'The Toss of a Coin', Chapter 7 / 2

Area Management, Bridgend (cont'd)

In the middle of my spell at Bridgend I was summoned to attend BR’s Middle Management Course – six weeks at the former LMR Training School in Derby. A couple of dozen budding senior managers were bombarded with outrageous ideas – thinking the unthinkable was doubtless the remit the lecturers had been urged to deliver to shake us out of any complacency we may have had. My abiding memory of the course, however, was the 48 hours we spent in groups on a specific project. My team, which included (deliberately) no engineers, was sent to Crewe Works to devise ways of reducing the downtime of Class 47 diesel locomotives in the Works by at least 24 hours. Our confidence what not boosted by the news that our project presentation would be assessed by the Board’s Chief Mechanical & Electrical Engineer, R.C.Bond, no less. We were further dismayed to discover that one of our number, an architect by trade, had wasted a whole day minutely recording the activities of a group of fitters on a large blue locomotive which turned out not to be a Class 47 but a streamlined steam locomotive, A4 pacific 4498 ‘Sir Nigel Gresley’, and one of us went to Crewe station that evening and bought him an Ian Allan ABC to try to teach him the difference between a steam and diesel engine! In the end we did produce some suggestions and Mr Bond was very kind to us – whether Crewe Works management ever implemented any of our ideas was never fed back to us.

About this time my landlady became ill and had to go into hospital and for a week I lodged in a local hotel while I searched for new lodgings. I found a newspaper advertisement for the winter occupation of a holiday flat on the Glamorgan coast at the village of Southerndown, about five miles from Bridgend and reachable by an hourly bus service, for I was still a few months off getting the Mini I referred to earlier. I was pretty desperate because I couldn’t really afford to continue at weekly hotel prices so I rode out to Southerndown on the east side of the Ogmore river, after dark (it was November) and when I’d negotiated a rate of 3 guineas a week with the elderly couple who owned it, I took it at once, returned back to Bridgend, picked up my meagre belongings in one suitcase and moved in that night.

Next day was one of those perfect blue sky days that you sometimes get in winter, and I got up early – even though it was a Saturday and my day off – and went to explore where I had come to. The cottage – a whitewashed stone simple building whose walls must have been at least a foot thick – was high above the cliffs and a five minute walk took me down the lane that led to the beach. I got to the ridge where the lane dropped dramatically and held my breath in awe at the landscape laid out before me. The wide sandy beach was framed by magnificent jagged cliffs that some past volcanic eruption had twisted into a geologist’s dream. The sea was calm and blue and the beach was empty. I ran headlong down the little road and gambolled on that beach in sheer exuberance. I fell in love with the place there and then, and when, in March, the couple asked me if I wanted to stay on, as they now felt too old to cope with new holiday-makers every week, I jumped at the chance and stayed there very happily until I got married three years later and we bought our own house back in Bridgend.

Later in a second winter there after I’d moved to a temporary post in Cardiff and had exchanged my railway Mini for my own Austin 1100, I was driving along the coast road still in darkness when I saw a number of dim lights twinkling ahead of me. I was mystified, thinking perhaps my headlights were catching the frosty outlines of grass on the roadside when suddenly my lights picked out dozens of sheep lying on the tarmac – apparently the roadway was warmer than the fields and the sheep had found a hole in the fence and settled on the road for the night. I braked heavily, skidded on the frosty road and slammed into some of the sheep sideways – thump, thump, thump – and came to rest with one wing crushed against a stone wall and the headlight shining upwards into the sky. Shaken, I got out, surrounded by loudly bleating sheep – the low skirts of the 1100 had knocked the sheep out of the way and none had gone under the car. I found, despite the awkward angle of the headlight, that the car was still drive-able and I crept on into Bridgend and reported the accident to the police before catching the ‘Blue Pullman’ to London, which had been my intention.

When I called back at the police station that evening, the police reported that a constable had visited the site, had found all the sheep safely ensconced in their field and the farmer had reported no sheep being injured in any way. The policeman advised me that the farmer had probably removed any that were injured or dead, patched up the hole in his boundary fence in case he faced a claim from me for the damage to my car. The police said they could prove nothing. However, it may be that the Welsh sheep, who seem to be a hardy lot, had just got up, shaken themselves, and got on with life. I’d seen sheep hit by cars in the Aberbeeg and Tondu valleys and get up uninjured. Not the case if we hit them with one of our trains, but trespass by sheep in the valleys was so widespread that it was impracticable to stop trains and warn them of animals on the line.

After 18 months or so, Eric Warr was promoted to the Divisional Office in Marland House, Cardiff and I took over as Area Manager. My problems in the valleys above Tondu continued unabated. A loaded train of coal –18 unfitted wagons – ran away from Abergwynfi colliery with its Paxman D95XX (class 14) despite 12 of the wagons having brakes manually pinned down and derailed at the trap points protecting the Treherbert – Cymmer Afan single line, damming a stream in the process which then flooded the track. Before the wheels stopped spinning, doors of the miners’ cottages on the hillside above the line opened and dozens of small children descended on the train stripping it of anything removable and filling their buckets with coal dust (destined for Margam Steel Works) even though they were all entitled to free coal from the mine.

A few weeks later another D95XX was propelling four empty wagons up the 1 in 27/36 to Glyncorrwg Colliery when it buffered up to another wagon left foul over the entrance to the colliery siding. These five wagons overpowered our weak tool and the train ran back down the gradient accelerating rapidly, the locomotive brakes inadequate to slow the runaway. The train crew decided discretion was the better part of valour and jumped before the train reached the catch points protecting the junction at Cymmer and the D95XX made a spectacular somersault at an estimated 35 mph and lay in the ditch between track and cutting bank.

