The Enginemen - Preface

Preface - The Railway Background

The novel is based on fictional characters in a real place and time, Old Oak Common steam locomotive depot in the period from March 1961 to March 1963. Old Oak Common, or OOC as it was usually abbreviated, was the main maintenance depot for steam locomotives in the London area serving the Paddington terminus of the Western Region of British Railways. At that time it had 170 locomotives allocated, from the most powerful ‘King’ class 4-6-0 locomotives which mainly operated on the Paddington - Birmingham Snow Hill - Wolverhampton route, the regular express locomotives, the slightly smaller ‘Castles’ which covered most of the other Region’s mainline turns that were not already dieselised, mixed traffic ‘Halls’ and an array of smaller tank engines for local services, empty stock workings in and out of Paddington station and some freight motive power.

Diesel Hydraulic locomotives based on a German design, named after British ‘Warships’ had been introduced to the London - Bristol and Plymouth routes a couple of years previously, but these were based at new diesel maintenance depots at Plymouth Laira and Bristol Bath Road, the latter depot being visible from the south end of Temple Meads station. The ‘top link’ of drivers at Old Oak had been converted to diesels, but other links made up of twelve or twenty four drivers still operated the turns rostered to the depot’s steam locomotive fleet, apart from a few diesel shunting turns in Acton Yard, whose drivers were mainly the ‘old man’s gang’, drivers whose health restricted them to light duties.

When Stanley Raymond became General Manager of the Western Region in 1961, he made a priority of it being the first BR Region to rid itself of inefficient and costly steam power. By the summer of 1962, new diesels of the 1,700hp ‘Hymek’ class and 2,700hp ‘Western’ class were being delivered and nearly all mainline expresses out of Paddington, except for the Oxford and Worcester routes were diagrammed to be worked by diesel traction from the Winter Timetable commencing at the end of September. As a result, all of Old Oak Common’s ‘Kings’ and most of the ‘Castles’ were made redundant there and were either transferred to other depots in South Wales, Gloucester, Worcester, or Wolverhampton, or were taken out of service, stored or scrapped.

The depot was a significant source of employment in the area. Not only did it employ a contingent of qualified fitters and their mates, but also over 300 drivers and firemen whose work was planned through a dozen links of men whose duties rotated week by week. In addition there were shed labourers who covered the stores, the locomotive coaling and watering stages, who cleaned out the pits of ash and oil and a large band of engine cleaners, mostly Jamaicans, who kept the depot’s allocation of ‘Kings’ and ‘Castles’ sparkling in their Brunswick green paint and burnished brass and copperwork.

A team of clerks kept records of the staff and engines, wrote out duty rosters, allocated engines to trains and supported the small hierarchy of managers, a Chief Maintenance Foreman, Chief Clerk and the overall governor, the ‘Shedmaster’. Industrial relations and official communications between management and elected representatives of the staff were carried out through meetings of the Local Departmental Committees (LDCs) - there were separate LDCs for footplate staff, maintenance staff and clerks.

I have tried to depict the depot, its engines and work as factually as I can, subject to deliberate changes for the purposes of the plot, for I was employed there during my student vacations in 1957 and 1958, and as a management trainee from April to June 1962. However, the characters I have depicted, drivers, firemen, shedmaster, clerks and inspectors, are completely fictional and bear no intended likeness to any of the men I met.

The method of allocating drivers in certain links to their own ‘regular’ engine is also an invention for this novel, as is the allocation of engine and crew diagrams between and within depots for this is a novel, not a historical record. The Western Region tended to allocate a locomotive to the same train for weeks on end, while drivers rotated on a daily basis. However, the practice of single- or double-manning a locomotive with regular crews, fostering pride in ‘their’ locomotive, was common on some Eastern and Scottish Region depots such as Kings Cross, Haymarket (Edinburgh), Ipswich and Norwich. For the purposes of this story, I have brought an imaginary shedmaster from that tradition to introduce the practice at Old Oak Common in an endeavour to retain pride and morale during a time of change when the whole future of Old Oak Common depot was under threat.

I reiterate that I have used the general background and atmosphere of a mainline steam locomotive depot for setting the scene of the novel, but the incidents described as well as the characters are entirely fictional. References to locomotive and crew diagrams as well as the description of particular runs are from my imagination based on my experience at the depot over an intermittent five year period. You cannot find Driver Peplow’s log with locomotive number 5008 described in any articles of the monthly magazine, ‘Trains Illustrated’, nor trace a strike over an alleged unfair dismissal although the historical background, including politics and sport of the day has been researched.

The 24 hour clock was not used by British Railways in 1961/2 and ‘am’ and ‘pm’ times were distinguished by the use of stops and slashes, as follows: 7.55 = am and 7/55 = pm. I have used this notation throughout.