8 November 1949 was a proud day for the Shildon Works Band. They were on their way to London to play in the Lord Mayor’s parade, and these photographs show them about to board the train at Darlington for their journey south.

I think the photographs capture the excitement of the occasion. The band’s uniforms are immaculate, their shoes beautifully polished, and their brass instruments are gleaming. The steam engine stands ready to depart.

Before setting off, they pose for photographs with the engine driver and a junior member of the band. In the first two photographs, the little boy looks rather unsure, but in the third picture he looks thrilled to be standing on the footplate of the locomotive.

In this picture the band are shown at the end of their journey, marching through the wet streets of London in the Lord Mayor’s parade.

He (invariably they were male) was a well-respected figure with significant social standing in the local community. He was usually provided with a station house to live in. It was also common, especially in rural areas, for the station master to be running a sideline or two to supplement his railway pay packet.

Today’s station managers don’t have the same visible presence on the platform, and can split their time between managing several large stations. Using historical accounts from our collection and memories shared by station masters through the Station Stories project, I’ve pieced together a picture of the role of the station master as it’s changed through more than a century of station life.

Tom Baker became a station master with Midland railway in the 1890s. His diary entries offer revealing insights into his professional and private life.

Here he records his efforts to locate a missing trunk:

October 1893

At work 7.40am. Pretty busy. Recorded wire from Wilson Rangemoor which said “Shall expect trunk at Burton four o’clock”. Griffiths wired Burton who had no trace. About 3pm Mr Hodgson came in and he mentioned the matter to him. Mr Hodgson in turn told Mr Maxey who had Griffiths in and gave him a good jacketing. He looked no end of places but without success.

Left duty 8pm. Still no trace of Wilson’s trunk. Went to see if anything had been heard of it at 10pm. Griffith, West and Challans were there. Burton had just wired for description of trunk and we replied and at 11pm they replied “Wilson’s box now found”. Bed at 11.30pm. Tired out.

A typical page from Tom Baker’s diary.

Tom’s diary includes comments about Victorian society, such as this description of the Liverpool docks:

July 1893

I saw children and women barefooted and nearly naked. They had scurvy.

It also charts his growing affection for Edie, the young lady who became his wife. Like many of its time, their courtship was largely conducted by letter.

Edie replied to my letter writing that she didn’t like me going to Liverpool.

Had a very nice letter indeed from Edie, best I have received yet.

Edie, or ‘Grandmother Edith’, in a photo taken by one of her grandchildren.

The next recollections were submitted by a station master’s great-granddaughter via our online story form. Her great-grandfather was the station master at various big stations in the early 1900s, including Bristol Temple Meads and Derby.

He had a top hat which folded away into a box. He used to show it to us when we were children and told tales of having to wear it on special occasions to meet important people who were arriving at his station. One person I particularly recall him speaking about was Sarah Bernhardt, a French film actress.

Sarah Bernhardt and her entourage at St Pancras station, 1894

Norman Kemp was appointed the station master for two small branch line stations Elland and Greetland in the 1940s:

When I first came to Elland station from Hull I rang them up and said, “Can you find me some accommodation?” I got off this train, I remember it was steamed up so I was black and dirty, I’d called into Wakefield to report. Then this little porter who was in his early seventies came down to meet me. I said, “Where am I staying, have you got me somewhere?” he said, “Ey lad, just down the path there, Station Hotel”. I was there nearly six months until I found a house, and my wife came to join me with our first son.

In those days many station masters had side lines such as coal sales, newspaper sales and so on. In fact, the first station I was at, Hedon on the Withernsea line, even had a lorry to deliver the coal, it was such a large operation.

