Fire and Steam

by Christian Wolmar

  Across the Channel in France, the railways also had a role to play. A network of narrow-gauge railways built and maintained by the substantial railway divisions of the British, American and French armies was the principal method of supplying the frontline. No other war would be fought over such trench-bound territories, whose location moved so little over such a long period, making them very suitable for supply by rail. In 1917, there was again fulsome praise from the military after the summer offensive at Passchendaele. Sir William Robertson, the Chief of the General Staff, praised the railways for carrying 200,000 tons of ammunition and 50,000 of stone for roadbuilding: ‘All these things meant a tremendous amount of railway work . . . I would like to acknowledge the most valuable services rendered to the Army by the railway managers and the railway employees who have gone out to do that work for us in France.’16

  The railways coped with all these difficulties and new responsibilities, despite suffering from a further difficulty – the loss of thousands of key staff to the military. Rather foolishly, the government made no attempt to prevent railway workers from enlisting and, consequently, like their fellows in other industries, they flocked to sign up. It was, for example, rather unfortunate for the Highland Railway that the barracks of the Cameron Highlanders was just beside the railway at Inverness and that the regiment was given the task of raising an extra battalion soon after the onset of war. The railway lost vital staff such as signalmen and drivers, and crucially fitters from the works, which became severely undermanned and therefore took far longer to bring locomotives back into service. The patriotism which took those men to the war was, with hindsight, somewhat misplaced as they would have been more useful in their existing occupations. The government of 1939 avoided falling into the same trap and, at the outset of the Second World War, decreed that the railways would be a ‘reserved’ occupation, requiring special permission for any workers to sign up (see Chapter 13). And it was not only the unskilled and blue-collar workers who were temporarily lost to the railway. In addition to top managers like Herbert Walker, 2,000 railway officers were ‘loaned’ to government to fulfil various important managerial roles. Albert Stanley, later Lord Ashfield, who ran the London Electric Railway Company, the precursor to London Underground, was even made President of the Board of Trade, and Sam Fay of the Great Central was given responsibility for running the War Department’s own railways.

  It was hardly surprising that railway workers were a source of recruitment. At the outbreak of war, there were 625,559 railway workers, reflecting the fact that the industry was necessarily very labour-intensive in those pre-electronic days. Wages, as we have seen, were low, providing little inducement to investment in labour-saving devices. Porters were required to carry luggage and handle goods at even the smallest station, which of course were all staffed with booking office clerks, ticket collectors and a station-master, though sometimes these tasks were rolled into one. There were countless signal boxes which had to be near the points and junctions they controlled because the tracks were connected directly to the boxes by a system of rods and wires.17 There had to be two men on each footplate – a driver and a fireman – and a guard as brakeman for every freight as well as passenger train. While some of these tasks could be dispensed with, the railway could not function safely without the great majority of these workers. The burden of overwork often fell on the footplatemen, with shifts lasting twenty or more hours becoming commonplace as a result of delays caused by overcrowding on the network. A driver or fireman might end up in charge of a heavily delayed train and not return home for days, sleeping in whatever nook and cranny he could find and scrounging food from the free buffets provided for servicemen – although, cruelly, they were often turned away: ‘there was no patriotic glow to be got out of feeding sooty railwaymen who were hauling the ammunition and ambulance trains’.18

  The hordes of men enlisting left huge numbers of vacancies: by the end of the war 30 per cent of the pre-war workforce, a total of 184,000 railwaymen, had gone to war. These vacancies could not be filled until an alternative source of labour was tapped – those women who were being thrown out of their old jobs in great numbers as factories producing non-essential goods were shut down and the well-to-do laid off their servants. The women were eager to find new work and by April 1915, 47,000 had registered for war duties. The solution may have seemed obvious, but even though the suffragettes had begun their campaign for the vote, women’s choices were still very circumscribed, with only unmarried girls expected to work and then in a very restricted range of jobs.19 For women to take on these male roles was therefore seen as controversial, with potential long-term repercussions. Moreover, it was an issue on which unions were unwilling to challenge the railway managers who were reluctant to take this radical step. Despite the unions’ supposedly progressive nature, they were deeply resistant to women replacing the enlisted men, even temporarily. In fairness, the unions’ fears that women would be taken on at lower wages were well founded, as this had happened in other industries, but their objections went deeper than this. In her book, Railwaywomen, Helena Wojtczak argues that many railwaymen were shocked at the idea of women replacing them, not just because of their view of women’s role in society but because of genuine doubts about the ability of the ‘weaker sex’ to undertake the work: ‘The dominant beliefs about women’s correct sphere in life were coupled with the conviction that women were, as individuals, incapable of performing such work.’20

  However, women were beginning to replace their menfolk in other industries and after the Railway Executive Committee had created a sub-committee, which after much deliberation eventually recommended the employment of women in some male grades, the bar on women was lifted in the spring of 1915 and they were initially allowed to take up jobs like carriage-cleaners and clerks. Men were subject to conscription from January 1916, and increasing numbers of women had to be taken on then, which meant that they made inroads into even more traditionally male roles, notably in the uniformed grades such as porters and ticket collectors. The brave women pioneers who took on these jobs must have found it tough as they had to expose themselves daily to curiosity from the passengers, and even the press.

