‘In fog and falling snow’ – the BR rule book is threaded with a set of instructions about the winter which ruled the lives of those working the railway. Keeping everyone safe in the season of frost, snow and ice has never been easy. Overcoming friction is, after all, why trains exist, so anything that increases the chance of trains not stopping where they should, had to (and still has to) be taken very seriously.
Steam locomotives struggling up a gradient with frequent bouts of slipping may have made for spectacularthe hill without having to split the train, or hand sand from the ground, you then had to hope the driver could stop where he needed to on the run down the other side. Protections provided for runaways in the form of ‘catch’ points or sand drags were not really much help if the weather had conspired to make what was normally a challenging ‘bank’ (hill) a nightmare of lost adhesion. Plus, as the name implies, catch (or trap) points could and did cause derailments from freights struggling up a grade if they lost adhesion and started to slip back.
