Railway Practical Jokes

[new puritan]

Was not meant to be a practical joke but just a 'funny' response but sometimes you get a 'result' ..............

 

 

In those wonderful days that have long gone when we were allowed to enjoy our work we had an HST with a booked stop of 10 minutes and it often used to arrive 5 minutes earlier resulting in it sitting in the platform for 15 minutes. One evening it duly arrived 5 minutes early and after exchanging pleasantries with the Senior Conductor I wandered off to dispatch another train and returned a couple of minutes later to find an agitated passenger leaning out of the window.

 

Passenger 'Why aren't we going anywhere?'

 

Me 'Driver needed a cup of tea'

 

I then turn and the driver walks past us carrying a cuppa from the train's buffet! Result!!!

 

It became even more entertaining as driver pauses for a quick chat with me as we had worked together in BR days and passenger is now turning purple with rage.

 

Driver then ambles to front of train and passenger watches driver climb into cab and after a few seconds ...

 

Passenger 'We're still not moving'

 

Me 'He's got to drink it before he'll be ready to drive'

 

Passenger now suitably wound up I retreated along the platform to await the departure time.

[Debs.]

I recall a certain TCI`s bicycle being "coupled-through" `twixt two 25`s: screw-coupling and vac-pipes through the frame and air-pipes through the spokes........and later; his beloved Austin Maxi set-carefully over the pit, on one of the shed-roads.

[Oldddudders]

In my Control years I saw - and heard of - a few naughty goings-on.

 

Before my time, one chap had chickens, and would bring fresh eggs into the office for regular "customers". One such, a chap with the slightly unfortunate name of Don Keys, came into the office one early turn complaining that his boiled egg that morning had been rather hard. He didn't know it had already been boiled gently for an hour before he collected it in the office!

 

Back in the early '60s, there had been a split turn, where the guy would have a couple of hours off between stints on the panel. On this day it was another Don, a pipe smoker famous for smoking during extended phone conversations, with all the complications of re-lighting the thing mid-discussion, dropping lighted matches in lap - all that sort of stuff. Implausibly, this day Don had left his pipe on the panel while taking his break, and wicked people had an idea. The bowl of the pipe was carefull emptied, then filled with live match-heads, bits of rubber band, paper etc. The old ash was then carefully tamped back in on top. Don returned, and the office waited with baited breath. No-one could recall him ever taking so long to re-start the pipe, but eventually he took it off the panel, added a little new tobacco and lit it. After a couple of minutes there was something like an explosion, Don dropped the pipe, his glasses fell off and the office convulsed. He never, ever left his pipe unguarded again.

 

Finally we have Fred. Fred was, in common with many in the office, a former soldier in the Hitler war, and had kept up some of the disciplines of those days, being quite dapper, with his shoes always bowed to a fine shine. He had been a Loco Controller for years, but had now moved up to Area 1. A nervous sort of man, he was ripe for a legpull, and Derby Day produced the chance. As the Royal Train proceeded through his area a spoof telex message appeared on his desk and he almost fainted. It read "1210 Victoria - Tattenham Corner terminate Selhurst - corgi sh1t on floor. Royal Party to take taxis and claim refund as appropriate."

[The Stationmaster]

I still haven't seen one of the really old ones - send a strapper off to the stores to get some red lamp oil for tail lamps (it was even funnier when they brought a can back and when it was poured out it was found not to be red so they were sent back again).

 

Pipe smokers were always good for some fun - one of the chaps on the Parcels Section in Reading DMO seemed to be forever starting small fires or smoking waste paper bins through careless emptying of his pipe but that came to an end after one of the Inspectors dropped a lighted match into a waste paper bin and shoved it under said offenders chair - and blamed it on him.

 

Another amusing, but in some ways rather sad thing, was a Secondman at Ebbw Junction who had a habit of accosting 'foreigners' in the cabin and asking them if they were mad? This would develop into a major interrogation which led to him asking his victim to prove they were not mad - which left them dumbfounded or nor a little worried. But the party trick came at the end when he produced written evidence that he wasn't mad - by producing his discharge letter from a certain local institution (I don't know if he was ever passed for driving but there was nothing in his medical state to take him off the footplate).

