Waverley81

Further to the post above I have also written up a turn I went on with my grandfather in 1980, to London Paddington. I hope you like it and it certainly isn't the kind of thing that could happen these days! One of my first proper outings was to London Paddington with my grandad in the Spring of 1980. Prior to me taking up spotting he had never really encouraged me to have an interest in trains at all but once I showed an interest he began to take me with him to work and that was just the best thing. It wouldn’t always be possible to ride in the cab with him on every trip. There were rules even thirty years ago and I was only 11 at the time. On occasion, I would have to slip back into the carriages at strategic points, or occupy the front seat of the DMU instead; the one behind the driver or guard with the best view forward. However, whenever he felt it was safe to do so he would smuggle me into the cab and take me with him. Birmingham New Street would be the regular trip. Hereford was another popular run and these would be mostly a variety of DMUs. London, however, was always best because it would be a class 50 or 47, with some real high speed running. On this occasion, I had cycled to the rear, pedestrian entrance to Worcester depot, just off an alleyway that led to Railway Walk. My grandfather met me at the gate and, after locking my bike up in the staff bike shed, we walked through the depot to Shrub Hill Station. He would always make sure I got all the numbers off the depot first. At this point in time Worcester had lost its re-fuelling capacity and was more of a stabling point, although some fitters were still employed and minor maintenance was carried out in the roofless shed. There would always be a motley collection of DMUs and maybe the odd western region 31 or 37. At weekends you might be lucky and get up to 10 locos but one or two was the norm during the week. For some reason I never took any pictures at Worcester depot; too familiar I guess. Waiting for us on this day on the platform was 47 511 (OC) at the head of the Paddington service with 9 coaches. I remember my grandad being quite pleased as these were his preferred loco. I liked the 50s but in his usual, unsentimental and totally pragmatic way he would point out that the ‘Brush 4,’ as he called them, was a far more reliable machine. He was only ever concerned about punctuality, comfort and reliability. He had driven Halls, Castles and Kings in the Great Western steam days and never once mourned their passing due to the improved working conditions offered by diesels. However, I have a very cherished picture of him smiling broadly in the cab of Clun Castle at Worcester in the 1950s. I have included a picture of 47 509 Albion (OC) at Worcester Shrub Hill. It was taken in early 1981 and the ‘Brush 4’ is about to depart at the head of another Paddington service. The wonderful semaphore signal is clearly having some maintenance carried out. This view is pretty much unchanged today, over 30 years on, with the semaphores still very much in charge. The first hour of the journey to Paddington was fairly uninteresting from a spotting point of view. My grandfather drove and I had to stand up because we had a second man who was clearly learning the route and logging miles. At this time most of the route was single line, token working and so there wasn’t much danger of passing anything. Honeybourne station had not been re-opened yet and so the CCE Tip here and line to MOD Long Marston would be passed at speed, making the 31 on a trip working from Worcester harder to spot. This line still sees significant traffic today, with numerous locos and rolling stock moving in and out of store here. At Oxford station I would have to squat down to avoid being seen by staff on the platform. I would still make sure that I got the numbers of whatever was on the depot and the Reading 08 that would be station pilot and usually resided in the parcels bay. Here also, the drivers swapped over and my grandad warmed up the tea on the cab hotplate as the second man took the throttle. He was most definitely on a mission and I remember my grandfather encouraging him to ‘give it some welly’ after passing Didcot and getting the ‘up fast’ to Reading. 