Steam Special [Princess Elizabeth on the Lickey Incline]

Late arrivals jockey for position along the field edge, beyond which, polished rails reflect bright afternoon sunlight. Birdsong is interspersed with urgent murmurings about lenses, lighting and apertures. A normal service diesel unit clatters down the slope, past the expectant crowd and out of sight. From some distance, a shrill whistle pierces the air. Cameras and recorders, of every description, are lifted and poised. The watchers shuffle tensely. The regular, purposeful beat of a steam locomotive working hard uphill is unmistakable and almost upon us. All eyes are fixed on the curtain of trees. The show is about to begin.

Princess Elizabeth [not on the Lickey!]

Talyllyn Railway

We called in at Tywyn Wharf just in time to wave off the 2.00 p.m. departure. Number 7 Tom Rolt was in charge. The preservation of the Talyllyn Railway provided the inspiration for the Ealing Comedies 1953 film, the Titfield Thunderbolt.

The Narrow Gauge Railway Museum, accessed from the platform at Tywyn and on two floors, is first class, housing retired narrow-gauge locomotives and a wealth of memorabilia. I was also very impressed with the clarity of the labelling of the various items on display - clear and consistent but not over-loaded with information.

Flying Visit

This notice on the toilet for “Martians with one leg shorter than the other” welcomed us to Ynys-Hir RSPB reserve on the Dovey estuary. It has such an attractive location, perched on gentle, wooded slopes above the marsh. It provides safe haven for incoming migrants like pied flycatcher and common redstart. How tranquil and inviting those thickets and glades must seem to the summer visitors that have recently logged up all those air miles just to get there.

Next door at Cors Dyfi, the ospreys have also returned - though a female interloper has already taken up residence on the nest and appears to be getting on very well with the returning male. There could be a bit of a domestic there in a day or two, when last year’s incumbent finally arrives.

The Shrewsbury to Aberystwyth railway abuts both these sites but that has not deterred the birds one bit. The line runs much closer to the osprey’s nest site than the statutory 200 yards minimum distance that separates proceedings from the imaginatively designed, raised visitor’s centre and watchpoint. The rail network has become so firmly embedded within our natural landscape over the last couple of centuries. It has become very much a part of the scenery.

Union of South Africa

A4 Class No. 60009 Union of South Africa is to be permanently withdrawn when her current mainline  certificate ends in April 2019, so opportunities to see her once more in full working order have taken on a renewed significance.

At Newark Northgate on 20^th December 2017, she was northbound to York on the East Coast Main Line but not booked to stop. In the event, she took a breather in platform one giving sufficient time for a few more photos to add to a collection going back over her many years in preservation. It was wonderful to see her in BR livery on the old home ground of the remarkable A4s. 

 

Service with a Smile

[This article appears in the current edition of the Railway Antiques Gazette, with thanks to the editor, Tim Petchey]

This murky photo of Jubilee Class No. 45661 Vernon was taken on Birkenhead sheds on 2/2/64, around the time that we met Billy J Kramer.

“All right, lads?” Billy J. Kramer volunteered with a smile, as he approached the stage door at the New Brighton Tower Ballroom, sometime in 1964. We felt so chuffed with that. We were now virtually mates with a pop star, having already gained his autograph in the same spot on an earlier occasion and we liked to think he had remembered us from last time.

Billy J. was managed by Brian Epstein, of Beatles fame. He had burst onto the scene during the previous year with the Lennon and McCartney number, “Do you want to know a secret?” I think we probably met him around the time of his subsequent hit record “Little Children.” A grown-up singing about little children might earn you a visit from Operation Yew Tree today and, at the very least, closer scrutiny of the lyrics.

For the intervening fifty years, I believed the story that we had heard at the time, which was that Billy J. had formerly been a porter at Liverpool Central High Level station. However, as he himself confirmed in an interview broadcast on BBC1 TV’s Breakfast programme in 2013, he left school to join a railway engineering apprenticeship scheme and was actually a fitter at the sheds, “I used to take steam engines to bits and put them back together again.”

Porter or fitter, it is hardly surprising that a young man leaving school in the 1960’s could still find a job with one of the big employers. Steel making, coal mining, ship building, dock working and textile manufacturing all accounted for vast numbers of traditional, male-dominated, manual occupations then and the railways were no exception.

