Fire and Steam

by Christian Wolmar

  Coincidentally, as in 1914, the declaration of war stopped the unions from calling a strike. There had been industrial peace since the General Strike in 1926 but as traffic had been improving – though not shareholder dividends – the unions felt that it was time to put in a strong wage claim. Just as the storm clouds of war were gathering, ASLEF, ever more militant, announced that a strike would start on 26 August, but its leaders were talked out of it by Ernest Brown, the Minister of Labour, who intimated that the railways might be needed to take the children to safety. He was to be proved right within days but the unions nevertheless pursued their claim which was referred to a national tribunal. When it reported in October, the Commission gave some concessions to the workers by raising minimum wages to £2 7s in rural areas and £2 10s in London, although wage packets were already much fatter thanks to overtime, and in any case drivers received more than double that minimum. As the war inevitably brought inflation in its wake, the railway workers were again paid a war supplement which started at 4 shillings for men and 3 shillings for women, and rose throughout the war. There was a big wage differential between the sexes, with average wages in mid-1943 of £3 4s for women and £5 5s for men – because they did more overtime and were given all the supervisory posts – but for both sexes these were good wages compared with other industries.2

  The government did not repeat its mistake of allowing railwaymen to sign up indiscriminately. Railway employment was made a ‘reserved’ occupation, which meant that requests to join the forces were considered individually. Nevertheless 60,000 railway workers joined the forces in the course of the war, 3,500 of whom lost their lives, and a further 45,000 were released for other vital occupations. Interestingly, these totals include 4,000 women who, of course, were not allowed to go to the Front but did serve in various military capacities. As in the First World War, the administrative skills of railway managers were in great demand and large numbers were seconded to various government departments.

  Women were recruited in large numbers to fill the gaps and this time there was no need for debate, although they still faced much of the same prejudice as in 1914. At the outbreak of the war, there had been only 25,000 women in the railway industry and this soared to over 105,000, representing just under a sixth of the total workforce of 650,000 by 1943. They performed a wide range of jobs, including guard and signal work, as well as portering and carriage-cleaning, but again there was a total ban on women working on the footplate. Supervisory and managerial jobs were also closed to them, and girls were not allowed to take up apprenticeships. There was a repeat of the discussion among the unions about whether women should receive equal pay: this time, in order to avoid concerns that employing them would lower wages, women performing jobs defined as male grades were generally paid 4s per week less for the first three months, and then the male rate. After the war, as before, most were forced out of their jobs but this time a higher proportion remained.

  The railways had been something of a closed shop until now. Reg Robertson, who was a fireman in the war, explains how the railway had been a ‘family affair’: ‘[Normally] to stand any chance of a job, you had to come from a family that already had the breadwinner working for the company.’3 Applicants related to a railway worker might get in while total outsiders had their applications rejected. But times had changed, and in late 1940, Robertson answered an advertisement in the Brentwood Gazette for engine cleaners, the first rung on the ladder to becoming a fireman and then a driver.

  As in 1914, the railways were called into immediate action and successfully carried out an enormous logistical task within days of the start of the conflict. This time it was the evacuation of children and others considered vulnerable from the cities in order to protect them from the bombing that was thought to be imminent. Within a couple of weeks, 1.3 million people had been moved into the countryside on 3,800 special trains, half from London and the rest from major cities such as Liverpool, Newcastle and Glasgow. The meticulous planning, which included reducing congestion at London’s main line termini by starting trains from suburban stations such as Watford and Wimbledon, paid off and there were remarkably few mishaps. Many of the children drifted back during the phoney war of the next nine months and a similar, though smaller, evacuation exercise had to be carried out again when the bombs actually started falling.

  Troop trains were soon running, with the first part of the British Expeditionary Force being dispatched from the port of Glasgow, having travelled there on twenty-two special trains. Soon after, Southampton received over ten times that number of military traffic en route to France. Some of these trains were far longer than normal, with up to twenty-five coaches, and while that allowed many more passengers to be carried, these sluggish behemoths compounded congestion on the network.

  Another crisis soon ensued. The retreat from Dunkirk required hundreds of trains to evacuate servicemen, some of them badly injured, away from the Channel ports. Fortunately, the trains carrying the escaping men, who had been strafed and machine-gunned as they had tried to get off the French beaches, were not attacked by the Germans as they left the British Channel ports, even though they would have been an easy target. Overall, nearly 300,000 Dunkirk survivors, many injured, were transported in just ten busy days straddling May and June 1940 in 620 special trains. Again, as in the First World War, the railways had passed their initial test with commendable efficiency. The GWR, ever with an eye to publicity, even produced a booklet, Dunkirk and the Great Western, publicizing its role in the rescue using both its trains and ships. In fact, it had been a remarkable cooperative effort from all the railways, which had supplied a total of 186 trains,4 each ten coaches long and hauled by whatever locomotives were available.

