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.

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’ve read many lovely stories about romance at the railway station, from young love, to first dates, and emotional reunions.

When I was 11 years old, I grew very fond of a girl in my class at school. Then came the devastating news that she was to move to a different part of the country and I was never to see her again. Still feeling hopelessly dejected, I went on holiday to Scarborough with my parents. All I could think about was my lost love. Then, on Scarborough station, waiting to catch the late afternoon train home, I saw her. Just as we passed through the station entrance under the clock tower, she was walking the other way with her dad. I obviously couldn’t talk to her but I was absolutely delighted to have seen her one last time. Every time I visit Scarborough and pass under the clock tower I remember that day.

British Rail poster advertising rail travel to Scarborough

Waterloo Station has many special memories for me. I’d been on my first date with Lillian. She had to catch her train from Waterloo and it was the last train of the evening. As we had first met ballroom dancing, we decided to have a little dance on the platform. Her train was about to leave and that is where we had our first kiss. It was brilliant. On our third date, we met under the big clock at the station.Now we live together, twenty minutes walk away from our favourite station.

The clock at Waterloo Station, where Tom and Lillian met before dates.

My husband and I had a terrific argument early in our married life. He left to return to his parents at Dunnington near Sheffield. I missed him so much that I went to York station to get a train to Sheffield. As I was about to get on, he alighted from the train. What a reunion!

I’ve also been hearing how railway stations can be great places for fun and mischief! Many people have fond memories of growing up near stations and recalled their childhood antics.

As children we spent a lot of time at the station. We lived so close that the trains were at the bottom of our street! We were frequently getting told off by the railway police because we were on the lines and we weren’t supposed to be. We used to make dens in the rolling stock wagons. They were empty but it was still very dangerous and we would come back black. It was a playground for us. We loved it!

Station workers made their own fun too, including finding ways to amuse themselves on the trains.

There were houses that backed onto the railway line. The owners put their empty glass milk bottles on their walls for collection. As the train came past, we threw lumps of coal to try and hit the bottles on the wall. The women in the houses gathered up these lumps of coal to light their fires.

Sometimes railway workers were the victims of pranks. One junior rail man fell foul of the wintery weather.

I enjoyed getting to know the passengers. Although most passengers were friendly, one group of girls from a private school who changed trains at the station were mischief makers. During the winter they’d throw snowballs at me. Once they made a slide at the bottom of the footbridge stairs. I slid halfway along the platform whilst they pelted me with snowballs.

Snow at York Station

Reading about the social life connected with the railways has also been lovely. I especially liked discovering the tradition of railway queens. The first railway queen was chosen in 1924 and, every year afterwards, 50,000 people attended the competition at the Belle Vue carnival in Manchester. The event was one of the main dates in the railway social calendar and staff travelled to Manchester on special charter trains. All girls below the age of 14 from railway families could enter the contest. Sue Smith, née Tonge, was chosen as the railway queen in 1966. Here she is in her railway queen regalia. She had four velvet gowns, two in blue and two red, as well as six tiaras and two chains of office.

Former railway queen, Sue Smith

Perhaps all this romance, fun and socialising is what kept four consecutive generations of one family working on the railways for 160 years. I really enjoyed reading their story. Altogether, seven members of the family contributed a massive 250 years’ work. A real labour of love.

Most families would have difficulty telling you the occupation of their great grandparents, but for the Selby family there is no problem: everyone worked on or was in some way involved with the rail roads of Great Britain. The railways were a real family affair.

 This is Maurice Selby. When he joined the railway, he followed in the footsteps of his father and his grandfather.

During World War Two, Maurice’s duties included issuing tickets and completing paperwork.

Of course, there had to be some perks for all this family’s hard work.

Maurice’s eldest daughter Pauline travelled to school on the train, albeit to the next stop in the town of Thorne. In the cold winter, passenger trains were often delayed. This, however, was no obstacle for Maurice, who telephoned down the line, convincing the signalman to stop a goods train in the station, allowing Pauline to travel home on the footplate.

I’d love to hear your memories too. If you have a station story you’d like to share, you can get in touch by filling in our online Station Stories form or emailing your story to station.stories@nrm.org.uk

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.

The lads started out working at Borough Gardens shed in Newcastle as engine cleaners. Here’s a few anecdotes about those early days:

We started on two pound and six pence a week. I just give mine to me mother. We were all fifteen or sixteen. When you cleaned the engines all the dirty cotton waste used to run down your arms. To stop this you’d put a rag round your wrist. It always got soaking wet with paraffin. It wasn’t very nice.

We worked such long hours. Once, tired from our shift, and with only an hour to go until our next one started, my mate and I thought it wasn’t worth going home. We fell asleep in a Ritz cinema doorway. We were only young lads. We were woken up by a couple of policemen.