The locomotive works that we trooped round in our school uniforms, lead by our statutory member of staff in possession of a group visit permit, were just bulging with men in overalls in the various workshops, breaking off to grin at us and making the odd asides between themselves that were not meant for our ears, once they had looked up from their tasks and noticed our presence. Locomotive sheds and station platforms were also generally very well manned and some, including Doctor Beeching, had already concluded that they were actually heavily over-manned and that something needed to be done about it. 

The restructuring of British industry that has since become known as de-industrialisation – some would prefer dismantling and dismembering, others just destruction and devastation – certainly represented one of the major changes that have taken place during my lifetime. Manual labour for men has largely been replaced by high tech’ office jobs for most, with the obvious big exception being public service sector jobs, which are often still comparatively low paid.

In the 1960’s our whole family only required the services of a railway porter [and indeed the fitters, come to think of it] on two days in the year, for going on holiday and for coming back. Suitcases were big and heavy to begin with and were then packed to bursting and strapped up for added security. Dad booked a taxi to take us to the station. We never owned a car and so I was always beside myself with the excitement of it all by the time that the big day finally arrived.

I remember how older folk used to moan about station porters standing around talking to each other rather than springing into action when they saw car-loads like ours pulling onto the roadway provided for that purpose between the platforms at the big terminus stations. I don’t think that was ever a problem for us, but Mum and Dad did need help to get us on board our train with all our things. Dad would then tip the porter, who would then touch his hat in Dad’s direction.

I think I probably suppressed a momentary feeling of superiority by association, at that point, which I hope I then felt a bit guilty about. Later on, in life, this turned into an agonising tussle in my head over the whole business of “tipping” and its connotations, one which I have not yet completely come to terms with to my own satisfaction. “There should be no need for it,” became my bottom line, as I wrestled internally over promoting the notion of an adequate and truly “living wage” whilst at the same time often denying those concerned an extra few bob “on principle.”

My three children, all of whom have worked in cafes or bars at one time or another, will always take me to task, big time, for attempting to put half-baked political gestures before any preparedness to dispense with hard cash in such instances. As it has often been the case that I frequently seem to be the one who is buying the meal, my get-out clause has usually been to say to them, “Well, you leave the tip, then.”

On Amtrak trains today, you can choose to use the “free” Redcaps baggage handler’s service, except that in reality those guys work for their tips, as appears to be the case in large parts of the American service industry. My son reminded us that bar attendants, for example, are so poorly paid that they rely on a substantial tip every time you order a drink from them and that a less than generous one might earn you at least a withering look, if not a derogatory comment.

The Redcaps will move your gear for you with some alacrity, but still only up to a certain weight, beyond which they will not touch it with a barge-pole on health and safety grounds, and who could blame them for that. It is potentially and literally back-breaking work. Without them you are on your own. The tour company impressed on us the importance of taking suitcases of a manageable size, which had been totally ignored by a minority of the party, who then went on to provide us with some added entertainment throughout the trip as they did battle with their own belongings every time the next leg of the journey was embarked on. They were always very smartly dressed each night for dinner, I noticed, when we joined them in our tee-shirts, shorts and trainers.

We were “Have a nice day” recipients frequently as we made our collective way across the continent. It was said with genuine good humour, I felt, rather than corporate compulsion. It was certainly delivered with a smile and we found almost everyone working in a service capacity from whom we needed help to be most gracious in providing it. It was quite refreshing. I know there are some grumpy UK check-out assistants, but I sense a change for the better over here, too. People shouldn’t need a company policy to know how to behave towards customers. Not that that is always one-way traffic, either.

I’ve witnessed Brits behaving badly in France towards service providers a number of times and not youths but middle aged, middle class morons, who apparently believe that the louder you shout in English the more easily you will be understood in a foreign language. On one camp site in Brittany, a tent had been bedecked with bunting made up of Union flags, which might have just been acceptable had it been an Olympic year, but it wasn’t. In the Vendee, one Little Englander had swept up a wall of dust around the boundary of his camp site emplacement to make a more formal demarcation zone. Given another fortnight’s holiday, I imagined that he would have had a six-foot wall with broken glass along the top and a pair of those “keep your distance” spiked metal gates as well. It struck me that France was actually one of the last places that people with this mindset would normally have chosen for a vacation. Perhaps they saw themselves as part of some sort of expeditionary force. The much quoted, legendary newspaper headline “Fog in Channel – Continent cut off,” came to mind.

Present-day logistics throw up some seemingly random manoeuvres for the service industry. A delivery man arrived at our door clutching two parcelled clothing items that my wife had ordered online. “Do you know where these have come from?” he asked. I expressed bewilderment and he answered his own question before I’d finished pulling inquisitive faces, “Calverton.” That is very nearly the next village to ours. “Via Birmingham and Lincoln” he added, as he turned tail with a smile that told me he was very pleased with his punch line.

