'The Toss of a Coin', Chapter 7 / 1

Area Management, Bridgend

I arrived at Bridgend as Assistant Area Manager in the winter of 1965 and had to find lodgings. I was recommended a semi-detached house about half a mile from the station in North Street with a widow and her teenage son and installed myself, noting that my main heating (a key issue for me as a soul suffering acutely from the cold) was an old ‘Valour’ oil stove. There was also no sign of a telephone and as I would be ‘on call’ every other week I advised my landlady that I might get called out any time of day or night, which would mean being ‘knocked up’ by a taxi driver sent by the station inspector.

‘That won’t be often, will it?’ opined my landlady hopefully, and I reassured her as best I could, remembering my reputation as a ‘Jonah’ at Aberbeeg – having been called out sixteen times in ten months compared with Stan’s three times! Sure enough, I was called out every evening or night that first week to some minor derailment. I discovered later that the Area Manager and I had replaced eight stationmasters who liked the overtime to supplement their ‘on call’ allowance, and therefore encouraged their staff to call them, however minor the incident. As ‘management staff’ neither Eric Warr, my boss, nor I would receive any additional payment.

On the Friday evening we did have an accident, which warranted my attention. Our ‘08’ shunter in Bridgend West Yard managed to derail and turn over and we had to summon the Canton breakdown crane. We toiled all night and I arrived back at my digs just before six absolutely exhausted. I had thrown off my clothes and flung myself into bed and had fallen into a deep sleep, when, at just twenty past six, I heard hammering on my bedroom door. It took me a long time to make sense of the noise but in the end I realised that I was being called out again and that a taxi was waiting for me. It took me straight to Tondu loco shed where they had managed to derail a pair of wheels of a wagon of loco coal inside the shed limit and clear of the running lines. It only needed a pair of ramps and a pannier tank to give it a shove, and as I stared stupefied in the steady drizzle at my feet, I realised that in my brain fog I had put on one brown shoe and one black. The inspector looked at my misery and said, ‘I think you’d better go home, guvnor, you’ll not be much help to us here.’ From then on we made it clear that we expected the supervisory staff to deal with minor incidents that did not affect running lines and managed to reduce call outs to a more reasonable level, although there were plenty of derailments in the Welsh Valleys in the early years of dieselisation.

My new domain was a big one geographically. The Area Management team of which I was now a part had responsibility for the Cardiff – Swansea mainline between St Fagans and Stormy Sidings, near Pyle; the passenger branch to Tondu, Maesteg and Cymmer Afan and colliery outlets to Glyncorrwg and up to Abergwynfi Colliery and the Rhonnda tunnel, to the west of Treherbert; the Garw and Ogmore Valleys with their coal mines; and Llantrisant Yard, near the village of Pontyclun and freight only branches to a colliery, iron ore mine and a Ministry of Defence depot. There were two loco depots and train crew signing on points at Tondu and Llantrisant and, of course, the main line station at Bridgend itself.

The Area Manager’s office, which I shared, was in the former Goods depot at Bridgend. The Area had 534 staff and one of the most difficult jobs I found was to remember everyone’s name. Some managers I’ve met have an extraordinary capacity to do this. The most remarkable example I ever encountered was my former Headmaster at Charterhouse, Brian Young, a brilliant scholar who became head of ITV at one stage. He used to gather in house photographs of all eleven houses (700+ boys in total) and deliberately learn every boy’s name so that within a fortnight of the new term starting he could greet every boy he met by name. I’m afraid I was very weak in this department. The fact that so many of my staff were on shifts did not help and there’s a limit in time on how long you can keep asking someone their name. Of course, as the new boy, everyone soon knew who you were, which didn’t help.

With such a wide area, a car was essential and initially I was very dependent on the Area Manager or taxis. Later the railway management took it upon themselves to teach me to drive and supply me with a brand new ‘Mini’, my first car whose identity I’ve never forgotten, a little grey number, JLE 406D. But first I had to be taught to drive and I was sent to the WR Driving School at Taplow where there was a private road layout adjacent to the station, which had all those ingredients needed, traffic lights, a roundabout, a hill start. I arrived at 9 o’clock on the Monday morning and was put in the driver’s seat of a little pale blue Mini, shown the controls, handed the keys, whereupon the instructor got out and told me to get on with it and teach myself by trial and error. Little wonder that you could change gear without depressing the clutch. When I got my brand new Mini and took my foot off the clutch for the first time, I nearly shot through the windscreen! Anyway, that Monday morning I had the track to myself until about 11 o’clock when learner parcel van drivers began to appear and I had to cope with traffic, drivers who might do silly and unexpected things as they had two hours’ less experience than me. By this time I thought I was Stirling Moss and was tearing round the circuit seeing how many seconds I could clip off my best time (inclusive of the compulsory hill starts). By day two I was driving in Burnham Beeches and by day three I was driving up Slough High Street with its notorious number of traffic lights (accompanied by the instructor, I hasten to add).

When I received my new Mini I received further necessary instruction on how to change gear with a car whose clutch was not life expired from the efforts of a new unsupervised learner every week and I passed my test first go and was let loose on the hills of South Wales. The car was splendid if I was on my own, but when on occasion I had visitors from the Divisional office or the National Coal Board to transport into the hills, I found I was having to drop down an extra gear – even to first gear for some of our remoter steeply graded lanes.