  For the public, however, travelling by train during the war was a grim and, at times, expensive experience. The Brighton trains which had previously been among the slowest expresses in the country, averaging just 52 mph, suddenly became the fastest as speeds were reduced on most services around the network. All the lights were turned off in the crowded coaches so that enemy aircraft could not spot the trains, and until hooded lamps and efficient blinds could be installed passengers had to endure night travelling with just the barest glow of a faint blue lamp. Initially excursion and cheap day tickets were scrapped, though the latter were reinstated but only for off-peak times. Other fares remained the same throughout the war and the biggest problems were overcrowding and delays. Conditions on the LNER’s East Coast line were particularly unpleasant due to the reduction in services and the fact that it attracted the most attacks, being the nearest railway to the German airfields: the trains were of ‘caravan length and often quite incredibly crowded with corridors jammed with men and women sleeping propped up in gangways and lavatories’.5 The sheer volume of people weighed down the carriages on to their springs, giving a bumpy and uncomfortable ride.

  The number of services was cut back on most lines, sometimes dramatically. On the Great Western, for example, there were just fourteen daily trains from London to Bristol, compared with twenty pre-war, and services between London and Glasgow on the LMS were halved from twelve to six daily. Of the remaining services, many did not run – by 1942 it was common for 200 trains per day to be cancelled, leaving thousands of people milling about at stations to be crammed into the next service. Moreover, people had to endure the awful conditions on the trains for far longer than before the war as the scheduled journey times went up by 50 per cent or more. Plymouth, with all trains now being routed via Bristol rather than the direct way, using the Berks & Hants line, took six and a half hours to reach from London, compared with a best time before the war of four hours, and Glasgow was a massive ten hours from the capital, a third longer.

  Worse, even these extended scheduled times often bore little relationship to reality. Delays were inevitable as the extra services on the network, often carrying troops who were given priority, caused hold-ups on congested lines. There were plenty of other reasons why trains were late which
were largely out of the railways’ control. Materials and people to repair the track were in short supply, countless temporary speed restrictions which, in effect, became permanent were imposed because of the poor condition of the track, and the overlong trains were not only slow but often required two stops at shorter stations to give passengers a chance to get on and off, causing yet more delay. Even reductions in the number of train services could, paradoxically, cause difficulties. On the Southern, the regular passage of trains ensured that the third rail did not ice up, and longer intervals meant a greater risk of breakdowns in freezing weather. All these changes to the timetable and disruptions had a very widespread knock-on effect, and there is much truth in the old railway adage that a timetable change in York can cause delay to a branch line service in Cornwall.

  Most of the pleasures of railway travel soon became a distant memory. First class was abolished in 1941 to allow better use of available space and restaurant cars went the same way three years later. There was also the ever-present risk of being bombed or strafed by the Germans and the railway authorities had to work out how best to cope with an attack. At first, in the spring of 1940 when the Blitz began, they made the same mistake as in the First World War and issued an instruction that as soon as a warning of approaching enemy aircraft was announced, trains were to stop at the next station to allow any worried passengers to get off and then proceed at a mere 15 mph. Goods trains were supposed to slow down to a snail’s pace of 10 mph. However, these rules caused the network to grind to a halt far too often, given that attacks were almost continuous in the south and on the east coast, and consequently the rules had to be relaxed if the railways were to function at all. Instead, trains were generally allowed to proceed at 30 mph but even at this speed severe dislocation and delay was caused to passengers. Both passengers and railway workers faced a variety of new hazards from the blackout conditions: platform edges were painted white but nevertheless many people fell on to the track and the death rate among the workforce soared because of the risks of working in the dark.

  The overall burden on the railways was far greater than in the First World War and again various outposts of the network became frantically busy. This time it was not Scotland but Norfolk where the construction of 150 bomber airfields required vast quantities of material to be transported, often ending up at tiny country stations which might previously only have handled a couple of coal wagons each week. Moreover, once these airfields were built, the RAF relied on the railways to transport the personnel using them, and the fuel for the planes, which put further stress on these little-used lines.

  The military traffic reached a peak in 1944 when the railways ran an average of 500 special trains for the government every day, many of them part of the preparations for the invasion of France. The complexities of such an exercise are impossible to exaggerate. Trains cannot just be put on the tracks randomly and allowed to follow whatever the signals and points instruct. Each additional train required a route plan – a train path – to weave the train into the existing pattern of traffic, taking into account the weight of the train, the power of the locomotives, and military requirements such as stops to feed the troops en route. Even goods trains had to be scheduled in a way that ensured the availability of crews with the right route knowledge,6 which was even more essential since the blackout conditions of the war made driving much harder. Normally such timetables would have been drawn up at leisure several months in advance using graph paper, by a timetabler who would need to know every nook and cranny of the route7 but with so many extra trains changes had to be made daily to accommodate them. The most extreme pressure was in the run-up to D-Day and its immediate aftermath, when the railways near the coastal towns were working at well beyond their maximum expected capacity, and it was only the skills of the railway managers, the signalmen and the drivers which ensured their smooth running.