 

Going back in time another trick - so I was told - was stealing Fireman's favourite shovels. This led at Old Oak to the practice of Firemen hiding their shovel in the reserve coal stack, and in some cases completely forgetting about it. Reputedly when the stack was cleared one layer of it contained more shovels than coal - but perhaps someone was having me on with that bit of the tale?

[kevinlms]

The lift in Gresley House at Doncaster had a safety device on the doors to detect if anything was trapped. If you were on the landing and wiggled the door in the right way the lift would stop between floors for a couple of minutes. We never got the Divisional Manager but we had a good laugh at the expense of his assistants

 

At trade school there was an industrial type lift that for some reason had the doors at one end of the long sides. The lift could easily hold about 50 people. One day about a dozen of us crowded around the doorway, so that it looked full. When we stopped at the floor where the art students would normally be picked up, we called out, sorry the lift is full.

Just as the door shut, we heard a voice call out, 'Hey, they're all standing at the front'. Too late the door completed closing and we were gone, with much laughter of course!

 

Kevin Martin

[Rugd1022]

Mike - I'd wager the tales of buried shovels at Old Oak were true.... I've heard it from several different trustworthy sources.

 

Another one that did the rounds in the mess room on platform 1 at Paddington was that someone had put a dead rat in the large hot water ern, this was usually told to any non Old Oak man who happened to come in and put his mash can under the tap, just to see what sort of reaction they'd give!

 

At Stonebridge Park in the early '80s it was rumoured that George the TCI had managed to change one of the old hand Guard's pay number one week, supposedly as revenge for some imagined slight (George was a bit prickly at times). Come pay day said Guard went home minus his transparent envelope of cash.... he was not a happy bunny. A joke too far perhaps but some of these 'battles' between blokes who just couldn't get along could go on for years!

[Trevellan]

In my Control years I saw - and heard of - a few naughty goings-on....[snip]

 

Thanks for those Ian, but they should have come with a health warning. I nearly spilt hot tea in my lap because I was laughing so much!

 

Priceless.

[Guest stuartp]

Early 1992, the Leeds AOM Ops Supervisors are all in Leeds for our quarterly team meeting. Having listened to the morning's guest speaker from HMRI explain how many reasons he could find for putting us all in jail we all retire next door to City House to sample the Civil Service canteen on the top floor. We had all recently been issued with the new BR uniform, the one immediately prior to privatisation where everyone got blue stripey shirts.

 

So we all pile into the lift dressed in our identical 'Supervisor not in contact with the public' uniforms of double breasted dark blue suits, stripey shirts and dark blue overcoats, about 12 of us in all. The light in the lift is not working, and just before the doors shut a young girl of about 18 appears with a catering trolley, so being gentlemen we all flatten ourselves against the walls and invite her in. We must have looked like the Blues Brothers fan club on a day out.

 

She looks around nervously, the doors shut, and as we are all plunged into darkness a voice asks "So what's it like to be stuck in a lift wi' 12 sex maniacs then ?" before she takes the longest 10 second lift ride of her life ...

[Southernman46]

We would occasionally leave an apprecntice stewing under an EPB camshaft cover weighed down with brake blocks for a couple of hours (no names but this at a doubled ended EMU shed near Dartford).

 

another brake block one - working at Southern House Electrification in the early 80's, we had a guy who would come in on a Friday with a massive rucksack intent on departing for the wilds of Devon or Wales at close of play. This particular Friday, Keith had gone out to site and whilst he was gone we unpacked the entire rucksack, put the brake block at the bottom and repacked it. (I forget why we even had a brake block on the section - I think it had been left by the rolling stock development boys during an office re-shuffle). Anyway, come 4 pm Keith shoulders his rucksack (plus 20 pounds of cast iron) and disappears, giving no indication of the extra weight nor did it ever get mentioned in the aftermath !!! I would love to have seen his face on discovering it.

