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Little-seen corners of the railway


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  • RMweb Gold

Gosh, you are a clever lot - it is indeed Newton Abbot, the non-public side of the footbridge, now FGW offices.

 

And how did you guess my colleague and I were sheltering from the rain there?

 

Well, we were, a bit, and were waiting for this:

post-57-0-10353300-1403963707.jpg

 

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  • RMweb Gold

Well actually Station Managers since the late '60s, but in his case Stationmaster of course.

Just for the record I was actually an AM (as in Area Manager) as well as being an AAM and umpteen other things over the years but when I set my name up for RMweb I though 'stationmaster' had a more 'real railway' feel to it than the more modern titles and I did of course actually manage quite  few stations in my time (among other things including loco depots, various).

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  • RMweb Gold

I once tried, not that long ago (it was in late Railtrack or early Network Rail days) to get the title 'District Operations Manager' introduced during a local reorganisation - unfortunately the high ups with no sense of imagination wouldn't have anything with the allegedly 'old fashioned' word 'district' in it...

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  • RMweb Gold

I once tried, not that long ago (it was in late Railtrack or early Network Rail days) to get the title 'District Operations Manager' introduced during a local reorganisation - unfortunately the high ups with no sense of imagination wouldn't have anything with the allegedly 'old fashioned' word 'district' in it...

I think Districts preceded Divisions (1962-ish), and indeed remained in use for civil engineering boundaries for decades afterwards.  I also suspect that organisational design is now a high art practised by people with MBAs and a nod to Harvard. Any connection with the railway is purely coincidental.

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  • RMweb Gold

I think Districts preceded Divisions (1962-ish), and indeed remained in use for civil engineering boundaries for decades afterwards.  I also suspect that organisational design is now a high art practised by people with MBAs and a nod to Harvard. Any connection with the railway is purely coincidental.

There might be some truth in that by now Ian but back in our day, when we were grown up enough to be allowed to write reorganisations, I think we had a reasonable choice of titles although 'District' was verboten in the Ops world.  I was always amused in one of my later big railway jobs to be in a post where my title was 'such & such Officer'  (the good Captain might even remember it although I'd had far more to do with him in my previous job when I was only an 'Assistant' but effectively the Chief Controller's right hand man although my job title said something very different).

 

The world of railway job titles is always an amusing and sometimes fascinating one and my final one (in its first incarnation) was fairly ordinary in English but sounded quite impressive in French, let alone adding up to a single word of about 20-30 letters in German.

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When I was a kid and my mates wanted to be engine drivers I decided that the railway job I fancied far more was Divisional Traffic Superintendent. I'm not sure why or probably exactly what it was but one grandfather was a station master and the other a signalman and I knew I wanted to go up in the world, be paid monthly and have an office (I think I might have also just read Bhowani Junction !!)

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