  On the freight side, the key issue was to reduce the wasteful carriage of thousands of empty wagons back to their home depots. To this end, the entire fleet of 655,000 railway-owned wagons, together with the 585,000 in private hands, was used as a single resource, controlled by the unimaginatively named but vital ‘Inter-Company Freight Rolling Stock Control’ at Amersham. It set up a novel system, making every station in the country file daily returns on its need for wagons and the equally vital sheets and ropes to cover them. Thanks to coordination and these backroom administrative tasks, the amount of freight carried on the railway rose by nearly 50 per cent by 1943 without any extra wagons being introduced. Special services had to be accommodated on the network, too, such as ambulance trains that had to travel particularly slowly and, most bizarrely, armoured trains which were built to help repel an invasion with a heavily protected locomotive at the front and gun platforms at both ends. They patrolled the south coast for the early years of the war but in the event served little purpose as fears of an invasion receded, and gradually they were left in the sidings.

  To compound their difficulties, large swathes of the railways were frequently under attack and suffered substantial damage. Once the Blitz had started in earnest in the summer of 1940, the railway began to suffer massive damage and over the space of the next five years there were 9,200 ‘incidents’, 247 of which put the line concerned out of action for a week or more. London and the Southern railway took the brunt of the attacks but the East Coast line and the Midlands suffered too. There were two bad phases: the bombing raids of the Blitz in 1940–1 and the flying bomb rocket attacks towards the end of the war in 1944–5. In the first series of attacks, the Luftwaffe made a concerted attempt to destroy communication links and some of the frequent hits on the City and St Paul’s were actually aimed at the nearby Snow Hill to Blackfriars line, which, as in the First World War, was a vital route through London and was one of the most bombed sections of track in Britain. A particularly devastating attack on the rail network was the destruction of a bridge in Southwark Street, just south of the Thames, in April 1941, which cut off access to the Snow Hill line for a couple of months until a temporary structure could be erected; it took a year and a half to install a permanent new bridge. Marshalling yards, the dockyard railways and the London main line stations, just by their sheer size, proved to be easier and frequently hit targets. In Doncaster, a decoy goods yard was even built in order to protect the real one on the other side of the tracks. On the worst night of the Blitz in May 1941, seven London termini were damaged by bombs and only Marylebone of the capital’s major stations was left unscathed. At Waterloo, the most badly damaged, it took a month to restore services fully. Of course it was not only London. Late in 1940, three arches of the brick viaduct carrying trains into Liverpool on the LMS were bombed and a second attack destroyed much of the repair work, while Middlesbrough station was completely destroyed in a raid in August 1942.

  Despite the damage sustained by the railway, the Germans never even came close to paralysing the network. The duplication of lines helped, as it had done in the First World War, but the main reason was that the Germans found it virtually impossible to direct bombs on to a thin line of tracks without a guidance device. The Allies were to find this out in the latter stages of the war when attacks on the French rail network to prevent the Germans bringing in reinforcements proved ineffective. Instead, they had to call on the French railway workers sympathetic to the Resistance to sabotage the system. However, where the Luftwaffe’s targeted attacks had mostly failed, the random aim of the V1 and V2 bombs later in the war caused more havoc on the railways. The first V2 happened to strike the railway at Bethnal Green and several others caused devastation to railway property including one which hit the track in front of a Kent Coast express that promptly fell into the hole killing several passengers.

  Once the bombs hit, the unsung heroes of the civil engineering department came to the fore, men who had stayed at home, not always by choice, but nevertheless risked their lives like their contemporaries fighting in Europe. They did not wait until the ‘All Clear’ was give
n, but as soon as they were alerted that the railway was damaged they went out immediately to start effecting repairs, working at great risk not only from continued enemy attacks but also from trains running on nearby tracks. Other railway workers, running isolated signal boxes or setting out to work during air raids, were equally heroic.

  The most famous tale of heroism on the railways during the war was the action of the driver and fireman of a long munitions train of fifty-one wagons, carrying tons of bombs and detonators, in the small market town of Soham in Cambridgeshire on 2 June 1944, just four days before D-Day. As the train was going through the town, the driver, Ben Gimbert, noticed flames coming up from under a wagon. Instead of just abandoning the train where an explosion would have flattened the whole town, he got his fireman Jim Nightall to uncouple the rear part of the train and then carried on with the burning wagon to try to reach the open countryside. However, he had got only a short way out of the station when the remaining wagons on the train, loaded with forty-four 500-pound bombs, blew up, causing the biggest explosion on British soil during the war. Amazingly Gimbert survived, despite being thrown 200 yards by the explosion, but both Nightall and the signalman, Frank Bridges, were killed and though every window in the town was shattered, its inhabitants were saved by the actions of the railwaymen. Gimbert and Nightall (posthumously) were awarded the George Cross, the highest award for bravery available to a civilian. There were countless other heroic deeds by railway workers, many of which went unrecognized. Helena Wojtczak8 uncovered the tale of a stewardess on a Great Western liner, Elizabeth Mary Owen, who saved several lives after her ship, the St Patrick, was sunk on the way to Rosslare in Ireland. She repeatedly dived into cabins to bring out passengers and was awarded the George Medal. Sadly, her efforts were totally ignored in the company’s official account in its Great Western Magazine.