Memoirs of a Railway Volunteer - Part 8

On to Rowsley Part III

I placed a few small ads in the railway press, but before they appeared I was involved in a similar but smaller operation of my own. The local ganger at Chinley had been ordered to throw his stores in a rubbish skip and was deeply upset. When I got there I could quite understand why. There was an enormous heap of fishplate shims, in all sorts of sizes, absolutely brand new. If I’d managed to get there a day earlier they would still have been in the original packaging. The accountants felt he had more than he could safely store. These shims are very precise tapered stampings used to take out the wear in fishplate joints, graded from 5 to 13 thou, left and right handed. The maker’s minimum order used to be a thousand sets of any one size, and we had considered ourselves fortunate to get a few mixed bags the previous year.

I had a roll of rubbish sacks and filled them with shims. I made two trips that day and filled the car boot each time. I arranged a few hours off work and that night I got in touch with Gary Dixon and let him know we had an operation running. We both knew Chinley as we had lifted the sidings there about fifteen years before that, and he met me there with his works van early the following day. We filled all our available sacks with shims, over sixty of them, and dumped them in my garage. My reckoning was we had about two tons of shims, theoretically worth about £1-00 per ounce when new, so you can work out the value yourselves.

The idea of selling equipment to other railways was a bit novel for some people, and there were a few doubters. However not long after that we had our first customer, one of the Welsh Highland mafia now working professionally for one of the smaller private companies. I took him for a walk round our stores, I had no idea of the proper prices, and made them up as we went along. I priced the stuff to clear, as the idea was to help the rest of the preservation movement as well as ourselves. A spirit level? Certainly, £30. A bag of shims – same price. Sighting boards, £50 per set…an hour or so later I went back to the mess and put the kettle on. Derek Ankers appeared.

“How’d it go?” I showed him a cheque for about £700.

“I thought you said he was a friend of yours”

He was and he is, but business is business, and the cheque was handed over to the company.

The Junta drank a lot of tea over the trading issue. The general conclusion was that there was a lot of money to be made and we were going to make it, keep it and spend it. We were particularly attached to the notion of spending it, and money handed over to Peak Rail would be liable to disappear into the general pot. We preferred to handle our own affairs, and life would be a lot simpler if we kept the matter to ourselves. The money would be a one off capital endowment and should be used to stock the railway for the future. Once upon a time this would not have been a problem. In the past there had been a variety of semi-independent funds raising money for the railway in various places. I used to call it the “Olympic Principle”- when something happened, there was a race to trace the money, and the first guy that found it, spent it. However this aspect of the railway had been generally tidied up and centralised. There were just one or two dormant funds which had been missed, one was called the Peak Rail Stock Fund, and by an amazing coincidence, the last remaining signatory on the building society passbook, was me. The account had been kept going by one heroic contributor, David Winter, who had been paying a small standing order while the fund otherwise lay quiet. It was rapidly woken up, with Vince Kay as an additional signatory, and thanks to Dave it already contained a small but useful balance.

We sold a few items here and there, and after the word spread about a bit I had a contact from the Dean Forest Railway, who wondered if we could supply up to four hundred lengths of point rodding. Up at Buxton there was still an enormous stack of rodding which we had never carted away, matched only by the even larger stack at Darley Dale. I was worried about the stack at Buxton getting stolen, and it would be an extra job to find the men and transport to shift it. I knew Steve was after more rodding and took a deep breath. “£5-00 per length”. Eventually they thought they could perhaps manage at 300 lengths and the deal was done.

Vince and I were gloating over the passbook one Saturday teatime when Steve called at the volunteers mess.

“You’ll never guess what turned up at the stores last week – a ships anchor”

“Did you get it?”

“No, why?”

“ A ships anchor we could have sold.”

“Where is the big extending ladder?”

“Sold it!”

“You mad sods – you’d sell anything, we need that ladder…”(and quite a lot more in the same vein).

