Going Loco - July 2024

12 JULY

So, You Want to be an Engine Driver?

It’s been the dream of many a youngster to become an engine driver. So much so it’s almost a cliché, but it is still an aspiration that many people look up to. It has to be said that doing so today is far easier than it was in a steam era. Most preserved lines, us included, have pathways that will enable you to become a driver in a few years but back in the day that was a much harder proposition. How hard? Let’s find out …

Boys from Eton College cleaning an engine at Slough during world war II. Photograph published in the Great Western Railway Magazine, 1945

If you want to be an engine driver, you started out as a boy cleaner and yes, it was a boy as well, women steam footplate crew are definitely something of the preservation era. Even during wartime, when many roles previously undertaken by men were turned over to women whilst the men were away fighting, an exception was made for locomotive drivers and fireman. The main reason given was that it took a long time to learn all the different routes that a crew may be expected to travel down. The short time that women had during the war replacing previously male-dominated jobs did not allow for this extensive training to take place. After the war, it again became a male only preserve until the end of steam. The skills were so valued that locomotive footplate crew was a reserved occupation. This meant that they were not eligible to be called up for military service.

The cleaning gang giving their best attention to No 6000 King George V, November 1934

You started your career at about 14 or 15 years old. You were taken on as a cleaner, but there really was quite a lot more to it than that. As part of your training you would help out with a great many of the jobs that were undertaken around the shed. This could be anything from shovelling ash, washing out boilers, acting as a fitter’s mate, and so on and so on … While this was going on, you were being instructed on the final points of the engineering and operation of steam locomotives. It’s worth mentioning here a rather egalitarian attitude to education on the railway.

Young firemen at Didcot engine shed in the early 1960s, Kev Pierpoint and Bob Cotterell

Education on shed was provided by the senior drivers and fireman to their juniors. There are several remarkable things about what was known as the mutual improvement classes. The first is that it was unpaid. When your time came to be in the senior ranks, you gave freely of your time to teach the next generation because that’s what the previous generation had done for you. While the company may well have provided some literature and maybe an old carriage in which to hold the classes, that was about the extent of their involvement. It was education for railway men by railway men.

Polishing No 6023 King Edward II at Didcot Railway Centre, 28 August 2017

The other thing to realise about a career on the railway was that any form of promotion was done on seniority. The classic example of this being the fact that when Churchward retired, Collett became the chief mechanical engineer of the Great Western Railway this meant that William Stanier, despite his obvious ability, would never have become chief mechanical engineer as he and Collett were very close in age and Collett had seniority. A move to the LMS really was Stanier’s only option to become a CME. In terms of footplate crew, it was not uncommon to have to move sheds to take up a promotion while waiting for the equivalent position to open up at your home shed.

The Mutual Improvement Class at Swindon in 1911. Note W A Stanier, the tall man with dark moustache, standing in centre behind the valve gear model

So, once you had successfully completed your training as a fireman, you would initially be known as a passed cleaner. This meant that you were qualified to do firing turns but had not yet officially been promoted. This saw you at the bottom of the system called the links. This was a series of rungs on the ladder, if you like, that went from the mundane jobs of looking after locomotives on the shed to the most demanding turns such as express passenger work. As you became a fireman, you started by looking after the fires of locomotives on the shed, keeping the engines hot overnight ready for their work the next day and so on.

A posed photograph showing the driver and fireman of a goods train with an express passing

You would then move on to perhaps local shunting work on a small tank engine. then local goods work, local passenger trains, with the jobs on the route knowledge becoming ever more complex and demanding. Long distance heavy freight trains and faster passenger services were on the upper end of the links and somewhere like old Oak Common outside Paddington would have been the express workings on Kings and Castles, as the top link for our budding fireman.

On the footplate of No 7015 Carn Brea Castle in February 1953 with the fire made up to halfway up the firehole in true Great Western style. Fireman Maurice Townsend and driver Bill Bateman. Photograph by Kenneth Leech

As he was working his way up through the links he would have been training as a driver and he would eventually qualify as such. Again he would start off being known as a passed fireman able to take driving jobs, but not yet fully promoted. Once he had found a promotion, as a newly minted driver, of course he went right back down to the bottom of the links. He moved the engines round the shed as a driver, did the shunting work as a driver and slowly but surely crawled his way back up to the top of the links and with luck, skill and health permitting, by the time he was in his 40s or 50s he would be amongst the elite top link drivers.

Kev Pierpoint firing No 4079 Pendennis Castle on a test run between Reading and Didcot in February 1967. Bill McAlpine is sitting, extreme left, on a comfortable chair attached to the fireman’s hinged seat, which is a plain wooden board. The comfortable chair had to be removed as the space it took up interfered with the fireman’s ability to swing his shovel!

These men really knew what they were doing in the main. And they had to. Being in charge of a 2,000 – 2,500 hp locomotive pulling a 500 ton train full of passengers for mile after mile at 70 to 80mph is a huge responsibility. You have to know where the signals are, you have to know where the gradients are, where the speed restrictions are, and so on and so on and so on … The constant flow of incoming information as you thundered through the countryside must have been intense.

