MEMORIES OF A WEST COUNTRY SIGNALMAN
Larry Crossier, a fellow Plymouthian and great friend, was surely born to be a signalman. For nearly seven decades or so, nothing pleased him more than talking about signalling, signalmen and their boxes. With the contraction of semaphores throughout the land during the 1960s, Larry realised that much of their history could well disappear unless steps were taken to preserve it, hence his being one of the founding members of the Signalling Record Society.
Before relating Larry’s tales of Plymouth and its railways, such terms as auto-trains, auto workings, sandwich autos, motor trains and so on, were never used by him, nor presumably by his fellow local signalmen, Railcars being their universal collective title.
As a young teenager just prior to the outbreak of the Second World War, whilst numerous lads were busily watching and collecting the numbers of passing steam engines, Larry was hooked on the delicate sound of bells and the crashing of point and signal levers which emanated from the two large boxes that controlled movements into and out of Plymouth’s busy North Road station.
East Box was a replacement for the 48-lever example of 1908. Constructed to cope with the enlargement of North Road station, it was brought into use on 25th June 1939. With a complement of 185 levers within the 79ft-long, concrete-roofed, brick structure, it was approximately twice the size of its predecessor.
The 59-lever North Road West Box of 1908, which Larry became very familiar with in his youth, was visually a typical Great Western wooden structure. Measuring 38ft by 13ft, it had replaced the former Saxby & Farmer example of 1876. The latter’s existence coincided with the opening of the joint Great Western Railway/ London & South Western Railway North Road station, the Cornwall loop line, and the introduction of mixed gauge on the GW branch from Tavistock Junction to Launceston; in doing so, via a connection, this enabled LSWR trains to reach Devonport prior to construction of the direct line from Launceston, the Plymouth, Devonport & South Western Junction Railway.
Coinciding with the enlargement of the station which included two new platforms, Nos.7 and 8, was the widening of the railway bridge over North Road, adjacent to the station entrance, necessitating West Box being moved a short distance for clearance purposes..
Despite his junior years, Larry had soon formed a friendship with one of the signalmen in the West Box, namely Cecil Wilcox, leading to regular visits into his sanctum. Despite the threat of dismissal for allowing such practice, Cecil went even further in encouraging Larry’s desire to learn all that he could about signalling. And so it was that on one memorable occasion he allowed Larry to unofficially relieve the telephone boy, so that he could nip off to the cinema, whilst at other times, under close supervision, allowing him to set the signals and points for various movements.
By the time that Larry was about to leave school, it was known by all and sundry in the boxes and by the local signalling Inspectors that this determined and enthusiastic lad desperately wanted to become a signalman. Happily for Larry, he was informed that come his sixteenth birthday, a job would almost certainly come his way. Fortunately the company was true to its word in giving Larry the chance of becoming a signalman; his first place of employment was Bickleigh, the second station north of Tavistock Junction on the line to Launceston.
With the import of petroleum becoming ever more problematic, numerous local bus services were reduced, resulting in the local railway