“Keep your wig on Steve, its round by the 8F mess coach”


Steve retrieved the ladder, and climbed the Down Home signal in the South Yard at Darley Dale to carry out some adjustments to the upper arm. This was just across the tracks from the mess hut. A black and white cat which had attached itself to him from nowhere, followed him up the steel ladder, and sat on the lower arm to watch what he was doing. The problem of course, came when they both came to go down, and the cat found that paws and claws do not grip very well on round steel rungs. Steve grabbed the cat and brought it down with some difficulty, while Vince and I watched from the mess hut in stitches.

I record this as occasions when we could pull Steve’s leg, and not the other way round have a certain rarity value. One of the S & T volunteers was Richard Hatch, who had worked for Steve on BR and soldiered on despite a very bad back. Hatchy got his leg pulled like everyone else, and at around this time a letter arrived at the company office which went something like this:



Lifeboat Cottage,
Church Lane,
Darley Dale
The Managing Directors,
Peak Rail PLC

Dear Sirs,

I live close to the railway line at Darley Dale and often see your construction train passing through. I am puzzled by some of the remarks made by your workers, to the effect that “That hatch is no use”. I was not aware that trains had have hatches, which are more commonly found on ships.

I am one of the leading collectors of nautical memorabilia in this country and if this hatch is no longer required then I would be very keen to acquire it for future public exhibition in exchange for a suitable donation to your project.

I thank you in anticipation.

Yours faithfully,

Captain.................(Merchant Navy, retired).

I am told the management spent some time trying to frame a suitable reply before it was realised that a) there is no Lifeboat cottage on Church Lane b) the captain had the same name as the captain of the Titanic. No prizes for guessing which S & T engineer wrote it.

With some money, and a lot of material for barter, we were able to go shopping. We needed motive power for the works train, and here we made a lucky connection with the Nottingham Sleeper Company, who specialise in track materials, but are also occasionally general dealers in railway rolling stock. At this time they had a number of diesel shunters for sale. They were looking for a crawler crane to sit stationary in the middle of their yard. Our crawler crane had come to the end of its duties for the foreseeable future, and its tracks were badly worn; Mick had made enquiries, and its value in this condition was limited. It had after all worked for eight years without a major overhaul. Mick rapidly came to a deal to swap the crane for a capable looking Vanguard six wheel diesel, plus 100 sleepers, cost of transport of the locomotive to be paid by the Fund. The Vanguard was powerful enough to start a works train, and just as important, heavy enough to stop it.

This created a certain amount of consternation in the commercial department, as they had been hoping to sell it themselves. When they went looking for it, the crane had gone and all they found was Mick fitting a new starter motor to the new diesel shunter. However there were still hundreds of tons of ballast to drop and we had to have a suitable locomotive for the works trains.

In between these adventures we kept plugging away at the extension, particularly the platform. One of the things we needed was a metric cross-sectional drawing to issue to the builder and pass on to H.M. Railway Inspectorate in due course. I managed to get my hands on one and this was passed on to the builder. It was a very nice looking platform wall, but something was not quite right. It was too far away from the track. We checked the measurements again, and realised that the platform was built to Berne Gauge!

Personally I blame metrication - if the measurements had been in imperial units we’d have spotted it at once. That’s my defence and I’m sticking to it. Fortunately, the only difference was that the track was about six inches further away from the platform. I spent a morning digging ballast away from the outer sleeper ends, and Mick slewed the track over in the afternoon, so neatly that you can’t see the change. He was kind enough to say that if we’d had the track any closer to the foundations he wouldn’t have been able to get the back actor in to dig the foundation trench, but Bob Grange still calls me Bernie from time to time.

