Workhorses Steam Days

BBC Four Collections, archive programmes chosen by experts.

For this collection, Gary Boyd-Hope has selected programmes

celebrating Britain's steam railway legacy.

More programmes on this theme

and other BBC Four collections are available on BBC iPlayer.

WHISTLE BLOWS

No little boy ever dreamt of being a railway porter when he grew up.

After all, where's the glamour

and excitement in carrying things around for other people?

But freight trains did carry Britain's things around

for 100 years or more, and the engines that pulled

and pushed and shunted, up and down, to and fro, were the real

strength of the railway system, the ones that got things done.

You don't actually need engines at all for a railway, of course.

Horses will do just as well -

if you only need to pull one full truck or a few empties a short way.

And, in fact, they used horses with rails long before engines were

ever thought of, and were still using them for shunting in the 1940s.

The 16-tonne truck became standard on railways because it was what

a horse could pull, but for trains with two or more trucks going a long

way, there's only one kind of horse that can do it - the iron horse.

I'm afraid there isn't much nostalgia for steam goods trains.

People didn't even notice them much at the time.

They just trundled slowly past,

holding up the express that you wanted to get on.

And yet, from 1850 onwards,

freight trains always made more money than passenger trains.

Railway freight gave us a whole way of life. The pick-up-goods era.

Railways were the common carrier,

which meant that they were legally obliged to carry any consignment,

however small, to any destination, however remote.

Everything from sheep to strawberries - anywhere in Britain.

Now, the whole trouble with a pick-up-goods train is that

it's great for the community but it's a big headache for the railway.

What a railway really likes is a long goods train,

full of just one thing - coal, or oil, or cars - which goes

straight from its starting point to its destination, without stopping

to pick up the farmer's chickens,

and this was the way freight was going more and more, into vast bulk,

but the vaster and bulkier the trains got,

the harder they were to pull.

The quick, cheap and easy solution was to get two

engines on the front, but this was a false economy,

because although two trains are twice as expensive,

they are not twice as efficient,

and also, apparently there was a temptation for many

drivers to assume that the other engine was doing most of the work.

And if they both thought that, well, there were problems.

No, the most sensible - if expensive - solution,

was to build much bigger and much stronger engines.

And this engine behind me, a class 9, is the biggest

and strongest that British Rail ever built for freight.

This particular one,

which has been preserved by the East Somerset Railway, actually

holds the record for pulling the heaviest load ever known on a British

line, and one of the nice things about working on a film like this

is that very occasionally, you do get to drive in a cab yourself, so...

WHISTLE BLOWS

Today, we're pulling, rather ironically, a load of stone -

the stone used to build roads and help the railway's great rival,

the motor vehicle.

British Rail's other great contribution to the steam era,

of course, was to kill it stone dead,

and these 9Fs were scrapped in the 1960s with almost indecent haste.

This was one of only five to be preserved.

I can see why people thought this was British Rail's finest

contribution to the steam age.

The feeling of power and strength is immense.

And I also can't help thinking that it had taken

the railways 100 years to find out that the type of loads

they moved best were the ones they started with -

the no-nonsense train with just one kind of cargo on board.

Slate was first carried in bulk by boat and canal.

But you can't get boats up the quarries of north Wales.

What you can use is a narrow-gauge railway and a little tank engine.

Now, if our engines had evolved entirely on mountain sides

among sharp, narrow curves, they might all

look like this 0-4-0 tank engine built in 1889, specially for the job.

But of course, they didn't.

Just coming up to its 100th birthday,

this 0-6-0 tender engine was designed

to haul heavy, frequent loads over the industrial centre of England.

Before the 0-6-0 could go out earning money for

the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway shareholders, it had to be fed...

and watered.

So much coal was dug out of our mines that in 1900,

the French put round a malicious rumour that Britain

was about to become buoyant and float away!

But it's hard for us to imagine what quantities of coal

were eaten up in the steam age,

which should perhaps have been called the coal age.

Coal fed British industry, from ironworks to Royal Navy destroyers,

from engines in Penzance, to shipyards in Glasgow.

The freight of many railway lines was over 50% coal.

A lot of that coal never left the railways at all.

It simply went down the line to feed hungry engines.

Railway engines are the only vehicles I can think of

which go just as fast backwards as forwards.

But going backwards is not much fun for the driver and fireman.

So it's onto the turntable.

Turntables were originally operated by hand,

but then they realised that the steam vacuum

created in the engine could be used to do the job just as well.

