'The Toss of a Coin', Chapter 8

Cardiff Divisional Office

I was sent for by Bob Hilton in the Spring of 1967 and told (people didn’t ask in those days) that I would be covering the post of District Terminals Superintendent in Swansea for a while as there were a number of temporary officers’ moves taking place. The previous incumbent had moved to a similar role at the Cardiff Divisional Office in Marland House. My main priorities seemed to be to keep an eye on the summer sailings and trains at Fishguard harbour – bearing in mind my experience some four years before during my training – and the taking of a number of consultation meetings with the trade unions over the closure of goods and parcels facilities which were coming thick and fast as the Beeching proposals began to bite.

As Fishguard had no regular train service from Swansea and was a good 2-3 hours drive by road, the post was furnished with a chauffeur and car, previously supplied to the District Manager before the abolition of that tier of management. The District Terminals and Operating Superintendents were the last remnants of that organisation. The idea was that I would be able to undertake work en route if I was driven, but we discovered on my first two journeys to the port that I became car sick as soon as I attempted any reading work in the back of the car, and that I was even queasy being driven that distance anyway. So I regret my travel sickness became the reason for the chauffeur’s redundancy and I was allocated a self-drive Cortina. And a pretty awful car it was too. It had a disconcerting habit of dying the moment I took my foot off the accelerator and I lost count of the number of roundabouts I free-wheeled round frantically trying to ‘cough’ the engine back into life. It was a flimsy thing too. I kept the car later when I moved to posts in Cardiff and the following winter was innocently standing at traffic lights when I was rammed from the rear by a Morris Oxford that had skidded on ice. I could find no scratch on the latter car, but the rear end of my Cortina crumpled like an accordion, it went to the garage and I never saw it again.

Before I breathed a sigh of relief, however, I was ironically provided with a company Morris Oxford, a venerable machine that nearly caused me to come to grief one evening on the A48 as I was obeying a ‘call out’, when suddenly without any warning the bonnet flew open and completely obscured my vision. An emergency stop luckily prevented me colliding with a bus that had halted in front of me and I’m glad to say that they let me use my own 1100 after that and claim mileage expenses.

I was then moved to Cardiff to cover the absence of the Divisional Terminals Manager for three months, a man who seemed terrified every time he received a summons from Bob Hilton, the Divisional Manager. Hilton was a manager of the old school, autocratic but decisive and forceful, embracing the new ‘management thinking’ that was de rigueur under Richard Beeching. He was only interested in solutions, not problems, and expected his managers to get on and do things – as long as they were ‘on message’. This was fine as long as his management instincts were right – and they usually were – but occasionally things would go badly awry when he pushed something and his managers were too timid or fearful to argue. I was not particularly happy as Terminals Manager finding myself required to confront a very militant set of Trade Union representatives covering the terminal and freight staff – Sectional Council D. As often as not I had the unhappy role of negotiating closures of depots or stations, and it was with some relief that I was transferred to the Operations side where I had more support in the powerful and gifted Cliff Rose, who became a Board Member at an early age and died of cancer tragically young.

After another temporary period as an Operating Assistant, the Train Planning Officer’s job became vacant and I was appointed on a permanent basis. The main line services between Severn Tunnel Junction and Swansea, Carmarthen and Fishguard were timed and diagrammed by the Western Region HQ staff in Paddington, but I was responsible for the passenger services in the Cardiff Valleys and all the internal South Wales freight services. After a few months, my job was amalgamated with that of the Trains Office Superintendent who was responsible for the Cardiff Control Office, so I found myself having to implement my own plan and correct any of its shortcomings on a daily, even hourly, basis.

This was my first experience of managing in the office environment and I quickly noticed a couple of cultural issues that needed tackling – one successfully, the other I’m not so sure about. The train timers and diagrammers in the Train Planning section were competent, indeed, dedicated to their work and we got on fine with our mutual interests. I had always prided myself on my enlightened and forward thinking staff management attitude and policy and had welcomed participation in a scheme developed by the Personnel section that took newly recruited clerks and gave them a taste of working alongside experienced staff in different sections for a few weeks before permanent employment. I had chatted to a few of these clerical trainees, mainly women, and was both surprised and taken aback when I received a complaint from the Personnel Manager that a number of these trainee clerks felt neglected or ignored when working in my department and as all the complaints were from women, I was accused of running a sexist organisation. I was certainly unaware of any overt hostility to the women and made my own enquiries with the staff, who seemed as bemused as I was by the complaints. We eventually came to the conclusion that most of the Train Planning staff were so engrossed in the minutiae of their jobs and so interested in it, that they assumed the new clerks would be as interested. But of course, not many of these new recruits were train enthusiasts and the women missed the rapport and conversation they experienced in other sections where the issues were more about ‘people’ than ‘things’. Having persuaded the Personnel Manager that no intended slight or prejudice had been present, he concluded that such staff would find it difficult to change their approach – indeed the company valued their dedication – so he decided to avoid sending many of the new clerks to Train Planning in future unless they showed an obvious aptitude and interest in that type of work.

