requesting wagons

[Nearholmer]

I will repeat a story that ‘did the rounds’ in the late 1970s, regarding a van found somewhere at Southampton, at the end of a long-disused siding.

 

When it was opened, it contained a full shipment of utility furniture, presumably consigned in the 1940s, and certainly un-touched since.

 

 

[rodent279]

1 hour ago, Nearholmer said:

I will repeat a story that ‘did the rounds’ in the late 1970s, regarding a van found somewhere at Southampton, at the end of a long-disused siding.

 

When it was opened, it contained a full shipment of utility furniture, presumably consigned in the 1940s, and certainly un-touched since.

 

 

I bet there weren't many gold bullion vans that went missing!

[Rivercider]

9 hours ago, C126 said:

May I just ask a supplementary question to this, which has been nagging me since seeing the B.T.F. 'T.O.P.S.' film suggested on a different thread: where were 'spare' wagons stabled?  If I remember correctly, yards came under an 'Area Freight Centre', which allocated wagons to the traffic required for each daily freight train.  Would a 'Vanfit' be nabbed as empty from the nearest siding, or sent from a 'pool' somewhere?  I.e., did the A.F.C. have a rake of sidings filled with wagons ready to go out and earn their keep?  I am interested in the T.O.P.S. era, early 1970's to mid '80's.  Many thanks to all, and for the replies above, including the original question.

In the TOPS era 'common user' wagons like standard vanfits would be distributed according to a TOPS Movement Instruction (MI). In each Area Freight Centre (AFC) the freight rolling stock clerk, or nominated clerk, made a daily input to the Central Wagon Authority (CWA) for wagon loading requirements for the TOPS Responsibility Area. Each TRA had a number of MIs for regularly requested wagon types.

When a wagon of the correct type was released empty in that location, or at a yard nearby it would pick up the empty destination of the requesting yard. Ideally a wagon of the correct type would become available at the yard concerned, though sometimes the empties might come from some distance away. 

From my time in the Bristol TRA starting in 1978 we did not keep a stock of empty common user wagons of any type. All requirements for empty loading were supplied as required against a TOPS MI.

In our area we needed various empties at time:-

Empty VVVs vanfits to load bagged fertiliser from ICI Severnside.

Empty HTVs and HTOs 21t hoppers to load imported house coal at Avonmouth Docks.

Empty VEAs to load explosives from ROF Puriton.

Empty MCOs 16t mins to load scrap from Stapleton Road.

Empty VAA/VBA to load imported bagged cocoa beans at Avonmouth Docks.

Empty Belgian 'roll-top' ferry vans to load ingots from Commonwealth Smelting for export.

Also various other occasional traffic.  

 

Obviously the situation would be different elsewhere, no doubt coal empties would collect in certain yards, steel empties near steelworks, and empty vanfits in East Anglia against the seasonal traffic of bagged beet pulp nuts,

 

cheers 

Edited April 20, 2021 by Rivercider

[Trog]

7 hours ago, Rivercider said:

Ha!

 

As the WR Civil Engineers wagon supervisor my dad was on the other side.

Part of his job was chasing up lost or delayed wagons. He might visit a yard looking for a salmon of rails

which had apparently been on hand for 2 weeks only to find it empty. Then when he tried to make arrangements for it to be shunted out was told by the local pway that 'we are loading that with scrap in three weeks time'.

Of course the wagon might well have been needed somewhere else that coming weekend. Oh what fun he had at times.

 

cheers

 

 

He might have had a bit of trouble finding my Tench, as I had the local shunter move it from the siding where it would probably last have been reported to TOPs into a works, travelling over a canal bridge that had been replaced but not yet decked. So if walking across it as we did while installing the rails you had to walk on the long timbers, the four foot and field sides of the bridge 'deck' being an open ten foot drop into the canal. (No warning signs as you walked down the track you just came to the abutment and found this big hole with a couple of waybeams across it.) Then loaded with what had been the S&C leading to the siding the Tench wagon was on, so that it and its load would still be there when I had connected the siding back to some other S&C  just down the line in a couple of days as I had a use for the original S&C elsewhere in the works.

