Last time BR put a fogman on duty?

[Welly]

Walking in the fog yesterday made me wonder when the last time a fogman (or fogperson?) was actually put on duty in fog? I imagine that would have been sometime in the 1970s?

 

Anyone know?

[Mol_PMB]

Good question, and I'm afraid I've no idea. But I'm going to hazard a guess it is more recent than the 1970s and possibly continued as a valid option in some locations until the roll-out of GSM-R communications?

Mol

[Edwin_m]

Didn't fitment of AWS effectively make them  unnecessary?  Having said that I'm not sure AWS got to all the more obscure routes until sometime in the 1990s.  

 

I don't believe they were ever considered necessary at colour light distants either.  

Edited December 18, 2021 by Edwin_m

[micknich2003]

I started has a signalman 1979, and I have no recollection of Fogmen.

[The Stationmaster]

I can't ever remember having Fogmen out - Snowmen (no laughs please) very much a 'yes' - but Fogmen no.  Generally Fogmen were not provided at Distant Signals which had ATC (GWR/WR) or AWS (BR,various) and they were not normally provided for colour light distant signals.  

 

Overall that probably still left potential for requiring them in some places possibly into the late 1970s or maybe even the very early '80s.  But by 1972 the Block Regulations had altered to such an extent that it was possible to carry on working without Fogmen (albeit with reduction of line capacity) and that really reflected the near impossibility of actually being able to find any.

[Wheatley]

I suspect they formally ended with the 1972 Rule Book changes but I doubt there were many places still using them by then. I started in 1987 and they had been replaced by double block working where semaphore distant were still in use. 

Edited December 18, 2021 by Wheatley

[33C]

I had "fogmen" flagging and detting an emergency speed order in a thick fog at Dagenham in 2003. ( 2 dets, 20 yards apart, yellow flag waved side to side, reduce speed to 20mph immediately to commencement, yellow held steady to termination, green waved side to side. Scared the crap out of me when they went off, but that's the point! 

Edited December 18, 2021 by 33C
added detail

[Michael Hodgson]

4 hours ago, Welly said:

Walking in the fog yesterday made me wonder when the last time a fogman (or fogperson?) was actually put on duty in fog? I imagine that would have been sometime in the 1970s?

 

Anyone know?

Was it foggy in the 1970s then ?

[D826]

Defo remember detonators going off in fog round Brum on an Aberdeen  to Plymouth 125, circa 1986.

 

The old man said you wouldn't believe how foggy it got on the Met/ex GC lines out of Neasden to Harrow on the Hill, Watford Met/ Aylesbury etc circa 1952 - 1970.

 

Best regards 

 

Matt W

[doilum]

13 hours ago, Michael Hodgson said:

Was it foggy in the 1970s then ?

It was was proper fog. Not uncommon to have up to five or six days in the year when visibility was best measured in inches. 

[Nearholmer]

I’m not sure whether fog has genuinely reduced since the 70s, because I moved from one part of the country to another in 1982, and the micro-climate is different, but certainly there were some very thick fogs in the 70s.

 

But, although our local line was deeply trad semaphore-signalled, I never saw or heard of frogmen. PWay staff were deployed in falling snow to keep points clear, and I think to clear signal arms and lenses, and I do recall trains creeping about like snails in heavily falling snow because drivers wanted to be certain to see the signals. PWay were also at the line side for odd ESRs.

 

I do well recall being on a train that completely overshot a country station in the dark/fog, and had to back-up to let the passengers off, but that was a station with (by that time) no signals. The station lights, which would have been the formal marker, were notably feeble, and I think the drivers normally navigated by the “general lightscape”, which had temporarily disappeared in the murk.

[johnb]

 Indeed it was that thick, I recall being on a Met train, would have been a bit earlier though around 1955/60, in 'T' stock (slam doors) crawling along between North Harrow and Pinner slowing right down at times with the guard calling out 'Not the station yet!" The clue to the driver was no more than a lit hurricane lamp placed at the top of the approach ramp, which is why he was creeping along.

[Oldddudders]

Double-block working was a nightmare for timekeeping. Rush-hour services, used to running at close intervals, were now kept much further apart for all the right reasons. The Dartford group of lines, served by 4 different routes from London converging on that station, was wont to suffer very badly, I was told, with trains up to an hour late arriving, only a dozen miles from London. 

 

The 1971 resignalling, together with a fourth platform at Dartford, transformed things. 

[doilum]

Perhaps much to do with the loss of heavy industry and domestic coal fires, but I cannot recall a " proper" fog this century. Memories of car journies with the passenger hanging out of the window trying to follow the curb or the night I abandoned the car at the top of the drive and took the motorcycle to collect my future wife from work were not unique. At school we even had a fog protocol. The headmaster would stand by the statue at breaktime and, if he couldn't see the front gate, we were going home early. The bus companies refused to run in the fog after dark.

[Nearholmer]

If it was a function of heavy industry, it’s reach must have been very large, because I grew up in The Weald, near the Kent/Sussex border, which hasn’t had any heavy industry to speak of since iron-making moved from charcoal to coal in the mid-C18th. It’s an area, like the Chilterns but more so because it is nearer to the sea, that gets heavy mist/fog because of the way the hills trap layers of air of different temperatures and humidities, but in the 70s we were getting really thick fogs even up at c700ft, well above the valleys. I’d assumed that subtle climate change had altered things, in that what leads to fog is stagnant air, an absence of wind, a condition that seems very unusual now (except this week!).

