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Dehydration in Steam Loco Crews


Arun Sharma
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Having worked outside in Saudi with an in the shade temperature of 50C, I can sympathise, with stokers and Firemen, But at least my work wasn't hard physical labour. Only light physical work. . Bae wouldn't issue salt tablets either.

 

The MSWR Swindon Town station, signal box was renown for pints being lowered to it in a basket from the pub almost above the cutting. It wouldn't be surprising if " arrangements" were made for the odd one to go the way of a loco crew..

 

I believe the water at Ludgershall from the columns were drinkable, however their use was discouraged,

A, the water was direct out of the ground and very chalky not good for locos,

B, it came from the army and the MSWJR/GWR/BR had to pay for the water..

 

 

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23 hours ago, Wheatley said:

Thanks Mike. I was thinking more of the re-use of the screw top pop bottle for water (or cold tea !) rather than for pop as such. They were popular in signalboxes for keeping milk in, as were large medicine bottles, as they could be relied on not to leak all over your bag and were widely available. Nowadays of course one is spoilt for choice for water bottles of all shapes, sizes and practicalities. 

A relative of mine who was a driver at Monument Lane used to collect empty Johnnie Walker wkiskey bottles as on a rough rider they could be laid down in the locker and stay put rather than risk falling over.

 

Personally the hardest and hottest work I did was taking turns as blacksmith's striker. I found the best lunchtime antidote was some fish and chips with plenty of salt followed by two or three pints of Ansells Mild. Most of the gang seemed to carry a small bottle of salt in their bag for use at lunchtime and it went on all kinds of sandwiches. Salty bacon was also very popular especially amongst the Irish members of local contract gangs.

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7 hours ago, NorthEndCab said:


 

Which is presumably why when you see photographs / footage of steam-era railwaymen they tend to look a lot older than they actually were. 
 

I took this screenshot from “The Elizabethan Express,” British Transport Film. I know a top-link express driver would have been one of the senior men on the depot, but he looks 10+ years older than he  realistically was. (I could have used the other driver before the halfway change, but you get the point.)

 

It also seems to be a common theme that they didn’t survive long after retirement. I don’t know whether that was peculiar the the footplate grade In those days though?

 

A Top Link Driver at a large depot in steam days would be very unlikely to be under 50-55 years of age and in fact in some depots well into dieselisation times Driver Seniority Dates went back a very long time indeed, two or three decades, which meant that no driver at such a depot was going to be under 40 or 50 years old.  And of course until the late 1960s almost everybody looked, or tried to look, older than they actually were because of the way they dressed and because of relatively poor diets, smoking and so on.

 

Of course former footplatemen, like many other railwaymen and people in other physical occupations, didn't all die young and average life expectancy was based on all deaths from the time of birth so was reduced by infant mortality.  So in the 1960s it wasn't at all unusual to find retired railwaymen living into their 80s, or even still working on the railway in their 70s, and in the 1980s I knew several who made it into their 90s (almost all former Drivers as it happens).   Men who worked on steam traction faced various work related injuries but above all the occupation required toughness because of the poor (to us) working conditions and hence produced people who could survive but all too often with work related conditions such as rheumatism which affected their mobility in later life.

 

When the former GWR MAS (= Mutual Aid Society -  a pension fund originally run by GWR footplate staff and only open to those in or who had been in those grades) was wound up in the early 1970s it had about 800 members most of whom were over 75 with a substantial number over 80 and a few over 90.  Quite what they did with their 12p per week (on average)  pension I'm not sure but of course when the fund started half a crown a week went quite a long way.

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2 hours ago, The Stationmaster said:

A Top Link Driver at a large depot in steam days would be very unlikely to be under 50-55 years of age and in fact in some depots well into dieselisation times


I can well believe it. I’m told my depot had a reputation as being quite “stagnant,” for promotion until about the late 80’s. 
 

I’ve hear a lot of the older guys talking about people retiring as second-men. 
 

The running joke was that when men from our depot went to a “foreign,” messroom, the TCS couldn’t tell which was the driver and which was the second man.

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15 hours ago, NorthEndCab said:

It also seems to be a common theme that they didn’t survive long after retirement. I don’t know whether that was peculiar the the footplate grade In those days though?

 

 

Also seemed to apply to PW Supervisors into the 1980's running up and down embankments at 64, dead by 66.

 

The P Way also seem to suffer from dodgy knees, to the extent that the condition has acquired the name of ballast knee. Think how your legs feel after a day on a shingle beach then try it for nearly 50 years.

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4 hours ago, Trog said:

 

Also seemed to apply to PW Supervisors into the 1980's running up and down embankments at 64, dead by 66.

 

The P Way also seem to suffer from dodgy knees, to the extent that the condition has acquired the name of ballast knee. Think how your legs feel after a day on a shingle beach then try it for nearly 50 years.