 

I had reason for taking precautions as the Supervisor who wanted the Tench had form for acquiring things, needing a sliding buffer after a driver had gone a little further than usual up the Abbey Branch. He had gone down to Hither Green with our area BR yellow hi-ab lorry and driver and craned a suitable buffer from their stock onto the lorry and driven off with it.

[The Stationmaster]

7 hours ago, rodent279 said:

I bet there weren't many gold bullion vans that went missing!

None that I ever heard of.  But on the other hand I definitely know of one occasion in 1965 when the keys for a Bullion Van went missing - and not just one set but both sets.  it wasn't unusual for the set sent to somewhere down country to occasionally take a while to be returned but that would hardly count as missing.  But when no trace of either set of keys could be found for the better part of two weeks I think that probably does count as 'missing'

 

Oddly the last load which that van carried had been gold bullion from Avonmouth Docks although that had reached its desination safely and been unloaded..

[Michael Hodgson]

1 hour ago, The Stationmaster said:

None that I ever heard of.  But on the other hand I definitely know of one occasion in 1965 when the keys for a Bullion Van went missing - and not just one set but both sets.  it wasn't unusual for the set sent to somewhere down country to occasionally take a while to be returned but that would hardly count as missing.  But when no trace of either set of keys could be found for the better part of two weeks I think that probably does count as 'missing'

 

 

So did they ever find the keys ... or was it necesary to blow the bloody doors off?

[The Johnster]

I doubt if any of the Big 4 could have stated with any absolute certainty how many wagons they had or where all those they knew about were at any given time, loaded or empty, and BR was much the same pre-TOPS.  Wagons would disappear into large industrial complexes, possibly to be appropriated for internal use or even buried in slag heaps.  One hears of wagons in service with different numbers on each works plate, sometimes neither matching the painted number.  People made mistakes, entered transposed numbers, there were duplications of numbers, wagons got destroyed or shunted into docks and ringers sent back to the railways, loads were stolen and responsibility hidden by changing a wagon’s identity; there was occasional jiggerypokery. 
 

At the grouping, the big 4 never fully reconciled what they had on the books with what they had on the tracks, and pooling and wartime confusion did not help.  How do you accurately determine the running number of a wagon destroyed in an air raid, in the aftermath of which it might be difficult to discern a wagon at all, never mind which one it was!  So BR were faced with the same inaccuracies in their turn. 
 

The thing about the utility furniture story is that nobody immediately jumped up and loudly asserted that such a thing was impossible, because everybody knew that it was entirely possible!

 

4 minutes ago, rodent279 said:

I bet there weren't many gold bullion vans that went missing!

Hmm. Probably not, but if one did it might be unreported for various reasons, perhaps being considered ‘not in the public interest’ especially when the crime was ‘victimless’.  It may have been thought more important to prevent such publicity damaging customer confidence in the service. 

 

I was aware of a container of 50p coins, about £2m in value, that vanished en route from Llantrisant to the Bank of England in the mid  70s, apparently going AWOL between Acton and Stratford; IIRC this was never reported, despite being the same amount lost in the 1963 ‘Great Train Robbery’.  In another incident, an aluminium ingot worth a few hundred £k was lifted from a freightliner service at Crwmlyn Burrows while the train was waiting to be called forward into Danygraig liner terminal, again mid 70s. 
 

Bullion is pretty closely monitored by the Transport Police, though, and a heist would be difficult unless it was an ‘inside’ job, as the 50p heist must have been.  The guard of a container train has no idea what is in the boxes, and somebody must have known which exact box to remove from the train. 

 

[br2975]

Possibly, due to its' more localised operation......no one has mentioned the predecessor to TOPS; namely  "CPC" (Continuous Progress Control) yet ?