So they plug it in and make it suck itself round through its navel.

For 100 years, the standard British workhorse looked

almost exactly like this - three pairs of driving wheels

to spread the axle load, and none of the wheels very big -

not good for speed, but good for traction -

and a large tender for all that coal and water that they got through.

Meanwhile, there's the job of putting the train together.

It's beneath the dignity of a big engine to do work like this.

WHISTLE BLOWS

WHISTLE BLOWS

Mile for mile, the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway once earned

more money from freight than any other line in Britain.

WHISTLE BLOWS

I wonder if they ever worked out what proportion of freight running time

was spent going up and down goods yards.

I bet they were too scared to find out

how long they took getting nowhere.

40 years later, and we're on, yes,

the same old standard British workhorse.

This one was built for the London, Midland, Scottish Railway.

It's still an 0-6-0.

The boiler's bigger, but technically the engine isn't much different.

A steam buff might say it didn't need to be much different.

But really it was a case of technological inertia.

The rest of the world were building much bigger engines

and even experimenting with diesels.

But we British steamed on blithely as before.

Our mixed goods trains never moved at much more than

a leisurely 20 or 30mph, for safety reasons.

They didn't have enough stopping power to go any faster

because only the engine and the guard's van

were equipped with brakes.

What the railways wanted was for all the trucks to have brakes as well,

linked to the engine.

Technically they could've done it,

but half the trucks on the average train belonged to private owners,

everyone from coal companies to Colman's Mustard,

and they simply didn't want to invest the money in conversion.

When you see a steam train rolling through a green chunk of England,

it looks like a poem by John Betjeman.

But it wasn't always so poetic for the crew.

Tunnels were their worst enemy.

Imagine the smoke and sparks being blown down into the cab

for ten minutes at a go.

One thing that amazes me about freight trains in Britain

is that we've never built up the folklore about them

that they had in America, for instance.

No Casey Jones, no Rock Island Line,

no Chattanooga Choo Choo or Honky Tonk Train Blues.

The only hobos we ever had on British trains were tramps

looking for a good night's sleep at a freight truck and getting

moved overnight to somewhere they had no desire to get to.

Yet there is something evocative about the old freight train.

Where have all those trucks come from?

What strange cargoes do they all carry?

And who was waiting for it all at the other end for

the impossible job of sorting it all out?

The freight handlers at Bristol Temple Meads Depot, perhaps.

PRESENTER: 'Temple Meads is like some gigantic sideboard,

'a sideboard almost as big as Wembley, with 5,000 feet of platform

'served by 15 railroads, 35 auto trucks and four mobile cranes...

'..accommodation for 400 wagons

'and 1,000 tonnes of goods all at one time,

'goods assembled from the fields,

'fresh packed from the assembly line,

'green gathered from the factory.

'Here, they're sorted and served out to the city,

'the surrounding country, and on to the sideboards of smaller depots.'

Wrestling with a loose-coupled train as it wended its way

between England's "sideboards" was the province of the guard.

I met Roger Hobson.

I think it's about one of the least glamorous jobs on the railway,

actually, to be fair. It's very little heard of

compared with the driver and fireman.

People always get the impression you just sit here

not doing much. What do you actually do?

Well, it's a matter of controlling the train.

You see, the guard's in charge of the train,

and on a loose-coupled freight train, the guard controls the train

by means of using the handbrake, purely and simply.

- All the time? - All the time, yes.

The idea is to keep the couplings taut on the train

by use of the handbrake.

And what would happen if you didn't?

Well, the train could break in half,

because if you get a snatch from the engine

and the couplings aren't tied, the train will literally break in half,

- which is obviously dangerous. - Has it ever happened?

Oh, yes, certainly, many times.

It hasn't actually happened on this railway, but in the old days,

on the original railways, it happened fairly frequently.

The Severn Valley Railway operates passenger trains

as a tourist attraction.

But they also occasionally move pick-up goods trains.

Now, the passenger trains go faster than you do,

so you have to waste time stopping and getting out of their way,

and even after you've politely got into a siding

and let them through,

you sometimes find they've created further problems for you.

I should watch it. You're about to set fire to yourself, mate.

Oh, that's nice!

When railways were first invented, landowners worried

that trains would frighten livestock, run over animals

and set fire to the countryside.

And they were dead right.

For the driver and crew, it's just another headache.

But for the signalman, it's a question of, "What kept you so long?"

