The Railway Night Workers

I think we have established by now that I am quite fond of jobs that involve being left alone at night.

Night watchman, absolutely not. Lighthouse keeper, sign me up immediately, and now we arrive at the railway, where I have discovered another job I think I could have managed rather nicely: sitting in a signal box in the middle of nowhere with a kettle.

Although, as usual, I have massively underestimated the amount of responsibility involved.

The railway did not go to sleep when the last passenger train left the station. Even after the platforms emptied and the waiting rooms were locked, trains were still moving, goods still needed to travel, signals had to be worked, and the railway itself needed maintaining. There was an entire workforce out there in the darkness keeping everything moving while most of the country slept.

THE RAILWAY AFTER EVERYONE WENT HOME

By the late nineteenth century, Britain’s railway network had become enormous. Passenger traffic was only part of it. Coal, livestock, milk, fish, fruit, newspapers, mail, parcels and manufactured goods all moved by rail, and much of that traffic travelled overnight because it needed to be somewhere by morning.

A station that seemed almost abandoned after the last evening passenger service could become busy again when a mail or goods train arrived, then settle down until the next one. Somewhere further along the line, a signalman was still in his box. In a goods yard, wagons were being sorted and coupled. Out on the track, maintenance workers might be waiting for a section of railway to become available so they could begin work.

The railway had not stopped for the night. It had simply become a different railway.

UP IN THE SIGNAL BOX

The signal box is probably the railway night job we picture most easily: a small building beside the tracks, often raised to give the signalman a clear view of the line, with large windows and a row of heavy levers inside.

The familiar design took time to develop. From the 1840s, huts and cabins were being provided for men operating signals, often on raised platforms. By the early 1860s, the fully glazed signal box had begun to appear. John Saxby’s 1856 patent for mechanical interlocking was one of the major steps that turned railway signalling into something recognisable today.

Interlocking connected points and signals so that conflicting movements could not simply be selected at the same time. Inside the box, the signalman worked a frame containing rows of large levers connected mechanically to equipment outside. At a small box there might only be a handful; at busier locations there could be dozens, and the work was physical as well as mental. The old Cannon Street signal box in London had sixty-seven levers, while its replacement in 1893 included one box with 243.

My peaceful little evening with a kettle is becoming considerably more strenuous.

ONE TRAIN AT A TIME

The signalman’s main job was to keep trains safely separated.

Early railways sometimes relied on maintaining a set time interval between trains, which worked perfectly well until the first train stopped unexpectedly and the one behind it continued towards the same piece of railway. As traffic increased, the system had to become safer.

The railway was divided into sections, and under the absolute block system the basic principle was that only one train should normally occupy a block section at a time. Signalmen in neighbouring boxes communicated with one another before trains were allowed to proceed. The Regulation of Railways Act 1889 helped make absolute block working and interlocking standard requirements on passenger lines.

The bells inside signal boxes were part of this conversation. Different patterns communicated information about trains and movements, so a man could be sitting alone in a box with darkness beyond the windows when a bell suddenly sounded from another box somewhere down the line. The National Railway Museum still has signalling equipment used for exactly this purpose, including an 1862 block bell from the Southeastern Railway.

A train would be offered from one box to the next, accepted if the section was clear, signalled forward and recorded. Once it had passed, the signalman watched for the tail lamp at the rear of the train because that showed the whole train had gone through and not left part of itself behind somewhere on the line.

Then the box could settle again until the next bell rang.

I can absolutely see the appeal.

THOUSANDS OF LITTLE ROOMS

Just before the First World War, the number of signal boxes in Great Britain reached somewhere around 12,000 to 13,000.

I had not appreciated the scale of that until I read it.

Some boxes stood beside enormous junctions or busy stations, while others sat next to remote stretches of line with little around them except fields, track and perhaps a cottage nearby. At night there would have been thousands of these small illuminated rooms scattered around the country, each containing somebody responsible for their piece of railway.

Reading that immediately made me think of the beacons being lit across the mountains in The Lord of the Rings, except with considerably more paperwork and the same requirement that nobody becomes distracted at the important moment.

As it turns out, distraction could be disastrous.

YOU REALLY COULD NOT AFFORD TO FORGET

In the early hours of Christmas Eve 1910, signalman Alfred Sutton was working at Hawes Junction, now Garsdale, on the Settle to Carlisle line.

It had been an exceptionally busy night. Sutton was an experienced signalman who had already been on duty for more than nine hours, dealing with express trains, goods traffic and several light engines, meaning locomotives travelling without a train attached. Two of those engines were moved onto the down line and stopped at an advanced starting signal while they waited for permission to continue north.

They remained there for twenty-three minutes.

Sutton forgot about them.

He then accepted the northbound Scotch express and cleared his signals. The two waiting engines saw the signal change and moved forward, believing it was intended for them. The express followed into the same section and caught them north of the junction.

Twelve people were killed.

It is difficult not to feel something for everyone involved, including Sutton, because the mistake itself is frighteningly ordinary. He forgot something.

We all do it. We walk into a room and cannot remember why we are there, leave something on the kitchen counter or realise halfway to work that the thing we absolutely had to remember is still beside the front door.

For a signalman, an ordinary human lapse could have catastrophic consequences.

The accident forced changes. Historic England notes that the Hawes Junction disaster helped prompt the widespread adoption of track circuits, electrical systems capable of detecting the presence of a train on a section of track rather than leaving the signalman to rely entirely on procedure, records and memory.