Edited April 21, 2021 by br2975

[rodent279]

If, as in the case of the van full of utility furniture, a wagon is (was) discovered whose contents were not claimed, and the originator could not be traced, what was done with the contents? Was it sold off? Or did it "fall off the back of a wagon" ?

Edited April 21, 2021 by rodent279

[The Stationmaster]

8 hours ago, Michael Hodgson said:

 

So did they ever find the keys ... or was it necesary to blow the bloody doors off?

Both sets eventually turned up at the place they had been sent to. What happened was that said place reported that they couldn't find the keys (the first set) and that they had therefore gone missing so the second set was sent down to them and they promptly lost those as well.  That in turn meant thatteh van which had been sent down for the job couldn't be loaded so there was no security risk 0 f ortunately.

 

It was quite a difficiult proposition to lose a Noil van (Noil was the telegraphic code for these vans on the Western, presumably used because it meant nothing to most people) as even their empty workings were very closely monitored so their whereabouts were always known because arrivals at outstations were always advised by wire and they were only moved on booked trains.

 

2 hours ago, rodent279 said:

If, as in the case of the van full of utility furniture, a wagon is (was) discovered whose contents were not claimed, and the originator could not be traced, what was done with the contents? Was it sold off? Or did it "fall off the back of a wagon" ?

Every week into the 1970s the General Instructions Circular contained a list of lost (loaded) wagons and a list of loaded wagons on hand without labels and the fun bit was looking through it to see if the same wagon number appeared in both lists - which it very occasionally did.   Any goods that could not be traced to a consignee or back to the consignor - which was a very rare event as packages were almost invariably labelled with some details - were disposed f of by tender.  Far more common for going missing or astray or otherwise lost or turning up without labels were items of parcels traffic and most larger parcels offices had a clerk devoted to dealing with missing and tracing and POD (proof of delivery work).  That also went on for goods smalls but most of the work there was POD rather than missing but occasionally the GIC would have an entry about a missing load.

 

3 hours ago, br2975 said:

Possibly, due to its' more localised operation......no one has mentioned the predecessor to TOPS; namely  "CPC" (Continuous Progress Control) yet ?

I didn't work in South Wales until after the CPC experiment had ended but very few people seemed to have a good word for it and some were anti-TOPs because they thought it might be no better than CPC had been.  Apparently the big problem with CPC was that it was very much a RIRO system (Rubbish In Rubbish Out) and the data it held was quickly corrupted by poor reporting so places might (and did) find themselves being instructed to forward empties which they didn't actually have on hand.  The advantage of TOPS was that it used what amounted to a sort of relational database approach which because it worked on individual wagon numbers and matched details from the wagon files against the location or train files made it far more reliable.  TOPS could even pick up if somebody taking and reporting wagon numbers had got one wrong - as long as there weren't two wagons with the same number although that was found to be very rare.   (It was far more common to come across wagons which had two different numbers and even, very occasionally three different numbers but that could usually be resolved by checking the cast wagon plate to make sure the painted numbers agreed with it.  But all of this was only a problem when wagon details were. first being loaded to the system and the painted number(s) could be altered to match the plated number.  A big problem,  which was very rare, was if a wagon was found to have two different plated numbers.)

[Fat Controller]

Mike,

I often used to see references to 'Control' freights, most notably in the section of the South Wales WTTs dedicated to Conditional workings. Would these be to clear out the 'Empties' around Swansea Docks, for example?

[Bucoops]

4 hours ago, The Stationmaster said:

Both sets eventually turned up at the place they had been sent to. What happened was that said place reported that they couldn't find the keys (the first set) and that they had therefore gone missing so the second set was sent down to them and they promptly lost those as well.  That in turn meant thatteh van which had been sent down for the job couldn't be loaded so there was no security risk 0 f ortunately.

 

It was quite a difficiult proposition to lose a Noil van (Noil was the telegraphic code for these vans on the Western, presumably used because it meant nothing to most people) as even their empty workings were very closely monitored so their whereabouts were always known because arrivals at outstations were always advised by wire and they were only moved on booked trains.