I remember, as a young boy, my father once persuading

an engine driver he knew to take me out for the day.

We went five miles, shunted a few trucks around and came back again.

It took all day.

It still does.

- Morning! - Cheers, mate.

A pick-up goods train would amble through Highley

once or twice a day.

It dropped off trucks full of things ordered locally

and picked up any truck full of things going elsewhere -

farm produce, bits of machinery, milk,

racing pigeons to be released by a station master...

Anything.

WHISTLES

GPV, by the way, stands for gunpowder van.

And, for obvious reasons, this never went next to the engine.

People always have a vague look of worry on the railways.

The signalman worries about the next passenger train coming through.

The cows worry that this screeching monster has come to take them

on a last trip to the abattoir.

One way of speeding up the snail's pace of goods trains

around Britain was fly shunting.

You put in your shunting pole while the train was still moving,

uncoupled the desired van...

..and then ran after it to slam on the handbrake

before you had a pile up.

No wonder that 50 shunters a year were killed

at the turn of the century, and hundreds maimed.

Unfortunately for us, time has run out.

All goods traffic will have to clear off the main line

because an express passenger train is arriving on it any minute.

RINGING

Today, the main cargo of the line is people.

But in British Rail days,

the main cargo was something you couldn't escape from...

even here.

Mr Richardson, you were stationmaster here in the 1950s

for five years.

But although today it's the Severn Valley line,

it's full of birds and trees,

in those days it was mostly coal, wasn't it?

Yes, we carried a terrific amount of coal up and down

the line from Alveley Colliery.

About 1,000 tonnes per day used to come out through there.

So you actually dealt with more coal than passengers?

Well, revenue-wise, yes.

We used to deal with quite a lot of passengers,

but they were all, most of them were short journeys, you know,

workmen going to Kidderminster, the carpet factories,

to the military base at Hartlebury,

one or two to Bridgnorth and one or two to Worcester.

Stourport used to take a few.

In its heyday, the railway system employed an incredible

three quarters of a million people,

and even a small station like this had a full complement of staff -

stationmaster and signalman, booking clerks and freight clerks,

porters, shunters, an agent,

not to mention the train crews themselves.

Today they have to double up on jobs.

The shunter has to act as farm hand if necessary.

MOOING

I can't imagine anything much nicer than living at

a flowery station like this, so I'm fiercely jealous of Mrs Oliver,

who now occupies the stationmaster's house.

It's hard for us now to believe the range of services that she knew.

Will you give these to Fred Jones at Highley Station, please?

Of course I will, certainly. Thank you very much indeed.

'Every little detail taken care of.'

WHISTLES

The railways offered a comprehensive service.

The GWR would collect from your own farm.

The LMS hired out grain sacks to farming customers,

though they discontinued this when so few of the sacks came back.

And the LNER offered a complete house moving operation.

"If desired," they said,

"arrangements can be made for the laying of carpets

"and linoleum, hanging of pictures, placing of articles in cupboards

"and shelves, etc, to complete a really trouble-free removal."

It must have been a wonderful service to the locality. But was it economic?

I mean...

Well, it was in its day, because of course you must remember

that the trains were in their heyday before there were motor vehicles,

and so they were virtually the lifeline

for the countryside communities.

Nowadays, if you want to do anything like that, you go to, well,

you send it by post.

Well, nowadays, of course, a lot of stuff doesn't go by rail.

Rail is only interested in bulk loads these days.

Oil, coal?

Freightliner trains... Yes, oil, coal, certainly to power stations,

but no smalls at all now.

That's the thing I keep forgetting, actually,

that motor traffic is a very recent thing, isn't it?

Oh, yes, comparatively,

I mean, motor transport has really only come into its own since the war.

Before then, you went to the station.

At every station, they used to have a what they call,

I forget what they called them now, but it was a sort of manager

who touted for business around the country areas.

- Really? - Oh, yes, absolutely.

I grew up next door to the Great Western Railway,

and I can still remember the clanking of goods trains

through the night - the lonely whistle, the echoing of empty wagons.

It never occurred to me

till now that night-time was the right time for goods trains.

With nothing else around, no passengers,

they could get down to business.

By night they flourished unseen,

and, unseen, the mixed-goods train died and vanished from British life.

WHISTLES

Although I didn't know it at the time,

shunting engines were a doomed species.

When other competition arose,

they would survive only in steam zoos and railway safari parks.

Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.

If the goods train can't take you,

the lorry must.