By the 1890s this was beginning to change, for reasons that are still not entirely clear. The end of the broad gauge in 1892 was widely remarked, provoking reflections on the passage of time since the Great Western’s ‘brave days of old’, as The Times put it. The first description of a rural branch line in terms of time-bound tradition, as identified in Ian Carter’s exhaustive study of railways in literature, came as early as 1893: it is Arthur Quiller-Couch’s ‘Cuckoo Valley Railway’, a thinly disguised travel sketch of the archaic Bodmin & Wadebridge Railway in Cornwall, opened in 1834. A copy of the earliest surviving edition of Bradshaw fetched £25 at Sotheby’s in 1901. All these details suggest an emerging perception of the railways as a subject of historic interest.
Looking forward, national attention was caught by the so-called Race to the North of summer 1895, in which the East Coast and West Coast companies vied to run the fastest through service from London to Aberdeen. The ‘race’ was partly a protracted stunt, but it also showed excitingly that locomotives could run for long distances much faster than the timetable required. It is tempting to link the contest to the advent of railway anthropomorphism in English literature, in the shape of Rudyard Kipling’s story ‘.007’ (1898). Long before Thomas the Tank Engine, Kipling’s locomotives talked, felt pain and experienced pride, shame and boastfulness. His rolling stock could converse too, and was much less silly than the Rev. W. Awdry’s.
Railways exercised a disproportionate pull over many other clergymen besides Wilbert Awdry (1911–77). This, too, is not easily explained. One early devotee was the Rev. Victor Whitechurch (1868–1933), author of Thrilling Stories of the Railway (1912), featuring the vegetarian railway detective Thorpe Hazell. Another sign of interest among the professional classes was the establishment in 1899 of the Railway Club, the world’s first railway enthusiasts’ society, complete with a London clubroom and library. Aristocratic interest was rarer, but not unknown. The Dukes of Sutherland with their private train are too rarefied to count, leaving ‘Dozey’ Collier, third Lord Monkswell (1875–1964), as the best candidate. Monkswell seized any opportunity to mount a locomotive footplate, and sounded off on railway matters in the Lords over many decades. The General Strike found him in his element, acting as a volunteer signalman at Marylebone.
The Railway Club shut its doors in 2008, leaving the Railway Magazine (founded 1897) as the oldest survivor from the dawn of organised enthusiasm. Like the club, the magazine was the first of its kind anywhere. Its opening issue straddled the gap between enthusiasm and older sorts of writing, mixing stodgy analysis of railway share performances with livelier material such as an illustrated interview with the Great Western’s general manager. The magazine soon clocked up monthly sales of 25,000, under its tetchy and opinionated editor G. A. Sekon (properly Nokes, with the letters reversed). Sekon liked to use the now-extinct terms ‘railwayac’ and ‘locomotivac’ for followers of the railways, and signalled his own membership of the emerging tribe by naming both his house and his son after Brunel.
First issue of the Railway Magazine, 1897. The locomotive is one of the Great Northern Railway’s admired ‘single drivers’, introduced in 1870
As they woke up to the benefits of cultivating a public image, the railways began to encourage outside interest as well. The roots of this consciousness can be traced back to competition for passenger traffic, in which the Midland’s upgrading of third class in the 1870s was an early gambit. The companies’ seductive publicity posters were among the later products of this policy, as well as such things as the stylish books, jigsaws, board games and other paraphernalia mass-produced by the Great Western between the wars. Stressing its seniority, the London & North Western took to calling itself the ‘Premier Line’ and churned out thousands of postcards depicting its locomotives and carriages alongside their forerunners from Liverpool & Manchester days. The display of real railway antiques at certain busy stations – Locomotion itself at Darlington from 1892, an archaic Furness Railway engine at Barrow and a Bodmin & Wade-bridge carriage at Waterloo from early in the new century – made the same point in a different way. That railways were a British invention, a legitimate source of national pride in a nationalistic age, added to their appeal. By Edwardian times, too, the nation’s trains were at their all-time peak of visual allure, with richly elaborate liveries for both locomotives and carriages – the Railway Magazine in 1899 noted the ‘lighter and more artistic shades’ coming into vogue for the latter – and high standards of cleanliness and finish. No other country lavished so much trouble and expense on the appearance of its trains. Another attraction was the diversity of the network, with its plethora of separate companies (Bradshaw’s Railway Manual for 1894 lists 277 of them across the British Isles), multifarious private manufacturers of locomotives and rolling stock and industrial systems and feeder lines of every type.
