There was nothing worse than animosity between two men on the foot-plate, because there was nowhere you could turn to on an 8 hour shift, it could be like a prison without bars.
In all my 15 years of firing I was most fortunate in only having one driver that I did not get on with, and he would fall out with anyone. To give you some idea what it was like I bumped into his wife during the day, who was a north country woman, with a good sense of humour, and she said to me “I’ve been told that you’re my old mans fireman”, and I said “yes, I am”. She said “well, how do you get on with him?” And I said “look, I’m not going to tell any lies”, I said “some days I do and some days I don’t”, and I said “most days I don’t”, and she said “do you know, when I married that man I thought I would make him like me, but the buggers making me like him”, and that was from his wife.
He was a terror, you could do nothing right for the man, you couldn’t even put the coal in the firebox right, he was a selfish man. Fortunately most of the men at Swindon were great.
He was a lovable rogue was ‘Fagen’, he’d work every hour he could and grab all the overtime he could and he’d pinch anything he could, but he’d never rob his mates.
He used to boast about it, ‘cause he used to live in one of the companies houses and of course there were no garages with these houses. In the winter the owners would cover their car with an old raincoat, and Fagen would come along and if he saw a better raincoat or overcoat on someone’s car than he was wearing he used to change it!
Now this is the gospel truth, because the fireman that was with him on this incident will bear me out. They were up the Marsden siding, shunting, which is about three miles from Swindon. A train came down from London which reported an object on the line. So a message went back from Crossold bridges back to Marsden sidings where Fagen was shunting. He was told to come out of the yard and come towards Swindon and search the line to see if he could find this object that had been reported.
So when they came along the line they see’s this body of a man who had committed suicide. His head was on one side of the track and the body on the other. Now Fagen goes to the body and lifts up the leg to see the shoes and said, “just my bloody luck, size seven”.
I remember years ago as a young fireman in the mess room waiting for orders, the foreman came in and he said to me, “driver Wilkins fireman has gone sick, when driver Wilkins books on, I want you to do his firemans duties”, so I picked up my gear and went round to the booking-on point.
Driver Wilkins came in and I said “I’ve got to come along with you driver, your mates gone sick”, to which he asked “how long have you been firing my son?”, I replied “four years driver”, to which he said, “I’m sorry, nothing personal but I can’t take you on a job like this, it’s got to be a man of experience, I haven’t got time to supervise a learner”.
So the foreman had to shift all the men around in the shed so that he could get a more senior fireman who could go with driver Wilkins.
He was a nice old fellow was driver Wilkins, but that was how it was, drivers didn’t have time to teach anyone, they expected you to know what to do. At 70 mph or more they were watching ahead for signals and had to have confidence in their fireman.
Make no mistake about it, no matter what safety devices we had, the greatest safety device was a drivers eyes. Not only can he see, he hears and he smells, in thick fog he would listen and know just by the sound of the foundation of the track, every bridge and every signal point he passed through, he knew just where he was.
A driver would use all three of his senses; sight, hearing and smell.
The year was 1940, it was when the Germans with their fighter planes were ‘train busting’ in France, when they would come down broadside and aim at the locomotive, and of course if their cannon shells hit the boiler, well the thing exploded.
I remember on this particular day we were on a falling gradient from Wooton Basset to Dawnsey. The gradient was so steep that the rails were higher up than the fields each side.
Now on this particular day, working a freight train down to Dawnsey, I went from my side of the cabin to open the water feed valve to put more water in the boiler. As I opened the valve and looked back along the train, coming along just above the roof of the wagons was a Heinkel 111 bomber. I knew what it was because at that particular time it was the only 2-engine bomber that Germany had.
As she flew by the cab, the German pilot actually waved to me, and I could see the iron cross and swastikas all over. As the pilot waved to me he banked away and went straight up into the clouds. Now I really thought that he was going to turn and come back on a strafing run, but we didn’t see anything more of him, whether he was out of ammunition or whether he decided to let us live I do not know. All I know is that I was really scarred that day.
Becoming a Train Driver was a boyhood ambition for me. I remember I was given a little toy train when I was 5 years of age, and I’ve still got it.
I was having my bath at the end of the kitchen table in a zinc bath, because you didn’t have a proper bathroom in those days and my dad came in the room and took the lid off of the box, wound it up and held it up for me to see. And when the wheels had stopped and the spring had run down he put it back in the box and he said “when you’ve had your bath”, he said “that’s yours, happy birthday”, and that’s the quickest bath I’ve had in all my life.
