How Britain Worked Read online

  It is a very tight squeeze, easing yourself into the firebox feet first, but there’s a surprising amount of space once you are inside: not quite enough room to swing a cat, but more space than you might think. When you see coal being shovelled in through the hole, you might think that the firebox is a bit like a domestic fireplace. In fact, it’s a lot bigger than that. This isn’t just a simple coal fire; it’s so big that it takes three or four hours to get going. It’s only when you are inside the firebox that you really appreciate how a steam engine actually works. The heat from the fire passes along a network of air tubes, with the loco’s funnel drawing the heat just like the chimney on a house draws smoke and heat up the chimney. The air tubes pass through a tank that is full of water, turning the water to steam.

  The first steam trains had only one heater tube, but they soon found that more tubes worked better; 5164 has dozens of them. This creates more surface area where the hot metal of the tubes is in contact with the water, which heats the water more efficiently. Naturally, all of these tubes need to be cleaned out as well. Monkey and I cleaned out the heating tubes by blasting air through them. Most of the muck and soot from inside the tubes was blasted straight back out at us. We couldn’t see a thing in there and could hardly breathe, the air was so thick with soot. Monkey had been on that job for nearly a week. I don’t mind getting dirty – in fact, I’m famous for enjoying getting filthy doing a bit of hard graft – but even I didn’t envy Monkey that job. We had an electric lamp with us when we were working in the firebox but a lad doing this job in the nineteenth century would have been working by candlelight; and he would have worked a minimum twelve-hour shift. One fourteen-year-old GWR engine cleaner, John Harris, having worked three twelve-hour shifts in a row, fell asleep in the firebox. When a stoker came to fire up the boiler, he didn’t notice poor John and tipped a shovel of hot, glowing coals all over him. John died from his burns. Sends a shiver down your spine, doesn’t it?

  Despite such tragedies, there was no shortage of youngsters who wanted to become engine cleaners. It was seen as the first stage on the promotion ladder that might lead you to one day becoming an engine driver, if you worked hard. Not that you had much choice about working hard, mind. An engine cleaner might have to start a shift at 3.00 a.m. That meant getting up at 1.30 a.m., and a ‘knocker upper’ was employed to come to your house and bang on the door until he got an answer. The railway companies liked their staff to live close to where they worked so that they could be called upon to work extra shifts whenever they were needed. If you refused to do the extra shifts, you could be fined.

  If the engine cleaner kept his nose as clean as the engine, and learned enough about other people’s jobs as well as the railway regulations to pass an examination, then he would be promoted to passed cleaner. That meant he could be relied upon to stoke the boiler as well as clean it. He could then look forward to progressing through at least three levels as a fireman before he had any chance of becoming a driver. All of that might take twenty-five years and if, after suffering all those years of muck and soot and grease and oil, his eyes were not deemed 100 per cent perfect, he would never make it as an engine driver. A driver not only had to be an expert on how his engine worked, and be able to maintain it, he also had to pass stringent eyesight and colour recognition tests. This was to ensure he could identify signals correctly at a distance, part of the increasing safety measures being introduced to cut accidents on the ever-busier railways. By 1900, drivers had to pass not only an eyesight test but also an annual medical exam.

  The driver was the senior man on the footplate and demanded complete respect. The class divisions in British society most definitely extended to the workplace, and status was everything. If you had earned your place on a certain rung of the ladder, you expected those below you to show you proper respect, just as you, in turn, deferred to those higher up the ladder. A fully qualified driver was one of the gods of the engine shed. Fortunately, I wouldn’t have to wait twenty-five years for my chance to drive a locomotive.

  A BIT OF A WOBBLE

  Before I could take my place on the footplate, there were various parts that had to be fabricated to get 5164 running. In the Bridgnorth workshop they have a fine selection of engineering tools and I had the chance to help turn out a few bits and pieces. I will admit that I sometimes get more nervous starting up a machining tool than I do sitting on a start line before a motorcycle race. One of the lads minding a machine in the workshop where a part was being milled was sitting reading a book while the machine did its job. I, however, couldn’t take my eyes off the job while I was doing it. Even though I knew that the machine was set right and doing the job, even though I’m a mechanic and knew that it wasn’t about to go wrong, I just couldn’t bear the thought of it not turning out right.

  I became an apprentice to an apprentice when they discovered that 5164 had a spot of wheel wobble. A slight wobble might not seem to matter much on a machine of this size but, when she’s running at speed, it’s the sort of thing that can cause vibrations that can do real damage. I helped to manhandle two tons of wheel and axle into position in the workshop so that we could use a micrometer (the biggest one I’d ever seen) to measure the thickness of the axle and find out what was going on. This was proper muck-and-grease heavy-duty engineering. I was told that measuring the axle had to be done accurately because, just like on my motorbike, something that isn’t right is going to break. Vibrations could start to shake the loco apart. Bearings would start to run hot and could seize up.

