A 1960s Idyll: What it was Like in the Final Years

'B1' at Sheffield Midland station, 1965

By the time I was old enough to travel without my parents, steam was far away from where I lived on the ECML close to London. It meant major overnight trips, but in the mid-1960s this was possible, even for quite young children, without having to take much account of the hazards and restrictions that would now make such adventures out of the question. Although I only had my weekly pocket money, I could still afford the occasional long-distance spotting trip, for train fares had not become as riotously expensive as they were to do in subsequent years: at Paddington ten years later the man in front of me in the ticket queue asked for a first-class return to Penzance and I was hardly surprised when the ticket clerk replied "Do you want a mortgage?"

For an eleven year-old, locospotting trips from southeastern to northwestern England were serious expeditions. They had to be planned meticulously: train times to London, suitable departures from Euston, sheds to be visited and how to get to them on public transport. Lists of allocations and recent reallocations had to be scrutinized, for in those days steam depots were changing by the day. The merits of one shed had to be weighed up against those of another, as there was never enough time and money to visit them all. Thank goodness for that all-important Ian Allan directory, which explained in detail how to get to each shed, right down to the last bus route and backstreet. I wonder, though, whether shedmasters loathed it, for it ensured a constant stream of enthusiasts at the gate.

On each of those epic journeys two or three of us set off on a Friday evening. If we were three, one usually lacked the staying power and before the day was out he began to whine about being tired and wanting to go home early. But we always stayed the course. It began with the bus ride to the station and 50 minutes in a green diesel multiple-unit rattling along in the dark towards Kings Cross. We took a quick look around the Cross and St Pancras and then scurried over to Euston for the 1 a.m. train to the north. Money was always tight. Indeed, Carlisle Kingmoor remained an unattainable goal because it was simply too expensive for my pocket money and too far away. At twelve I became adept at hunching myself up and asking the man in the ticket office for a half-fare return in as high a voice as I could. More than once the response was "My goodness! They make people large where you come from!" But I never failed to get my half-fare, perhaps because I gave up when the pretence started to wear thin.

My recollections of Euston before modernization are vague as they predate my spotting years. I can still visualize those last traces of LNWR grandeur, the soot-blackened Doric arch four-square at the entrance and the high coffered ceiling of the booking hall, with its yellowed cream paintwork. But when we were off on our juvenile expeditions Euston was already a soulless modern station, cowering behind that deserted, windswept corporate plaza, and antiseptic in the cold gleam of a thousand fluorescent lights. Yet there was something ineffably romantic about those blue and white electric locomotives, the E3000 and E3100 series, as they hummed softly at the end of their trains and their silver badges glinted in the lamplight. By the standards of the day they were extremely powerful engines and I always loved the sense of effortless acceleration as they took the bank out of Euston and span rapidly along the new all-welded rails.

The train arrived at Crewe before dawn, and we tumbled out sleepily into the cold darkness. By then Crewe North had become a diesel stabling point and all the steam locomotives were concentrated at Crewe South shed. In the 1960s, ‘bunking’ Crewe South was a rite of passage for any locospotter from the South of England, but the operation required discretion and judgement, as the presence of small boys was naturally frowned upon by the shed authorities. Having once been issued a peremptory order to quit the premises, the next time my companions and I approached the place with more circumspection. Before dawn we crept behind some mineral wagons and made our way along the back wall of the shed. At a certain point a beam of light streamed out of the window of the shedmaster’s office. Peeping cautiously in we glimpsed him very nearby in conversation with one of his staff. So we flattened ourselves out and wormed our way along the cindery ground under the window sill. I wonder if he would have been surprised had he suddenly decided to open the window only to find us prostrate in the darkness beneath it!

At the end of the wall there was the cavernous mouth of the shed with its collection of ‘Black Fives’ and Stanier ‘8Fs’. Even as late as mid-1966 one could find as many as 70 locomotives on shed: my visit in August of that year turned up 2 Ivatt 4MTs, 20 ‘Black Fives’, 1 Ivatt ‘2MT’, 1 ‘Jinty’, 17 Stanier ‘8Fs’, 4 ‘Britannias’, 2 BR ‘5MT’ 4-6-0s, 1 BR ‘4MT’ 4-6-0, 3 Standard ‘2MT’ 2-6-0s, 8 ‘9Fs’ and preserved ‘A4' no. 4498, Sir Nigel Gresley, a healthy number and surprising variety for the period. But by August 1967 its allocation was down to 23 steam (and up to 21 diesels), and in November 1967 it closed, though diesels and a few preserved steam were still stabled there in 1968.

