My British Rail Life

By Colin Varney

My British Rail Life focuses on the nationalised rail industry. From leaving school in1975, to the date of privatisation, 1 April 1994, Colin Varney fashions a recollection, which is anhonest and humorous record of his experiences growing up as a British Rail employee.Starting at Southampton Central, as a Signalman’s Booking Lad, he then became a Signalman, Signalling Manager, (and Signalling Instructor later in his career.) He covers his time as a Station Supervisor, Youth Training Scheme Co-ordinator and a short spell in a Telephone Enquiry Bureau, in an industry of constant reorganisation and job-changing.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Brown Dog Books
• Release date: May 8, 2024
• ISBN: 9781839527562

Book preview

PROLOGUE

‘Hold on a minute, I’ll just put this next row of cabbages in, then I’ll be ready.’ Those words were uttered by my father at the advent of his second son’s birth. He was on the late shift at Fulwell Junction Signal Box on 2 July 1959 when I was born, and was tending to the allotment at the back of the cabin when the area inspector came to declare the wonderful news. Thus, I arrived. Into a railway family. I’m sure that my grandfather – a steam engine driver of 45 years’ experience – was soon to be told of the arrival of his second grandchild.

It was inevitable then, that some 16 years later my accession to railway work was to come. My grandfather had started his career at 14 with the then London and South Western Railway as a ‘knocker-upper’; a quite appropriate title for a human alarm clock that ran the streets of towns throughout the country, banging on doors to get the early-shift traincrews out of their beds and to the depots to prep the engines for the morning rush hour. Then came the fireman’s duties at Nine Elms before achieving the Holy Grail of all railwaymen: becoming the driver of a steam train. And that’s where he stayed: a driver, moving only from Nine Elms to Bournemouth until his retirement in 1966. Meanwhile, my father had followed a career in signalling. Starting as a booking boy [1a] at Worting Junction in 1947 and moving through the signalling ranks to reach the day of my birth, having created (unknowingly) another railway generation. He went on to work in station supervisory roles and, in 1988, finished his career as chief trains inspector at Waterloo, responsible for an inspectorate of 15 men and being regularly involved in the overseeing of the Royal Train.

It is to these two people alone that I owe much of my fateful move into a 46-year-long career, because I have very strongly come to believe that certain things are undoubtedly in the blood. Railways were in mine. This book seeks to take you on the journey that touched three decades and saw many changes in all aspects of my life and certainly within the rail industry. It will explore my early life in signalling as a teenager, my promotion to supervisory work at some of the railway’s busiest stations, leading to achieving the role of a signalling inspector. It will cover parenthood and how that brings pressures into the work environment. It explores the making and breaking of friendships and my accession to the training environment and how I rose to the top of that tree at Waterloo as a signalling instructor. With 19 years covered in detail, I am delighted to share with you My British Rail Life.

This book is dedicated to the memory of my grandfather, Jack Varney, seen tending Battle of Britain class Royal Observer Corps at Waterloo Station on the 2 July 1961, my 2nd birthday.

GRANDAD WITH FIREMAN DOUG CONGDON

MY FATHER, ME AND MY SISTER 1967

Chapter 1. Starting Out

School and me never really got on. Through nearly 12 years of education, I was the archetypal C-grade student who occasionally rose to the dizzy heights of a B or even a B+. Some of my old school reports made interesting reading in that I was eminently capable of achieving ‘heights’ but never rose to them. I was a pretty useful bowler in the school cricket team, but wasn’t ‘one of the boys’ so never got to show my real passion for the game. I scraped through GCE O-level in Art and English, and in my last six months of secondary education felt destined to work in an office for the rest of my days.

However, I had no idea of the powerful force of family. Specifically, the railway family. With two generations already in that family, I recall my earliest memory of being hoisted up onto the footplate of a Merchant Navy Pacific locomotive taking water at Southampton during a stop on the Bournemouth Belle with my grandad at the helm. I might have been only four years old but I clearly remember one major thing: it was hot! These footplate visits continued regularly, and so too did the visits to signal boxes to see my father race up and down the lever frame, winding the gates and hoisting semaphore signals into the air, some from so far away that I could scarcely see them along the track. So it was no real surprise to me that, in seeing me struggle in the weeks after leaving school, my father announced that on Monday 11 August 1975, if I turned up at Southampton Station Manager’s Office at 0900, there would be a job waiting for me as the signal box booking boy.

I was to be joining a company that was made up of wholly owned subsidiaries which were run at an arm’s-length by the British Railways Board. The railway engineering works became British Rail Engineering Limited (BREL) in 1970; the ferry operations were run by Sealink, However, the BRB was still directly responsible for a multitude of other functions, such as the British Transport Police, the British Rail Property Board (which was responsible not just for operational track and property, but also for thousands of miles of abandoned tracks and stations arising from the Beeching cuts and other closure programmes), a staff savings bank, convalescent homes for rail staff, and the internal railway telephone and data comms networks (the largest in the country after British Telecom’s).