When I was a teacher the typical day was made up of a battering of individual social interactions. Exhausting as it was, I miss that now. Sometimes, the only meeting outside the house that I might have in a whole day is a few words with the supermarket check-out assistant. How important it is, suddenly, that that goes well and that it is a good-natured encounter. It sounds daft but it’s true. Next to the till is a notice reminding us that the staff do not tolerate abusive behaviour towards them. How sad that such a notice is necessary.

I find the railways a generally welcoming environment these days. Though the traditional allegiances to the old railway companies may be a thing of the past, perhaps the heritage lines often lead the way in retaining “old fashioned” levels of service because they are largely manned by volunteers who choose to be there and are clearly enjoying making a contribution. Our recent visit to the Swanage Railway certainly bore that out. I would like to think that such relationships are based neither on subservience or deference as was often the case in the past, nor on corporate insistence and empty rhetoric, as in the supposed American business model. They should be based instead on mutual respect and a belief that we could all be a little happier if a bit of effort is made in that direction. I’ve never forgotten how kind and pleasant Billy J. Kramer was to us when we were kids, yet that coming together was all over in a matter of seconds and it is now more than half a century ago.

Taking the moral high ground

Unless I’m much mistaken, the gentleman of a similar age next to me on the exercise bike in the gym is the man who ran the sweet shop in town for decades. Here we are now, both pedalling away in the mirror - getting nowhere and with our life’s work largely behind us.

I felt tempted to make comparisons. Forty years in education helping working class kids get on - often in the face of opposition not just from them but from their parents, too - set against a lifetime of providing tooth decay and diabetes for children of all ages.

Then I thought about how much I liked sweets as a child and how we still have sugary treats as part of our personal mission to take afternoon tea in every café in the country.

Be less judgemental and more tolerant, I reminded myself. People need jobs and I was lucky. Perhaps my choice of promoting our railway heritage should be diverted to the needs of the homeless or keeping the vegetation under control on the trail.

I can usually see the other point of view if I think about it long enough. I’d never have made a politician. Anyway, while I sort out my priorities going forward, here’s a nice picture of a railway engine.

Our cab ride on a class 47

The only time I have ever had a cab ride on a diesel locomotive was in August 1979 at Newton Abbott. We were staying at a guest house in Teignmouth and we had been on the train to Paignton for the day.

On the way back, our train stopped at Newton Abbott and Chris asked me if we had to change for Teignmouth. I said no, thinking that it was a through train but we ended up instead in the sidings at Hackney Yard, where the stock was obviously [by then] being stabled.

The class 47 uncoupled from the train and started to run back past us along the adjacent track. We stuck our heads out of the window to attract the driver’s attention. He pulled to a halt alongside us and we transferred our eleven-month-old son, his buggy and ourselves into the cab of the 47.

The driver then took us back to the platform at Newton Abbott. Though I felt a bit sheepish at my mistake, I was also quite pleased to get my one and only - and totally unexpected - diesel cab ride.

Remember when you were young……….

We had the album cover. In fact, we probably had our second and third album covers, as well. What we didn’t have was guitars, any songs of our own or the determination to go in that direction - too much football, too many trains.

However, we sang in harmony to the Beatles’ This Boy, swung at our badminton rackets behind the curtain on the church hall stage in time with Pete Townshend’s Pinball Wizard and stroked the chords of the Kinks’ Louie Louie.

We shrieked “Can you see the real me, can you?” from the top of some of England’s highest mountains? [I have done this in recent times, also, though admittedly, from some rather smaller peaks] and yelled at the sea from perfect, yet desolate, Pembrokeshire sands that, “A beach is a place that a man can feel, He’s the only soul in the world that’s real” [likewise].

We had the energy and we knew what we liked - and we’ve still got the LP covers.   

Plumtree

It was our wedding anniversary [July 2016] and therefore a good excuse for an extravagant lunch out. My daughter, who knows more about such things than we do, provided us with a shortlist of some fine dining recommendations she had previously sampled, from which we plumped for the bistro at Plumtree. It occupies the former railway station on the long defunct Midland Railway route from Nottingham to St Pancras, the so-called direct route via Melton Mowbray and avoiding Leicester. This meant that expresses from London to the north calling at Nottingham no longer had to travel east from Trent Junction into the city, then reverse down the same section before moving on towards Sheffield.