This proliferation of types and variants was in inverse proportion to economy. As the locomotive historian W. A. Tuplin tartly put it, ‘The efforts of a score of design staffs of different railways, independently feeling their way to what was essentially a common goal, produced designs in profusion to the delight of any interested observer who was not at the same time a railway shareholder.’ Amplifying this delight, locomotives designed for home rails were more fully aestheticised than almost anywhere else. The utilitarian pipes, valves, boxes and handrails that disfigured the silhouettes of so many American or Italian engines were less conspicuous on their British equivalents, tucked away out of sight or integrated with the main outlines of the machine. Particular care was taken with the profile of the chimney (never, ever, to be called a ‘funnel’). In the words of J. G. Robinson, Chief Mechanical Engineer of the Great Central Railway, ‘A chimney to a locomotive is like a hat to a man; the finishing touch.’ In a similar spirit, the young Hamilton Ellis (born 1909) daydreamed about ‘the faultless engine’, made up of all his favourite bits of existing ones. Only after nationalisation was this tradition of tidy styling wholeheartedly given up in favour of rugged accessibility for the working parts. One diehard Great Westernite was moved to denounce British Railways’ ‘hideous Americanised progeny’ in a letter to Trains Illustrated. Even this transition was slow and partial: the first new standard locomotive did not emerge until 1951, and one Great Western design was still in production five years after that. Amazingly, in 1949–51 BR built itself a batch of twenty-eight small shunting engines to a pure North Eastern Railway design dating back to 1898.
Locomotive naming, like the naming of particular timetabled trains (see Chapter 7), was another national indulgence. Railways elsewhere often began with named engines – Der Adler, the first locomotive in Germany, Tom Thumb in the United States – before adopting prosaic systems of numbering as their stocks grew. Most Victorian railways in the UK took a similar course, but not all: the Great Western used names without numbers for its broad-gauge engines right to the end, the London & North Western applied both names and numbers to its express locomotives. Some of this name-giving had a scattergun quality; the LNWR’s Prince of Wales class, built from 1911 onwards, included Czar of Russia, Witch, John Ruskin (safely dead by then) and Gallipoli. The Great Western sharpened the focus by introducing themed names for certain classes: cities, saints, even flowers. But the true heyday commenced with the trend in the 1920s for enlisting locomotive naming to the conscious pursuit of better public relations.
The newly constituted Southern Railway made the first move. Hoping to foster West Country tourism, the company transformed its existing N15 class into ‘King Arthurs’ – a late echo of the dying fall of Victorian chivalric ideals, like the clear-browed young knights depicted in war memorial windows of the period. So E736 became Excalibur, E742 Camelot, E750 Morgan le Fay and so on. As more locomotives rolled into service, obscure corners of Arthurian legend were scoured for material, yielding names unvoiced even at the most fanciful Victorian christenings: Sir Ontzlake, Sir Galagars, Sir Dodinas le Savage. A later class was named after public schools,
a valuable source of Southern traffic, except that the roll-call had to be extended well beyond the railway’s own territory in order to forestall a loss of social tone or academic standards. The Great Western likewise ended up with some names from outside its own domain, as it compiled long feudal catalogues of castles, abbeys, halls, granges and manors for its large passenger engines (stretching the point further, it also roped in Albert Hall and a couple of Oxford colleges).