With the usual nerves that accompany any new job – let alone your first job – I arrived promptly and was introduced to Mr (Roy) Brown, the station manager (in the 1970s, management were always called Mr, never by their first name). Within a short space of time, I was being escorted to the signal box at the Western end of the station. Despite having been in a goodly number of signal boxes in the early years of my life, I don’t think anything prepared me for the first moments of Southampton. It was like walking into the Hall of Kings(P120).

Coloured levers, gleaming brass instruments and six lines of railway operated by two smartly dressed signalman at the latter end of their careers. The old school: George Hadfield and Stan Appleton. The class system didn’t prevail on the operating floor: it was ‘George’ and ‘Stan’. They were joined by a young lad by the name of Michael Smith. He was the on-duty booking boy, the job I was employed to learn. I was offered the courtesy of the obligatory signal-box brew, and it was then that I discovered how difficult the job might be to learn. My teacher, Michael, had the most extraordinary stutter. I could barely work out what he was saying at all. Within an hour I had discovered that George was on the edge of being starkly bonkers and Stan was the archetypal gentleman. I sought sanctuary in Stan. He was the only one making any sense. With a six-month trial period bestowed upon me, I had to keep my nose clean and make sure I gave the best account of myself, so I knuckled down to what I soon began to realise was a terribly important and responsible job. In short, a booking boy’s job was to record the times in a document known as a Train Register. All the actions taken in the use of the signalling bells and – to a lesser degree the block instruments – had to be written down against the time they were carried out.

For readers without a knowledge of signalling, the bells and instruments seek to ensure that they maintain the golden rule of signalling: to allow only one train into any one (block) section of line at any one time [1]. The Train Register was – and still is – a legally constructed document submissible as evidence at any investigation into any rail incident. It is divided into two sections: ‘Up’ line and ‘Down’ line movements. The Up line is any line going towards London. The Down line is the opposite. It can be confusing because although we might naturally say that we are travelling up to Scotland, we’ll be travelling on the Down line. There I was then, learning not to be confused and compiling a document that – if tampered with or falsified – could potentially end the career of any signalman involved in a breach of the rules. Some job at 16! I felt like I was on a tightrope, ready to shop the gods if I got the slightest thing wrong.

After my first full week, the ritual of collecting my pay was introduced to me. The pay office at Southampton was a small room, with enough space for two people. It had a ticket-office style window, behind which sat the miserable pay clerk who took time out from his day duties in the Up-side ticket office to dole out the pay into semi-transparent envelopes. This allowed the clerk and payee to see the payslip in the envelope before it was handed over and signed for on the employee’s pay card. My pay for my first week’s work: £15. This would be nearly £150 in present-day value. It was already agreed with my mum that one third of that money was for housekeeping, so I had £10 to spend on myself for the week, knowing that the very next week it would be the same. And the week after that, and the week after that, almost into infinity. That was the picture I saw unfolding as a 16-year-old. A bright, affluent, stable future. Only five months and two weeks to go to secure it.

In that typical way of a teenager, where youthful exuberance overwhelms any sense of responsibility, I marked my fledgling railway career by starting a criminal record at the same time. The newly-created M271 motorway, which had cut through playing fields regularly used by me and a school friend, was just too tempting to cross without using the provided footbridge. We climbed over the boundary fence and set sail across six lanes of motorway for just a bit of fun: right in front of a passing police car. Three weeks later I received a £3 fine in the local juvenile court for trespass and the most craven fear that this would affect my trial period at work. It didn’t. It remains my only crime to this day.

Suffice it to say that six months went by quickly and I was confirmed on to the permanent staff. In my probation period I had become proficient in understanding the long list of bell-codes needed to communicate with both Northam Junction(P32) and Millbrook Boxes (P33).

Through regular Sunday shifts, where the principal duty was box cleaning, I had developed a lifelong satisfaction in brass-cleaning and making the lever tops shine with the brilliance of stainless steel. I had even been educated in the art of sweeping the linoleum floor. This was demonstrated to me after I had shown little prowess or experience in using a broom. In a gung-ho fashion I appeared – to my signalman colleague Brian Blachford – to be spreading more dust than I was sweeping. He showed me that the method of sweeping was to push the dust along the box floor in broom-head widths so that, as you made your way from one end to the other, the dust was always in a line at 90 degrees to the lever frame. After it was correctly swept, it was then polished to a shine that you were occasionally threatened with having to eat your dinner off. The lever frame kickboard (a long frame-length plank laid into the floor that allowed the signalman to get purchase on pulling the more difficult levers) was always scrubbed to a brutal white with Glitto. However, the biggest test of all that I passed was to have gradually understood whatever Michael Smith was saying to me and to ensure the Register was compiled correctly.