  According to the micrometer there was a variance of only five ‘thou’ (five thousandths of an inch, or 0.2mm) over the entire length of the axle. That is quite remarkable given that the axle was machined a hundred years ago, by men who had no computer-aided precision machines to help them: all they had to go on were careful measurements and a skilful eye. When it was new, there would have been no discrepancy – the axle would have been of uniform thickness over its entire length. The standards may have been set by fancy design engineers like Brunel, but the skilled craftsmen who created things like the train axle were true engineers, masters of their craft. Have you ever seen pictures of someone like Stephenson standing next to a lathe? I haven’t.

  Five ‘thou’ was within tolerance, so the wobble had to be coming from somewhere else. The problem was traced to a crank pin, the bit that sticks out from the wheel where the crank arms are attached. Its bearing was worn and a new one had to be fabricated. To make the new, perfectly round, bearing, it had to be cast and I had to learn about the old-fashioned technique of white metalling. This was when I was made an apprentice to an apprentice, as seventeen-year-old Mark showed me how it was done.

  We had a metal mould that we heated using a blowtorch so that the bearing wouldn’t stick to it or shrink onto it when it was set. Once the mould was good and hot, we poured in a cocktail of molten metal: a mixture of tin, copper, lead and an element called antimony. This took about twenty minutes to set into the round, disc-with-a-hole-in-the-middle bearing. The outside dimensions of the set bearing were correct for it to fit into the hole at the end of the crank arm, but it was a tight squeeze and we used an enormous press to force it in. Once it was tightly in there, we could start machining the inner surface of the bearing.

  The machining process was carried out under the watchful eye of twenty-two-year-old Will. We needed the bearing to have an inner diameter of four inches, 408 ‘thou’ for a perfect fit, and could afford a tolerance of about a thousandth of an inch. The crank arm with the bearing in place was set on another machine, carefully aligned so that the cutter could scrape the tiniest of fractions off the surface. Will showed me how to cut, measure, cut and measure until finally he reckoned it was done. The final measurement I took was four inches, 407 ‘thou’. Pretty much spot on. I don’t know many twenty-two-year-olds who could do that, but Will is a craftsman who truly loves his job. He told me that if he was offered the choice between a job worth hundreds of thousands of pounds or told he cou
ld carry on working on the trains, he’d choose the trains every time. That’s dedication for you. Needless to say, when we took the bearing out and tried it on the crank pin on the loco, with a little lubrication, it fitted like a glove.

  THE ACE OF SPADES

  My next step towards becoming an engine driver was to work as a fireman. I was going to need a shovel, and the shovel I wanted had to be made the way it might have been done in the nineteenth century. That meant I could get to grips with one of the revolutionary materials of the Industrial Revolution – wrought iron.

  Wrought iron is different from cast iron in a number of ways, including how it is made. Cast iron is poured into a mould and allowed to cool and harden. When wrought iron is produced in its molten form, it is allowed to cool only so far. Because it has less carbon in it than cast iron, it is more malleable. It can be rolled into bars or sheets or stamped in its soft state. It can be worked, which is what ‘wrought’ actually means. Because it has fewer carbon ‘impurities’, a cold wrought-iron bar can also be reheated and worked into shape, something that you can’t really do with a cast-iron bar. Wrought iron was used instead of cast iron for making a multitude of things from simple nails and railway rails to horseshoes and ships. They made the Eiffel Tower in Paris out of wrought iron. If it was good enough for what was then the world’s tallest building, it was good enough for my shovel!

  I went to see a man called Mike Wilkins, who gave up a desk job years ago to learn the blacksmith’s trade and make things out of metal. Mike can turn out delicate ironwork made to look like flowers or small trees and ornamental creations that serve as garden gates. So showing me how to make a shovel was all in a day’s work. First we cut a wrought-iron bar to size to make the shaft of the shovel. Using a hacksaw on a piece of metal held in a clamp, you have to get your stance right to work the hacksaw. My first foreman told me that you’ve got it right if you can feel your balls squeezed between your legs: I have no idea how he would have explained it to a female apprentice!

  There was a furnace in Mike’s workshop – a proper blacksmith’s furnace where we could just nestle the wrought iron in amongst the coals to heat it up. Again we were using shedloads of coal or coke in the furnace: it really was what fuelled the Industrial Revolution. I put the end of the shaft into the coals to heat it so that it could be looped round to form a handle. It took just a few seconds to heat the metal to 1,000 degrees Celsius – the temperature at which it could be worked without damaging its internal structure, and snapping or shattering it.

  When I picked the iron bar out of the bed of coal, the end was glowing red-hot. I had to swing round and lay it on the curved end of the anvil. It was a heavy old beast: you wouldn’t want that landing on your foot! It was then a question of bashing the red-hot end to bend it over the curved surface of the anvil and create the handle loop. Mike had a few things to say about my hammering technique and reckoned I was being too gentle. He seemed to think that I was more interested in making a nice rhythmic sound than bending the metal, but I got there in the end.

  Once the loop was created, we then had to make a fire weld to close the end of the loop. This meant superheating the metal to 1,400 degrees Celsius, until its surface actually starts to melt, and then melding the end to the shaft with a few mighty wallops. Or at least, that’s what I thought. Mike explained to me that I had to judge my hammer blows like I was swatting a fly, so my ‘softly-softly’ approach was now going to work just fine. Even an experienced blacksmith, apparently, can get a fire weld wrong. If you hit it too many times and lose too much metal (bits fly off the molten surface every time you whack it) the handle could be too weak to use.

