Introduction

'Black Five' no. 44848 withdrawn and stored on Rosegrove (10F) MPD 6 April 1968

There are photographs by the thousand. There are also cine films, now available on video, and tape recordings, now issued on compact disk. Despite the plethora of documentary material from the 1950s and 1960s that has been collected, preserved and reissued, it remains difficult to capture the essence of the steam railway age. It was, of course, a question of at least four senses: to be experienced it had to be seen, heard, smelt and felt (and tasted?--I wonder....). Perhaps we all ought to do more to recapture those impressions. Here are some notes culled from my own memories and reading.

Sixteen Short Impressions

(1) A large freight locomotive, probably a New England (34E) 'WD' 2-8-0, is being thrashed hard along the GNR main line at Langley Junction. There is a ringing clang on two distinct notes from the worn big-ends on either side. It syncopates rapidly, indicating just how fast the small, 4 ft 8-1/2 in wheels are turning. Yet the train is probably only travelling at 30 mph. I read that a Britannia once towed a 'WD' 2-8-0 from March to Stratford at 50 mph. The crew of the latter stepped down at the end of the journey white-faced and trembling, muttering about "sparks coming out of the motion"....

(2) From Valley Way, Stevenage, outer suburban tank engines are visible outlined against the backdrop of the low Knebworth hills, running up the 1 in 200 gradient towards Woolmer Green and Welwyn. As they exert themselves against the gradient, the matt black of their dirt-covered paintwork contrasts with the white plumes of steam, which extend the length of their trains. They are L-1 tanks, based at Hitchin 34D depot, and they pull double Gresley 'quad-art' (quadruple articulated) sets of carriages, which make a distinctive sound on the rail joints of the poorly aligned local roads. The verdant background is particularly strinking against a passing '9F' 2-10-0, for the sheer massive bulk of these locomotives and the empty space beneath the boiler, which is pitched as high as possible so that the firebox can clear the rear pair of 5 ft driving wheels. Perhaps this is why they are nicknamed 'spaceships'.

(3) Standing on Knebworth station, accessed by platform ticket, on a Saturday afternoon around 1959. The trains from the north come out of the cutting like bullets from a gun, roll sonorously over the crossing at the down end of the platform and hurtle through the station with a gush of smoke. I am only six years old and hide in terror behind the waiting room. One of the locomotives is different to the others: it has black livery, a strongly tapered boiler and a curved name-plate over the central driving wheel splasher, with the name picked out in crimson. It is travelling so fast I am unable to see the name. I presume it was an ex-LMSR 'Jubilee', but what was it doing on an express into Kings Cross?

(4) Standing on the down side of the line at Langley Junction on a cool, humid Saturday afternoon. In front is a substantial rivetted plate-steel girder bridge and the much newer concrete dual-carriageway bridge to the industrial area on the Langley side. Opposite is the water-softening plant for Langley troughs, constructed by the GNR in 1919. Between the road and the line is an old GNR cast-iron sign warning that "Trespassers will be prosecuted". Titanium white letters on dark paint that has faded to Wedgwood blue. Along comes the 1.45 p.m. to Harrogate. It is headed by a '9F' 2-10-0, which is being run flat out down the 1 in 200. A whirlwind, from rail level deeply impressive: the flailing motion and long row of 5ft-diameter driving wheels--90mph?

(5) A New England '9F' bowls past at a steady 30 mph on the down slow. Behind it, 98 coal wagons chatter and groan along like something out of a Rev. W. Awdry tale. They are of many kinds, steel and wooden, rusted and repainted, grey, brown and russet, high-sided and low-sided. Later in the day a '9F' on another long train of coal empties comes to a halt outside the old GNR box with the home signal set against it. When the board is pulled off it starts with a jerk, as they so often did, and a wave of movement runs briskly down the long train of loose-coupled wagons until it slams the guard's van viciously back and forth.

(6) In the signalbox, ting, long pause, ting-ting-ting, short pause, ting: the local train is due. The weather is warm and the wooden sleepers give off a smell of creosote. Now come the slide and decisive clang of the signalman's lever, the metallic rustling of the wire and dry squeak of the small wheels which support it where it runs along beside the line, the soft grating sound of the signal board as it rises, swivelling on its pole. A short wait, and then ting-ting--the train enters section. Here it is: a grubby 'B1', lime incrustations on smokebox and cylinder covers are tell-tale signs of priming. It hauls a rake of Gresley coaches repainted in BR maroon. The rumble of the driving wheels and rhythmic clank of worn-down motion that has acquired too much tolerance. Steel on steel, polishing the surfaces bright. The echoing pulse of the carriage wheels as they clatter noisily over the rail joints, the swaying coach bodies.

(7) A two-cylinder locomotive starts away from the station with a snatch and a rhythmic series of tugs that eventually merge into a steady pull as it gets up speed. The couplings between the carriages grunt and the corridor connection between each pair of coaches grinds as they sway. The maroon plush of the seats is as hard as sandpaper. A layer of grime covers everything and darkens the corners and windowsills. The tables between the bench seats have a reptilian grey surface with scaly brown varnish at their rounded wooden edges. Screwed in over the head-rests there are tarnished mirrors and faded prints of Richmond Castle in Yorkshire. Loopy nets of brown string dangle from the luggage rack above. Outside, the trails of white steam appear to float past the window like a series of streamers waving around in the wind. Every so often they obscure the view, especially when compressed beneath the soot-blackened brick arches of overbridges. The telegraph poles with their rows of horizontal battens appear at the window one after another, and between them the great parallel burden of wires loops down and up, down and up. The sequence is mesmerizing: pole-loop-pole-loop-pole-loop, on and on. Descending the 1 in 200 bank from Woolmer Green to Langley Junction the train sways and rattles. The permanent way is well made on the main, but poor on the local: di-dum di-dum, pause, di-dum di-dum, pause, di-dum di-dum, pause--and so on.