 

Plumtree and Keyworth, as it was first called when it opened in 1880, closed to passengers the week after I was born in 1949, so it has not been a railway station now for very nearly half of its existence. Renamed as plain Plumtree in 1893, the station had platforms either side of the double track main line. Goods traffic survived until November 1965 and the through route itself closed in 1968.

The restaurant in the main station building had been tastefully refurbished just prior to our visit. We took our table on what must previously have been the up platform but which is now a light and airy conservatory extension to the main station building. The service was attentive and polite and the food turned out to be excellent, as recommended. On my way to the loo, I found a photo on the wall showing the station in full swing during the Edwardian era.

A friendly and elegant lady on the next table told us that she had been deliberating between a summer dress and something a bit heavier before leaving home, and with the sun now putting in an appearance - fairly briefly as it turned out - she suddenly felt a little over-dressed. I decide at that moment that I had made the right decision to ditch the somewhat threadbare shorts I had been wearing earlier that morning in favour of a clean pair of only slightly faded denim jeans. It was only lunch time after all.

She went on to tell us that she had been educated at a grammar school, adding that she was now giving her age away [rather than any self-awareness of her social status that she thought we ought to know about], that she was a linguist and that her husband had been a businessman in Paris. She backed all this up by addressing her partner in French that was a little louder than seemed necessary, and in an accent that sounded overly-Anglicised to me, though in the interest of continued harmony, I kept this observation to myself.

My attention wandered outside and I noticed that the former down track was still in place, though the down platform had either been totally dismantled or what remained of it had simply disappeared behind a profusion of foliage. I drew my wife’s attention to the beginning of the catenary system adjacent to the former station yard that allows electric trains to take power from overhead wires over the 13.5 mile Old Dalby test track that runs in the direction of Melton Mowbray, where access to the whole system is now gained. I can’t quite remember her reply.

New stock for the expanding London underground network has been tested here and a section of the up line, which is still in situ towards Melton, has been equipped with an electrified third rail. Those sets can be seen sometimes on the railway overbridge that crosses the A46 double carriageway Lincoln to Leicester road to the south east of Plumtree. The Class 390 Pendolinos were tested here, too, and before that British Rail’s ill-fated but nevertheless influential Advanced Passenger Train, which reached a speed of 143.6 mph during trials in 1976 on this section of track. It had travelled even faster the year before, on the ex-Great Western main line between Swindon and Reading, reaching 152.3mph on that occasion and setting a UK record in the process.

 

After our meal, we took a walk along the driveway towards the old goods shed, south of the station building on the up side of the line. It has been transformed into a first-class functions venue known [not perhaps strictly accurately] as The Carriage Shed. As we strolled along, a wedding party started to arrive and the obligatory disco music cranked up to welcome the happy couple and their guests.

I thought about our own wedding 44 years ago to the day. It had been a rather simple registry office affair, but I recalled that my dad had been very impressed by the generally merry atmosphere that had followed the more formal town hall event for the rest of the day. People used to tell us regularly what a delightful man he was. He was also a great conversationalist but he certainly did not talk about himself all the time. He was a grammar school boy, of course – won a scholarship to go there, too, actually.  

Winning Combo

We stayed at quite a lot of youth hostels between 1963 and 1974. Until 1968, we also did quite a lot of train spotting. In some instances, we combined the two.

Towards the end of steam on British Railways, surviving locomotives were concentrated in the north west of England, at depots like Carnforth and Carlisle Kingmoor. We visited both, as part of our hostelling forays to the Lake District.

We referred to Ambleside’s Walnut Café as “Café Walnut” to bestow on it a bit of the glamour that it lacked in real life. We spent a lot of time in there when it was raining - which was quite a lot of the time. It’s now a chippy.

On the way to the Lakes by bus. Photo with thanks to Ian Hughes.

Nameplates

Sometimes it was the name, itself, that I found particularly attractive, but it could also be the nameplate design. I was sufficiently impressed with West Country Class No. 34009 Lyme Regis at Bournemouth in 1965, to take a precious photo of the nameplate alone, as well as one of the locomotive. Photography was not cheap, even in black and white. Each frame had to count.

At Blackburn in 2008, Black Five No. 45407 was sporting the name The Lancashire Fusilier, one that she did not carry in British Railways days. The regimental nameplates of the Patriot and Royal Scot classes, as well as just four of the Black Fives, were amongst the most noteworthy because of the additional crest above the name.