The top link footplate crew for the 50th Anniversary of the Cornish Riviera Express, at Paddington on 1 July 1954

While we are talking about that, think about that top link fireman as well! He’d be keeping an eye out over the side of the cab for the signals, ensuring that the boiler had enough water and the driver had enough steam. In order to do that on a big GWR locomotive, when working hard, he’d be shovelling a ton of coal an hour. Trying to accurately place coal on the fire on a footplate that was partially exposed to the 80 mile an hour draught, standing on a floor that was never stable. Locomotive suspension is set up to allow the engine to put the power to the track and not for the comfort of the crew. The tender would rock and roll at its own rhythm and to fill the gap between the two, is a metal bridge piece called a fall plate. With one edge resting on the engine and the other resting on the tender, the motion of the fall plate is a combination of the two! Frozen from the waist up and roasted from the waist down – the glamour of the steam era …

Doug Godden at Didcot on 25 May 2019 – “It doesn’t take that long to train to become a brain surgeon does it?”

It’s quite amazing when you think just how long it took to become that express train driver. I had a very great privilege of knowing Doug Godden who was an Old Oak Common fireman and he said to me words to the effect that people wouldn’t put up with a training schedule for a non-professional job that was that long today! As he said: “It doesn’t take that long to train to become a brain surgeon does it?”

5 JULY

A Genuinely Lifting Experience

The lifting shop when new in 1932, with Bulldog class locomotive No 3448 Kingfisher

Well, sorry about the late publishing of last week’s blog – our webmaster went on a well-deserved holiday and we weren’t able to fill his not inconsiderable shoes*. To tell you the truth, none of us dare touch his website for fear of screwing it up! Still, better late than never and effectively it’s a double Going Loco week! Silver lining and all that good stuff. We had better get back to the shed I suppose. So, last time we talked shed, we were looking at washing out boilers and loading up coal. Now let’s have an uplifting experience …

The architect’s drawing of the lifting shop, in the Great Western Trust collection

The lifting shop is the big building to the rear of the locomotive shed. It is clearly cleverly named, as its main content is a 50 ton hoist! The building and the crane are contemporary with the building of the main shed. They have all been here since 1932. It’s therefore quite amazing it is all still in use. Admittedly not as intensively as once it was, but it is still a vital piece of equipment keeping the locomotives of the Great Western Society collection running.

A list of machinery installed in the lifting shop, original document in the Great Western Trust collection

There are two cranes that are combined on the one structure. The main 50 tonne hoist is obvious, with its huge hooks and massive winding drum. It can be driven in two speeds, fast or slow. The fast gear limits the weight to a 10 tons lift capacity. In slow gear the full 50 ton capacity can be used. To the side of one of the legs of the main hoist is a small six ton manually operated hoist this is used for lifting and swinging smaller components on an off locomotives. The main hoist is electrically powered but the auxiliary six tonne hoist is driven manually.

A complete engine lifted – Wantage Tramway No 5 being loaded onto a wagon for the journey to the 150th Anniversary of Railways exhibition at Shildon in 1975

Also contained within the lifting shop is a forge. The full range of blacksmith tools are still in the rack on the wall. The ventilation and chimney stretch way up into the high roof and out through the top. There is also an electric fan that is used to supply air to the fuel and the forge and get both it and the metal it is heating to the required high temperatures. Today you will find that the lifting shop is far more full of machine tools than it ever would’ve been during the steam era. This is because, basically, we need somewhere to put them to keep both them and their operators dry! You do, however, still get the feeling that you would’ve done had you walked in there in the late 1930s.

The forge in the lifting shop, photographed early in the preservation era

As far as we know, this is the last, Great Western Railway lifting shop that is in full operation with its original crane and equipment. Frankly, we’d be lost without it. The reason that the site is still here is because there is no road access but the problem with that is of course that you can’t get a crane on site to lift things like boilers out of locomotives … The 50 ton hoist is more than capable of lifting even our largest boilers and a great deal more. A number of the fleet are so light, that the hoist could quite literally lift the whole locomotive up! One other operation that we still do, that as far as I am aware is not done elsewhere, is where wheel sets and or bogies are removed from a locomotive by lifting it up from the buffer beam and pivoting it on the rear driving wheels. There are many photographs of this operation in the steam era, but not very many from the preservation era.

No 6024 King Edward I lifted for attention to the bogie in May 2008

I will use the lifting shop as a segway to talk about the variety of tradesmen that once worked day-in day-out at the shed. These were known as the shop grades. Bernard Barlow remembers there being 15 skilled craftsman working at the shed. There were boilersmiths who repaired and maintained the locomotive pressure vessels. The mechanical staff in Bernard’s day was led by chief fitter William Miles. Apparently he was an ex-Royal Navy man and immensely knowledgeable. He was an incredibly well-respected man who Bernard describes as ‘one of the few that really knew what he was talking about’.

The boiler of No 4079 Pendennis Castle lifted in November 2020 for the frames to be positioned underneath

Alongside the fitters and the boilersmiths there were blacksmiths, coppersmiths and many other people doing mechanical work to keep the locomotives moving. It was a complex set of skills that were needed to keep these engines moving, as it still is today. When you consider that a roster of Didcot staff taken in 1928, when the shed was home to 31 engines, there were a total of 172 people working there. Of these, only 110 were drivers and fireman. The rest were concerned with the maintenance, fuel and running of the locomotives and the shed.

The boiler of No 4079 Pendennis Castle being replaced in the frames in November 2020

When you look at staffing levels such as these, you can understand why the far simpler diesels eventually won their day. Having taken a very brief look at the maintenance staff – and there is a lot more to it than I’ve indicated here – I suppose the final things that we need to look at is the management of the shed and those folks that drove and fired the engines. Sounds like a couple more Going Loco blogs to me…

The bogie of No 1014 County of Glamorgan being run out in a demonstration for members of the public in September 2023

* Metaphorically speaking of course – I don’t want you all thinking that Website Rob is some British form of Sasquatch …**

** That’s my role …

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