  In the end, women carried out a very wide variety of tasks on the railway (there had been a smattering of signal workers and crossing keepers even before the war). The unions were at first reluctant to allow women to be paid the same wages but realized that they would undermine their own industrial strength if there were a significant differential. The railway company managements, meanwhile, sensing that they could cut women’s wages even in peacetime, were quite eager to let them take on new tasks such as shunting and track maintenance, a move resisted by the unions. Consequently, women were never allowed near that male redoubt, the footplate, as a result of the unmovable opposition of ASLEF, which even tried, unsuccessfully, to prevent women from being engine cleaners.21 Women were also discriminated against by not receiving automatic annual rises, being banned from overtime, and initially not being paid the war bonus of two to three shillings weekly which was introduced in early 1915 to compensate for the high rate of inflation. Eventually, though, women did receive part of that bonus, which had to be increased several times during the war. On the London Underground women were permitted to serve as guards and they became so vital to its continued functioning that when the Watford extension of the Bakerloo line opened in 1917, all the staff except drivers were women. Women became commonplace throughout the railway, no more so than on the ticket barrier where three quarters of collectors were female, carrying out a job which the press had warned was unsuitable because they would not be able to handle obstreperous passengers.

  And there were many such passengers, as rail users had more than their normal cause for complaint on the overstretched railways. At first the companies largely maintained their normal schedule, apart from certain sections of line, such as the routes to the Kent ports, which were restricted to military use. A few branch lines were closed and some l
ittle-used stations shut. Routes were rationalized, so that there was only one way to travel between major cities: while before the war a passenger travelling between London and Edinburgh had three choices of route, now they could go only from King’s Cross and on the London to Glasgow route, in the morning they could go only from St Pancras on the Midland but after midday they would have to take the West Coast from Euston. On some routes where alternatives were still available, passengers could use tickets interchangeably, an unprecedented concession. For example, the holder of a ticket between London and Birmingham could travel by whichever route was more convenient, rather than, as normal, being confined to the Great Western or the London & North Western.

  Rail travel became less pleasant as not only were the trains overcrowded but facilities like restaurant cars disappeared from many services and nearly all were withdrawn by the spring of 1916.22 Sleeping car services mostly survived on the basis that government officials travelling on business needed a good night’s sleep, although there was much public feeling that these services catered largely for the rich. Passengers were asked to limit their luggage – few people travelled in those days without at least a large trunk or several suitcases – but these injunctions were frequently ignored and had to be enforced by regulation in December 1916, restricting people to 100 lbs (45 kg, still a lot by today’s standards and three times Ryanair’s baggage allowance!). Shortage of rolling stock meant that old non-corridor trains were reintroduced on several long-distance routes, which meant much crossing of legs for passengers used to trains with toilet facilities.

  At holiday times travel was particularly arduous because so many people were desperate to get away from the towns. The railway companies and government officials attempted to put people off from travelling with advertising campaigns saying that ‘joy riders’ should stay at home. However, many people were earning higher than normal wages with little to spend it on due to wartime shortages and were understandably eager to obtain some respite from the war. Passengers often turned up in their droves at Christmas or Whitsun, forcing the railway companies, rather reluctantly, to lay on extra trains. Surprisingly, though, the railways were happy to provide lucrative excursion trains to the coast on lesser-used lines. In fact, the government cancelled the 1916 Whitsun Bank Holiday, but even that did not deter a large number of passengers from travelling during that week. Not only did they ignore the requests to stay at home, they did not always adhere to necessary wartime precautions and happily raised the blackout window blinds during air raids, forcing the government to insist that the rail companies turned out all the lights when the sirens started. Initially, trains were ordered to halt once the alarm had been sounded but this caused such widespread chaos across the network that they were soon instructed to proceed at a reduced speed, partly in case of damage to the track but mainly to reduce the need to fire the boiler as the flames could be seen from the air.

  The railways in the First World War suffered little from bombing, although Zeppelin airships did attack London in the early months, sending people scurrying into the Underground for safety, but in nothing like the numbers that were to seek shelter there during the Second World War. The airship attacks ended after a few months, but from early 1917 there were concentrated attacks by aircraft and in the worst attack on the railways, twenty people, including eight railway workers, were killed by a bomb at St Pancras on 17 February 1918. Unusually, the North Eastern was put out of action for a few days when a German cruiser bombarded Hartlepool and neighbouring towns in December 1914. Oddly, the greatest damage to railway equipment took place at sea with the loss of several railway-run steamships on their vital shuttle services across the Channel. Overall, there were few attacks on the rail network, and the total death toll of railway staff killed while on duty was twenty-four during the whole war.

