Back Track
Introduction
The small town of Shirebrook is situated in the farthest north east corner of Derbyshire. Its narrow terraced streets lie in the postindustrial shadow of spoil heaps now being reclaimed by nature. It presents a somewhat bleak prospect today dominated by the cavernous warehouses of Sports Direct. In the early 1970s it was a busy but unassuming place, home to just under 9,000 people. Most of its working population was employed by the National Coal Board (NCB) in its local pits. The largest of these was Shirebrook where about 1,100 men worked underground and 350 on the surface. It was one of the NCB's select few ‘big hitters’ so called because it regularly got more than one million tons of coal a year. It was one of many pits in the NCB's East Midlands Region covering the north Nottinghamshire coalfield which was recognised as one of the most productive in the country. Historically its coal had been moved by rail over the metals of the Lancashire, Derbyshire & East Coast Railway Company which built a network of lines connecting Chesterfield to Lincoln with a short extension to Sheffield in the 1890s. (Plans to connect these with the North West of England and a port on the East Coast never came to fruition.) This area was known colloquially by railwaymen as the LD. In steam days the motive power and men to move the traffic were located at Langwith Junction (41J) but after dieselisation the Eastern Region decided to construct a new purpose-built maintenance depot and fuelling point at Shirebrook West (SB). It was opened on 14th June 1965.
First steps
The route to becoming a guard was not straightforward. Father was an engine driver at Langwith shed, so on leaving school at fifteen in April 1963 in the last days of steam our would-be railwayman applied to start as a cleaner. Unfortunately, he failed the medical due to sub-standard eyesight. So like many before him
