It is 1973 and I am stand­ing in Ilford Sta­tion on a Sunday after­noon where the track used to be. I’m work­ing as a navvy and accord­ing to my payslip I am a plate-layer. We’ve been here nearly twelve hours already and the job is nowhere near fin­ished — we need to get the new track down before com­mence­ment of hos­til­it­ies on Monday morn­ing. Apart from the work itself, this job is all about smoking — Old Hol­born mostly. One of our gang will have smoked two ounces of tobacco and twenty tailor-mades by the end of the shift (eight­een hours). A Brit­ish Rail bloke in a suit attempts to move a pile of stones with a shovel which just bounces off them. He throws down the shovel in dis­gust and we look smug — use a fork, you idiot.

In the early sev­en­ties, before the advent of Human Resources, Health and Safety and union-bashing Tory gov­ern­ments, there was work aplenty in Essex for any­one who could present them­selves at the Col­chester Odeon at 7am. At that time, a bona fide exist­ence for us hip­pies, school drop-outs and squat­ters revolved mainly around smoking dope and doing as little work as pos­sible. The words work and ethic never appeared in the same sen­tence. There was a lot of labour­ing work around for those who could be bothered, some of it ‘cas­ual’ or ‘off the cards’, i.e. cash and tax free. In fact if you were a bloke with long hair just about the only work you could get was labour­ing. (It was dif­fi­cult to rent a flat too and I was also turned down by the Tech­nical Col­lege for refus­ing to get a hair-cut.) The rail­way job was rel­at­ively well paid — £40 a week take home as long as you did a week­end shift. To put this in per­spect­ive: the car I bought as a res­ult of this employ­ment cost £15, and the insur­ance, £40. Driv­ing les­sons were £3.50 at the BSM and my total out­lay to get a driv­ing licence was £73.

So one morn­ing, I found myself wait­ing at the cinema with a few oth­ers. This was recruit­ment at its most informal. No-one spoke to me and I didn’t know where I was going or what I was going there to do. A ropey-looking bus full of grim-faced old men smoking roll-ups pulled up and I got on, sat down and rolled a cigar­ette too. I was feel­ing slightly out of place as a seventeen-year-old, bespec­tacled, middle-class ex-public schoolboy.

We were a track-relaying gang work­ing for Balfour Beatty sub-contracted to Brit­ish Rail, con­sist­ing of Poles (by far the best work­ers), Irish and loc­als from Suf­folk and Essex. I have never since met such tough men. The work con­sisted of wield­ing imple­ments such as pick­axes, shovels, sledge-hammers, six-foot crow­bars, scythes and large forks. Track that has been in situ for ten years or so can­not just be lif­ted out since the stones that the track is laid on (known to us affec­tion­ately as slag) set solid after a while so it all has to be dug out. Most people find dig­ging the garden quite hard work. Mul­tiply that by ten.

To begin the pro­cess of relay­ing track the gang would spread out over a sec­tion, three beds  to a man. A ‘bed’ was the area between the sleepers. If we wanted to be more pre­cise we used the terms four foot and six foot, - the four foot being the area between the run­ning rails and the six foot the area between pairs of tracks. (The term four foot comes from the stand­ard rail­way gauge of four feet, eight and a half inches). To dig out your beds you had to stand on a sleeper, then raise your fork high above the slag and smash it down just next to the sleeper. It would take a few goes to get to any depth at all; if and when you did, you could lever the fork against the sleeper to remove (hope­fully) a decent amount of slag which you’d then chuck to one side. If you missed the slag and hit the sleeper a huge, jar­ring shock would be trans­mit­ted up your arm. We some­times used pick­axes to loosen the slag but most just relied on brute force and a fork. Once you had removed some slag you could then use a foot on your fork and your entire body weight to attack the slag from less of an angle. Once you had fin­ished excav­at­ing your beds you could have a smoke for five minutes or so before mov­ing on to the next section.

Every now and then, the arrival of a train would be her­al­ded by a blast on a kind of tin bugle by a one-armed man who then shouted either ‘up road’ or ‘down road’ depend­ing on the train’s dir­ec­tion of travel (up being towards Lon­don and down away from Lon­don). We would stand by the side of the track until the train had passed. Once a fast train took the lid of our over­size tea-can with it which could well have res­ul­ted in an Odd-Job-style decap­it­a­tion. Train toi­lets emp­tied straight onto the track at that time and we often admired the res­ults or in some cases were sprayed. Other diver­sions included execut­ing myxomatosis-infected rab­bits with shovels and mer­ci­less piss-taking. Gen­er­ally the Poles were the quietest, the Irish the most philo­soph­ical and the loc­als the most gar­rulous — most of their open­ing con­ver­sa­tional gam­bits con­sisted of the words: ‘I tell you what…’

Dur­ing the six months or so that I worked there, I saw new blokes start almost every day; some las­ted an hour or so and most just one day. Absent­ee­ism was com­mon­place and gen­er­ally tol­er­ated. Inactiv­ity was not. I once made the mis­take of sit­ting down for a breather. Luck­ily an old bloke called Fred advised me: ‘you can have a smoke but don’t sit down oth­er­wise he’ll be on to you’. He being the fore­man or ganger. All I remem­ber about him is that he was Welsh and used to hold his dick with an unusual reverse grip when piss­ing by the side of the track. Fun­nily enough the sunken area to the side of the track was known as the cess.