Norman and his new bride Pam leaving Hull Paragon station on the ‘Honeymoon Special’ to Kings Cross, London

E.L. Wheeler was a country station master in the 1950s. He was in charge of Sandling for Hythe station and Westenhanger station. Here he describes how he overcame the challenge of travelling between them:

To overcome the difficulties of travelling between the two stations an ancient bicycle was made available. The supply of which to me, had created one less item on hand in the Central Lost Property office at Waterloo. I also used it to travel to my most distant signal box, Herringe, a couple of miles beyond Westenhanger. This box was only used on Saturdays during the summer train service to cope with additional boat trains to and from the Channel ports.

Mr Wheeler in his station master days

The Beeching cuts in the 1960s led to the closure of many small stations. The land was sold off, including the station master’s house.

Hollin Harper was a station master in the 1950s. He experienced the Beeching axe first hand:

I was appointed Station Master at Moulton on the Richmond branch, from the 12 November, 1951. The attraction of that job was twofold – one, I got a house – I remember the house rent was eight and eleven pence a week – and it was on the Richmond branch, which had a good passenger service in those days. We used to think, ‘Well, as long as they’ve got troops stationed at Catterick camp, this railway’s going to last forever’. How false that was. It didn’t last for ever at all and it lost its passenger service in 1969, a matter of great regret. It lost its freight service in 1970 and was completely closed and abandoned – something we never thought could ever happen.

The red on the map signifies lines that were closed down by the Beeching axe

Mohammed Ayub was an assistant station manager at Liverpool street station in the 1980s. He has fond recollections of banter with passengers:

A few funny things happened at Liverpool Street. One day I was standing on platform 11 seeing off the Hook of Holland. A gentleman and his wife came to me. The wife pointed at the engine, and he said to me, “Is this the train for Hook of Holland?” I said, “No, this (pointing to where she had) is the engine, the train is farther back”.” She laughed and the gentleman gave me a big grin. The gentleman put his wife on the train before he came back. As he walked back one of my inspectors says to me, “You’re in trouble”. The gentleman said to me, “Can I talk to you, on your own?” I took him aside and he said, “Thank you very much. She’s never laughed the last twenty years. You’ve made my day”. I had my ups and downs, some passengers were rough, and some were easy, but I always did my job!

Passengers boarding the ‘Hook continental’ train at Liverpool Street station, London

Until earlier this year, Phil Crow was the station manager for York, Darlington and Durham railway stations. In an interview, he talked about his career progression, and how he juggled managing three stations:

Twenty-eight years ago I started on a Youth Training Scheme. I progressed through a range of placements that involved things like working with Red Star parcels. I then moved onto switchboard operator at the Travel Centre at Middlesbrough. Then I’ve progressed through Travel Centres to supervisor to Travel Centre manager to head of Travel Centres for the route and then into station operations.

I tend to base most of my time at York because it has more services, more staff, and more customers: the footfall is much higher. I go through Darlington everyday on a morning and on an evening, so I get to see Darlington everyday and I get to Durham as often as I can. For example this week I’ve been to Durham twice. I’ve got a team of four managers. This enables us to ensure we’ve got consistent approach across all of the stations.

The ticket office at York station, 1993

A timeless thread through all the station master stories is the enormous sense of pride they all took in the job. This is nicely summed up by Trevor Adams, former manager of Waterloo Station, who recalls:

People wanted a bowler hat on the platform to meet them and say, “Good morning. Thank you for travelling by British Rail”.  That’s what makes the railways tick, the people!

You can see stories like these on display in our redeveloped Station Hall. Find out more about the changes were making on our main Station Hall page.

If you have a station story to tell, you can get in touch by filling in our online form, or emailing us at stationstories@nrm.org.uk

Note: Sally’s now left our museum to work at the British Postal Museum & Archive – but we’re still actively collecting your Station Stories. Email us at the address above.

‘The turkey will require three hours to boil gently, & perhaps three hours to roast”

Alongside the letter was a festive package that included ”a few sausages” and ”a few bones to make some good gravy”.

Our archives contain more food-related documents than you might think. We’ve recently uploaded a list of railway hotel and catering material, which is also available to view in our archive and library centre. It includes items like this 1975 Christmas menu for York Station Hotel.