Eric Warr, the Area Manager, was the former Shedmaster of Southall, an extrovert Londoner with a very practical and at times, unorthodox way of dealing with problems. On one occasion we had a problem with the ground frame that controlled the entrance to Bridgend West Yard from the Up Main Line. It had failed with the points set to the yard causing a stoppage on the main line. Eric took me down with him and I watched as he dismantled the ground frame mechanism and clipped the points to allow trains to start running again. ‘Don’t let me ever see you doing that!’ he said, ‘I know what I’m doing, it’s against the rules but I’m taking responsibility. You can only do that sort of thing when you’ve a lot more experience under your belt.’

One week that winter it rained – as only it can in Wales – and at 4am there was a loud knocking on the door, which woke the whole household. The taxi driver said, ‘They say it’s serious, you’d better come quick!’ With some foreboding I arrived at the station, the night pitch black, the wind howling and rain lashing on the station roof and platform. There were coaches standing on the Up Main - luckily, as I discovered shortly afterwards, empty stock as the Fishguard Boat Train had been cancelled because of storms in the Irish Sea. I fetched my Bardic handlamp from my office and ventured out into the eerie darkness and came across a sight I shall never forget. My way was blocked by mangled wreckage some three vehicles high filling the cutting just where the Vale of Glamorgan line parted from the main line to Cardiff. Underneath the angular jagged metal of coaches and wagons I could just see the rear of a Class 47 burrowing under the snout of a class 37 that had clearly met it head on.

There was obviously nothing I could do to rescue the train crews before the fire brigade arrived with cutting gear and within minutes the darkness and silence had been transformed as fire engines, police and ambulances converged on the station. As dawn broke I could see the scale of the disaster – the cutting was filled to the brim with 12 coaches, 52 wagons, and three diesel engines, for the coal train had been double-headed by two class 37s. The torrential rain had loosened rock from the cutting just east of the station and this had spilled onto the track in the storm and darkness and had derailed the empty stock, which had been travelling at around 60 mph. The loco had been derailed and unfortunately had slewed foul of the Down Main and had met the double-headed coal train travelling at around 35 mph head on. As the class 47 was on the trackbed, the front 37 rode over it crushing the cab, killing the second man immediately and severely injuring the driver who died later. The crew of the freight were lucky and survived with comparatively minor injuries.

The line clearance in appalling weather, cutting strengthening and track renewal – including the whole double junction – took nearly two weeks during which time trains to West Wales were diverted via Pontypool Road and the Vale of Neath. However, the rain continued and lines became flooded and at one stage the only way we got the Down Fishguard Boat Train through was to send it, with its ‘Western’ diesel hydraulic, via Treherbert through the tunnel to Cymmer Afan, then down the Llynfi Valley through Maesteg and Tondu to Pyle and back onto the main line. Cliff Rose, Divisional Movements Manager, was in my office when the decision was taken – he had no idea whether this type of diesel was cleared for this route, but he took a chance and it crept down the valley successfully as we all held our breath.

This was a time of great stress for all concerned – I spent most of the period on twelve hours nights and by the end was so shattered that the Assistant Divisional Manager, Jack Page, seriously wondered if I was physically up to the job. I survived and my lack of fortune continued, becoming host to more than my share of mishaps. As a painful reminder of the accident the mutilated corpse of Fisguard empty stock engine, D1671 ‘Thor’, stood for several weeks in my goods yard right beside my office, shrouded in tarpaulins to screen it from the sight of passengers as they passed.

I also got more than my fair share of Sunday engineering work to supervise. Many were the winter nights spent putting in single line working between Bridgend and Stormy Sidings – a very apt name – or near the Cardiff end of my patch, between Llantrisant (now more correctly called Pontyclun) and my border at St Fagans. For some reason the track formation under the main line in the River Ely valley was ‘fragile’ and we had a number of plain line derailments there, culminating in a spectacular incident when the empty gunpowder van forming part of the brake force behind the locomotive jumped plain line when travelling at around 45 mph and the train of coke behind it reared up on end and deposited several hundred tons into the river just after Miskin. A local coal merchant was granted the franchise of emptying the river of the coke and I shudder to think how many householders received a motley collection of ballast with their fuel! This was one of a series of derailments involving plain line, when all the ingredients were near to their limit – speed, track voiding and uneven wagon loading or stiff springs. After several such derailments and analysis of each by the Derby derailment research team, it was decided to restrict the large number of short wheelbase freight wagons to 35 mph.

It was during one of my engineering possessions in yet another steady downpour that we actually caught a fish – and a decent size one at that – from between the sleepers in the main line where the Llanharan Colliery workings had caused subsidence and a 40 mph permanent restriction was in force. It was around this time that I enjoyed one of my last steam footplate runs in BR service. Tondu depot had closed although men remained stationed there and our Churchward 2-8-0 tanks at Llantrisant for the iron ore trains to Llanwern had been replaced by the new 37s. However, the engineering Sunday turns would sometimes produce a steam engine, and I enjoyed one Sunday managing affairs from the footplate of 0-6-2 tank, 5691.