47 511 was certainly on form because I remember some really consistent 100mph running with a top speed of 102mph indicated by the cab speedometer somewhere around Pangbourne. I wasn’t timing the speeds officially but I’ve no reason to disbelieve the loco’s instruments. It certainly felt very fast and was a strong performance with load 9. Reading was another opportunity to become ‘invisible’ for a few minutes after taking as many numbers from the depot as we approached. I would always try and catch a glimpse of 97 020 or PWM 653 at the signal works as we left the station and despite passing through on numerous occasions I remember these little shunters being frustratingly illusive for quite some time before I managed to see them. More high speed running to Paddington made the then quite busy DMU depot at Southall almost impossible to take in as we passed at over 90mph but the yard at Acton would be easier as the speed eased off with a double amber on the approaches to Paddington. I always tried my best to get the numbers of locos on Old Oak Common and it might yield an 08 or two, possibly a new HST or even something going through the washer. However, the reality was the mainline locos were always too far away really and Old Oak was a depot I sadly never got to look around, unfortunately. When the time came to leave I got my wish and 50 031 Hood (LA) was rostored for our return. The journey takes about two and a half hours and this time there was no second man so I got the second best seat in the house all the way back home. The disadvantage was I wasn’t able to keep an eye on the speed but I do recall the English Electric 16CSVT power plant being much noisier than the Sulzer one in 47 511. The journey back was more relaxed and I hid less and took some pictures at Oxford. Once again we were Load 9, mostly Mark 2s, excluding the full brake and buffet. The pictures are of me and my grandfather leaning out of Hood's cab. No LA depot sticker but someone has quite unsympathetically scratched the code into her blue paintwork. The most interesting and exciting part of the trip, however, occurred just as we had left Oxford. Accelerating hard from the platform, I don’t recall there being any need to slow down for Wolvercot Junction and we branched off onto the Cottswold line, flat out, at full throttle. Maximum line speed was 90mph and the first stop at this time would be Charlbury, some 15 minutes hence, so we had plenty of opportunity to accelerate towards this speed. I remember my grandfather pointing out that Sir Peter Parker, the then Chairman of BR, used to live in Charlbury and would often commute to London on these services. This may have been one of the reasons why such a frequent Inter-City service was still being maintained over a relatively quiet line. Anyway, somewhere before the now regular stop of Hanborough, Hood shut down. There was no warning, no sign that anything was wrong. The huge English Electric 16 cylinder simply fell silent. My grandfather issued a few choice expletives related to the heritage of these less than fine machines (in his eyes) and then paused for a moment or two, as if considering the situation. He then quite calmly asked me to come and sit in the driver’s seat. He explained that we had a good 10 minutes at least before Charlbury and with a trainload of over 400 tonnes, currently travelling at over 80mph we would probably be able to coast most of the way there on this gradient. If I could sit in his seat and stop the deadman’s switch from activating he would go back into the engine compartment and see if he could rectify the fault. He was sure it was electrical, due to the sudden nature of the failure and he was well used to these things breaking down on him. I think he must have had an idea even then as to what had caused the failure. Who was I to argue? What 11 year old would pass up the opportunity to drive a class 50, albeit silently coasting on a single track line? We had the token to Kingham, so we knew there would be no signal checks until then. With no real thought as to how inappropriate this course of action might have been I sat in the seat and did as I was instructed. 50 031 trundled on. Signals were passed. AWS switches pressed and the passengers would have been none the wiser as my grandfather rummaged around in the engine compartment searching for the fault, which had left us powerless. I really don’t know how long he was back there but I seem to remember the speed had dropped to between 60 and 70mph when he returned to try and re-start the engine. I remained in the seat as the ignition was tried and Hood immediately burst back into life first time. My grandfather and I quickly swapped seats and grinning broadly he applied the throttle we began to pick up speed once more. After a little chuckle to himself, probably over what he had just accomplished, he explained that for some reason the Woodward Governor had cut in and shut off the fuel supply. He would log it in the book and let the fitters look at it at the next opportunity but for the remainder of the journey 50 031 performed faultlessly once more. We even made up the time lost and arrived at Worcester Shrub Hill on schedule. This wasn’t the end of the trip as we then had to shunt our loco and stock back into the sidings at Midland Road, south of the station. Here the coaches would be serviced and cleaned prior to them returning to London on a later service. 50 031 would also remain here and that is where the final pictures were taken. The tall chimney in the background is the old Metal Box factory which is still there today, now minus chimney, and amazingly is still rail served for steel products from Round Oak on a weekly basis.