A more successful intervention on my part was the lead I took in trying to persuade controllers that I did not measure their success by the amount of manipulation of resources – crews and engines – that they indulged in. There seemed to be an attitude that they must look busy or management would shut their post, a constant fear at a time of drastic cost reductions being sought by Beeching and his new officer recruits. However, with my responsibility for the plan, I took it personally if Control spent most of the time wrecking it through constant changes and I told them that if they had to make changes other than to reflect revised traffic flows or emergencies, then the Train Planning Office had failed. As manager of both, I encouraged a closer understanding between the two departments, getting train planners to go and discuss proposals with the Chief Controller or asking the controllers to report working that needed adjustment instead of grumbling under their breath and changing the plan without giving proper feedback. I think I convinced most controllers that I would genuinely like to see them with feet on the desk reading the Mirror when I visited Control for that would indicate everything was running as planned!

By and large, the Cardiff Valley passenger service needed little action unless the whole timetable was to be recast and I found that I spent many hours each week negotiating requirements with the Coal Board Transport Officers in Cardiff and Swansea. There were large flows of coal moved internally to the steelworks at Margam and Llanwern and also for export via Newport, Barry and Swansea Docks. I would agree longer distance coal flows with the NCB and then negotiate paths with the Regional Office – my first achievement of note was to run a coal train to Newcastle, albeit a specialist train of anthracite that was only mined in West Wales. On a daily basis we received forecasts of tonnages available at the pitheads and my job was to ensure a sufficient provision of empty coal wagons to clear the tonnage and not, in the worst case, to hold up the mine production as the coal could not be loaded. We had a number of locomotives designated to cope with the daily variations under ‘Control Orders’ and these would be diagrammed by roneo notice to depots only the afternoon before implementation.

It soon became apparent to me that we were having to improvise far too much on a daily basis and every weekend we were running a special expensive programme to tackle backlogs to avoid NCB criticism and penalty payments. Under the ‘slash and burn’ principle that had been in operation since the Beeching/Raymond era, many yards and depots had closed and spare resources of track, trains and men severely restricted, but it had been done piecemeal without any overall strategy. By now we had a new Divisional Movements Manager, Gerry Orbell, who joined us from the Eastern Region and Cliff Rose had been elevated to Assistant Divisional Manager. We were having crises nearly every day, exemplified by the congestion in yards like East Usk, Alexandra Dock Junction and Radyr, which were often so full that we could only move a train towards them if Control simultaneously took a train from them for somewhere else. It was all very wasteful, made worse by the fact that the longer distance diesel engine diagrams were so complex that once we were out of the plan, chaos reigned. We had the stray ends of Tinsley or Toton engines booked for trips from Margam to Severn Tunnel Junction and similar, engines that were rarely traceable and never in the right place when you wanted them. Gerry and I decided that something drastic and radical needed to be done and the concept of the South Wales Freight Strategy was born. Our mantra was ‘keep it simple’.

We decided to involve senior Operations staff from Paddington Headquarters as we wanted to analyse and review all freight working in South Wales including flows of traffic into and out of the Principality. This was a brave move on behalf of my manager as some senior officers, including the Divisional Manager himself, were paranoid about any potential interference from HQ in their affairs and we had to keep their involvement under wraps. We built a Divisional team including train planners and productivity staff from Management Services and the HQ team with Ray Fox, Train Planning Officer, Vic Gregory, Freight Officer, Dennis Mann the Diagramming Officer and others led by the Regional Operations Manager himself, Leslie Lloyd. I - under direction from HQ - arranged overnight stays at seaside hotels in Barry and on the Gower for the team to have a meal together, and spend a couple of hours preparing the agenda and key issues for the next day’s discussions. We were joined by the HQ Projects Manager, T.C.Baynton-Hughes and John Hodge from South Wales who together were persuading the NCB to rearrange their transport requirements to put out the wagons in block loads for one destination, but varying daily, the start of the so-called ‘Blocplan’. These evening sessions invariably started with sport of some sort – bowls, croquet, a golf driving range on one occasion – at which we all made sure Leslie Lloyd, an ardent competitor, won. After dinner and the real work, around 11pm, we would adjourn over pints to a fearsome game of ‘Liar Dice’, which again Leslie would win and Baynton invariably lose as I don’t think he ever fathomed the rules. At around 1am, most would retire to bed, while I had to drive round the Vale of Glamorgan back to my home – the former summer-rented seaside cottage balanced on the cliff top above the sands of Southerndown Bay, near the dismantled Dunraven Castle (dismantled apparently in days of yore so that the owner could avoid paying tax on it!).