 

Every week into the 1970s the General Instructions Circular contained a list of lost (loaded) wagons and a list of loaded wagons on hand without labels and the fun bit was looking through it to see if the same wagon number appeared in both lists - which it very occasionally did.   Any goods that could not be traced to a consignee or back to the consignor - which was a very rare event as packages were almost invariably labelled with some details - were disposed f of by tender.  Far more common for going missing or astray or otherwise lost or turning up without labels were items of parcels traffic and most larger parcels offices had a clerk devoted to dealing with missing and tracing and POD (proof of delivery work).  That also went on for goods smalls but most of the work there was POD rather than missing but occasionally the GIC would have an entry about a missing load.

 

I didn't work in South Wales until after the CPC experiment had ended but very few people seemed to have a good word for it and some were anti-TOPs because they thought it might be no better than CPC had been.  Apparently the big problem with CPC was that it was very much a RIRO system (Rubbish In Rubbish Out) and the data it held was quickly corrupted by poor reporting so places might (and did) find themselves being instructed to forward empties which they didn't actually have on hand.  The advantage of TOPS was that it used what amounted to a sort of relational database approach which because it worked on individual wagon numbers and matched details from the wagon files against the location or train files made it far more reliable.  TOPS could even pick up if somebody taking and reporting wagon numbers had got one wrong - as long as there weren't two wagons with the same number although that was found to be very rare.   (It was far more common to come across wagons which had two different numbers and even, very occasionally three different numbers but that could usually be resolved by checking the cast wagon plate to make sure the painted numbers agreed with it.  But all of this was only a problem when wagon details were. first being loaded to the system and the painted number(s) could be altered to match the plated number.  A big problem,  which was very rare, was if a wagon was found to have two different plated numbers.)

 

Surely disposed of by firebox rather than tender?

 

I'm rather enjoying this thread, it's fascinating, please all continue adding anecdotes!

[C126]

6 minutes ago, Bucoops said:

 

Surely disposed of by firebox rather than tender?

 

I'm rather enjoying this thread, it's fascinating, please all continue adding anecdotes!

 

May I just second Bucoops, and thank all for contributing.  It is this detailed operational information, the anecdotes, and specialist day-to-day knowledge necessary to do the job that can never be captured in memoirs or brief journal articles, and is quite incomprehensible to those of us who have never done these, often very complicated and specialist, railway jobs.  All the more important when this whole sector and way of life has gone forever.  Thank you all, and sorry I have not the time and energy to-day to 'Like' every contribution individually.

[sir douglas]

thanks to all replies, a lesser known behind the scenes inner workings of the system which i had no idea about

[HGR]

So far only wagons have been discussed, but bear in mind that coaching stock could get in on the act as well. Vehicles could and did regularly go 'missing', or find somewhere to hide for a while until the offending vehicle appeared on search lists. This happened both before and after stock going on to TOPS / POIS in the '80s. Vehicles misappropriated for mid-week use by other districts / regions or divisions seemed to be limited to the 'B' stock used for the summer daters (Saturdays-only excursions to the seaside usually), which resulted in regular Friday evening search parties around the region and ECS to recover the delinquents and work them back to their home depots in time for the week-end bucket & spade jollies. North Eastern allocations seemed to have an uncanny habit of not getting worked back off the LMR for some reason, but never did know where they went to hide other than Edge Hill or Red Banks used to be a good starting point for CCTs with numbers starting with an 'E' regional prefix ? A later attempt at keeping these on their correct circuit working involved painting a red band on them.

 

Once had a Mk.1 SK that we discovered had different numbers on either side (found literally after having walked down one side of the set, and back up the other side). Of course, coaches don't have the number on the cast works plate on the solebar, only the lot number / builder and year. This did allow us to rule out one of the two offered numbers. The other giveaway was by looking up the side of the coach body at a shallow angle, where you could see at least three sets of self-adhesive numbers with regional prefix letters from previous inter-regional transfers (before these were dropped when they went on POIS) hiding under the layers of equally numerous repaints with varying degrees of sanding down. What I did learn as part of this exercise is that some works used to stamp the vehicle number in half-inch high digits on the corner of the headstocks, which could be visible if the many layers of paint and years' worth of crud / brake block dust sealed in between had flaked off in the opportune place.

