'The Toss of a Coin', Chapter 1/1

This book is aimed at those interested generally in railways and for those for whom the rapid change of Britain’s railways between the 1950s and the end of the century is of historical significance. It might be of interest and some amusement to some of my colleagues who shared similar experiences in the time of metamorphosis from a nationalised bureaucracy of the 1950s to the current renewal as railways reclaim their national transportation role having passed through some traumatic times in the transformation.

It’s a personal account of what it was like inside the industry - from joining the railways when I decided to turn my hobby into my career, when it was still very acceptable to be an enthusiast and hold a management position, through the Beeching era, through the railway’s rediscovery of its role in the 1980s to the convulsions of privatisation. And then, a second career as a railway safety consultant and a third, founding and leading the railway’s favourite charity, ‘Railway Children’.

The genesis of the book grew from ten hours of interviews I shared with Frank Paterson, former General Manager of the Eastern Region and now Chairman of the Friends of the National Railway Museum, who asked me for material as part of a project that the NRM was undertaking with funding from the National Lottery - an oral history compiled by railwaymen and women from all spheres of duty within the UK railway industry. Hours of tapes can be accessed through the NRM’s search engine and some excerpts are selected from time to time for the Museum’s website under the heading of ‘Railway Voices’.

Chapter 1 / 1
Why did I become a railwayman?
It was not a family tradition. I can’t really explain my passion for trains, which began at a very early age. Perhaps I associated trains with meeting my father when he was so often absent during the war years. My only other railway connection was my Great Uncle George, husband of my paternal grandmother’s sister. She, Aunt Kate, had been one of Queen Mary’s maids in the Brunswick Tower at Windsor Castle with my grandmother, and after her marriage to George, an engine driver, had moved to Guildford. Uncle George had worked Guildford top link turns on the Waterloo - Portsmouth direct line during the 1920s with his ‘own’ engine, Drummond D15 4-4-0, No.466, but had retired through ill health in 1929. (He eventually died of old age aged 98 in the 1970s!). In the late 1940s when I was nine or ten, I’d visited them for the day, and my Uncle, as a treat, took me down to Guildford engine shed, and put me on the footplate of the shed pilot, 0-4-0 saddletank, 'Ironside'. My main memory is being in the diminutive cab as we hauled a dead locomotive onto the turntable and burning my shins on the open fire as I only wore short trousers.

This did not put me off. My maternal grandmother once told me that a distant relative of hers had been a driver on the ‘broad gauge’ at Gloucester in the 1860s, so the story went, but I never traced the truth of this rumour.

Neither of these somewhat tenuous links with the railway industry was a conscious memory when, as a two year old, I’m told I used to bully my mother into pushing me the two and a half miles from our home in East Molesey to the open land to the north of the Southern main line at Esher to see the trains go by - you couldn’t do that easily now as the growth of trees and shrubs would obscure the view. Apparently the electric trains at Hampton Court would not do; only the 'King Arthur' and 'Lord Nelson'steam engines winging their wartime loads to the South Coast, Salisbury Plain and the West Country would satisfy my infant demands. Perhaps there is something in ‘reincarnation’ after all – that distant relative at Gloucester may have had more in common with me than I had supposed…

My father quickly ascertained that I could be entertained by toys and books of trains and whilst in the army, used to send me letters adorned with a simple line drawing of a train at the top corner. My earliest memory of all is of standing at the bottom of steps to the platform of Shrewsbury station (we had been evacuated to Shropshire for a while in 1941) waiting for my father to book his soldier’s warrant ticket and being lifted to the top just in time to see the tail light of the London express disappearing along the platform. I can remember the frustration of not being allowed to look out of the window on the next train (two hours later) because it was dark and the blackout. I was 3 years old. I think it was in the Welsh border country at that time that my father was involved with the building - or relaying – of part of the former Shropshire & Montgomery Railway for the storage of foodstuffs imported through Liverpool Docks off the transatlantic convoys. He used to tell us tales of the diminutive steam engine, ‘Gazelle’ which was apparently employed in the line’s reconstruction and of its propensity to derail – a mishap easily corrected because of its midget size.

Another early memory. I am four years old. I am sitting in a nursery school howling my head off. In front of me on the plastic table I have made a barricade of toy bricks and in it placed my book, opened at my favourite page, a picture of a big green steam engine called ‘Lord Nelson’. The teachers sent my mother away saying, ‘Leave him, he will soon get over it once you have gone away’. They are wrong. I have howled all morning, through lunch and now it is early afternoon. The other children are doing their best to ignore me; the teachers are getting frustrated because of the din. They cannot phone home. We have no phone. They persuade me in the early afternoon to look at another book. For a few minutes I stare at a photo of the royal princesses - I remember a long hard look at the seven year old Princess Margaret Rose, ignoring her older sister - and then I return to my train book. They wait until my mother comes and then they say ‘It’s no good. Do not bring him tomorrow. Bring him only when he’s old enough to start Primary School.’ I am still sobbing although I’ve run out of tears. The bricks are cleared away. My books are closed and put safely in my mother’s cycle saddlebag.

A year later I go to school. It is the same place, but different. I am a year older. There is something active to do. I want to learn to read and write. My father is still away in the army. I do not know what he does or where he is now, but sometimes he comes home on leave and we see him off again at the station. He always takes me to see the engine. He told me that he remembered 'Queen Guinevere' once, I suspect on the way to his camp on Salisbury Plain. We get into the train before departure time to say farewell and I panic because I think the train will take us with him, and we have to get out lest my mother is embarrassed by my piercing screams. I don’t understand train timetables yet.