 

To this day I always imagine that on a Welsh hilltop somewhere there is an SR EMU brake block just awaiting discovery by a future industrial archiologist.........

 

More recently - whilst handsignalling during SLW at New Malden during a renewal, I left the red flag jammed between the SPT and the signal post for my relief but with a judious application of superglue - nice harmless one - not guaranteed to get you dismissed as most practical jokes in the modern era would unfortunately......it's not the same railway

[The Stationmaster]

Mike - I'd wager the tales of buried shovels at Old Oak were true.... I've heard it from several different trustworthy sources.

 

Another one that did the rounds in the mess room on platform 1 at Paddington was that someone had put a dead rat in the large hot water ern, this was usually told to any non Old Oak man who happened to come in and put his mash can under the tap, just to see what sort of reaction they'd give!

 

Another good one involving Old Oak men was the way they could be treated 'down country' where they seem to have been invariably known as 'cockneys' notwithstanding the fact that many of them had come from elsewhere. Anyway at one time in the diesel era Old Oak had a couple of regular jobs that turned round at Taunton where they had a break in the traincrew cabin. Anyway on one occasion an Old Oak man got into conversation with a Taunton man and the talk turned to vegetable and the 'large veg garden' which the Taunton Driver claimed to have and how much spare produce he had. The Old Oak man took the bait and it was duly agreed to let him have a couple of turnips when he was on the job again later that week.

 

A few weeks later when the Old Oak Driver again appeared at Taunton he was asked how he had liked the turnips to which he replied they'd taken ages to cook and even then had been very tough. He never could understand why this brought forth hoots of laughter because he'd never heard of a mangel (short for mangelwurzel) nor did he know that the Taunton man's 'garden' happened to be a farmer's field that he passed on the way to work.

[RJS1977]

I read a story not long back about a crew of a corridor-tender A4 who were awaiting departure from KX when they spottted two schoolgirls on the end of the platform and got into conversation. When they discovered that the two girls were about to travel on that train as far as Peterborough, the crew invited the two girls into the cab.

 

Partway through the journey, the driver and firemen spotted another train heading towards London on the adjacent line, so the driver got one girl to hold the regulator and reversing lever while the fireman gave the other his shovel. The crew then hid out of sight in the corridor.

 

The crew of the other train had the shock of their lives when they saw the A4 being driven by two schoolgirls with flying ponytails!

[dmustu]

When I was a Guard on the Snow Hill lines, a favorite trick was, when you were departing the station, the supervisor would come running out of the office to give you some 'mail' for one of the booking offices, that he 'forgot' to give you earlier. You'd lean forward out of the window and tale the mail off him, only to have someone else hiding behind one of the pillars step out and chuck a bucket of water over you. You'd get some funny looks of some of the passengers at Moor Street, when you turn up soaking wet on a hot summers day.

[roythebus]

The practical joke lives on in the heritage era.

 

A couple of years ago I was trainee fireman on the KESR working with a crew from t'Moors, John and Kevin. One day we had to take water at Tenterden where the water didn't have "treatment" added. the loco supervisor found out and "told off" the crew for using the "wrong water" who grumbled the rest of the day in their respective northern accents.

 

A week or so later, there was an article on the KESR website featuring a lady driver on the KESR with a picture of her by a loco surrounded by steam.

 

This was cut and pasted with a headline from the the local paper along with a spoof article written in a northern accent about what happens when the locos get filled with the wrong water!! This was sent up north; the fireman fell for the story, the driver called him some choice names when he realised the joke. But it resulted in a good laugh.

 

Thanks to Kevin G and John F for an otherwise very educational week.

 

Every day they'd drop off a Werthers Original to the gateman at Cranbrook Road FX..when Kevin sent John to the cafe to get an egg...which was wrapped in a Werthers bag and dropped neatly into the gatekeeper's hands at Cranbrook Road..who grasped it eagerly...and got gooey egg running down his arms!