Our most horrendous and indeed, miraculous, runaway was in the Garw Valley. A class 37 had hauled 52 empty mineral wagons up the 1 in 50 and stopped at the ground frame controlling the entrance to the Garw colliery. The guard walked forward to operate the frame and called the train forward. The train started with a bit of a jerk and the coupling between the first and second wagons snapped and 51 wagons and brake van set off down the hill with the guard in hot and vain pursuit. It was a hopeless quest and the entire train of unbraked wagons quickly accelerated to a frightening speed. It smashed through crossing gates just missing a bus and I received a phone call from the signalman at Bryncethin Junction at the foot of the bank and about a mile from Tondu, saying ‘Listen to this guvnor!’ and in my office I was treated to the roaring sound of the runaway train then estimated at 70 mph!

At the inquiry the signalman was criticised for not turning the raft of wagons through the trap points into the river in order to protect Tondu Junction, depot and village, but the signalman claimed that he was unsure whether the guard was still on board and did not want to condemn him to certain death. By Tondu after a mile on the level, speed had reduced to about 60 mph, but the four way junction ahead had double reverse curves and a speed restriction of 5 mph. Staff had already cleared the terraced cottages in the line of fire and later described how the train seemed to scream round the curves on two wheels. How it did not spread itself all over the junction no-one knows, but it sped off up the gradient to Pyle and Margam with two quick witted shunters in pursuit in their old banger. They correctly surmised where the train would have slowed sufficiently to pin down enough brakes to stop the train rolling back to Tondu and having another go at demolishing the junction. When it was eventually stopped and the train was examined, 37 of the wagons out of the 52 vehicles were found to have hot axle boxes.

Another source of vexation, although not nearly so serious, was the constant theft of the tiny oil lamps, which lit the wooden platforms at Maesteg – the line served by a ‘Bubble Car’ shuttling between Bridgend and Cymmer Afan. We were worried that someone would slip or fall from one of the platforms in the darkness and kept replacing the lamps only to find they would disappear again within days. Eventually we discovered that these lamps were highly prized by local entrepreneurs for hatching out baby chicks!

Gerry Fiennes was General Manager until 1966 and he was getting increasingly dissatisfied with what he considered to be the lack of sufficient horsepower on WR expresses - certainly compared with the Deltics on the East Coast. He therefore directed that a pair of 37s in multiple were to be tried out on the South Wales - London expresses with the prototype XP64 stock and I rode on the 08.20 Swansea to a London meeting one day in May with a pair of Newport Godfrey Road engines, D6877 and D6892. The acceleration from scratch was phenomenal and we sustained 100 mph on level track but after a couple of weeks, the experiment was called off as the heavy freight locos were unsuited to continuous high speed and began to develop serious traction problems.

Near the end of my time at Bridgend, I was alarmed to hear that I was to be host for a full day’s saloon tour by the new General Manager, my bugbear, Lance Ibbotson. I had to report to the saloon arriving in Bridgend West Yard at 08.00 and present myself for breakfast. I was so nervous that I was physically sick just before climbing into the vehicle and I doubt I did justice to the eggs and bacon served up. At least there were no kippers. This time I’d done my homework well and having been in the area for nearly four years, I was able to answer all the GM’s questions or bluff successfully. A couple of years later my successor had a similar tour, which he told me was going pretty poorly until they got to Llantrisant Yard. The General Manager had been scathing about the need for Llantrisant at all and its few wagons from the Ministry of Defence Depot and colliery above Mwyndy Junction. My colleague was fearing another diatribe when the saloon arrived back in the yard expecting to find it empty. However, the place was a hive of activity dumbfounding Lance Ibbotson, with two iron ore trains and a coal train awaiting the road. After the General Manager, somewhat appeased, had gone on his way, the new Area Manager, Ken Shingleton, asked Bill Heard, the area inspector, how come the yard had been so busy.

‘Ah, we’ve been holding them here since lunchtime. We thought you deserved a show for the General Manager!’ Llantrisant depot survived a few more months.

Not all memorable activity took place on the railway. As in Aberbeeg, social history was being lived out. I was in ‘chapel country’. In the 18,000 population town of Maesteg, there were said to be 32 different chapels (I didn’t count them) – doubling up because there was an English and Welsh language version of each denomination. In the Ogmore Valley there were two Methodist chapels a hundred yards from each other, but rivalries were such that they wouldn’t merge. One chapel was apparently praying for children for their Sunday School – they had potential teachers. The other had so many children they were praying for teachers. That condition continued without either prayer being answered! When one was in financial trouble, the other chapel, which was well endowed, paid their bills to save them having to join up.

Down in Bridgend I was prevailed upon to act as an ‘auxiliary preacher’ although I felt my calling was to youth work rather than taking Sunday services. When the quarterly plan came out I discovered that I was allocated to take the services at the chapels at the heads of the valleys, only because I had my railway car and I could drop the other preachers off as we passed the chapels as we went up the valley. Then I knew why I was ‘called to preach’! If you looked at Welsh Sunday bus timetables you could understand why I was in such demand. In the end my performance before the General Manager paid off or someone from a village chapel said they’d had enough of me (I was probably too radical/liberal in my beliefs for traditional Welsh chapel Methodism) and I found myself promoted to be Train Planning Officer at the Divisional Office in Cardiff. At least my on call duties would be less frequent, I could get home more often or conduct my long distance courting with greater ease (my girl friend and subsequent fiancée and wife was at college in Ealing). I now became a commuter from Bridgend.