After the war, and once he had been demobbed, we set off for our first seaside holiday in 1946 on the ‘Brighton Belle’. In exasperation at a small boy’s boredom and tiresome cries of ‘When are we going to get there?’ he somewhat foolishly replied, ‘Well, why don’t you collect engine numbers like other boys?’ So I did. I still wonder how much he regretted that chance remark.

A favourite maiden aunt who lived in Brighton soon cottoned on to my interest and every time we met she enhanced her reputation by producing a new 1/6d Ian Allan booklet in the series ‘My Best Railway Photographs’ - my first was of the Great Western by Maurice Earley and the second, a book of Southern photos by O.J.Morris. I have to admit that my loyalty was for the Great Western (the imprint of all those photos in Maurice Earley’s book did their job only too well) and although my career developed on the Western Region from 1960 onwards, I lived until 1962 on the Southern and so its trains were the familiar ones.

In the autumn of 1949 I started at Surbiton County Grammar School and travelled daily from Hampton Court. The school sat beside the south west main line, just on the Waterloo side of Surbiton station, high above the embankment there. A few of us collected each morning in a small clearing above the line (you can’t do it now - the undergrowth is too thick and the school is gone) to see the action before the school whistle blew at 9 o’ clock. We watched the 8.30am Waterloo - Bournemouth with its Nine Elms 'Merchant Navy' or 'West Country' sidle beneath the high road bridge, braking for the Surbiton stop. And almost simultaneously and almost noiselessly apart from the distant whistle as it approached the main Up platform at speed would come a malachite green 'Lord Nelson'. We soon lost interest in this because within weeks we’ve ‘copped’ the whole class!

The evening whilst waiting for the 4.25 home on Surbiton station was even more interesting. School finished at 4pm sharp and although I couldn’t get the 4.05, I was at the station at least by 4.10 in time to see the Up 'Atlantic Coast Express' roar through with its Exmouth Junction 'Merchant Navy' and almost simultaneously see the 3.54pm Waterloo - Basingstoke come bucketing down the track working hard with one of its collection of Nine Elms veterans - old Drummond T14 ‘Paddleboxes’ - which would leave a fog of pungent brown smoke hanging under the wide platform overbridge. After a couple of down line electrics taking some of my friends to Oxshott and Esher respectively, the ACE would be followed by the Eastleigh Van Train - mixed ECS and parcels with the possibility of almost anything at the front end. Although booked for an Eastleigh based ‘King Arthur’, it was obviously used for running in ex-works locos. I remember seeing just once the unfamiliar vision of a ‘Schools’ which surprised us all and caused extraordinary scenes of merriment among the crowd of small boy witnesses - after all, few of us at that stage could afford a trip to Charing Cross from our meagre pocket money.

Finally, just before my own electric slunk round the corner from under the high bridge below the school, the Clapham Junction Milk Empties, a train on which Bulleid’s WestCountry 'Torrington' performed for months, would charge through the station amid the clatter of its six wheelers, followed by the pungent smell of Kentish coal. And all the time an ancient Drummond L11 4-4-0 would be slithering up and down the adjacent coal yard (now a car park). On one memorable occasion it was, of all things, the malachite green royal T9, 30119. Looking back now, I realise that in those two years I never failed to see those four steam services between 4.05 and 4.25pm and the sheer consistency of the Southern Region’s punctuality could be taken for granted. One of my schoolmasters at Charterhouse lived near Worplesdon, his garden backing onto the Woking - Guildford mainline and he told me a few years ago that his party trick was to take visitors to see the hourly fast Pompey electrics crossing each other at the end of his garden - and it never failed!

It would have been around this time that I discovered the monthly Ian Allan magazine, Trains Illustrated. My first purchase was No.10, although since then I’ve managed to pick up a couple of the earliest editions. I used to long for the time of the month when the new magazine would arrive and pore over it until the next one appeared. I can remember those early editions and the photos much better than those in more recent magazines. It was the regular article by Cecil J. Allen on locomotive practice and performance that inspired me in particular and led later to my own interest in recording locomotive performance although I compiled no serious logs until about 1956.

And the anticipated thrill of making trips each school holiday with a friend to London, where we spent the day trainspotting at Paddington, Euston, Kings Cross and Liverpool Street – Waterloo, Charing Cross and Victoria’s engines were too familiar and Marylebone and Fenchurch Street were too small to be bothered with – St Pancras might justify a quick peek en route to Kings Cross.

Then, in 1951, I managed to win a Surrey County Council assisted place at Charterhouse public school and, initially, thought my enthusiasm might have to be dampened as my local barber advised me to keep my interest quiet as only cars or planes were deemed suitable to provide credibility among my future peers. I was deeply apprehensive about this new venture, although it provided some relief from bullying at the Grammar school, as I’d been a bit of a ‘teacher’s pet’ being acclaimed only too frequently as the first son of an ‘Old Boy’ to attend there.

There was not much to see of interest on the local railway at Godalming. My school had an odd rule. To cross a railway line was out of bounds. That stopped unauthorised trips into the local towns of Godalming or Guildford but allowed plenty of latitude on the West and North side of the school. I had an old bike given me by my grandfather (1936 Raleigh vintage) and between 1951 and 1956 frequently cycled the five or six miles to Wanborough (which meant a stiff climb over the Hog’s Back), as two trains on the Reading - Redhill ‘Rattler’, as it was known, would pass near Wanborough station a half an hour or so after our lunch finished. The westbound train would come first, huffing and puffing its three birdcage carriages, normally behind a Guildford or Redhill Wainwright ‘D’ 4-4-0, or even an occasional Wainwright ‘C’ goods 0-6-0. Memory reveres the ancient old ‘D’ struggling to lift its period formation out of the station amid a cloud of black smoke and leaking steam - a stark contrast to the burnished locomotive 737 in S.E & C.R livery in the National Railway Museum.