  Bashing it about knocked our loop handle out of shape. We were able to force it back into a nice curve again by using a cone anvil, forcing the misshapen loop down over the ever-widening cone with our trusty hammer in order to coax the loop back into shape. While the handle was cooling down (I wouldn’t fancy picking it up at 1,400 degrees!), Mike and I heated and shaped a sheet of wrought iron for the blade of the shovel.

  We hammered the flat sheet into shape on a metal bed that was a bit like an oversized ashtray. I could move the blade around and bash it with my hammer to make it take on the curves of the shovel. We then had to work on attaching the end of the shaft to the blade.

  To do this, we had to stick the end in the furnace and heat it up, then hammer it flat so that it could be split with the treadle hammer. This was a fine piece of kit that stood upright, taller than a man, with a kick-handle that you pushed down with your foot. Levers and counterbalances then brought a mighty hammerhead down on a striking plate. Sitting on the striking plate was the flattened end of our shovel shaft, and carefully poised on top of that was a heavy axe blade. The treadle hammer drove the axe head straight through the red-hot shaft, creating a cleft in the bottom. Once the shaft had been split, we clamped it in a vice. I was then able to use the axe head, hammering it into the cleft to make the split wider. When you see how solid this piece of metalwork ended up, it’s hard to believe that I was able to work it almost like a piece of wood (albeit a very, very hot piece of wood).

  The shaft now had two prongs at the end that, when we heated them in the furnace, we were able to puncture with holes that would take rivets. We didn’t drill the holes, we just hammered a punch through the hot metal. Drilling, in fact, would have weakened the ends of the shaft. You drill metal out to create a hole. Punching the hole through just pushed the hot metal out of the way so that it flowed around the hole. You don’t lose any metal, so it’s stronger than a drilled hole. Corresponding holes in the blade were then aligned and red-hot slugs of metal were slotted in place through the holes. The ends of the slugs were then hammered flat to form rivets, securing the shaft to the blade. I was extremely proud to hammer my initials into the blade and claim it as my own! This was a shovel that looked like it would last for a thousand years. It could withstand a nuclear holocaust. It was a heavy old piece of kit. It was never going to blow over in a breeze and you definitely wouldn’t want it round the back of the head!

  THE NEXT STATION ON THIS JOURNEY WILL BE

  Before I could use my shovel as a fireman, though, we needed somewhere for 5164 to go: a station. When the rail network was laid around the country, the stations, naturally, also slowly came into being. Some of these were great works of architecture where the architects really indulged themselves. There was no thought of making the main stations simple, workaday structures. The railway companies wanted to encourage people to use the railways, people who might actually be a bit frightened about travelling by train. It was said that if you were on a train travelling faster than the galloping speed of a horse – normally up to about 30mph – you wouldn’t be able to breathe. You can sort of understand why the Victorians might have thought that. If you stick your head out of the window of a speeding car, facing into the wind, it is hard to catch a breath. You have to turn away from the direction of travel to suck in some calm air. Maybe they thought that travelling by train would be like that all the time. No one really knew, after all, what it was like to travel faster than a galloping horse.

  To impress their fledgling passengers, and to give them a comforting feeling of reassurance, railway companies built their stations to look like stately homes or museums. These grand buildings suggested that travelling by train was to be looked forward to as much as a visit to a grand country house, or as safe as a trip to the library. Temple Meads station in Bristol was built in the style of a Tudor castle, while the station at Stoke-on-Trent looked more like a Jacobean stately home. Most impressive of all must be St Pancras in London, with the hotel that fronted the station looking like a Gothic palace.

  Smaller stations out in the countryside took on the appearance of large cottages, or the gatehouses to local estates, and were run with unerring efficiency by the local stationmaster. Not only passengers, but all manner of freight would pass through the station; from foodstuffs and fancy goods to coal, gravel and the Royal Mail.
Making sure that his station was always ready for passengers or freight was the stationmaster’s job. He also supplemented his income by doing some private trading in goods passing through the station: if you needed a load of sand or wanted some fresh fish, he was the man to see.

  The stationmaster was said to be as important to his local community as the doctor, the vicar or the local policeman, and was afforded the respect his status demanded. He generally lived in a house provided for him by the railway company: he would either pay rent or the house would be taken into account in his salary which, at some stations close to London in the 1860s, could be as much as £230 a year. On top of that, the stationmaster could expect a bonus of up to 40 per cent of his salary if the company was doing well and he was running a tidy station. The stationmaster was responsible for making sure that the station was kept clean, that the woodwork and ironwork were smartly painted and that the station gardens looked splendid and weed-free. The station porter was the one who would actually tend the garden and, in the absence of a general handyman, would probably attend to the other maintenance jobs as well. He wouldn’t be able to take any shortcuts and do a shoddy job, either, because most stationmasters started out their careers as lowly porters: they therefore knew all the tricks of the trade.