 

[rodent279]

18 minutes ago, HGR said:

So far only wagons have been discussed, but bear in mind that coaching stock could get in on the act as well. Vehicles could and did regularly go 'missing', or find somewhere to hide for a while until the offending vehicle appeared on search lists. This happened both before and after stock going on to TOPS / POIS in the '80s. Vehicles misappropriated for mid-week use by other districts / regions or divisions seemed to be limited to the 'B' stock used for the summer daters (Saturdays-only excursions to the seaside usually), which resulted in regular Friday evening search parties around the region and ECS to recover the delinquents and work them back to their home depots in time for the week-end bucket & spade jollies. North Eastern allocations seemed to have an uncanny habit of not getting worked back off the LMR for some reason, but never did know where they went to hide other than Edge Hill or Red Banks used to be a good starting point for CCTs with numbers starting with an 'E' regional prefix ? A later attempt at keeping these on their correct circuit working involved painting a red band on them.

 

Once had a Mk.1 SK that we discovered had different numbers on either side (found literally after having walked down one side of the set, and back up the other side). Of course, coaches don't have the number on the cast works plate on the solebar, only the lot number / builder and year. This did allow us to rule out one of the two offered numbers. The other giveaway was by looking up the side of the coach body at a shallow angle, where you could see at least three sets of self-adhesive numbers with regional prefix letters from previous inter-regional transfers (before these were dropped when they went on POIS) hiding under the layers of equally numerous repaints with varying degrees of sanding down. What I did learn as part of this exercise is that some works used to stamp the vehicle number in half-inch high digits on the corner of the headstocks, which could be visible if the many layers of paint and years' worth of crud / brake block dust sealed in between had flaked off in the opportune place.

 

Regarding coaching stock numbers, I guess theoretically at least, they would not get as indescribably filthy as freight stock, so less need to have cast ID plates on them. Though I do remember that parcels/newspaper vans could be a uniform shade of brown that almost looked like it could be paint!

[The Stationmaster]

23 hours ago, Fat Controller said:

Mike,

I often used to see references to 'Control' freights, most notably in the section of the South Wales WTTs dedicated to Conditional workings. Would these be to clear out the 'Empties' around Swansea Docks, for example?

'Control freights' - which were worked by Control Sets (of men) were basically there to seep up or take on anything in the way of surplus traffic being directed to whatever job was needed.  Technically they weren't even Conditional workings although they would sometimes use Conditional timetable paths.  A lot of this sort of working in South Wales was swept away by Bloc Plan and what remained in diagrammed and rostered turns became Manned Conditional turns which were jointly under local and Divisional control.

 

At Radyr in 1973 we had a 'short' and long' Manned Conditional turn on each shift. The short MC would normally work no further than the Tunnel (i.e Severn Tunnel Jcn) or Margam and often was used to supplement booked workings of empties from the empties segregation yard at East Usk.  Invariably it was used to move surplus traffic/empties that couldn't be cleared by booked services.  The 'long' MC did exactly the same but over longer distances so Acton was a not uncommon destination although officially Radyr men didn't know the road that far.  It was covered by our top link of 12 Drivers who were - in many respects accurately - known as the dirty dozen because of some of the tricks some of them got up to, they made the Saltley Seagulls and Didcot in its later days look like a bunch of beginners when it came to grabbing jobs and making overtime when they were out of sight - not unusual for them to get to Gloucester, Hereford or Swindon.  On one occasion I had a call from Control asking me to arrange relief for one of them who was on our ballast turn but had finished up between Ferryside and Carmarthen - where we definitely didn't have official route knowledge - and he was already over 12 hours on duty (we had an interesting conversation about his future the following day).