One of the PerWay supervisors at Reading got up from his office chair on his very last day at work on his 65th birthday, put on his overcoat, said cheerio to his colleagues, started to open the door - and dropped dead.  But he had always been known to smoke at least 40 Capstan Full Strength every day and around 60 a day when he was out site supervising at weekends.

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15 minutes ago, The Stationmaster said:

One of the PerWay supervisors at Reading got up from his office chair on his very last day at work on his 65th birthday, put on his overcoat, said cheerio to his colleagues, started to open the door - and dropped dead.  But he had always been known to smoke at least 40 Capstan Full Strength every day and around 60 a day when he was out site supervising at weekends.



Did he qualify for “Death in Service”?

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11 hours ago, NorthEndCab said:



Did he qualify for “Death in Service”?

Don't know but he definitely hadn't left the premises and I'm sure knowing the London Division Welfare Officer in those days he would have done his best to get the most advantageous financial arrangement for the  bereaved.    In fact without checking back through the pension fund rules I think it didn't make much difference in terms of pension lump sum payment if a member of salaried staff died in the first year of retirement.  Certainly in later years if you were in the BR combined salaried staff fund the lump sum on death tapered down over several years although it worked differently if you'd gone on redundancy or, differently again i think, on an ill-health pension.

20 hours ago, NorthEndCab said:


I can well believe it. I’m told my depot had a reputation as being quite “stagnant,” for promotion until about the late 80’s. 
 

I’ve hear a lot of the older guys talking about people retiring as second-men. 
 

The running joke was that when men from our depot went to a “foreign,” messroom, the TCS couldn’t tell which was the driver and which was the second man.

Coming back to this one there were indeed men who retired, at age 65, as Secondmen but it tended to be - if not exclusively - in the more remote areas such as on the West Highland line.

 

On the Western the introduction of HSTs had a massive effect on Seniority Dates because of the need for a second Driver  - Exeter and Penzance were probably the most extreme examples where the Seniority dates had been stuck very much in the late early '50s right into the mid 1980sand they sudden;y leapt forward by a decade or more.   One of my Drivers had a First Preference recorded for Penzance and on the basis of the longstanding Seniority Date there he would have retired before he could have got back.  But with the additional jobs his turn came up so it was into the office to be told 'you're starting at Penzance on Monday week'. plus our usual slightly unconventional question asking him if we'd 'lost' his note cancelling his First Preference?  We'd lost no bits of paper and Geoff went off back to his original depot a fairly happy man. 

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17 hours ago, The Stationmaster said:

One of the PerWay supervisors at Reading got up from his office chair on his very last day at work on his 65th birthday, put on his overcoat, said cheerio to his colleagues, started to open the door - and dropped dead.  But he had always been known to smoke at least 40 Capstan Full Strength every day and around 60 a day when he was out site supervising at weekends.

 

He had probably been working more than seven days a week since the day he joined the railway.

 

So his hobby was probably track work.

His social life was probably discussing track with his friends.

His friends were his work colleagues as they were the only people he ever met.

Wife complains about him talking about track in his sleep, guess what he dreams about.

(Probably one of those weird surreal dreams where the S&T staff get out of their van emerge blinking into the light and offer to help.)

 

So what point retiring when work is your life, poor chap probably had nothing left to live for? 

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18 hours ago, Trog said:

 

He had probably been working more than seven days a week since the day he joined the railway.

 

So his hobby was probably track work.

His social life was probably discussing track with his friends.

His friends were his work colleagues as they were the only people he ever met.

Wife complains about him talking about track in his sleep, guess what he dreams about.

(Probably one of those weird surreal dreams where the S&T staff get out of their van emerge blinking into the light and offer to help.)

 

So what point retiring when work is your life, poor chap probably had nothing left to live for? 

Apart from the last bit I think in some respects you might be right.  He was very definitely looking forward to retirement which he had said would allow him a lot more time to do anything other than work.  As he was a regular at possession planning meeting I'm sure that he spent a lot of time out on the jobs he had been involved in planning.  Strangely he shared a surname with a well known former CM&EE although he always said that he wasn't related to said gentleman (possibly because that man had forsaken the GWR to join the LMS??).  Some of these names did last on the Western - I used to work regularly on various jobs with a chap called Churchward and he was definitely related to G.J. of that name (he wasn't on the PerWay but in train planning).  My secretary in my final big railway job had previously worked for a chap called Urie who happened to be distantly related to the former loco superintendent of that name.

 

Another one who suffered early death because of past perway work was one of my great grandfathers who actually worked on the 1892 GWR gauge conversion - he retired in 1927 and died within a year of retirement mainly as a result of lifting (probably levering) a derailed empty ballast wagon off a fellow member of the gang.  Strangely he and his brother are just about the only named members of the Uffington PerWay gang in a picture in Vaughan's book about the Faringdon branch.

 

Going back to footplatemen one of my one time Drivers (on light duties by then following an injury) came from a family of GWR footplatemen who could trace their footplate time back to the broad gauge.