The Export Express service guaranteed next day delivery at British ports. Malt distribution from the plant in Knapton, North Yorkshire kept stationmaster Mr Douglas and his two signalmen ”busy all day every day”.

Railway company staff magazines are a fantastic resource for family and social history: you can come and browse them in our library and archive centre. 

Railway staff magazines frequently contained articles and cartoons in addition to the usual information for railway staff. They’re a great resource for family history: you can come and see them in our archive and library centre.

A few weeks ago, we received an email from Anton Van Drumpt. Anton is part of a crew of Dutch divers who dive wrecks in the North Sea from the former Royal Navy tender Lamlash. They had been diving on an unidentified wreck off the coast of Holland known only by its wreck number of HD 2211, and recovered an object off the wreck which they hoped would help to identify it. The plate is pictured below.

Black, Hawthorn Works Plate 571 (Photo courtesy of Anton van Drumpt)

It is a works plate from Black, Hawthorn & Co. dating from 1881. Black, Hawthorn were a steam locomotive manufacturer in Gateshead, who manufactured locomotives between 1865-1896. They specialised in producing industrial tank engines  (we even have one of their products in our collection, Bauxite - built in 1874). So Anton quite logically thought the National Railway Museum might be able to identify the plate.

We do hold original records for various independent manufacturing companies in our archives and we also hold copies of some that are held elsewhere. Unfortunately, these don’t include the records for Black, Hawthorn. However, in our library we do have a copy of the Black, Hawthorn Works list, published by the Industrial Locomotive Society and compiled from various original sources.

From this publication I was able to identify the engine that the plate came from. Of course, it turned out this wasn’t a steam locomotive at all but a steam engine made to power a ship. Like many other steam locomotive manufacturers, Black, Hawthorn also produced some stationary and marine engines. According to the list, the order book entry for no. 571 was for a “Marine engine & boiler & remove old engine” on 7th May 1880, and the customer was the “Earl of Durham for S.S. Countess of Durham”.

The information we provided led to further further research by the divers, which revealed that the Countess of Durham was a 539-ton freighter built in 1855 by the shipyard of Richardson, Duck in Stockton-on-Tees.  It was used to carry coal produced by the Countess of Durham’s mines in the North East of England. However it was stated by some nautical sources that the Countess had foundered on Goodwin Sands in the English Channel in a terrible storm during October 1881. The crew had been picked up by the fishing smack Reliance and taken to Ramsgate.

This did pose the question of how a ship that was believed to have been wrecked close to Ramsgate could have been found over 60 miles away near the Dutch Coast! Had the ship floated off Goodwin Sands during the storm and ended up wrecked across the North Sea? Or had parts of the nearly new engine been salvaged and used on another ship?

Further research by the Lamlash divers turned up a newspaper report quoting Lloyds telegrams that indicated that the Countess of Durham had been en-route to Amsterdam and was abandoned off the Dutch coast and the crew picked up by a fishing smack and taken to Ramsgate. It would appear that the Goodwin Sands report was something of a red herring!

Further evidence was provided by the fact that the cargo on the wreck was coal. So it would seem that the mystery of the wreck has been solved and final resting place of the Countess of Durham is indeed 30 miles off the Dutch coast.

It isn’t every day that we play a part in identifying a shipwreck!

I love the simplicity and typography of this South Eastern & Chatham Railway label for Charing Cross.

A rather more elaborate label for luggage being sent on the Cornish Riviera Express.

I wonder how many porters took notice of this label.

Rather than being used to label luggage with its destination, this sticker advertises some of the London Midland & Scottish railway’s services.

Not for luggage, but I couldn’t resist sharing this label for pigeons. The advert intended for fastidious fanciers is just wonderful!

Our luggage label collection is available through our library and archive – see here for more information.