It was a Hornby clockwork engine that cost my dad 12 shillings and 6 pence. You can still wind it up and it still runs and in the lid of its box there is a little form which states ‘this product is guaranteed against mechanical failure for 60 days’.
I often get this toy engine out and look at it and think to myself – yes, this is how it all started.
I was a fireman working with Bill, up on the 9.00 Swindon to Paddington, when we had an incident, which was very, very unusual.
The couplings between the locomotive and the tender, in what they called the ‘drag box’, where you had 3 links and also some safety chains, for some unknown reason, with the engine pulling, had sheared off the ‘cotter pin’ and the pinion had worked its way out, which meant that the locomotive actually left the tender. But because we were running the train, it was possible to keep it going. The train was now being pulled only by the safety chains, there was no coupling between engine and tender.
I always remember this occasion because on the foot-plate, between engine and tender, there is a flap which covers that gap which had come away from the tender that far, that the flap had dropped straight down between the two, and I had one foot on the tender and one foot on the cab. I shouted out to my driver “don’t look now Bill, but we’re running in two parts!” and he looked round at me and saw what had happened and immediately shut down the regulator. Because we were at speed the train just came up against us and he coaxed the train into Southall station where we stopped.
A crew of fitters were sent out and they got down on the track inside and managed to get the pinion back in. But we were not aloud to work on to Paddington without another engine on the front.
This incident was so rare that when we arrived at Paddington, the inspector was already there. He said to us, “when they’ve taken your coaches away, you’ve got to take this engine down to Old Oak sheds for an examination”.
This was such an unusual incident that I never heard of anyone else experiencing it.
To give you some idea as to the difference between a Steam locomotive and a Diesel, you can weigh it up in a nutshell.
With the Steam engine, the boiler was where you created your steam, and if you wanted to ‘steam heat’ your train, you backed on to the coaches, you put two pipes together and you opened a steam valve in the cab, and hot steam flowed back from the boiler through the train. On a Diesel locomotive there was no there was no huge boiler, the boiler was separate to steam heat the train and the driver had to have three days to learn how to get that steam and dispose of that boiler when he goes to ‘shed’.
The ‘King George V’ was the flagship of the Great Western Railway, the first of thirty in that class, built in 1927.
She went to America in 1927 at the invitation of the Baltimore and Iowa Railway. The reason that they invited here over there in 1927, was that the Baltimore and Iowa Railway was the first American railroad to ever carry passengers, and to celebrate that they invited the King George V over.
She had only just been built and had no special trial or anything, she was built in 1927 and went over there in 1927 to show the difference between a ‘modern’ locomotive and the ‘broad gauge’ engine of the ‘North Star’ so that the American people could see the difference.
The bell (a replica of the type carried on American engines) on the front and medals on the side was presented to commemorate the event.
When she came back to England, for many many years she was the most powerful locomotive of her class in the country. She could pull five hundred tons and leave London at 10.30 in the morning with the Cornish Riviera Express and she would be stopped dead at 2.30 in the afternoon at Plymouth which was 236 miles away. The fireman would have shoveled over five tons of coal almost continuously, and because she would use so much water, she would pick that up on the run, three times. Once at Westbury, once by Creitch and again at Dawlish.
She would take and use about nine to ten thousand gallons of water on that trip. This was all done by one crew, in fact the fireman had to be of such quality that he would be about to become a driver. Because no way could the driver, travelling at over 70 mph, have the time to supervise a fireman. It was the teamwork that gave you efficiency and a safe journey.
I worked on her as a young fireman, because all Great Western engines, at sometime in their life, would come through into Swindon Sheds for light or general repairs and Swindon men would take them out for trial. All engines on the Great Western would eventually pass through Swindon Works.
When an engine first came out of the works, they would be taken down for ‘light trial’ to Dawnsey and back just to see if anything was burning hot. If she was serviceable and could be released to Swindon running sheds then she would be down there for about three weeks.
There she would be on stopping trains, semi-fast and long runs until completely run in.
After this she would be allocated to a depot that needed a ‘loco’, and that depot would send their oldest engine to the shops to be renovated.
But when the war broke out locomotives were in such great demand the stock shed went out of business and we never stored them. But at one time before the war, it was nothing to have half a dozen brand new engines or engines that had had general repairs stood in the stock shed, waiting to be allocated to a depot that wanted one.
In fact in the link workings we used to have two sets of men. One would book on at six in the morning, another set would book on at two in the afternoon, for what was known as ‘light engine disposal’ and that was just to take one of the engines from the stock shed to which ever depot it was to be delivered too.