(8) The rhythmic beat of a locomotive exhaust suddenly fades away as the regulator is shut, but comes back as it is opened again. Wagons move slowly with a distinctive high-pitched creak, and the clashing buffers of a long string of loose-coupled 16-ton mineral wagons make a silvery cascade of sound. It starts slowly and accelerates until they have all been touched into motion in a long percussive surge. There is a much harsher wrenching noise as a loose-coupled goods train is abruptly started and wagons are suddenly slammed against one other.

(9) The magmatic hiss of a large express locomotive's safety valves blowing full blast reverberates off the cast iron and glass roof above. The air steadily becomes more humid. Conversation is impossible until it has finished. The sound penetrates the deepest recesses of one's ears, which ring for minutes afterwards. The pacific locomotives at the buffer stops radiate heat as they simmer quietly, elemental symbols of controlled power. The fireman is up on the tender guiding the leather bag of the water crane into the filler opening. Suddenly, behind a row of carriages, steam puffs up in a series of tiny clouds that progress towards the open end of the station: a locomotive, no longer penned in by its coaches, is going on shed.

(10) The Doric arch stands four-square as antiquated London taxis whizz under it one after another like peas out of a pea-shooter. Inside the booking hall, the cream paint peels and yellows high on the coffered ceiling. Shadows darken the arcade of the platforms, with their rows of cast iron columns. There are echoes of the long-departed LNWR. The 'Patriots' and 'Scots' with their big, curved smoke deflectors simmer at the buffer stops, waiting to go off to Camden shed.

(11) An outer suburban train from Baldock creeps through the dank blackness of Copenhagen and Gasworks tunnels and towards the terminus. The ancient gas lamps, long ago converted to electricity, give out a parsimonious glimmer of septic yellow light. They slide past the carriage window one after another, each illuminating a tiny area of damp, soot-blackened tunnel wall: another mesmerising rhythm. How imposing are the long, tall signal boxes and gantries of semaphore signals! Passengers trot across the wooden planks of the triangular extension to the suburban platform. At the end, two 'N7' condensing tanks stand next to one other, each attached to a rake of old LNER quad-art coach sets, with their rectangular observation windows protruding from the side of the guard's compartment and their ribbed coachwork, all beading and hinges.

(12) The booking office has a distinctive smell, a heady mixture of steam, coal, lubricating oil, coke, newsprint, pasteboard, floor polish and varnish. Layer upon layer of green, maroon or cream paint are chipped, faded and darkened by time and smoke. The ticket office has cut-glass partitions and pitch-pine divisions worn dark and smooth with decades of sliding. The tiny arched window where tickets are bought: the concealed features of the ticket clerk and the sound of his muffled voice behind the window. The deep clunk as a ticket is inserted into the date-stamping machine. The porter's trolley with its small iron wheels grating over stone thresholds or rumbling over floorboards. The distant thunder of coupled wheels and a quick whiff of smoke as an express train roars along the main-line through the station outside. Cast-iron spandrels, curly lamp brackets on fluted columns, fretted wooden canopies, navy-blue and white enamel signs.

(13) The fog is thick as soup and the quayside glistens, dankly. The train from Cambridge slides in beside the MV Arnhem. On deck the fittings are encrusted with layers of paint, once titanium white but now stained brown with blossoming carbuncles of rust. In the cabin there are slim blankets of oatmeal wool, sharp as sandpaper and such a strong reminder of the 1940s austerity years. A faded diamond LNER monogram is embroidered in the middle of each one and stamped on pillow cases of white hospital cotton, thin as tissue.

(14) Bolton MPD. Dawn has yet to break and the mouth of the shed is in pitch darkness. Black Fives are silhouetted against the weak gleam of the lamps that light the roads outside. An open firebox door paints the inside of the cab a Stanier '8F' a deep, flickering orange, and like a cloud of gold dust the colour reflects off the drifting steam that billows around it. A Black Five rumbles past, hissing rhythmically, its weight sending out tiny seismic shocks through the ballast underfoot as it traverses the poorly-bedded rails of the shed roads.

(15) Edale to Sheffield Midland on 21 August 1966 for 3/6d (17-1/2p) full fare. Most of these services were operated by DMUs but occasionally a Buxton 'Black Five' was used.

(16) August in Derbyshire, 1965. In the dormitory of Ilam Hall Youth Hostel. The window is open and the night air is still and heavy with the day's heat. It is long past midnight. The rhythmic beat of a locomotive exhaust suddenly fades away as the regulator is shut, but comes back as it is opened again. Wagons move slowly with a distinctive high-pitched creak, and the clashing buffers of a long string of loose-coupled 16-ton mineral wagons make a silvery cascade of sound. It starts slowly and accelerates until they have all been touched into motion in a long percussive surge. There is a much harsher wrenching noise as a loose-coupled goods train is abruptly started and wagons are suddenly slammed against one other. It turns into a symphony of sound as the locomotive, probably a Stanier '8F', tries to accelerate against the gradient and slips repeatedly. One can only imagine the battle that is going on in the dark, down in nearby Dovedale.

Edale to Sheffield Midland on 21 August 1966 for 3/6d (17-1/2p) full fare. Most of these services were operated by DMUs but occasionally a Buxton (9D) 'Black Five' was used, agile on the banks and clanking through the Peak District cuttings. No. 44851 was the last of these. The shed, roofless at the end, closed in March 1968.

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.