Over on the London, Midland & Scottish, military and imperial themes weighed more heavily, with classes named after regiments, naval ships and British imperial possessions. Once bestowed, these names were taken seriously: LMS locomotives were sometimes specially rostered to pull their namesake regiments’ troop trains, and some of those with Scottish names were reallocated to be nearer their home territories. By contrast, names on the London & North Eastern had a happy insouciance. Many of its largest express engines were named after racehorses, some nicely resonant (Sun Chariot, Velocity, Dick Turpin), others mystifying to the uninitiated (Sugar Palm, Hornet’s Beauty, Pretty Polly). Mindful of both ends of the social spectrum, the LNER honoured other kinds of sporting traffic by naming locomotive types after football clubs and fox-hunts, with little brass footballs or foxes incorporated into the nameplate designs. A private enthusiasm of the chief engineer accounts for the decision that many of the company’s most charismatic type, the streamlined A4 Pacifics introduced in 1935, should receive the names of wild birds. One consequence, in the words of the historian John Walton, was that ‘the world speed record holder [4468 Mallard, 126 miles per hour, 3 July 1938] was named after the commonest and most everyday species of duck’.
So ingrained did the custom of affixing names to new passenger locomotives become that it continued during the darkest years of the Second World War. O. V. S. Bulleid’s new locomotives for the Southern were given big showy plates with names of Merchant Navy lines, West Country locations, or squadrons and other subjects associated with the Battle of Britain. The irresponsible LNER even began naming its B1 class, introduced in 1942, after species of antelope (advance, Bongo and Puku), reaching a total of forty-one before running out.
Nationalisation did not change the picture immediately, as fresh castles, country houses and long-defunct racehorses were commemorated on new examples of existing designs. This disjunction between locomotive naming and the new world of socialist public ownership was pointed out in 1949 in a book by the railways’ most eminent clerical devotee, the Rev. Eric Treacy (1907–78), distinguished railway photographer and future Bishop of Wakefield. Treacy asked how a trade unionist driver might feel about driving an engine ‘bearing the name of an aristocratic parasite whose very existence was a threat to the emancipation of the working class’. Around the same time, an LNER-type locomotive was named W. P. Allen after a former leader of ASLEF, the enginemen’s union – but even this gesture was double-edged, for Allen had crossed over to take up the role of chief negotiator with the railway unions on matters of pay. When BR introduced its own express locomotives in 1951, their names were very much business-as-usual: Britannia for the first of the class, the rest largely shared between canonical British authors, stout-hearted monarchs, princes and generals, and a selection of dormant names from the Great Western’s broad-gauge days. When a powerful prototype locomotive was rolled out three years later, it was christened Duke of Gloucester, after the Queen’s second-oldest uncle.
Politics aside, locomotive names were an effective way of attracting public attention. The special glamour of ‘namers’ also helped to foster the pursuit that still dominates perceptions of railways as a hobby interest: trainspotting.
The story of trainspotting follows a long arc. There is a slow and shadowy Victorian lead-in, then a steeper ascent through the 1920s and 1930s to a golden age in the 1950s. A steady and apparently terminal decline follows the end of steam in the 1960s, increasingly accompanied by popular abuse.
The practice of noting down details of passing trains goes back a long way. The Great Western Railway Magazine in 1935 reproduced pages from the notebook of a fourteen-year-old Londoner living at Westbourne Park in 1861, in which engine names and other information about trains to and from Paddington were neatly recorded. The most surprising detail is that the observer, Fanny Johnson, was female. She has since been claimed as the earliest known trainspotter, but a challenge can be made on behalf of a ‘young Berkshire diarist’ living further along the Great Western main line, who wrote on 7 May 1840: ‘In the evening went up to the railway. Saw a new engine started today, the Tiger. I have seen altogether nine engines, running on the railway. The Morning Star, Evening Star, Dog Star, Ajax, Atlas, Planet, Mars, Firefly, & Tiger.’
In regions where engines went unnamed, mere numbers had to do. In The Railway Children, the station porter Perks tells the boy Peter that he knows of a ‘young gent’ who used to write down every engine number he saw. So Peter begins to do the same, on a yellow envelope supplied by Perks:
379
663
at which he ‘felt that this was the beginning of what would be a most interesting collection’.
Number-collecting could turn out to be the first stirring of something more serious. Around the year 1920, A. C. Perryman joined his fellow pupils in monitoring the London, Brighton & South Coast line, which passed close to the school. In 1924 he was caned for disturbing the class by exclaiming when an engine in the new Southern Railway livery ran past the window. Four years later, he entered the company’s service as a premium apprentice at its Brighton works. Schoolboy enthusiasm had to be kept under wraps here, but Perryman discovered a kindred spirit in the workshops: a senior chargeman who slipped wordlessly out of the building each day to watch the 5.05 p.m. departure go by, hauled by a ‘King Arthur’.