Another problem which arose with the platform was that the contractor declined to lay the coping slabs as specified in his contract. He claimed that the design was unsafe and he refused to be responsible for it. We reckoned that the real reason was that the slabs weighed about three hundredweight apiece, and the value apportioned to laying them in the contract wasn’t high enough to be attractive. We set to filling in behind the platform, and the Territorials returned to move several hundred tons of rubble from the shed site, which by now we had largely cleared. We also used sandstone waste from a nearby quarry, and my reckoning is that the platform infill took at least 600 tons of stone. As we were levelling the top, the JCB put its front wheel down a pothole and the bucket smashed down hard on top of the overhang. The impact was enough to crush three or four bricks to fragments, but the overhang as a whole did not crack at all. This resolved any lingering doubts there might have been over the strength of the design. Mick and Bob laid and rolled a deep layer of road planings along the platform top in readiness for the final layer of tarmac.

Mick eventually laid the coping slabs, and set them millimetre perfect with a surveyor’s level, but meanwhile another, and highly pleasurable diversion took place: the 9F Black Prince came to the railway on short term loan, and what a beautiful locomotive it was.

We had already tried hiring a big locomotive before, the West Country class “Hartland”. This had been highly enjoyable, but had done little more than break even. Guest engines take a lot of planning. You can set hire fees off against deferred maintenance to some extent, but the transport costs have got to be paid. We had learned from this, and apart from normal passenger trains, the locomotive also worked evening dining services, photographic charters and footplate experience courses arranged by Jackie Statham.

The locomotive has style, and so does its owner, David Shepherd the wildlife artist. He wrote about his railway experiences in “A Brush With Steam”, which is one of the best accounts of “hands on” railway preservation I have come across. In it he tells how he and his associates legally plundered the stores of British Railways in the sixties and seventies. I had the pleasure of meeting him, and he lamented that things had changed, such opportunities had gone and things “did not fall off the backs of lorries any more”. After our recent experiences at Wakefield I was able to reassure him that the good old days were not over yet!

Black Prince came complete with a travelling art gallery in a vintage double decker bus, which sold prints of David Shepherd’s work in aid of the World Wildlife Fund. The locomotive was a wonderful performer and a very smooth runner. Mick Thomas told of a run to Matlock when Black Prince was making no apparent effort and he suddenly realised that the 40mph traffic on the A6 was being left standing. I think that also says rather a lot about Mick’s efforts on the track. Apart from the financial rewards, we got a fair amount of publicity, and it was very rewarding for the volunteers, a nice plum job to break up the hard graft, the sort of thing to keep them coming back for more.

Then we put our shoulders to the wheel once more. Arthur Dudson gave me an introduction to his old firm, Balfour Beatty, where his name opened many doors. He was known there as “that grand railway buildin’ man”, a reputation which he thoroughly deserves. At any rate, we rapidly agreed a mutually beneficial swap. We would give them the steelwork from two right hand flat bottom B8 turnouts which they wanted for contractors tracks on the Hong Kong metro contract. We would also give them five sets of sighting boards, various unserviceable jacks out of our latest haul and thirty sacks of shims. In exchange we would get four sets of crossing timbers, (in addition to the two we retained) and two hundred french oak sleepers. As we had plenty of bullhead switches and crossings, this would give us a flying start to the construction of track on the shed site later on. I have from time to time wondered if they sold the shims back to the accountant who ordered then thrown out in the first place; good luck to them if they did.

By this time work on the extension was going uncommonly well. When the Junta reviewed the job lists on Sunday nights, there was only a trickle of small extra jobs going on to the list, and we were steadily knocking off the big ones. The platform was steadily taking shape, with electricity and water supplies laid in, the latter with future provision for the main locomotive water supply. The spoil bank was graded off behind the platform and a long line of bunker grade crossing timbers dug in to make the rear edge. Steve and his gang had been refurbishing Midland pattern timber posts for the area around Church lane, which they were determined to make into a showpiece, and they dug by hand an enormous hole in the middle of the extension for a signal pole which would function as a fixed distant in both directions.

We continued to make regular trips to Wakefield, and at about this time we recovered over 200 gallons of paint, some of which was best quality micaceous iron oxide paint. Some of it definitely wasn’t. There was rather a lot of magnolia gloss, which we took on the basis that we were expected to clear everything. We were anxious to be polite, as Steve had shown us the inside of the main shed, which contained three parcels vans and an LMS Full Brake in mint condition. These were in static use as storage space, and one day they would have to go as well. In due course Steve worked his magic here, but meantime we had to find a use for the magnolia.