That is one of the things I find most interesting about old working systems. They were often improved because somebody discovered, in the worst possible way, where a human being could make a mistake.

THE MEN ON THE TRACK

Signalmen were only one part of the railway working through the night. The track itself needed continual attention.

Rails wore, sleepers deteriorated, ballast moved, points and crossings needed maintaining, vegetation grew where it should not and eventually almost everything needed repairing or replacing. The quieter hours were an obvious opportunity to do that work because access to the railway was easier when fewer trains were running.

The same principle still applies. Network Rail says most planned engineering work takes place overnight or at weekends because it causes less disruption and allows workers safer access to the track. Its teams still renew rails, inspect structures, maintain signalling equipment and deal with vegetation while most passengers are asleep.

The equipment has changed enormously, but the basic rhythm has not. Once the railway becomes quiet enough, another workforce moves in.

THE PERMANENT WAY

I particularly like the old railway term permanent way.

It refers to the track and the infrastructure associated with it, but it sounds considerably grander than that.

The men who maintained it were known at different times as permanent-way workers, platelayers or track gangs, depending on the period, railway company and work involved. Their workplace was not a warm signal box. They were outside inspecting track, replacing worn components, maintaining points and crossings and dealing with the endless physical work required to keep miles of railway safe.

At night that could mean working by artificial light, in rain, wind and freezing temperatures while Britain supplied whatever additional weather it had available.

Unlike the lighthouse keeper, they did not even get a nice building to hide in, so I am withdrawing my application for this particular role.

THE GOODS RAILWAY

This is the part of railway history that is probably easiest to forget because most of us now think of a railway primarily as something that carries people.

For much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it carried almost everything else as well.

Coal dominated freight traffic, but railway wagons also moved animals, food, industrial materials, parcels and manufactured goods. Milk travelled from rural areas towards towns and cities, first in churns and later in specialised tank wagons. By the twentieth century, some milk tanks were being attached to passenger trains because they were built to travel at higher speeds.

Goods depots could therefore be anything but peaceful at night. Oral history collected by the National Railway Museum describes milk churns being unloaded at King’s Cross throughout the night, with residents nearby apparently having to endure the constant clanging and banging.

Meanwhile, wagons had to be shunted into the correct trains, paperwork checked, vehicles coupled and loads prepared for journeys most members of the public never saw.

Someone could go to bed while part of their breakfast was still hundreds of miles away.

THE NIGHT MAIL

The mail railway deserves its own mention because it is wonderfully elaborate.

Britain began carrying mail by rail in 1830, and by 1838 specially adapted carriages were being used so postal workers could sort letters while the train was moving. These became the Travelling Post Offices, or TPOs.

Before the First World War, more than 130 TPO services were operating around the United Kingdom. Some could even exchange mail without stopping. Pouches were suspended beside the track and collected by apparatus on the moving train while other bags were dropped into trackside nets. By 1913 there were around 245 mail-bag exchange points in use.

That is ridiculous in the best possible way.

You are travelling through the countryside at night, sorting letters in a moving railway carriage, and at precisely the correct point somebody has arranged for you to snatch a bag of post from beside the track without the train even stopping.

What could possibly go wrong?

Apparently enough things that the practice was eventually abandoned, although the final exchange using the apparatus did not take place until 1971. Travelling Post Offices themselves continued much longer, with the final service running in January 2004.

The night mail became such a recognisable part of railway life that the General Post Office made the famous documentary Night Mail in 1936, following the postal special travelling from London towards Scotland and the people working aboard it.

Again, an entire working world existed while everyone else was in bed.

THREE IN THE MORNING IN JANUARY

A railway at night in July is one thing. A railway at three in the morning in January is quite another.

Signal boxes often had a stove or fireplace, which immediately moves signalman back towards the top of my preferred railway jobs, but plenty of other workers had no such luxury. Fog reduced visibility, snow buried equipment, freezing conditions interfered with points and storms could bring debris onto the line.

The points still needed to move, signals still had to work, and the track still had to remain usable, which inevitably meant that somebody had to go outside and sort it.

There appears to be no period of British history in which somebody does not eventually get handed a shovel.

THE LONELY STATIONS

Then there were the smaller stations, some of which still required staff during the night because of late trains, goods traffic, mail or signalling duties.

I keep thinking about what those places must have felt like after midnight. During the day there had been footsteps, voices, whistles, doors opening and passengers asking questions, but now the platform was empty, and the lamps were still burning.

Somewhere inside, a clock might be ticking while a porter waited for the next train.

Eventually something would change. A signal moved in the distance, perhaps, or the first sound of an approaching locomotive began to travel along the rails. Then the train arrived out of the darkness and filled the station with noise, steam and movement.

A few minutes later it was gone again and everything settled back down.

I would have liked that.

A RAILWAY MOST PEOPLE NEVER SAW

This is what I like most about these old night jobs. They show how much ordinary life depended on work that was almost invisible to the people benefiting from it.

Somebody could go to bed in London while milk, mail and newspapers were still travelling across the country. They could wake the next morning, buy a paper, receive a letter and catch a train without giving much thought to what had happened during the hours in between.

The signalman had answered the bells and worked the levers. Goods workers had sorted the wagons. Postal workers had sorted letters while travelling through the night. Track gangs had repaired whatever needed attention, and somewhere a porter had waited on an empty platform for a train most people never saw.

Then morning arrived, commuters returned and the familiar railway began again.

The night railway had done its job.