[Harlequin]

The following story is bit tangential but it really stayed with me after I read it! (In the Signalling Record Autumn 2021 - so quite recent):

 

Handsworth and Smethwick signal box in the 1950's. There are 4 lines passing the box and a ladder of crossovers between them and further sidings and avoiding lines outside.

 

In the fog it was often impossible to know what train had passed on which line, in which direction or to see the tail lights! So the signalman was assisted by a "tail lamp man" who would stand in the ten foot between the main and relief lines and shout up to the box.

 

So that he knew where he was and didn't accidentally stray into the path of a passing train, the tail lamp man would stand in the fixed crossing between the up relief and down main lines and if the fog was really thick he would light fires to show him the limits of his "safe area".

 

That sounds scary enough but when the fixed crossing needed to be used, the signalman would shout down to the tail lamp man and he would stand aside from his normal safe area and then try to go back to it after the train had crossed.

 

Would you do that job? It sounds like the stuff of nightmares to me!

 

[doilum]

43 minutes ago, Nearholmer said:

If it was a function of heavy industry, it’s reach must have been very large, because I grew up in The Weald, near the Kent/Sussex border, which hasn’t had any heavy industry to speak of since iron-making moved from charcoal to coal in the mid-C18th. It’s an area, like the Chilterns but more so because it is nearer to the sea, that gets heavy mist/fog because of the way the hills trap layers of air of different temperatures and humidities, but in the 70s we were getting really thick fogs even up at c700ft, well above the valleys. I’d assumed that subtle climate change had altered things, in that what leads to fog is stagnant air, an absence of wind, a condition that seems very unusual now (except this week!).

Lack of winter anticyclones also explains why deep frosts have also become so rare.

[2E Sub Shed]

1 hour ago, doilum said:

Memories of car journies with the passenger hanging out of the window trying to follow the curb 

Remember doing that after a work's Christmas dinner late one December evening  in early 1990's down the A4 in the Kennet Valley between Newbury and Hungerford . 

[KingEdwardII]

2 hours ago, doilum said:

At school we even had a fog protocol.

That made me smile - the place I used to work is a converted country house estate, miles from anywhere but with up to 2,000 folk working in the offices there. The management had a "Snow Protocol" - as soon as 2 flakes of snow were seen falling on the place, everyone was packed off home.

 

The reason for this approach was very simple - the managers did not want to face the prospect of dealing with up to 2,000 employees stranded and unable to get home.

 

Fortunately, this is all in the "soft South" and so snow was not a common occurrence. However, we had one particularly nasty experience of Thundersnow at the dark end of a midwinter afternoon. Everyone was told to go home, but by the time we were on the roads leading away from the place it was already chaos, with very heavy snow descending, the roads well covered with the white stuff and vehicles sliding around all over the place. 

 

Yours, Mike.

[KingEdwardII]

1 hour ago, doilum said:

Lack of winter anticyclones also explains why deep frosts have also become so rare.

Hmm, it's perhaps easy to forget, but December 2010 was the coldest December in the UK since the start of the 20th century. A real bone chiller. -10C even in south Hampshire where I live. You have to go well back into the Victorian era to find anything colder in December.

 

https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/binaries/content/assets/metofficegovuk/pdf/weather/learn-about/uk-past-events/interesting/2010/snow-and-low-temperatures-december-2010---met-office.pdf

 

Despite "global warming" the UK is still capable of some really cold winters - let's just hope we don't get anything like 62/63 again.

 

Yours, Mike.

[boxbrownie]

2 hours ago, doilum said:

At school we even had a fog protocol. The headmaster would stand by the statue at breaktime and, if he couldn't see the front gate, we were going home early. The bus companies refused to run in the fog after dark.

Blimey, you were lucky……back in the 60’s when it was smog we had to walk to and from school in a caterpillar line, was so thick you couldn’t see more than the kid in front…….never got to go home early 

[Nearholmer]

2 hours ago, doilum said:

Lack of winter anticyclones also explains why deep frosts have also become so rare.

Again, it may be a function of having moved to an area that has different local climate, but dry, cold, clear, biting-east-wind anticyclones  still seem to occur, but I’d agree with you that the sort that gives damp, cold-but-not-so-cold, sheet of leaden low cloud, and barely a puff of wind for days on end, which are the ones that make fog, do seem rarer. Definitely like that out this afternoon: foggy already, and thickening. Even the dog didn’t really seem keen on it!

 

 

Edited December 19, 2021 by Nearholmer

[doilum]

1 hour ago, boxbrownie said:

Blimey, you were lucky……back in the 60’s when it was smog we had to walk to and from school in a caterpillar line, was so thick you couldn’t see more than the kid in front…….never got to go home early 

We were bused in from a catchment the size of Malta!

[Michael Hodgson]

3 hours ago, boxbrownie said:

Blimey, you were lucky……back in the 60’s when it was smog we had to walk to and from school in a caterpillar line, was so thick you couldn’t see more than the kid in front…….never got to go home early 

I remember frequent extremely thick fogs in the Warrington area in the early 1960s, particularly close to the Manchester Ship Canal - I walked to Junior School 100 yards from it and sometimes walked into lamp posts because visibility was so bad.  There were flare lamps with naked flames (like aladdin's lamp) placed at the kerbside so that traffic could see the main road.  However the situation improved vastly following implementation of the Clean Air Acts, and I don't remember remotely as bad a problem during the late 1960s when  houses had switched from coal fires to central heating and factories had to restrict the pollution generated by their chimneys.  I was going to Grammar School by then and buses managed OK. Lymm wasn't quite as close to the Ship Canal though.

[boxbrownie]

2 hours ago, doilum said:

We were bused in from a catchment the size of Malta!

Well I lived in a small place called London at the time