“I wonder what they use it for Mick?”

“You wazzack Oaksy. They don’t use it for anything, that’s why they had twenty gallons of the stuff left in store”

I tried suggesting to the carriage painting gang that the old British railways livery of Carmine and Cream – known as blood and custard – would be a good idea, and that custard and custard would be even better. This fell on deaf ears. I tried to sell it as a bathroom decoration, but it was definitely not non drip. Fortunately Colin Fearnley realised that it could be mixed with a drop of colour dye to make the right shade of paint for coach interiors, so I think quite a bit of it has been used in the intervening ten years. I managed to sell on some of the paint to other railways at £5-00 per gallon – including some of the magnolia.

All this time we were working through the last list of detail jobs – installing ground frames and point locks, fencing, platform lighting. A preliminary visit from the inspector was encouraging, but he insisted that the platform must have a tarmac surface; we had been half hoping to get away with a layer of road scrapings. The tarmac was laid by a mixed gang of contractors and midweek volunteers, and Derby Branch creosoted the Midland Railway pattern slatted fence.

We were starting to make plans for the development of the shed site, and I did my best to acquire a building at Matlock, which narrowly failed to come off later. This was a disused truck maintenance shed which stood close to the railway at Matlock. It was just wide enough for one track, tall enough for an engine, and ninety feet long, with a bay to one side for a workshop. At one time in the past I’d even thought about renting it off Tarmac and laying a branch up to it, which I gave up on the grounds of gradient, expense and security. It was a good few feet above the level of the railway, the walls were only cement sheet, and buildings at the quarry were always being burgled. Now plans for developing Cawdor Quarry were stirring, and one day the land would have to be cleared. I went over it with a tape measure, and found that the diagonal measurements between the uprights were remarkably constant, which meant it was pretty carefully built.

We got to know the developer quite well, and he seemed very open and friendly. This isn’t normal behaviour for a property developer, and he either was exactly what he said he was, or a complete crook. On the whole I think he was both. Eventually he went to prison for corruption elsewhere, but I believe he did his best to be fair to the railway, and offered a choice of buildings from the quarry. The Matlock issue had been a fraught and extremely technical subject for many years, and I was under no illusion that it could be easily solved.

The plan was that as soon as the extension opened, we would start laying a single line of track at Rowsley on the shed approach, heading in the general direction of the ashpit and putting turnouts for further development as we went. If we added a further turnout on the inside of the curve, then the Matlock shed or something like it could be built on the A6 side of the ashpit as an interim measure while the main shed was developed. This did not work out in the end of course, but it shows how the minds of the construction junta were working at the time.

In between construction projects Steve continued his salvage campaign at a phenomenal pace. One of his recoveries was a salvage compound brought from Sheffield in the teeth of the winter weather. It had a neat sectional steel frame, about twelve feet by twenty, and a sloping top which was designed to have a roof, in fact someone had already started to weld angle irons across before giving up. Now it was derelict at the side of the line near Meadowhall. He managed to borrow a large trailer to tow behind his Volvo, and we went in with Vince Kay and Richard Hatch.

The problem was the welding, which had to be cut through, and this was three inch angle. The disk on Steve’s electric grinder wore out and we had to flog all over Sheffield trying to buy one on a Sunday. We were doing fine when a cold rain began to fall. Steve hurriedly unplugged his grinder and I finished off the last angle with a hacksaw. Vince and I broke most of the rusty bolts at the corners with a hammer and chisel. The rain was getting heavy and sleety, and it was time to head for the hills. We loaded the trailer and drove away. As we came up the hills on the south side the rain was turning to heavy snow and the traffic was starting to struggle. Richard was in the car with me, and Steve and Vince were somewhere in the jam behind.