To make the most of collecting engine numbers, it was necessary to know what there was to see. Published details of engines in service appeared sporadically, starting with a list of Great Western ‘namers’ in 1869, but for a long time these were neither comprehensive nor regular enough to keep the observer up to date. The first published compendium was produced in 1935 by the Railway Correspondence and Travel Society as a supplement to its members’ magazine, under the ponderous title The Locomotive Stock as at 31 December, 1934 of the Main Line Companies of Great Britain (and Ireland) including alterations to stock during 1934. These booklets were unsatisfactory for spotters’ record-keeping, however, as they summarised continuously numbered classes in blocks, in the form (for example) ‘5000–5499’. Few spotters of the 1930s and early 1940s would ever have seen a copy, and most kept hand-written lists instead. One labour-saving dodge popular with Birmingham observers was to draw paper grids of ten squares by ten, numbered graph-wise along two sides, which could be infilled square by square as new engines were noted.
There was a publishing opportunity here, and the man who seized it prospered as a result. He was Ian Allan (1922–2015), a young official on the Southern, whose duties included answering letters of enquiry concerning the company’s new locomotives. Allan’s suggestion in 1942 that the Southern should issue its own engine list was approved by his superiors, who left him to arrange publication himself. Allan called his booklet An ABC of Southern Locomotives. ABCs for the three other major companies followed, with steeply rising print runs: 2,000 for the first Southern edition, a total of 145,000 for all four railways five years later. Every engine number was shown and could be individually underlined (for some reason, ticking off the numbers never caught on). More remarkable still, their first printings appeared when railway traffic was a matter of national security, and photographing trains was explicitly forbidden. A hardback combined edition, known to spotters as the ‘Combine’, appeared in 1948; a single, simplified booklet listing every locomotive together with its home allocation, known as the Locoshed Book, followed in 1950.
These books could be kept up to date by consulting Allan’s monthly magazine, Trains Illustrated, which supplied details of new, withdrawn and real
located engines. He also founded a Locospotters’ Club, entry fee and member’s badge one shilling. (‘Do you know a Real Spotter when you see one? All genuine spotters wear this badge’ …) By 1952 Real Spotters could buy club notepaper, envelopes and Christmas cards, cycle pennants, ties and special locospotters’ pencils. The club required its members to vow never to interfere with railway equipment, cause a nuisance to staff or trespass on railway land. Over a quarter of a million enthusiasts eventually signed up.
The spotters’ code notwithstanding, not everyone felt kindly towards the craze. Crowds of school-capped youths on the platform ends of favoured stations were sometimes a hindrance to the smooth and safe operation of the railway. Certain stations chose to ban spotters altogether, beginning in 1948 with Tamworth in Staffordshire. Two main lines cross at different levels at Tamworth, and on busy days some 250 youths might gather to watch the passing show. When not scribbling down numbers, they also reportedly ‘ran across the metals [tracks] in front of trains, rode on slow-moving vehicles, threw stones, interfered with signal wires, and got in the way of passengers’. Banished, spotters gathered instead in a nearby field, blessed with good vantage points across the angle between the lines.
Episodes such as the Tamworth ban helped to draw the craze to the attention of outsiders. Newspaper reports begin around 1946. Journalists took a while to decide on phraseology; ‘taking train numbers’, ‘collecting locomotive numbers’, ‘engine-numbering’ were all in use, as well as ‘trainspotting’. The snappier formula is also less accurate, given that the objects of scrutiny were locomotives rather than the trains they pulled, and the aim was to identify them individually rather than merely to spot what kind they were. It may be that the coinage carried an echo of ‘plane-spotting’, the colloquial term for aircraft recognition during the Second World War, when observers on rooftops and other vantage points watched for Luftwaffe intruders. Plane-spotting was an adult and purposeful business, so any half-conscious associations with number-taking on the rails could only have been flattering. Some fans certainly embraced the term with pride, like the eight boys aged between eleven and fourteen who came together as the North Hull Estate Train Spotters’ Club in 1948.
The Railways Page 64