The lads in the 1940s.

The lads all socialised together too:

When you started on the railway you lost touch with a lot of your old school friends. Your railway friends became your life. We had a football team at the Borough Gardens depot. It was formed for one purpose only: the annual charity game against Gateshead shed. Apart from the occasional kickabout, the team never played together until the charity match which was always Good Friday. The match was followed by the annual Good Friday Dance in Gateshead Town Hall. Both events were in aid of the Railwaymen’s Widows and Orphans Fund.

Borough Gardens football team in the early 1950s.

The lads all progressed up the career ladder at the same time:

You did a year or so as an engine cleaner, then you got passed as a fireman, and eventually after about thirty years you got made a driver. But being an engine cleaner wasn’t a lowly job, it was part of the line of promotion to be a driver.

You sometimes got a tip on the London trains. I’d heard a rumour about this driver that used to say to passengers, “Give it to the boy” – meaning the fireman. One time I was on with this driver, and a bloke approached us with a pound note for the driver. Foolishly I said, “I’m not the driver, he is”. Well, he didn’t “give it to the boy” that time.

You were waiting for dead man’s shoes. If there was a vacancy for a driver you got it in order of who’d been in the job the longest. Seniority wasn’t based on ability. You often had to wait for someone to retire. That was how it worked.

A couple of the lads on an outing with some older drivers in 1955.

The lads started out as engine drivers in age of steam:

In the steam days everything was more casual, particularly on the branch lines. If you were trundling along in a rural area and you saw someone running for the train you’d say, “Come on now, hurry up,” and you could stop and let them on. There was plenty of time.

They experienced the transition from steam to diesel:

Drivers who had worked on steam locos for forty or more years were not convinced that these clean shiny noisy brutes could do the job they knew steam engines could.

Training course for inspectors.

As HST drivers they regularly worked the Edinburgh to Kings Cross main line:

I was never given any money but once an old lady came up to me at Kings Cross. She said, “Eee driver you were right in on time, there’s a couple of sweets for yer.”

When you worked the Kings Cross mainline down from Newcastle you lodged overnight in Kentish town. There were open top cubicles in the hostel rooms. One night I was in with this other driver, and boy did he snore. In the morning he complained, “I cannae sleep in those bunks.” I said, “Well we must have had a pig in the room”.

We’re still looking for your station stories. If you’re a former station worker with a story to tell, we’d love to hear from you. You can get in touch by filling in our online Station Stories form or emailing your story to station.stories@nrm.org.uk

A little while ago I promised to bring you some sneak peeks into some of the themes that we’re covering in the app before we launch it in September. A good place to start is with the intense competition between the railways and road transport.

The period after the First World War saw a huge increase in car ownership and road building. By the 1920s, competition from cars and motorcoaches was making life uncomfortable for the ‘Big Four’ railway companies.

One of the many ways in which the railways responded to this competition was by focusing on a key customer – the middle class gentleman, as likely to be tempted in to a car purchase as he was to spend his money on a rail ticket.

If such a man could be persuaded that the train was a more civilised choice than the private motorcar and more appropriate for a gentleman, he may well decide to travel by rail more often.

The cartoons in railway magazines give us an entertaining insight in to how the  railways painted motoring as less civilized than taking the train. This 1935 example from London, Midland & Scottish Railway magazine shows an upper crust male arriving in a less than pristine state at his destination:

The clean, tidy and relaxed ‘Girl’, we are led to assume, came by rail!

These cartoons often played on motorist’s feelings of inadequacy when compared to the power of the train. In another LMS cartoon from 1935 a bespectacled ‘Speed Fiend’ is shown trying, and failing, to keep up with the effortless speed of the express train, much to the frustration of his wife:

It is no accident that ladies are present in these images – women were often shown as the ‘victims’ of reckless motoring. They were depicted as valuing safety, and by extension, men that chose the train over the car.

The message to send was that the train was the only choice for the debonair, sophisticated man. Southern Railway’s publication ‘Over the Points’, sent to First Class ticket purchasers underlined this with stylish illustrations by Victor Reinganum, like this one from 1939:

I’ll let EP Leigh-Bennett, debonair if somewhat self-satisfied correspondent for ‘Over the Points’ have the final word. Imagining a fantasy trip to the seaside, he compared his relaxed journey by rail with that of his motor maniac friend:

I visualized him dropping me from his supercharged Somethingorother on a Saturday summer noon at Victoria Station and getting thence to Brighton at his best pace. And of my tranquil progress to the same house in Brighton by the route I infinitely preferred. And of how much lunch would be left for him by the time he reached our mutual destination!