Recently the Inreach team got excited when we were presented with an interesting challenge. One of our enquirers wanted to verify a fact he had heard about the A4 Pacific class of locomotive – like Mallard, built by the London & North Eastern Railway (LNER). The story goes that the locomotives were so fast that the LNER’s civil engineers became scared that the trains might start ripping up the track and cause an accident. They demanded that speed recorders were fitted (similar to a speedometer in your car) to a whole class of locomotive for the first time in Britain.

Mallard still holds the world steam speed record at 126mph. Although it was fitted with a speed recorder in the cab, a dynamometer car was needed to provide the accuracy for the record. Next year marks the 75th anniversary of Mallard’s unbroken record. To celebrate, we’ll be bringing together all six surviving A4s for the first time.

It might be a surprise to anyone that hasn’t seen a steam locomotive footplate before that very few British locos were ever fitted with anything like a speedometer. Judging the speed of the train was done purely through the driver’s skill, using his route knowledge and mileposts next to the track. This is despite the fact that speed recording equipment had existed for decades. Indeed, in France, 80% of locos had been fitted with a Flaman speed recorder by 1914 – 21 years before the first A4 was built.

This is the Flaman speed recorder now fitted to Mallard, but it is not the original. The Flamans in all of the A4s were removed during World War Two as there weren’t the resources to keep using the recordings (they used a lot of paper and staff time to check them). This one was fitted by Doncaster Works when Mallard was preserved, and was sourced in France. The speed dial had to be made from scratch because the French one was in kilometres per hour.

Unfortunately the story about the engineers’ fear of the A4s wasn’t going to stack up. Although it’s clear that all of the A4s were fitted with the speed recorders from new, it wasn’t the first time that a whole class of locomotive had been fitted with them on the LNER. In 1934, Sir Nigel Gresley designed the P2 class for express trains between Edinburgh and Aberdeen. The first of the class, Cock o’ the North, was sent to France after it was built to be tested at Vitry near Paris. To run on the French railways it needed a speed recorder, so it was fitted with one called a Telos from a London firm called the Hasler Telegraph Company. It was decided to fit the other five locomotives in the class with one – probably to prevent drivers speeding on the tight curves of the line to Aberdeen. Since the last P2 was built five months before the first A4, Silver Link, was completed, we had proven the A4 theory wrong.

We did however find out one interesting thing about the A4s in our research. The Silver Jubilee was a streamlined train, first hauled by the A4 Silver Link between London King’s Cross and Newcastle. The LNER’s staff magazine reported after the first running of the train that:

“a novel fixture is the electric speedometer which has been installed in the first-class restaurant car for the convenience of passengers interested in the running of the train”.

This wasn’t the end of the story though. The book Our Home Railways, How They Began and How They Are Worked by W J Gordon in 1910 (follow the link to the free E-Book) when referring to the London, Brighton & South Coast Railway (LB&SCR) mentions that ”every Brighton engine has, in the cab, a speed indicator”. That was 25 years before the LNER finished the P2s. This clearly needed further investigation.

In his presidential address to the Institution of Locomotive Engineers in 1948, Lt-Col Harold Rudgard credits William Stroudley with the invention of a speed indicator¹. Stroudley’s speed indicator was a novel design. A fan was driven from the axle of the rear trailing wheel by a belt. This pumped air into a gauge glass on the footplate. Higher speeds would force a ball sat in the glass upwards and this could be read against a gauge next to the glass.

Our attention soon turned to the London, Brighton and South Coast Railway Class G – designed by William Stroudley. The first of Stroudley’s speed indicators was fitted to locomotive Grosvenor, built in 1874. 13 more locomotives were ordered with some modifications, the last being delivered in 1881. Of course the fitting of the speed indicator to the prototype could have been a one-off. so the clincher came in the form of two images we found. The first was a photograph of No.336 Edinburgh, clearly showing the speed indicator fitted to the frames behind the single driving wheel. The second was a set of drawings in our archive showing Stroudley’s patented speed indicator. One drawing shows the speed indicator as fitted to No.350 Southbourne (below).