[Guest stuartp]

Not a practical joke as such, but in the same vein. Signalmen on the S&C did their own lamping when I was there, it was cheaper to pay them overtime than pay a lampman. One of my signalmen used to lose the lamproom key with ridiculous regularity. It was just a Yale key on a fob, but he insisted on taking it off the fob because it was uncomfortable in his jeans pocket. Asking nicely didn't work, telling him he was an idiot didn't work, and docking his pay for the cost of cutting a new one not only didn't work but was more trouble than it was worth. Lateral thinking was required.

 

Once upon a time minor stations used to send cash on hand to the banking station in a leather pouch secured by a padlock.The padlocks were dinky little things, and being a typically tidy and well run office we had dozens of the things shoved in a drawer and forgotten. Having collected yet another new key I noticed that the padlock would just fit through the hole in the end of it.

 

A quick enquiry over in the PWay yard and a rummage in their scrap pile turned up about 6 feet of signal pulley chain and a fishplate. Key padlocked to one end of the chain, fishplate padlocked to the other, I dropped the new key off later that day together with its hundredweight key fob.

 

"Tell ****** if he manages to lose this one I'm going to drown him in lamp oil".

[Chubber]

I have read somewhere of gullible GWR apprentices who were left for a whole lunch-break with their heads trapped between the rods of certain inside motions, having hefted them onto their shoulders during refitting....could it have been true, I wonder?

 

Doug

[RJS1977]

I don't know whether that's true or not, but I know one of the early TR volunteers managed to trap himself in Dolgoch's inside motion!

[roythebus]

I don't know whether that's true or not, but I know one of the early TR volunteers managed to trap himself in Dolgoch's inside motion!

BEN possibly??

[RJS1977]

BEN possibly??

 

No, having checked Page 95 of "Railway Adventure", I find it was David Curwen, the TRPS's first CME!

[ozzyo]

A long time ago I used to go to a preserved railway. As I was the smallest member I was nominated to clean the tube plate and do the checks in the firebox. So one day some people (one of them works for a well-known publisher) pulled the plug on my light and shut the firebox doors on me. After about 3hrs. someone said where's Titch. I was asleep in the firebox all nice and warm, it was pi$$ing down out side so I was a happy bunny.

 

OzzyO.

 

PS. it's not as bad as it may sound as if I had wanted to get out all I had to do was remove some fire bars and drop out of the ash pan and through the dampers.

[LeeWL]

I have seen a fair few practical jokes over the years. At a yard I worked, one of the shunters tied a couple of fishplates and chairs to the fuel transfer pump linkage under the cab floor of our Jocko. When the driver tried to operate the pump he nearly did his back in...

 

This same driver was a victim of the "wind up the sleeping shed driver trick" One night shift our friend was happily dozing in the cabin when one of the lads shone a red Bardic in his face and yelled "WOAAAAA!!! You're gonna pass it!!!" at him. This poor bloke shot bolt upright and jammed an imaginary brake in! Cue roars of laughter and a Bardic flung the lenghth of the corridor at the joker...

[roythebus]

Yeh, sounds a bit like me, 1971-ish, at the Crich Transport Extravaganza,asleep in my tent, when a mate who was with us and a driver on the DR who I worked with as a guard, shook my shoulder, "Roy,Roy, the stick's been off 10 minutesI" "Ah, Oh, (go away, or words to that effect)" when I realized where I was!

[Chubber]

This same driver was a victim of the "wind up the sleeping shed driver trick" One night shift our friend was happily dozing in the cabin when one of the lads shone a red Bardic in his face and yelled "WOAAAAA!!! You're gonna pass it!!!" at him. This poor bloke shot bolt upright and jammed an imaginary brake in! Cue roars of laughter and a Bardic flung the lenghth of the corridor at the joker...

 

Please forgive me if I add this non-railway 'red-light' story at this point......