I wonder how many other lads held a special place in their affections for Crewe South? It was the first major steam shed that I ever visited and the sight of many locomotives, perhaps 55 at the start of an average working day in the mid-1960s, profoundly overawed me. The front ones would be in steam, hissing gently and emanating that potent smell of water, coal and oil that was such a fundamental part of the steam railway experience. Behind them in the depths of the shed there would be ranks of locomotives, uniformly black with dirt, some with their motion in pieces next to their huge driving wheels, massive rods of forged steel, straw-yellow with innumerable coats of oil.

In 1966 it was of course still possible to go south instead of north in order to see steam. On Monday, 31 October of that year a friend and I travelled down to Winchester at a leisurely pace on the 08.35 semi-fast from Waterloo, hauled by no. 34040 Crewkerne. After a brief local journey on a diesel-electric multiple unit, we went straight into the shed at Eastleigh. Among 31 steam locomotives there were three Bulleid light pacifics, two USA tanks (no. 30073 was in green livery) and two named ‘Standard 5s’. Flushed with success, my companion and I decided to ‘bunk’ the works. It required almost more nerve than a timid 13-year-old like me could muster. The front entrance was guarded by a reception building, so we slipped in discretely through a narrow gap in the perimeter fence.

Amazingly, the works was deserted and we tiptoed around it without meeting anyone. Chuchward 2-8-0 No. 2818 and ‘Schools’ class no. 928 Repton were there, just restored and gleaming in their new paint. Later in the day, we saw one of the USAs tow in a dilapidated 34051 Sir Winston Churchill to take their place. Among the BRCW Type 3s and electro-diesels there were two that bodywork repairs had deprived of their numbers, a most frustrating sight for spotters like us. Having seen it all we marched out of the main entrance, provoking some amazement when we passed the uniformed character on the gate. Once on the street we cut and ran for fear he would take it upon himself to chase us!

At school it was a mark of prestige to have ‘bunked’ a works, but there was always someone with a better tale to tell: my geography teacher admitted that as a lad he had ‘bunked’ Stewart’s Lane depot and been chased out by two men in uniform, who covered up their eyes when they saw him hop across the lines with the 750-volt third rails!

As the mass extinction of steam locomotives gathered pace it engendered a rising tide of disappointment and nostalgia for classes that were no more. I still find it hard to believe that so many and so substantial pieces of engineering wrought with such skill by designers and artisans could have been so quickly and ruthlessly reduced to formless piles of scrap.

For a century, 1850-1950, or more, the railway was one of the great socializing forces. Surely it diffused the benefits of civilization much more readily than it spread the drawbacks. Whether or not they were an anachronism, in the 1960s, steam locomotives were a source of continuity with those historical forces that shaped society and commerce in the regions of Britain during this remarkable period. The motive power design practices of the ‘Big Four’ companies had created parallel traditions made up of thousands of accumulated refinements, each referring to a distinct historical period. The substitution of diesel and electric traction abruptly cut off those traditions in a way that few comparable inventions have suffered.

In Britain, government transport policy propelled the steam engine into decline. Rather than allowing locomotives to finish their working lives, they were summarily culled, first monthly, then weekly, and finally daily. In that last agonizing period, those of us born too late to become familiar with regular steam working in our own local areas, and who therefore went looking for steam far from home, frantically tried to keep up with which locos were where and which MPDs still had significant allocations. It was an increasingly frenetic danse macabre that no logic could predict.

Beside the rather artificial running down of Britain’s steam locomotives through shear neglect, their rapid elimination was defended on the grounds that the huge infrastructure needed to maintain and operate them was uneconomic. Yet other countries, even some that had no indigenous fuel reserves, kept their steam locos going for longer by concentrating them on particular depots and routes, a strategy that could have been used much more effectively in the UK with good results in terms of economy and efficiency.

What has been so striking about the decline of Britain’s railways is the strong polarization between official disdain for rail transport and public affection for the country’s railway heritage. There has been no middle ground between running railways as a visitor attraction and running them down as a public service.