[HGR]

6 hours ago, The Stationmaster said:

'Control freights' - which were worked by Control Sets (of men) were basically there to seep up or take on anything in the way of surplus traffic being directed to whatever job was needed.  Technically they weren't even Conditional workings although they would sometimes use Conditional timetable paths.  A lot of this sort of working in South Wales was swept away by Bloc Plan and what remained in diagrammed and rostered turns became Manned Conditional turns which were jointly under local and Divisional control.

 

At Radyr in 1973 we had a 'short' and long' Manned Conditional turn on each shift. The short MC would normally work no further than the Tunnel (i.e Severn Tunnel Jcn) or Margam and often was used to supplement booked workings of empties from the empties segregation yard at East Usk.  Invariably it was used to move surplus traffic/empties that couldn't be cleared by booked services.  The 'long' MC did exactly the same but over longer distances so Acton was a not uncommon destination although officially Radyr men didn't know the road that far.  It was covered by our top link of 12 Drivers who were - in many respects accurately - known as the dirty dozen because of some of the tricks some of them got up to, they made the Saltley Seagulls and Didcot in its later days look like a bunch of beginners when it came to grabbing jobs and making overtime when they were out of sight - not unusual for them to get to Gloucester, Hereford or Swindon.  On one occasion I had a call from Control asking me to arrange relief for one of them who was on our ballast turn but had finished up between Ferryside and Carmarthen - where we definitely didn't have official route knowledge - and he was already over 12 hours on duty (we had an interesting conversation about his future the following day).

Yep ... the rubber route card ! Wonderful material they were made out of. Stretched a mile before it would tear an inch. Amazing how far you could get on one of those, back in the days before Hidden hours etc.

 

[johnofwessex]

On 20/04/2021 at 15:04, Nearholmer said:

I will repeat a story that ‘did the rounds’ in the late 1970s, regarding a van found somewhere at Southampton, at the end of a long-disused siding.

 

When it was opened, it contained a full shipment of utility furniture, presumably consigned in the 1940s, and certainly un-touched since.

 

 

 

I knew a former 2nd Engineer on the Bristol Queen.

 

In about 1960 they had to do major boiler work - I think the rivets in the shell had become 'joggled' 

 

They ordered a complete set of internal gubbins from the builders, Rankine & Blackmore in Glasgow to be sent to Cardiff (Furnaces, tubes & Combustion Chammbers.

 

Needless to say the shipment got lost, que much searching of railway yards

[Tom Burnham]

Gerry Fiennes has anecdotes about missing wagons/vans at Whitemoor (and how they got missing when rewards were offered for finding them again) in his books - "I tried to run a railway" and "Fiennes on rails".  Good insight into what happerned at the sharp end in the 1930s.

[The Stationmaster]

On 22/04/2021 at 17:45, HGR said:

Yep ... the rubber route card ! Wonderful material they were made out of. Stretched a mile before it would tear an inch. Amazing how far you could get on one of those, back in the days before Hidden hours etc.

 

One of Radyr's 'dirty dizen' has da most impressive route card - one of the best I've ever seen.  The link included a couple of route refresher days and this particular Driver used them well as he carefully researched, through a contact in the Divisional Office, what was going to happen in the coming week.  Hence one day i was looking for him only to be told by the Movements Supervisor that said Driver was 'refreshing the road to Acton.'  Now it was obvious that he really was out somewhere because in he definitely couldn't be seen in his garden t in the nearby row of railway cottages so i decided to await his return and duly deal with him.

 

I had his route card and much to my satisfaction found that he signed the road to Swindon (and beyond) via 'Chippingham' (among other alternatives).  So when he got back I told him very bluntly that he was trying it on and I didn't believe his route card properly reflected his route knowledge so I was going to ask him some questions - starting with the names of the stations, in order, between Bristol East Depot and Wootton Bassett after which we'd move on to things like signal boxes.  Alas for him he couldn't even remember which side of 'Chippingham' Bath happened to be so much crossing out of routes followed.