This is Drawing 2550 in the SR original locomotive drawings collection in box 131 roll 490 (there are other speed indicator drawings in this roll and other drawings for the Class G). View Southern Railway drawings and drawing lists

From this we can be fairly certain that speed indicators were fitted to the whole class from new, and we believe this was the first time this happened in Britain. This was in fact 60 years before the LNER fitted its P2s with speed recorders, and even 27 years before the French patented their Flaman speed recorder. The LB&SCR continued to fit speed indicators to its locomotives. Indeed, one survives in the National Collection as fitted to Gladstone, and you can see it in Station Hall:

Of course, it’s nearly impossible to say how many accidents or lives could have been saved if the speed indicator had been fitted to other locomotives in Britain in addition to those on the Brighton lines. We can’t see an obvious reason why Stroudley and the LB&SCR introduced them when we can find no other pre-grouping company² that decided to use them.

By the way, if you know something about speed indicators that we’ve missed or of other uses of speed indicators before the LB&SCR Class G, let us know by commenting below. For more about the Inreach service or if you have your own enquiry, see our enquiries page for advice and contact details.

¹ A quick note: Stroudley didn’t invent the first speed indicator. We have one in our collection that was made in 1858, but we have no idea where it came from and we believe it was a one-off.

² Except for the London & South Western Railway, which from our drawings collection appears to have tried a few speed recorders around 1909, but still much later than the LB&SCR.

When a train approached, the human crossing keeper called one of his dogs (Bo-Bi or Ku-Ki), dressed them in the natty set-up shown below complete with specs (?!), and sent them off to the crossing. The dog raised a sign on a pole – the one below says “I am called Bo-bi” in Spanish – and then, when it was all clear, returned to his human colleague for derobing.

I’m being flippant, but this particular family of humans and dogs took the role very seriously – it was a skill learnt and passed down over generations. It must have been a spectacle worth seeing. If you want to discover more gems from Railway Magazine, we have a complete set of issues in Search Engine, our archive and library centre.

It’s about the size and thickness of early timetables from George Bradshaw’s famous series and, like those, contains timetables for every railway in England – which given the 1841 publishing date means it’s a rather slim tome. Unlike Bradshaw’s timetables, it also claims to deliver a description of the principal towns “with many Historical and highly amusing Records” [sic].

Apart from what I take to be a typo – York to Derby is 17 miles apparently – the only thing amusing about it that I can see is a complete absence of anything amusing.

Maybe the Great British Sense of Humour was a more subtle creature in the mid-19th century, or perhaps you just had to be there. Perhaps the fares were a joke and the train times ludicrous?

Anyway, this guide is a bit of a mystery. Nobody I’ve spoken to has heard of it, we don’t have any others in the collection, and only Manchester University and the British Library have a copy – so it’s not a publication that became famous or survived much, unlike Bradshaw’s.

Interestingly enough, I’ve just had an enquiry from a visitor to Search Engine who wondered if we had a copy of Topham’s Railway Timetable and Guide in the collection. We don’t – but it leads me to wonder how many more pseudo-Bradshaws are going to come out of the woodwork?

I’d be interested to hear if you think you’ve got an uncelebrated railway guide languishing in an attic or similar. However, if you want to look at ours and are curious to discover whether your funny bone will be tickled by its “Humourous Records”, let us know at search.engine@nrm.org.uk and we’ll get it out for you.

Update: Another interesting example of an early railway guides has come to light via Search Engine. A visitor brought in a guide to show us that has been in his family since his great grandfather. It’s a pristine copy – or pristine given its age of 1881 – of a locally produced timetable called the Lincoln Railway Guide. It’s the smallest timetable I’ve ever seen, and gave new meaning to the word “pocket-sized” – measuring approximately 7cm. A local jeweller commissioned the publication and his adverts are interspersed throughout – a very entrepreneurial tactic, cashing in on the railway boom of the time. The visitor has kindly sent a scan of the guide to show you here: