860s the Midland Railway arranged much of its new route to London in this way, providing platforms for the fast lines only. Despite the existence of dedicated goods routes here and there, rates of progress and times of arrival for goods trains often depended more on decisions taken ad hoc in the area’s control office than on any fixed timetable. This extreme slowness was due less to speeds when the trains were moving than to the long periods spent waiting in loops and sidings so that passenger trains could pass. The Great Western calculated in the 1930s that the average speed of goods carried on its routes was less than 10 mph. The LMS and LNER were even slower.

  Getting shot of the old colliery wagons altogether was therefore an early priority for the nationalised railways. To replace them, BR raised the payload to sixteen tons and built new standard wagons all of steel, to a total of 200,000, mostly with hand brakes only. A further 9,000 that had been built to help restock the war-ravaged railways of the Continent were repatriated, even as the new Railway Executive was vacillating over plans to push the standard mineral wagon payload up to 24.5 tons (which would have cut the length and dead weight of coal trains in proportion). More capacious types than this had been operating for decades in some areas, but most collieries were equipped only for the smaller versions, as were plenty of the drops, tips, chutes and hoists that received the wagons at depots, factories, wharves and docks. Similar constraints applied to the standard four-wheeled box wagon used for general freight. In this sense, the railways’ slow gains in efficient freight handling mirrored the sluggish progress of modernisation through British industry in general. In another sense, these small wooden wagons were simply part of the price of having been first in the field as a railway economy.

  The dawn of the 1960s found the operation of freight on British Railways in a thoroughly confused situation. Officially, the future was both bright and clear. Its blueprint was the Modernisation Plan of 1955, which aimed to create a financially self-sufficient system within fifteen years, using diesel and electric traction. Unbraked wagons were to be vanquished by vacuum-braked freight services, streamed through a network of automated marshalling yards. The vacuum brake would allow trains to run much more swiftly, offering a better service to customers and making optimum use of the rolling stock. Faster freight would also lessen conflict with passenger traffic over access to the tracks and allow the abolition of countless loops, refuge sidings and slow lines.

  The up-to-date version is celebrated in an instructive British Transport Film of 1957, Fully Fitted Freight. This follows the progress of the 4.18 p.m. train of miscellaneous goods from Bristol to Leeds and the onward transit of its cargoes after that. Much of the commentary is spoken in the ‘character’ mode much favoured by the film unit, as though to establish its distance from the austere intonations of the BBC or the slick facetious tones of cinema newsreels: voices steady, stoical, gently rueful now and again, and peppered with easily grasped workplace jargon. We see the train passing through open country to the stirring chords of Vaughan Williams, as a Bristolian version of the British Transport Voice intones its consignment list:

  Seven wagons chocolate … Fifteen cases Bristol milk sherry … Twelve cases port … Six barrels cider … Ten cases Spanish wine … Six cases pottery … Two tons printed matter … Ten tins tobacco … Forty cartons footwear … Fifteen hundredweight cigarettes … Seven crates machinery … Two and half tons light castings … Forty heavy duty chairs … Thirty revolving office chairs … Thirty-one wicker chairs … Eight crates of jam … Two of marmalade … Ten of coffee essence … One ton birdseed … Two wagons tomatoes … Fifty-eight stepladders … Three A-rigs … Twelve petrol motors … Nine dynamos … Seventy-two broomhandles … and one garden gate.

  The final scenes follow some of these goods beyond the railway: budgies receive seed in a Blackpool pet shop, Glaswegians get drunk on Somerset cider, a Highland granny trudges through snow in her Glastonbury-made sheepskin boots.

  This method of working had some crucial weaknesses. On the technical side, there was a conflict between the aspiration to phase out loose-coupled trains and the continuing dependence on individually marshalled consignments. From the shunter’s point of view, vacuum-braked wagons were much more burdensome to attach and detach, each operation requiring attention to brake pipes as well as couplings. So that the pipes were not jerked apart in transit, these wagons also had to be coupled more closely, like passenger coaches. This was often achieved by means of couplings that screwed together, in place of loose links. Neither brake pipes nor screw couplings could be manhandled using the humble shunting pole. Modernisation therefore brought a revival of the old-fashioned (and less safe) practice of ducking down between the buffers to wrestle pipes and couplings into place when two vehicles were divided or joined. The train filmed in 1957 has to stop at Derby for forty minutes for re-marshalling. ‘Any faster, and they’ll ’ave all t’passengers sendin’ themselves by goods!’ says a Derbyshire version of the British Transport Voice; but the camera has already shown that the train includes vans for Carlisle, Preston, Aberdeen and half a dozen more destinations beyond Leeds, all of which will require fu
rther re-marshalling somewhere up the line.

  Even the commitment to vacuum brakes was double-edged. It was pointless to deploy such wagons if they could not be connected to the locomotive, so they had to be placed at the front of the train, ahead of any unbraked vehicles (for which a brake van was still needed at the tail end). But this messed up the basic principle of the marshalling yard, that each train could be divided and recombined as required. As a cheaper alternative to full vacuum brakes, many wagons therefore were ‘through-piped’ instead. That meant fitting them with brake pipes and hoses, but without any connection to the wagon’s own brakes, which could still be worked only by a man standing by the track. Many freight trains were composed consequently of a mixture of fully braked and unbraked wagons, piped or unpiped. How fast a freight train could run safely depended on how many of its wagons could be braked from the locomotive, which in turn might depend on where they were in the make-up of the train. BR’s system of train operating codes adopted in 1961 reflected these differences: those beginning with three included fast goods braked throughout, class 4 had at least 90 per cent of vehicles vacuum-braked, and so on down to classes 7, 8 and 9, which had no continuous brakes at all. In the same year, the policy of fitting all mineral wagons with vacuum brakes was quietly abandoned. In effect, the Victorian coal train was through to the next round, only now with steel-bodied, oil-lubricated wagons and with diesel rather than steam in charge.