What an excellent thread this is! Thanks for starting it. I hope no one minds but I've been writing up my own railway 'adventures' recently on a thread on another forum and I wrote the chapter below in honour of my late grandfather. He was a railwayman through and through and I was able to illustrate it with a few original pictures from my collection. It would seem to fit nicely here, possibly accompanied by a story of one of our journies together a bit later. A Tribute to Den I was looking through my albums recently, in an effort to decide where I should take my next story from, when I came across a few pictures that didn’t really fit neatly in any adventure. They were largely one off pictures taken from a variety of trips made with my grandfather, who, as I’ve already mentioned before, was a driver. None of the locations are particularly special but this actually would be true of most of the spotting that was done in the 1980s. It simply wasn’t possible to go on extravagant adventures to Scotland or far flung depots every week and so most of the time I was limited to the lines around Worcester or those occasions when my granddad would smuggle me aboard his turns. I became very close to my grandfather as a result of these trips, many of which were mundane and uneventful for him but terrific adventures for me. He passed away peacefully in 2004 at the age of 85 and, as is so often the case, one never quite appreciates what people have done for you or how much they mean until they’re not there anymore. I can say that I did get to spend a good deal of time with my granddad, for which I’m extremely grateful and I thought I would indulge myself a little with this photographic tribute. Dennis Insall, or Den as everyone knew him, was born in the Cotswolds in 1919. He was one of 9 children, two of whom I’m pleased to say are still alive. He attended Moreton-in-Marsh Grammar School to the age of 15 but despite some academic prowess he ‘ran away’ to join the Great Western Railway and fulfil his childhood dream of becoming an engine driver. His working life started at Kingham shed where he began as an engine cleaner until he was 17. This was a hard, filthy job but he must have shown the right attitude because in just 2 years he was promoted to Worcester depot. At the time Worcester was a major railway city, boasting a GWR loco works as well as a large motive power depot, code 85A. This code was representative of its major status, with more minor sub-sheds receiving lesser letters. So for example, Gloucester Horton Road, often perceived later as more important was 85B. This picture, taken during a general strike in the 1950s, shows just how busy the loco depot at Worcester was. Even now this site is still full of tracks and is responsible for servicing, stabling and refuelling DMUs. Den arrived here in 1936 and used to commute from Chipping Norton on his bike! That’s a journey of 40 miles which he used to do along the A44 every Sunday to his digs in Worcester and every Friday back home with his washing. For anyone who knows the area that includes an ascent of Fish Hill on the Cotswold escarpment heading home. He must have been pretty fit. This picture was taken in front of an unidentified Castle on Worcester shed whilst he was still in his teens. Den is on the right. I’m not sure exactly when he made fireman and then driver but he was in a reserve occupation by the time the war came in 1939. That didn’t make him safe however, and he has plenty of tales of being bombed whilst on duty at Oxford, Banbury, Paddington and even Worcester. Standard practice was to get under your loco apparently. By the 1950s he was piloting top flight expresses out of Worcester and this meant driving Castles. He never moaned about the passing of steam. Diesels made for much better working conditions but he did have an affection for these locos in particular. Here he is in the cab of his favourite, 7029 Clun Castle on Worcester shed in the late 50s. This is the ‘Cathedrals Express’ with my grandfather at the helm at Wolvercot Junction, Oxford. It was taken by his brother Gordon, another GWR engine driver, and I believe the loco is 7011 Banbury Castle. Being born in 1968 I have only found this out from talking to him and other members of the family because my association with the railway only really started in 1979. By this time he was into the last 5 years of his career and was a senior driver and union shop steward at Worcester. A staunch Labour Party member and ASLEF man no one used to question Den when he would smuggle me aboard some of his trains and that was great. A typical run would be to Hereford and back and that’s where these pictures are from. The route is nothing grand and single track for much of the way but a cabride is always something special and it is a very beautiful line. I would often be encouraged to drive the thing, whatever it was, and I became pretty proficient on most type 4s and DMUs. Here we have a typical unit for the run, a Gloucester Class 119 cross country DMU. Cross country simply meant lower density seating and some nice orange curtains in first class but they were nice riding units and this set, L590 was Reading based. On other turns it would be a 47. Here I’m stood in front of 47008 (BR) at Hereford with some distant relatives that met us there on the platform. I think I’m 11 in this picture, despite looking about 6!!! I did drive this engine for much of the way too, much to my grandad’s pleasure. On one Sunday, Old Oak Common must have been short of locos and we had a pair of 31s instead of a 47 or 50 on the Paddington-Hereford. I remember rocking and rolling around in those two all the way there and back with my granddad telling me he would be driving today as these two beasts were not so user friendly as what I’d been used. 50s were more typical for these journeys and, at the risk of repeating myself a little, here we have my grandfather at Oxford just before 50031 Hood disgraced itself on the run to Worcester. Me, in front of the same machine having got there despite its minor tantrum. ( see later entry) And me at the helm of 50021 Rodney. We’re at Evesham, waiting for the token for single line working to Norton Junction, Worcester and yes, I’m driving!! My grandfather retired from British Rail, after 50 years service, in 1984 and my access to these trips disappeared but I will always be grateful to him for the wonderful memories.

Another brilliant compilation Bruce. Thanks very much. A real pleasure.

Loving this. Brilliant stuff. Thanks a lot:)

Found 1 or 2 more recently. Here's a rather tatty and faded 37 404 Ben Cruachan at Oban, I think late in 1988 (October/November)