A Stopped Train Makes No Sound, So We Interviewed the Fireman Who Walks Through the Rain

April 1911. The mess room of a Midland engine shed our guest asks us not to name, because "the company reads, and so does my mother." A kettle is losing an argument with a coal stove. Rain comes at the window sideways, as though it has a connection to make.

Amos Trudgeon has been a fireman for eleven years and a real person for none of them. He was assembled for this conversation out of Hansard, a Board of Trade report and other people's footnotes. He says this leaves him better documented than most of the drivers he has fired for. His coat has plainly walked to a great many signal boxes in sleet.

The background, briefly. On Christmas Eve 1910, a sleeping-car express ran into two light engines (locomotives running on their own, with nothing coupled behind) near Hawes Junction on the Settle–Carlisle line. Major J. W. Pringle's report for the Board of Trade appeared on 31 January.¹

Last month, a question in the Commons noted that several railway companies were posting notices threatening to punish men who failed to observe Rule 55.² That is the rule that sends a fireman out through the weather to remind a signalman that his train exists. The men are alarmed. The companies are stern. Firemen like Amos are, in his words, "the bit in between that gets wet."

Start with the basics. What does Rule 55 ask of you?

Amos: When we're stood at a signal, somebody off the engine goes to the box. Usually me, because the driver's the driver and the fireman's the legs. The book's less tidy than London thinks about how long you wait first. Two or three minutes in fair weather is how it's generally taken, and in rain, snow or fog you go straight off.³⁴

This being England, you mostly go straight off.

And once you're up the steps?

Amos: You tell him which train you are and where she's stood, and you sign his register to prove you came.³⁵ Then you're meant to see he's dropped a collar or a slide over the lever, so his hand meets iron before it meets the signal.³⁶ On our road you mostly look at a bare lever and take his word for it.

Half the time it goes: "Morning." "Morning." Signature. Down the steps. If the board comes off while you're up there (that's the signal clearing), your train sits and waits for you, with the driver waving like a windmill with a grievance.³

At a big junction you cross running lines in the dark just to get there. That's its own kind of danger, and nobody's written a rule for it.

Why send a man on foot? The signalman has his bells and instruments.

Amos: That's the bit outsiders don't twig. His bells are all about trains that are moving. "Is line clear." "Train entering section." "Train out of section."⁷ A train going somewhere makes a proper racket in that box.

A train that's stopped makes nothing. No bell. No needle. It's stood out in the wet, ticking as it cools, and the only places it exists for him are his head and a line in a book. So the rule sends me up the steps to be the train's memory. With legs. And chilblains.

What else helps him hold it all?

Amos: The register, open on his desk, with every train, every relief and every visitor in it. A careful man reads it the way a parson checks his watch before a sermon: often, and a bit anxiously.⁵ Then there's collars, which plenty of companies issued years back. The Midland hadn't.⁴ And track circuits, where the rail itself tells the box something's sat on it. Invented in the 1870s, I'm told. Good luck finding one round here.⁴

So that's a book, his head, and me. Only one of us gets rained on.

Tell me about Hawes Junction.

Amos: I've read every scrap I could lay hands on. The papers, what the men say, bits of the Major's report passed round the mess like a hymn sheet nobody wants to sing from.

Hawes is an odd box. Our engines are small, so the heavy northbound trains take a pilot (a second engine coupled on to help) up the bank to Ais Gill. The pilots come back light to Hawes to be turned and sent home.⁴ So that box fills up with engines that aren't quite trains. In the hour before, Sutton had nine light engines on top of his booked traffic and the Christmas specials.⁴ New box, too. Open six months or thereabouts.⁷

Two of those engines, coupled together, go out onto the Down main and stop at the advanced starter, the last signal he works before the line runs off towards Ais Gill. They're waiting for the express ahead to clear, which usually takes four to six minutes.⁴ They stood twenty-odd.⁴⁷

Nobody walked back.

Meanwhile Sutton's got goods trains, more engines, a telephone call and a message about his relief. Then he accepts the Scotch sleeper and pulls off his signals at 5.44.⁴

The two engines see the road come off, and away they go. They thought it was theirs. Course they did. It had been theirs in their heads for twenty minutes.

The express caught them just north of Lunds Viaduct, her at sixty-odd and them at about twenty-five.⁴⁸ Twelve dead. The carriages were gas-lit, and the gas caught.⁴ They took the dead to the Moorcock Inn.⁴

(He stops here and looks at the stove for a while.)