In addi­tion to dig­ging stuff out, we would also pack slag under sleep­ers to bring the track up to the right level – a pro­cess known as tamp­ing. This involved jack­ing up the track and ram­ming the stones home with a shovel. When we were done, or if a train was com­ing, the jacks would be released, the only warn­ing being a shout. You had to learn not to have your feet under a sleeper when this happened unless you wanted a couple of tons of steel and con­crete drop­ping on your toes. Another pro­cess was lin­ing. Twenty men with six-foot crow­bars, ten to each rail, would dig the bars in and lever against the track to push it in whatever dir­ec­tion was required accord­ing to a man sight­ing down the rail from a dis­tance. To syn­chron­ise the pulls there would be a rhythmic shout: hey — hup hup hup, the hups being when you pulled.

The clack­etty clack rhythm of train wheels hit­ting the joints between sec­tions of rail bolted together with plates has largely dis­ap­peared with the advent of long-welded rails. As in all engin­eer­ing of this type, expan­sion is a factor that needs to be catered for and in this case we used a pro­cess known as de-stressing. It was pro­nounced distress­ing which gave the activ­ity a cer­tain poignancy. To de-stress a sec­tion of track (usu­ally about a quarter of a mile long), we would unclip the rails from the sleep­ers, cut out a small piece (about nine inches long) and stretch the remain­ing rail with a hand-operated hydraulic gizmo before re-clipping. The clips were sprung S–shaped steel affairs which could be removed quite eas­ily with a well-aimed blow from a sledge ham­mer. I say well-aimed because you needed to have your foot on top of the clip when hit­ting it to keep it from shoot­ing off. Repla­cing them how­ever was much more dif­fi­cult. Being sprung they had to be hit very hard and in exactly the right place, oth­er­wise a kilo of steel would go fly­ing off usu­ally into your shins or worse, into someone else’s. This job was always done at night of course which didn’t help. We had a vari­ety of lights though includ­ing Tilley lamps (run on pres­sur­ised par­affin) and lengths of cable with bulbs every few feet — as seen in mini­ature on your Christ­mas tree.

Although there were machines to do all these tasks, they were gen­er­ally only avail­able for week­end engin­eer­ing works when there was a dead­line to meet. That often meant very long shifts start­ing at mid­night on Sat­urday and going right through until the fol­low­ing after­noon. The week­day work was a pic­nic com­pared to the week­end as we could stop for rain and smokes and cups of tea were brought to the track in the huge white enamel can. Week­ends we worked in all weath­ers and snatched breaks only if the work was going well.

Night-work was con­duc­ted with a sense of urgency in an eerie half-light. Mostly there was no con­ver­sa­tion, just gang­ers shout­ing orders. Weird-looking machines with sirens that soun­ded like air-raid warn­ings would appear for tamp­ing and lin­ing and there were oth­ers that ran on the adja­cent track with cranes that brought lengths of rail. If there was no adja­cent track we would erect tem­por­ary rails sup­por­ted by devices known as pots to allow a machine to deliver rails. In the absence of machinery, we did everything by hand. It took four men to carry a sleeper with devices known as dogs and many more were required to move rails — either with dogs or crow­bars. One night we moved eight­een pairs of long rails from one side of a track to the other using crow­bars. It took all night with much hey-hupping. There was another huge machine which had a kind of con­veyor belt that excav­ated under the track and dumped the res­ult­ing mix­ture of earth and slag on the embank­ment. We would spend days mov­ing this stuff with shovels to clear up the mess.

New slag was delivered in hop­pers and we had to turn a kind of steer­ing wheel to let the stuff out (hope­fully in the right place to save too much shov­el­ling later on) then jump off and run round to the next un-manned hop­per. I once jumped off onto the adja­cent track right in front of an oncom­ing train. A slow one, luck­ily. No sym­pathy to be had though — just a bollocking.

There were no toi­lets or wash­ing facil­it­ies of any kind and the only safety equip­ment I had was a dirty orange vest. I enjoyed my sand­wiches though — and the fags, and even the dis­gust­ing tea made with Carna­tion tinned milk.

 

Fur­ther reading

Cole­man, T. (1965) The Rail­way Nav­vies: A His­tory of the Men Who Built the Rail­ways. Hutchinson.