Next day we would assemble at some secret abode out of the sight of spies from the Divisional Office and bring together the evidence and analysis we had been gathering in our South Wales team. We reviewed the role of every marshalling yard, got Management Services with local management to draw up consistent siding allocations in the light of the Blocplan proposals, which took a lot of coal tonnage out of the yards, and simplified the engine and crew diagrams. When we were sufficiently advanced in our thinking, I was delegated to spend time with every local trade union representative group (LDCs) explaining our proposals and seeking staff ideas and input. The only proviso was that I was accompanied by a senior Trade Union official from Sectional Council to see fair play and ensure no local group put forward biased proposals that would unduly benefit their depot at the expense of others – a highly contentious issue. All LDCs except one – Margam – agreed to meet me on this basis and we benefited enormously from the staff input coming up with finalised plans that local staff believed were practicable and were ‘owned’ by them.

The upshot was when we held the ‘grand’ consultation meeting with 150 LDC representatives and Sectional Council staff from all over South Wales in the city’s ‘Temple of Peace’ (usually given a very ironic cheer when large controversial meetings were held there), it lasted just under an hour and a half. I spent the first 45 minutes going through the proposals explaining the staff ideas we had accepted and included in the strategy and which ones we had had to reject and why. Instead of a longwinded and protracted argument from staff representatives that was usual, one LDC member after another stood up to confirm their agreement and express their satisfaction with the way this huge and potentially controversial plan had been developed and consulted on. Only Margam, who had held out against co-operation, found any argument with the plans and other LDCs soon made it clear to them that they had turned down the opportunity to influence things, which was their loss and got little sympathy.

What the plan did was to rationalise the piecemeal changes that had taken place over the previous years, make the freight flows work with reduced yard and locomotive resources, meet the NCB’s justified criticisms and reduce the overall cost considerably without any substantial staff redundancies. As an example of the changes we made, we designated Severn Tunnel Junction to be the starting place for wagon load traffic to England, with increased frequency of trains round the clock for English destinations, instead of spreading them over Margam and Severn Tunnel. We diagrammed two 2,700 hp diesel hydraulics to do nothing but round trips from Margam to Severn Tunnel and back reducing the shunting need at Margam and giving the wagons a faster and more frequent service from Severn Tunnel Yard. The network of high speed steel freight services to the Midlands and North East we concentrated on Alexandra Dock Junction and East Usk became our main collection and dispersal point for coal empties in the Newport and Cardiff Valleys. When the plan was implemented with the vast changes, we all expected teething problems. They did not happen – why not? Because the local staff made sure it worked; it was their plan as much as ours. I’m astonished that this method of staff consultation was never picked up and copied by other Divisions and Regions. I subsequently wrote a 4,000 words thesis on ‘Simplicity in Railway Operations’ based on this experience, which was accepted as my qualification as a member of the Institute of Transport.

I had been courting a student from Ealing University since meeting her on holiday in 1965. At first continuation of the relationship was very difficult as Pat came from Fakenham in Norfolk, about as far from an open passenger railway in Great Britain as you could get. However, when she moved to London in the autumn, I was able to use the occasional half day to see her. It was a long journey for a couple of hours at most, with a 40 minute bus ride from Aberbeeg to Newport, then a two hour train journey and the same home in the evening. It became a bit easier when I moved to Bridgend. Despite this Pat was accused of fending off other would-be suitors by feigning an imagined boyfriend – in fact I gather I was known as a ‘figment of Pat’s imagination’ as I was so rarely seen in her college digs. We got married in 1969 and I reluctantly left my ‘paradise’ by the sea for a chalet bungalow ten minutes’ walk from Bridgend station. When a couple of years later our first daughter, Helen, was born, I was fortunate that my ‘on call’ commitments had fallen to one week in five, shared among the other Divisional Operating Officers, as after an initial misleading few weeks Helen began to have long sleepless periods. On the other weeks I could occasionally be found at 3am motoring round Bridgend and Porthcawl with Helen in the carrycot on the back seat, as putting her in the car and driving aimlessly around was the only certain way we knew of getting her back to sleep.