Then Tempest, a driver who'd been waiting with his own engine and watched the lot go, comes up and tells Sutton. Sutton won't believe him till he's looked in his register.⁴ I think about that more than I'd like.

When his relief came at six, Sutton asked him to tell the stationmaster he feared he'd "wrecked the Scotch Express."⁸

Pringle put responsibility on Sutton but faulted the drivers too. Fair?

Amos: He said Sutton "took no action to remind himself." He faulted the drivers for not whistling to get his attention and for not sending a fireman back under Rule 55.⁸

Now, the drivers say they whistled as they moved off, and Tempest heard it.⁴ But a whistle going away and a whistle saying we're still here are different animals. They were 270 yards out at the advanced starter, not sat by the box at the home signal. There was rain on his windows and engines shuffling all round the station.⁴ I'd not have heard it either, and I've young ears.

And the firemen didn't walk. I won't say they should have, and I won't say they shouldn't. You try twenty minutes watching a red lamp, telling yourself it'll come off the next minute. It's always the next minute. That's how you end up stood there for twenty.

Has the walk ever saved anyone, that you know of?

Amos: No idea. That's rather the trouble with it.³

(He looks pleased with this answer, then considerably less pleased.)

Nobody writes a report about the smash that didn't happen.

An MP said Sutton had been on duty nine and a half hours.

Amos: And the Major said overwork wasn't the cause.⁴⁹ I'm a fireman. I don't argue with Majors in print.

(A long pause, which the kettle fills on his behalf.)

Ten-hour turn, though. Holding every engine in your head. In the dark. At Christmas.

What's the mood now?

Amos: Sour as a week-old tea can. Companies have put notices up saying observe Rule 55 or be punished. It went up in the House last month. They said the rule was "causing alarm amongst railway servants," because in some places it's dangerous and in others it can't be done at all. They asked for a proper mechanical appliance to do the job instead, and the Minister said he was waiting on the inspectors' reports.²

Here's what galls me. Pringle wanted reminder appliances, and the Midland has set about fitting collars at Hawes and, they say, at hundreds of boxes besides.⁴ Good. That's iron for the signalman's memory. But the walk stays, and now there's a fine hung on it.

They've mended his memory with iron and mine with a threat.

If you could design whatever replaces you, what would it be?

Amos: (laughs) Something that doesn't take sugar.

No, straight answer. Something in the rail. A thing that knows the engine's there because it is there, and tells the box without anybody climbing steps to say so.⁴

It's the signature that bothers me, if I'm honest.

He buttons the coat to the throat, glances at the window (rain, naturally) and goes out to be somebody's memory.

Footnotes

1. Railways Archive, Accident Returns extract (Pringle, 31 January 1911). https://www.railwaysarchive.co.uk/docsummary.php?docID=175 ↩

2. Hansard, "Railway Accidents (Rule 55)," 27 March 1911. https://hansard.parliament.uk/commons/1911-03-27/debates/bfdaad16-62c6-4700-a58e-e729144f2bbd/RailwayAccidents(Rule55) ↩ ↩²

3. Wikipedia, "Rule 55." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_55 ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵

4. Wikipedia, "Hawes Junction rail crash" (citing Pringle's 1911 report). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawes_Junction_rail_crash ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹ ↩¹⁰ ↩¹¹ ↩¹² ↩¹³ ↩¹⁴ ↩¹⁵ ↩¹⁶ ↩¹⁷

5. Jan Ford's World, "The Train Register Book." https://janfordsworld.blogspot.com/2011/11/train-register-book.html ↩ ↩²

6. signalbox.org, "Rule 55." https://signalbox.org/rule-55/ ↩

7. David Fry, "A Christmas Tragedy: Hawes Junction – 1910," Danger Ahead! http://danger-ahead.railfan.net/accidents/hawes.htm ↩ ↩² ↩³

8. SCRCA Note, "The 1910 Hawes Junction Disaster" (quoting the Board of Trade report). https://scrca.foscl.org.uk/snippets/scrca-note-1910-hawes-junction-disaster ↩ ↩² ↩³

9. Hansard, House of Commons, 6 February 1911. https://hansard.parliament.uk/commons/1911-02-06/debates/04184e54-0f1d-43c9-8dd5-f9349ee441b5/CommonsChamber ↩