The message was clear – gentlemen prefer trains!

Made possible by funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council and supported by our rail partner East Coast, the app will explore the ways in which travel and journeys have been sold to rail passengers from the 1870s to the 1970s.

It is based on an extensive and groundbreaking research project undertaken by the Institute of Rail and Transport Studies here in York, a project that has delivered some surprising and interesting conclusions.

From using idealised descriptions of places to selling the idea of luxurious journeys as part of a desirable lifestyle, railway companies were experts at making people feel they had a desire to travel, a right to travel and even a duty to travel.

In many cases, railway companies in Britain were pioneers in using advanced marketing techniques that we now take for granted as part of our everyday lives. For example, they were quick to recognise the importance of corporate brands and identity, the saleability of speed, and were early adopters of American-style salesmanship training for their employees.

For example, have a look at this mildly cheeky 1928 cartoon from London, Midland & Scottish Railway’s company magazine:

LMS Magazine 5.1 (1928), p.23

It shows us that even at this early stage, the railway companies’ efforts at making salesmen of their staff were advanced enough to provoke gentle, and slightly weary satire. Joking aside, I wonder how many rail employees really did have locomotive-shaped topiary in their gardens?

As this project is all about rail travel, we wanted to think of a way to bring this story to people as they actually make their own rail journeys – a way of making it personal and relevant to your own journey as a rail passenger.

To do this, we are developing a free-to-use app for iPhone for use by travellers on the East Coast main line. As you make your trip by rail, you will be able to view original marketing material from our archive and explore how your journey would have been sold to you if you were travelling this route in the 1870s, 1930s, or the 1970s.

Take your own journey through history with our geotagged map, peruse a 1930s lineside guide, explore real carriages from the national collection in detail, or even have a go at making your own poster – journeys on the East Coast are about to get a lot more interesting!

We will be launching the app, called The East Coast Time Line, this September. Over the next few weeks I’ll be taking you behind the scenes of the project. I will be bringing you some ‘sneak peeks’ at some of the hidden treasures from our collection and telling some of the intriguing stories behind the history of Britain’s railways and their never-ending quest to attract passengers.

Duchess of Gloucester, which Percy Wilson drove in 1939

While doing research for Railfest 2012, I have come across all sorts of interesting stories and people. Percy Wilson is one of the most fascinating ex-railwaymen to have contributed his life story to Railway Voices – a project which was run by the Friends of the National Railway Museum.

Percy’s life story was recorded in 2001, when he was 102 years old. He was born in Cumbria in 1899 and began his railway career as an engine cleaner when he was 14 years old. Percy started firing engines at the age of 15 and became a driver in 1932. He had all sorts of adventures during his long career.

When he was 17 years old he joined the army and fought in World War I as a Lewis Gunner. In the recording Percy described what it was like when he first started working on the railways and what led him to join the forces.

“Well, it was a tough job for a young lad. I had to go into lodgings. My first week’s wages was seven and tuppence… Anyway the First World War started then… and Lord Kitchner, he was a fraud, he was shouting out, ‘Join up, join up, you’ll be back by Christmas’, but he didn’t say which Christmas we were going to be back.”

Percy goes on to talk about driving No 6225 Duchess of Gloucester, and the locomotive’s maximum speed when he drove it from Crewe to Chester during World War II.

“You never bothered by the speed. You had to get there so they could deal with it, but speed, I don’t know.”

“We’d… just short of six hundred ton on, five hundred tons the load for the engine out of Carlisle, and we passed Shap Summit in 31 minutes and coming down Shap Bank, course is quite easy that with six hundred ton behind you and we were about halfway down… the fireman that I had, he was a grand lad that, he was good enough for anything… we had a speed meter, you know, you were sitting like this and you just glanced down at it and I pointed to it, we were doing 110 mile an hour and, and Wigan was the next stop.”

When asked whether he had a reputation as a fast driver Percy responded:

“Well I don’t know. They used to say that I let it run away with me.

Percy Wilson was just one of hundreds of ex-railway men and women who contributed to the Railway Voices project. You can listen to extracts from some of the others on our main website.

Earlier this week, I received a letter from Mr Booth’s relatives containing two wonderful photographs of the man himself. These snapshots offer a fascinating glimpse into the human life behind the object.

Above, Herman and his wife enjoying a leisurely stroll. His three-piece suit is accessorised with less formal white shoes. This casual footwear indicates they are on holiday and leads me to wonder if they were accompanied by the cabin trunk on this trip.

Above, Herman relaxes at home. His smart attire – a lounge coat with a button hole –  is typical of the early twentieth century.

Many thanks to the relatives of Herman Booth for sharing these photographs with us.