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I can certainly call to mind a couple of Canton drivers, old school men, who did not adapt to retirement and 'went downhill' with nothing to do.  One drank himself to death tragically in a bedsit, never having been married; in work he was always smartly dressed and immaculately turned out, fancied himself as a bit of a ladies man, but was found in a filthy flat surrounded by sherry bottles and ankle deep in fag ends, a terrible end and only discovered when his landlord came around to complain he was behind with the rent.  Another man who turned to the bottle in retirement was thrown out by his wife and I found him sleeping rough under the Taff bridge, listening to the trains he used to drive.  Gave him a fiver, and told him to spend it on hot food, but...

 

The first of these was a man who lived close to the shed and could have kept in touch, or had an eye kept on him, had he frequented the shed's pub, the Craddock, now long gone,  He'd have been able to chat to his mates, might even have got a cab ride occasionally, but he simply went to ground, his life destroyed by separation from his work.  I do think it is tragic when a man's work becomes his life, and I've known a few of this sort over the years, grabbing as much overtime as they can get not for the money, but because they don' t want to go home to the missus.  Or the 4 walls of the empty bedsit.

 

Any boss I've ever worked for will tell you that I am ideally suited to a life of complete idleness, and when health issues made me retire 'on the sick' at the age of 45 it took me about 20 minutes to adapt completely to it!  

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On 07/09/2020 at 11:52, TheSignalEngineer said:

 

 

Personally the hardest and hottest work I did was taking turns as blacksmith's striker.

Mine was working on an pack cementation aluminide coatings line. Although the desciption sounds all technical, my part basically consisted of hitting metal boxes with a sledgehammer in 'warm' surrounding for 9 hours a day.

Half inch welded steel boxes (retorts) had 3 foot turbine blades placed upright in them and then were packed around with aluminium powder and heated to coat the blade. My job was to remove the blades from the densely packed powder by loosening it by 'percussive' methods. I built up some muscle that summer...

Plus point was that it was beside the ECML

Edited by Talltim
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3 hours ago, The Stationmaster said:

Strangely he shared a surname with a well known former CM&EE although he always said that he wasn't related to said gentleman (possibly because that man had forsaken the GWR to join the LMS??).  Some of these names did last on the Western - I used to work regularly on various jobs with a chap called Churchward and he was definitely related to G.J. of that name (he wasn't on the PerWay but in train planning).  My secretary in my final big railway job had previously worked for a chap called Urie who happened to be distantly related to the former loco superintendent of that name.

I worked a few times with a Stanier at Birmingham. 

Regarding my family I don't know of any connections with famous names but we had family members working on signalling for about 120 years. I also found that one family member worked as a carpenter for Evans O'Donnell, predecessors of Westinghouse at Chippenham. 

There were a whole string littered thoughout the Cousins, Uncles and Aunts somewhere approaching 20 and counting. 

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4 hours ago, The Stationmaster said:

 

............................

Going back to footplatemen one of my one time Drivers (on light duties by then following an injury) came from a family of GWR footplatemen who could trace their footplate time back to the broad gauge.

 

1789247838_FamilySmall.jpg.e06850850d18a5257444784caf8d39b1.jpg

 

My Great, Great Grandfather centre surrounded by his sons in their railway uniforms. Five generations later I retired from an office a couple of miles away from the farm where he grew up. Us LNWR types don't seem to feel the need to move around looking for greener grass in quite the same way the employees of lesser railways do.

 

The nearest I came to meeting a Great Name was at a PWI meeting where the speaker had as a young boy been taken to see an old gaffer living in the Ealing railway village who as a young man had once offered to make IK Brunel a coffee, and apparently been told where to stick it.

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The large American aircraft carriers have some 5,000 staff, most of which live semi-permanently l below decks.  The national makeup ( I understand) is largely Mexican, Puerto Rican, Filipino and other Asiatic origins. Being nuclear powered, at least the stokers are a thing of the past. However, These service staff must have a very restricted life, never going above the flight deck. 

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9 hours ago, Trog said:

 

1789247838_FamilySmall.jpg.e06850850d18a5257444784caf8d39b1.jpg

 

My Great, Great Grandfather centre surrounded by his sons in their railway uniforms. Five generations later I retired from an office a couple of miles away from the farm where he grew up. Us LNWR types don't seem to feel the need to move around looking for greener grass in quite the same way the employees of lesser railways do.

 

The nearest I came to meeting a Great Name was at a PWI meeting where the speaker had as a young boy been taken to see an old gaffer living in the Ealing railway village who as a young man had once offered to make IK Brunel a coffee, and apparently been told where to stick it.

Wow.  I once spoke to a retired driver at the Severn Tunnel Jc BRSA in the 70s; he was pushing 100 and reckoned to have fired on broad gauge 'Corsair' saddle tanks at Bristol Temple Meads goods depot, which I thought was pretty impressive!  This BRSA had a 'backwards' clock, which caused a good bit of panic at times.  The Rogiet pub down the road had the most foul mouthed Mynah Bird I have ever come across, and they seem to be predisposed to that sort of thing...

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