I had taken a keen interest in reading the signalmen I had worked with. The most important thing to remember was how they liked their tea. It became central to my job to ensure that each individual colleague had their tea made exactly to their specifications. In certain cases, you found out very quickly if you hadn’t made it quite right. You also got to know what they ate and when, who would want to have their breakfast first and indeed, which end of the seventy-five levers frame the ‘senior’ man would covet.

The Western end of the frame serving Millbrook was busier than the end serving Northam Junction. Two lines expanded into four from Northam into the station.

NORTHAM JUNCTION SIGNAL BOX

It was not unusual for the booking boy to be given a go on the lever frame to expand his early signalling experience. Such was the time spent that I had become quite proficient as a signalman’s assistant and could have a good stab at working the box under supervision by myself. This pleased the rather more lazy signalmen that I worked with, but I didn’t mind a jot.

ST DENYS SIGNAL BOX

I had also progressed to training as a booking boy at St Denys Box, (P34) north of Southampton. This controlled the busy junction to and from the line to Portsmouth and also access to and from what was then known as Bevois Park Yard. St Denys was especially required as a regulating point for trains going towards Eastleigh, which was the next signal box north, having been introduced as a panel box in 1966. With St Denys under my belt this added to the procession of different signalmen that I was to work alongside for the next 18 months or so. My rostered hours were 0600–1400 and 1400–2200, on a roster that included working weekends, so switching shifts weekly, I got to know the ‘resident’ signalmen and the many/varied types of relief signalmen, some who would work Southampton and St Denys and some who you wouldn’t see more than twice a year.

One particular signalman, Paul Sims was on duty at St Denys when I was introduced to the unofficial way in which signalling was sometimes undertaken. Innocent as I was to the way in which things worked, on a morning filled with frequent showers I happened to hold my arm out of the window to see if it was raining. The next thing I knew was that Mr Sims was racing to grab hold of a red flag. I was puzzled as to his anxiety, but soon understood that the driver had mistaken my raised arm gesture as a signal to move forward past the signal at which he was detained at danger. I was – in my innocence – given a right rollicking and told never to do that in a signal box again. Not until I’d attained the grade at the very least! He was a very fair man and recognised that I simply didn’t know that there was an unofficial set of hand signals used between footplate staff and signallers. Fairness seemed to underpin the attitude of all signalmen. It’s just that the sense of fairness was differently interpreted by each one of the different men. For example, you got to know who would let you come in on the first train in the morning.

The family home was on the Millbrook estate and I could catch a train from Redbridge station at what was considered to be a reasonable hour (0640). Some of my colleagues thought that was fair. Others thought it was fair to get you out of bed an hour earlier to catch the early morning staff bus at 0512 or to cycle in to arrive promptly for 0600. Two different views of fairness: one was just more tiring than the other. In the end it all turned out to be a happy balance and I was certainly building up my fitness through cycling to and from work regularly. These were happy and indeed affluent times. Not being old enough to spend my money on drink (that came later), I directed my money to my first love: music. I would buy records like they were going out of fashion, but in relative terms not spending a great deal of my available spare money. My first ever single record cost 50 pence in my first year at work. It was ‘Tonight’ by The Shadows

THE AUTHOR OUTSIDE THE FAMILY HOME IN MILLBROOK, SOUTHAMPTON IN EARLY 1978

The happy times were soon to end though. Within the first year of my fledgling career, I fell victim to the great railway disease of reorganisation. Because of the constant need for British Rail to find savings, booking boys’ duties were ended at St Denys and I found myself surplus to requirements after staff levels were reduced. The single great advantage of being in the railway industry was that you were never made redundant and put out of work, you were displaced. This effectively meant that, through union agreements, any staff whose jobs were discontinued were left to be used at best practice. I was pushed from one job to another in the area manager’s office at Southampton, the mailroom, the data input centre and then working with the clerks in the AMO’s admin department. For someone who had only just found his feet, this was a terribly unsettling period. I had a secure job indeed, but was waiting for the powers that be to make up their minds as to where that might be. I applied for clerical jobs without success but eventually found myself becoming an asset in the admin department because of a skill that I had developed in my teenage years that took all of my colleagues completely by surprise. I could use a typewriter. Since I was 12, I always had a craving to use one. My parents bought me a child’s Petite typewriter and I would clatter the keys for hours, typing short stories that I would show to family and friends. Hence, my secret weapon was put to good use, and I was given all manner of things to type up, taking the weight off the ladies who already had their work cut out keeping up with the demand.