 

When I was a member of the Hants Constabulary I was sent to a dodgy-sounding job at Fleet services on the M3. Reported by ambulance as an RTA [Road Traffic Accident.... we hadn't got to the mimsey-wimsey 'there is no such thing as an accident that causes a collision between two motor vehicles, somebody must be responsible for a Road Traffic Collision......]

 

.......I found the driver of a transit van in the middle of the lorry park with a 'serious' right leg injury. He had travelled from Devon, felt sleepy and so pulled into the services for a rest, and had driven into the lorry park and tucked in behind a LGV for a snooze. Apparently, the LGV had started up, woken him, and a flash of the brake lights made him believe he was about to run into the back of a vehicle he had 'stamped' on what he thought to be the brake with his right foot with sufficient effort to force his foot and ankle between the brake and clutch pedals. The Squirters had to be called to force the pedals apart to release him.....It was a less than pleasant job for most people concerned, although I was lucky enough to stay 'upwind' as the exercise had somewhat loosened the driver's grasp on his bowel-tight integrity...

 

Again, apologies for the hi-jack but I've been waiting for an excuse to tell that story for about 20 years.

 

Doug

[Oldddudders]

A mention of biscuits elsewhere on RMweb reminds me of a story from 1968. The Control at Redhill had been built initially underground during WWII, but when hostilities ceased was moved upstairs into a daylit single storey hut. There were 12 or 14 desks arranged in opposing pairs, so you could peer over your panel and under the overhead notice case at the chap opposite. The shift leader, called Deputy Chief Controller (the Chief Controller was a 9-5 office wallah in the Divisional Office at Croydon) sat at a transverse desk at the end by the door, and could survey all his charges as they ran the railway. The first desk to his right was the home of the DCC's Assistant - in effect the office boy. On early turn it was normal for him to be sent "down the town" to get bits and pieces of shopping for colleagues.

 

On this particular morning, the DCC was Bill. Bill was a frail, elderly man with a gravelly voice who knew the value of money. In common with many, he rolled his own cigarettes using Rizlas and Old Holborn. In his case he was wont to perform this delicate task on a piece of typing paper. Having rolled the cigarette he would spend several minutes tapping it end-on onto the paper, saving every scrap of tabacco that fell out, which he then tipped carefully back into the packet. Only then would the ciggie be lit! If things were quiet, he'd be found with that day's Financial Times on his desk, studying share prices. Bill also liked the occasional biscuit, and knew that Woolworths sold packets of broken biscuits. Thus when the DCC's Assistant "volunteered" his services for a shopping trip, Bill asked for a packet of these, please. Now, this day the DCC'sA job was being covered by Bernard, a seasoned Area 2 Controller working an extra shift. So he set off, and returned a while later to distribute the usual stuff for various colleagues - a packet of Guards fags for Bruce (Guards' Controller, natch!) and so on. Finally he came back to Bill's desk. "Sorry, Bill, Woollies didn't have any broken biscuits - so I got you these!" Bill's eyes rolled in his head as he beheld a packet of chocolate bourbons, and his calculator brain reeled as he imagined the pleasure of eating them - but weighed against the awful extra cost. Crunch! Crunch! Crunch! came the sound of Bernard smacking his hand across the packet "but it's alright - they're broken now!"

[Horsetan]

Remember that all of these brilliant practical jokes were played by grown men, in many cases with children and grandchildren. It's right up there with superglueing the soles of your colleague's shoes to the floor, or snipping the "Y" out of his Y-fronts.....

[acg5324]

Back in the mid 1980's when I worked at Haywards Heath Travel Centre / Ticket Office we had a Redstar parcels office that still dealt with livestock. Our regular traffic was crates of day old chicks for Buxted Chicken farms.

We had a YTS trainee with us for several months and myself and a collegue ( now very hight up in the Bluebell railway ) managed to convince him that the chicks were actually for McDonalds who would coat them directly in batter and sell them as McNuggets to save growing them into full size chickens first!!!

 

We also had fun when one of the boxes broke, they were like a double height Pizza box, and all the chicks got out. Took ages to round the little b*****s up.