Masters of the Permanent Way - Zen and the Art of Trainspotting

As previous visitors to my posts will know railways are in my blood. My paternal granfather lived and died a railwayman before I was born. He was a engine driver on the London Midland and Scottish Railway (LMS) which formed in 1923  and was the biggest of the Big Four British railway companies which were amalgamated and were nationalised on 1 January 1948 to become state owned British Railways.

My grandfather like many other young men of his generation emigrated from rural Wales to work on the railways in big cities like Birmingham which is at the hub of the rail network. He was killed by the night mail as he stepped back to speak to his fireman while their loco took on water. He survived three days without an arm and both legs the family were devastated, my mother never really got over it, she carried the newspaper cutting about her father's accident in her purse until the day she died and nobody knew that. My father worked all his life in the locomotive and railway rolling stock construction industry. As a child I would occasionally be taken to the factory to see big diesels being built for export to Africa, South America and the Far East, it was another world, the affluent society the end of empire, the post-war growth bubble and good old Marshall Aid protecting us all from Communism, so everything in the garden was rosy... or so it seemed.

This video commemorates a lost world, the world of my childhood when steam trains were still in service and they would chuff chuff past the end of my garden which backed onto a branch line mostly carrying frieght, but in the Summer some passenger trains Sunday Specials going to the seaside would go past the end of my garden, I ran to the fence to watch those lucky travellers who  were bound for the joys of the North Wales coast, or perhaps to Blackpool the capital of Fun.

Their destinations were strange and exotic places to me aged 5....far off  places by the sea with funfairs and candy floss and toffee apples, castles and donkeys on the beach.......those trains hauled by amazing engines belching smoke and fire in a cutting I looked down upon from the banks and which in the winter, when there was a covering of snow on the ground, I imagined to be a range of distant mountains and valleys of far off lands of my imagining where fantasies would be played out and bears may well be lurking.. It was a world of pure magic to me then and that enchantment hasn't been completely worn away by the many years that have since elapsed.

I worked for a short while in train building business myself, but it wasn't for me - so I became a British Rail guard working freight trains all over the Midlands and sometimes beyond.
I would sit at the back of the train applying the hand brake iron wheel (like a sort of anchor you might say), screwing the brake so hard the steel wheels beneath me would look like Catherine Wheels issuing sparks and smoke as thousands of tons slithered down, iron ore and coal trains descending the treacherous Lickey Bank - the steepest incline on the national rail system.
Later I trained to be a signalman and I had my own signal box, playing trains for real for a while before my life took a different direction and I left the land of my birth on a 3+ year sojourn, but that's another story.

I have all my life really been around railways either as a passenger, a worker or as an admirer of the effectiveness and comparative simplicity of railways and their enormous social, political and economic impact.

Obviously it was the railways that opened up the Americas and most the other continents, they penetrated Africa, mobilied much of Asia and indeed all of the world by the mass transportation of people and things they made possible. 

 

To me the locomotives and the rolling stock in this video are not only a great engineering and scientific achievement, they are aesthetically pleasing too, works of art in themselves in fact. 

The teak wood carriages of the full LNER rake on the Severn Valley Railway seen in the video are like travelling polished cabinets of people from all walks of life, hence the first, second and third class compartments, the English class system on wheels... all going together to the same destination. Those coaches were built over a 20 year period from 1923 to the last in 1943 by expert coachbuilders, craftsmen and they are to me as impressive as any fine piece of furniture, we won't see the like of those vehicles again.

The locomotives themselves hold a sort of alchemical fascination for me, their size and shape and colours sort of overwhelm the senses and often they somehow remind me of fantastical fire breathing beasts. It just seems to be a metaphor that fits them so well, they seem almost 'alive'. It is a mixture of fear and exhileration that they inspire at close quarters but when they are in full motion hurtling through the countryside they grab our attention from a distance... they are to me a delightful streak of technology that is rhythmically hypnotic and carrying the promise of places new and old like a lure, hundreds of stories being played out, a whole community on the move, poetry in motion to my mind.

I'm afraid this humble little image grab here on my pocket sized Bloggie doesn't include the spectacle of a steam hauled train gliding the silver rails through a pristine landscape, more's the pity.....but what I have tried to capture is the feeling and fascination of the sights, sounds and comings and goings of trains at the SVR gala. These images were captured over a period of about an hour on the platform of Kidderminster  SVR station during their Autumn Gala, when they ran trains throughout the night to Bridgnorth at the other end of the line, in that mysterious and distant county of Shropshire.... about 16 miles (26km) away.......There be dragons! Or so I hear anyway.

The Scottish Caledonian Railway locomotive 828 was built in 1899 seen here at SVR Gala 2012

* Explanatory note from Wikipedia:-

The permanent way is the elements of railway lines: generally the pairs of rails typically laid on the sleepers ("ties" in American parlance) embedded in ballast, intended to carry the ordinary trains of a railway. It is described as permanent way because in the earlier days of railway construction, contractors often laid a temporary track to transport spoil and materials about the site; when this work was substantially completed, the temporary track was taken up and the permanent way installed.