Jump to content
 

Why 'The Bunk'? eg. Malmesbury Bunk


TimC
 Share

Recommended Posts

  • RMweb Premium

During a Zoom call of modelling friends this evening it was asked why 'the bunk'?  when referring to branch line trains in the Wilts/Oxfordshire area.

 

The trains on a number of branches were called the 'Calne Bunk', 'Malmesbury Bunk', 'Abingdon Bunk' etc.  To be honest, until this evening I'd not come across this term.

 

Anyone any ideas?

Link to post
Share on other sites

Presumably no more than half the trains travelled bunker first [grin] Although I forget where I think I saw recently a mid 19thC reference to bunk as a tank engine, and wondered if there was a connection. 

  • Like 1
Link to post
Share on other sites

When I've heard this term used years ago by the 'old hands' it referred to specific lodging turns, particularly those that only came up occasionally. Long distance diagrams / workings where you didn't have the hours to get back - so you were put up in railway lodgings (usually a spare room in another railway worker's house in that area) to work home or come back 'on the cushions' the following day. Suspect it was historically more of a freight thing, as you could get regularly looped or 'put inside' to allow faster / passenger trains to pass, and spend a whole shift just to get a short distance covered. Booked arrival / WTT time on anything slower than a 6-speed was pretty much a hit-and-miss affair in the '80s.

  • Like 1
Link to post
Share on other sites

  • RMweb Gold
19 hours ago, HGR said:

When I've heard this term used years ago by the 'old hands' it referred to specific lodging turns, particularly those that only came up occasionally. Long distance diagrams / workings where you didn't have the hours to get back - so you were put up in railway lodgings (usually a spare room in another railway worker's house in that area) to work home or come back 'on the cushions' the following day. Suspect it was historically more of a freight thing, as you could get regularly looped or 'put inside' to allow faster / passenger trains to pass, and spend a whole shift just to get a short distance covered. Booked arrival / WTT time on anything slower than a 6-speed was pretty much a hit-and-miss affair in the '80s.

I've never heard that term used for lodging turns.  On the Western they were usually called 'Double Home turns/jobs' and they were mostly on passenger turns (e.g Old Oak Common. men lodged in Plymouth and - often regarded as the toughest of them all - Newton Abbot men lodged in Salop (plus obviously the opposite way round for the other two places).  So mainly passenger but there were probably some on freight jobs in earlier years.  

 

A pal of mine who was fireman at Top Shed always referred to them as lodging turns - one of their toughest being a Gateshead lodge job which involved working back south  a parcels train, often getting into the Cross with nothing but dust in the tender coal space.   On the non-stops of course London men lodged in Edinburgh and vice versa.

 

On my final 'big railway' job in the 1990s we officially called our lodging turns exactly that and I know our traincrew also called them that.  And I believe the same applied on Cross Country when they started lodging turns after privatisation.

 

Theuse of the word 'bunk' to describe various local branch passenger trains goes back a very long way into railway history and doesn't seem to have been universal but quite how it originated I've never been able to find out.  Possibly something to do with such turns being fairly 'soft' jobs for enginemen (so almost amounting to doing a bunk possibly?)  but it could be down to all sorts of things lost in the mists of time.   Another very old term was to call local station freight trips 'the fly' - again for reasons which are far from clear.

  • Like 3
  • Informative/Useful 2
Link to post
Share on other sites

17 hours ago, The Stationmaster said:

Newton Abbot men lodged in Salop 


Another olde wolde expression - one hopes they ended up in Shrewsbury lodgings rather than any of the many other places within the approx 1350 sq miles which was ‘Salop’ - which contained a range of other loco sheds :D:P including Wellington where, in BR (W) days at least, the station signs proclaimed it as Wellington (Salop), and also home to a loco shed.

 

Seriously though, interesting info - was the fly possibly anything to do with fly shunting - which may have occurred in these rural backwaters? 