  The worst incident on the mainland did, however, occur on the railways but it was unconnected with enemy action. The terrible Quintinshill accident, which involved three trains near Gretna on the Caledonian Railway on 22 May 1915, remains by far the worst catastrophe in British railway history and the death toll remains one of the highest in the Western world. The direct cause was sloppy working practices by the signalmen, but the story reveals the pressure that railway workers throughout the country experienced from the greatly increased traffic. The Caledonian main line approaching Carlisle from the north was, according to O. S. Nock, ‘one of the busiest stretches of double line railway in the Kingdom’23 during the war. On the morning of 22 May, the small signal box at Quintinshill near Gretna Junction, ten miles north of Carlisle, which controlled the sidings that were used to allow fast services to overtake local and freight trains, was particularly busy. The two overnight sleeping car expresses from London were late, as often happened, and in order to keep time a northbound local train had been sent ahead with the intention that it would be shunted into the sidings at Quintinshill to allow the express through. But both the sidings were full, one with the empties of a Jellicoe Special returning from Grangemouth, and therefore the local train was directed across to wait on the southbound main line instead. There was nothing unusual in that manoeuvre itself, provided the signalmen remained alert to the danger. They did not. The time was just after 6 a.m., which was supposed to be the point at which the signalmen changed shifts, but the two men, George Meakin and James Tinsley, had a private arrangement whereby the latter would often ride on the footplate of the local and the shift change would take place half an hour or so later. In order to cover their tracks, Meakin would put any details of trains after 6 a.m. on to a piece of paper for Tinsley to copy later into a logbook. Such informal arrangements were strictly against regulations but may well have been quite commonplace in such rural outposts. This time they were to prove fateful. On changing shifts, Tinsley, too busy copying up the register, forgot that the local had been shunted on to the southbound-running line and gave the ‘line clear’ signal to a troop train carrying 485 soldiers of the Royal Scots, who had just finished their training in Stirlingshire and were en route to Gallipoli in Turkey. Also against regulations, the fireman of the local and two brakemen from the goods trains were all chattering away in the box about the war, along with Meakin who was reading the paper Tinsley had brought. This hubbub distracted Tinsley so much that he did not realize he had just given the ‘line clear’ signal to the troop train, even though the local, on which he had just travelled, was standing in full view below his box.

  The troop train had no chance, coming down the slight gradient at 70 mph, and smashed into the local service head-on with such force that all the carriages were telescoped into just seventy yards, a third of its original length. Worse, old wooden and gas-lit rolling stock from the Great Central was being used, and several cylinders, stored underneath the train and unfortunately recently replenished, exploded, setting the carriages and the poor soldiers alight. And finally, to compound the horror, a minute later the delayed second express heading north which could not be stopped by the panicking signalmen ploughed into the wreckage. The hapless signalmen were sentenced to prison for manslaughter, Tinsley getting three years and Meakin eighteen months. Wartime censorship meant there was little press converage of the disaster and the official death toll of 227 may well be an underestimate as the regimental records of the troops were lost in the conflagration. Even so, that figure is twice that of the second worst disaster in Britain, the collision of three trains at Harrow in October 1952 when 112 were killed (see Chapter 14).

  Although normal passenger services had been cut back slightly over the first three years of the war, the shortage of skilled railway staff and rolling stock eventually forced the government early in 1917 to implement more stringent measures in an effort to reduce demand for rail travel. Fare levels, unchanged since 1914, were raised by 50 per cent24 and most concessionary tickets scrapped, while 400 minor stations and many branch lines were closed (although many stations were kept open for freight), some suffering the ignominy of having their rails lifted
and transported to France. Holiday trains were no longer run and passenger services throughout the network were cut back through the introduction of new timetables, with far slower timings, designed to save fuel. Even these draconian measures did not have the required effect, cutting usage by only 7 per cent, far less than the government had hoped. Despite all these restrictions and regulations, in some parts of the country the old competitive urges survived. The Great Central, with little war traffic, maintained its pre-war standards, taking traffic from the Midland, whose onerous war use meant it provided a far inferior service than before 1914.

  Given the railways’ contribution during the war, it was fitting that the armistice should be signed in a railway dining car on 11 November 1918. Ironically, one of the reasons for the ability of the railways to keep the supply lines open, even at times of great demand, was the fact that many routes had duplicate lines run by different companies: ‘The main factor in [the railways’] wartime success was the main defect of their pre-war situation. The wasteful peacetime competition, ensured that there was plenty of spare capacity to cope with traffic surges.’25 In other words, the competition that had been stimulated by the Victorians’ fear of monopoly had, at last, found a purpose. Again, ironically, it was the war that killed off most competition by leading to the creation of four large amalgamated railways out of the plethora of pre-war companies; the process by which it got there was a tortuous one that would leave the railways feeling unloved and, more importantly, cheated out of millions of pounds.