Then, in the early part of 1976, things took another turn when it was decided that I was surplus to requirements (again) in the typing pool, but an opportunity was given for training as booking boy/train announcer at Eastleigh Panel (P35). This was – in comparison to my initial thoughts on my first workday – a step beyond the gods. In my time as a booking boy at Southampton I had gained the impression from my colleagues that Eastleigh Signal Box was like communicating with another planet, such was their lofty status in the grade structure within the signalling ranks. So important were they that the booking boys at Southampton were simply prohibited from answering the telephone on the signal box ‘concentrator’ circuit telephone: a large piece of equipment looking like a telephone exchange offering direct lines to all aspects of the signalman’s job. When you were permitted to answer that line by the more liberal signalmen, a mysterious lump immediately grew in the throat before you spoke. Now I was being lined up to work with some of these lump-inducers and also to expand my skills in the field of train announcing. The elevation in job spec would eventually introduce me to my first taste of night-work, however, I couldn’t legally undertake that shift until I was 18. So, I busied myself at Eastleigh supping with the God’s and drank in my first experience of a Panel Signal Box. Commissioned in 1966 as part of a Region-wide re-signalling scheme, Eastleigh was light years away from the mechanical Signal Boxes of my early experience. . The signalling seemed to be technologically on another planet too. Using an elevated/angled panel constructed from thousands of separate metal tiles and using entrance/exit signalling through the use of push buttons, it seemed to me to convey so much importance in its very existence that I felt that if unauthorised persons were to even get too close to it, it would burst into flames and destroy itself.

It was akin to an altar in a cathedral. The signalmen were the priests: and so they were. John Murdon and Vic Elliot were held in such respect: they nearly had a direct line to the Almighty on the concentrator telephone.

They also had a monastic attitude, in that, unless it was necessary to speak with each other in the course of their duties, they maintained an absolute and devout vow of silence between them for an entire eight-hour shift. It was my experience on regular occasions to record no more than ten words said between them. Subtracting two words each for a courtesy hello and goodbye, this didn’t lend itself to fulsome dialogue.

In the spring of 1976, football fans will recall that Southampton won the FA cup. I am not a Saints fan but was miffed that I was rostered on late shift at Eastleigh on the Saturday and was destined to miss the TV coverage. Thankfully, two easy-going signalmen – John Daley and Gerald ‘Gerry’ Watts – were my companions along with Tim Timson on the train announcing. Expecting that a radio might be produced to listen to the game, imagine my astonishment when a small portable TV was produced and we all sat around it to catch what we could of the match while dealing with the otherwise temporarily unimportant matter of running a train service. If Messrs Murdon and Elliot were the gods, Messrs Daley and Watts were akin to descended agents of the devil. It was almost an act of heresy, not least to say totally against the rules! Great game though. I don’t regularly mention it as one of those ‘where were you

when…?’

moments, as it would have been an act of folly to say that I was on duty in a highly responsible signalling centre assisting in the delivery of train services and information to the travelling public.

I had completed my training by the late spring of 1976, but so had my opposite number training at Eastleigh and, as he was senior to me in age, he was placed in the vacancy at Eastleigh. This time I was ‘spare’. This was the term given to those people who were in full-time work with a designated position but didn’t have a job to physically undertake because staffing was deemed, on a day-to-day basis, to be sufficient. Hence, again, I was surplus to requirements. I had been surplus to requirements twice in less than a year. At home, my mother had decided that my father was also surplus to requirements, and they were divorced in the spring. Light began to shine in my homelife and summer dawned upon us.

The summer of 1976 was – until recent times – the hottest summer for five generations. My job during that time was to ensure that every working day, I rang the rosters office at 1000 sharp to enquire whether there was any short-notice work for that day or the day after. For the entire summer of that year, the answer was no. Hence, I was free to do as I pleased for the day. Effectively, in the first year of employment, I was being given an extra three months of paid annual leave ‘on the house’. What a job this was, I thought. I played a lot of music in that time, specifically a song that summed me up to a tee: ‘Music’ by John Miles was released in the spring and I played it to death. Fluid as things are, though, and with people moving onto different jobs, by the autumn I had returned to a regular slot as a booking boy covering Southampton and Eastleigh as required.

And that is very much how it stayed for the next nine months. Apart from The InterCity 125 high-speed train being introduced into passenger service on British Rail in October, nothing of further note happened and 1977 arrived. Away from railway life and onto real life, on 3 January a fledgling company called Apple Computer Company was renamed Apple Computer, Inc. and the company’s next computer, the Apple II, became a bestseller. A gallon of petrol cost 78 pence, equal to just near 18 pence per litre. The average house price was £13,000 and a Ford Cortina car would set you back £2532.

Central to me in the new year was the inestimable value of my mother’s action