When we got to the top of the rise, we chose the road to Chesterfield, and the dual carriageway was covered in virgin snow. We had been about the last car to get out of Sheffield in the blizzard. Richard and I bashed on through Chesterfield and over the hills, promising ourselves a hot cup of tea on arrival. When we got to Darley Dale the mess was deserted and in darkness – a power cut. Then the phone rang. It was Steve.

He had sensibly ditched the compound at a car park near the ring road and gone home. However, the snow didn’t seem so bad, and the trailer and its load would not last very long where they were. It was now well after dark, but there was a definite thaw at Darley Dale. So we went back for the trailer, and it was well after ten o’clock on Sunday night by the time we had unloaded at Rowsley. Much later, the compound became the basis for the S & T stores shed.

Meanwhile ballasting continued. It takes roughly three tons of ballast to build a yard of track, and it all had to be dropped into place, ploughed, tamped and boxed in. The shovelling gang would set off to the end of the work, space themselves out about six sleepers apart, each box in six bays, and then tramp forward to repeat the process. One mile of track has 2112 bays. About the last job to be done was to install handrails on the platform approach ramp, which were welded up by Mick from scaffolding tube. They had to be painted, and the colour chosen was…..magnolia.

Finally we were ready for inspection, and the comment of the inspecting officer was, “if everybody built railways to this standard then my job would be a lot easier.” We passed with flying colours.

For the opening we hired in a Black 5, No 45337 from the East Lancashire railway, and Jackie Statham and the Commercial department were organising what promised to be a successful programme based on their previous success with Black Prince. A few days before the official opening, 45337 was in steam for crew training at Darley Dale and Bob Grange was on the footplate. Mick and I approached him.

“Bob, we think the new level crossing needs proof testing to make sure it’s fit for service within normal operating parameters”

“Eh? Can I have that in English please”

“Give it some thrutch. If the track behaves at 35 0r 40 it‘ll be perfectly OK at 25”

“Oh right!”

Mick and I went down to the Church Lane crossing to wait. We felt we had earned a good display, just the once – for that matter so had Bob. Also there had been a few nasty comments in the Church Inn about playing with little trains. We had felt driven to go to drink in the Whitworth Arms and we had a point to make. Bob didn’t thrash the engine, he just opened the regulator a bit and left it there, and the Black 5 did what it was designed to do. It went over the crossing somewhat over the normal line speed with a cracking bark from the chimney, leaving a pall of clean exhaust behind. It looked and sounded magnificent and you could hear the slam of shutting windows all over Churchtown. Needless to say the track was in no way disturbed.

“That’s told ‘em”

Up at Rowsley Bob had a huge grin.

“Did you like that?” Well, yes. We did, but it wouldn’t do to make a habit of it.

A few days later the official opening took place. The volunteers all had a ride on one of the first trains, and the traditional comment was made, “That was boring – lets go and build another railway somewhere else”. We were absolutely burning to make progress towards a shed, and while the great and the good were making speeches and celebrating in the marquee, I was laying track on the shed approach with Vince and Sam.

Tim

 

Thank you Tim for posting Memoirs of a Railway Volunteer

It has been fantastic reading so far and I wish that every member have a read.

Cheers

 

I must agree with Admin here ,,,,its been a BRILLIANT read so far .

 

I have already commented but I've just read the latest series posted this week; wonderful stuff and an interesting critique of the privatised railway!

 

Thankyou for your very kind comments. There have been times when I felt I was living in a book written by Spike Milligan, and we always said one day it would make a book. I kept a log of my activities for most of the time. Not all of it was funny, but the idea is to give as true a picture as I can of what it was like to be at the heart of a railway project, mistakes warts and all. The articles will have to pause soon, as I am coming to the end of the available finished product, but there is plenty of material left for the future.

Tim

 

Do you think you have enough material to publish?

 

Does he have enough stories to publish....oh yes he does!

 

The finishing touches: Rowsley, early 1997.

White ballast and black ash. Austerity "Warrington" on footplate experience duty, Derby Branch creosoting the new fence.

Tim