Edited by MidlandRed
Link to post
Share on other sites

  • RMweb Premium
6 hours ago, MidlandRed said:

Seriously though, interesting info - was the fly possibly anything to do with fly shunting - which may have occurred in these rural backwaters? 

 

Or possibly, fly shunting was the sort of shunting done by "The Fly"?

Link to post
Share on other sites

  • RMweb Gold
11 hours ago, MidlandRed said:


Another olde wolde expression - one hopes they ended up in Shrewsbury lodgings rather than any of the many other places within the approx 1350 sq miles which was ‘Salop’ - which contained a range of other loco sheds :D:P including Wellington where, in BR (W) days at least, the station signs proclaimed it as Wellington (Salop), and also home to a loco shed.

 

Seriously though, interesting info - was the fly possibly anything to do with fly shunting - which may have occurred in these rural backwaters? 

Salop was the normal railway usage place name for Shrewsbury so I don't doubt for one minute that they ended up there.  Wlelington was of course referred to as Wellington (Salop) which is not the same as Salop.  Wellington (Salop) was in use as the place name on the GWR at least 20 years before nationalisation and probably long before that as there were two wellingtons on the GWR network. 

 

I would doubt that very much fly shunting was carried out by the vast majority of trip freight although I suspect that towing might well have occurred illicitly at certain place.   However in the oldest Rule Book I have - dating from 1877 - the term 'fly shunting' is clearly used not in the manner we now understand but instead of the term 'loose shunting'.  So it could well be the case that the use of the word 'fly' for a trip freight derived from that early usage of the term 'fly shunting'.  It is a name for a trip freight that appeared to have dropped out of general usage a long time ago although it might well have survived in one or two places long after fly shunting was defined as something very different from loose shunting.

  • Informative/Useful 3
Link to post
Share on other sites

Has the term fly come from the canal? Regular, timetabled passenger boats where known as "Flys"  (The Shropshire Fly being one, commemorated in at least one canal side pub name).  So called, allegedly, because they flew by the other boats, especially at locks.

  • Like 1
Link to post
Share on other sites

On 24/06/2021 at 11:43, The Stationmaster said:

Salop was the normal railway usage place name for Shrewsbury so I don't doubt for one minute that they ended up there.  Wlelington was of course referred to as Wellington (Salop) which is not the same as Salop.  Wellington (Salop) was in use as the place name on the GWR at least 20 years before nationalisation and probably long before that as there were two wellingtons on the GWR network. 

 

I would doubt that very much fly shunting was carried out by the vast majority of trip freight although I suspect that towing might well have occurred illicitly at certain place.   However in the oldest Rule Book I have - dating from 1877 - the term 'fly shunting' is clearly used not in the manner we now understand but instead of the term 'loose shunting'.  So it could well be the case that the use of the word 'fly' for a trip freight derived from that early usage of the term 'fly shunting'.  It is a name for a trip freight that appeared to have dropped out of general usage a long time ago although it might well have survived in one or two places long after fly shunting was defined as something very different from loose shunting.


Thanks Stationmaster - v informative as always. I suspect the use of Salop was, amongst many things railway, a quite antiquated terminology which just hung on (and even more so amongst railwaymen and the internal workings of the railway). By the time my interest in railways was burgeoning (early 60s), the shed and station were most definitely called Shrewsbury (particularly with the latter in Ian Allan publications including Locoshed and Shed Directory books etc). Shrewsbury was one of the last locations in the Midlands to retain an allocation of steam locos and contained withdrawn locos for some time (1967 IIRC). It was quite a run down establishment when I was taken there by my father, though there were a few standard class 4 tender locos on shed. 

Edited by MidlandRed
  • Like 1
Link to post
Share on other sites

Create an account or sign in to comment

You need to be a member in order to leave a comment

Create an account

Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!

Register a new account

Sign in

Already have an account? Sign in here.

Sign In Now
 Share

×
×
  • Create New...