 

On the Western we introduced route norms, basically 5 days worked over a route in 12 weeks, in 1989/90 and we also started very much sectorising work around the depots - mainly concentrating freight work on particular depots that were best placed to do it. This was, in some respects, a follow on to the restricted number of depots which had been allowed to learn HSTs and various restrictions we'd placed on learning some traction types.  Alas a similar approach was not followed by other Regions for their depots so, for example, the number of SPADs involving Eastleigh men in the Saltley area didn''t decline.   But we did have great fun at the meeting when we took away from Brighton their last freight turn and moved it to a WR depot

[br2975]

The South Wales freight reorganisation of the late 60s decreed that EMPTY wagons arriving into, or returning to South Wales 'from England' would be directed as follows;

16 ton  and  21 ton minerals, and 21 ton hoppers to East Usk Junction, Newport.

20 ton coke hoppers to Radyr.

All steel carrying wagons to Newport, Alexandra Dock Junction.

All banana vans to Barry.

All Shocvans to Briton ferry

All 'cripples' to either Rogerstone or Roath Line Sidings. 

.

Wagons would then be distributed, as traffic demanded.

e.g. coke hoppers from Radyr to Bedwas, Nantgarw or Llantrisant

.

Early each Monday, several trains of empty mineral wagons left East Usk for places like Jersey Marine, Radyr, Bargoed Pits, the Western Valleys.

Edited April 27, 2021 by br2975

[NorthEndCab]

On 25/04/2021 at 11:48, The Stationmaster said:

One of Radyr's 'dirty dizen' has da most impressive route card - one of the best I've ever seen.  The link included a couple of route refresher days and this particular Driver used them well as he carefully researched, through a contact in the Divisional Office, what was going to happen in the coming week.  Hence one day i was looking for him only to be told by the Movements Supervisor that said Driver was 'refreshing the road to Acton.'  Now it was obvious that he really was out somewhere because in he definitely couldn't be seen in his garden t in the nearby row of railway cottages so i decided to await his return and duly deal with him.

 

I had his route card and much to my satisfaction found that he signed the road to Swindon (and beyond) via 'Chippingham' (among other alternatives).  So when he got back I told him very bluntly that he was trying it on and I didn't believe his route card properly reflected his route knowledge so I was going to ask him some questions - starting with the names of the stations, in order, between Bristol East Depot and Wootton Bassett after which we'd move on to things like signal boxes.  Alas for him he couldn't even remember which side of 'Chippingham' Bath happened to be so much crossing out of routes followed.

 

On the Western we introduced route norms, basically 5 days worked over a route in 12 weeks, in 1989/90 and we also started very much sectorising work around the depots - mainly concentrating freight work on particular depots that were best placed to do it. This was, in some respects, a follow on to the restricted number of depots which had been allowed to learn HSTs and various restrictions we'd placed on learning some traction types.  Alas a similar approach was not followed by other Regions for their depots so, for example, the number of SPADs involving Eastleigh men in the Saltley area didn''t decline.   But we did have great fun at the meeting when we took away from Brighton their last freight turn and moved it to a WR depot

They do say that when Neil Armstrong landed on the moon he was relieving a Saltley man...

[The Stationmaster]

10 hours ago, NorthEndCab said:

They do say that when Neil Armstrong landed on the moon he was relieving a Saltley man...

According to what I heard it was a Didcot man .  Conversation I witnessed early one morning as i was getting on a News train from Paddington with a Reading Driver & Secondman when we met a couple of dicot men heading for the same train,

Reading Driver to Didcot men - 'How's the road learning going?'

Didcot Driver -  'What road learning?'

Reading Driver - 'To the moon, it's about the only place left that where you lot don't know the road'

 

I must however admit that in much later (than back then) years I was instrumental in making sure that Didcot got a decent fair share of some particular work which others were looking to put elsewhere.