BR diesel liveries 1950s-60s

[Nearholmer]

No surprise really, in that the “classic” railway, as existed from c1890 to c1970, is becoming as remote from everyday experience as is the era of commercial sailing boats.

 

And, for various good reasons, heritage railways seldom capture it precisely. 

 

Old films are probably the best guide as to what classic operation looked like, but people don’t seem to have expended expensive film on mundane activities like shunting and running-round very often.

Edited July 27, 2019 by Nearholmer

[lanchester]

On 25/07/2019 at 12:14, Martin S-C said:

This is the other part of your post I didn't pick up on. While death rates were calamitous during canal and later railway construction, as well as other civil engineering projects such as bridge building and tunneling, there certainly were some conscientious employers around, even in the Victorian era. I suspect though that modern writers pick up on these cases because to the modern lay reader the wasteful approach to life is shocking, whereas at the time it wasn't; it was simply how life was. I also wonder if writers highlight such examples of philanthropic corporate behaviour to illustrate that such attitudes were not the norm. Yes, it did happen, but the fact we remark on it means it wasn't common practice.

Long service awards were also often given out - though in past centuries "long service" might mean beginning work for a company when you were a boy and retiring in your 80s. Perhaps, with my cynical hat on, such awards were again rare and companies could afford to hand them out because there were so few of them!

I think the big social change came about after the Great War. Socialism with a lower case "s" had been gaining ground since the early Victorian times and went hand-in-hand with rising education standards but the Great War caused a step change and the 1920s and 30s saw the big rise of the unions, and of slowly improving working conditions generally.

One comment I come across often on such FaceBook groups as the 19th century railways group is from people who wonder how loco crews could accept driving trains in all weathers without a cab and the answer is that they did it because it was perfectly normal. Our retrospective attitude is coloured by locomotive cabs, first of steamers and later on diesels and electrics complete with padded armchairs but one must remember that the Victorian era, like every era before it was one where it was customary to work outdoors in all weathers without much protection. Canal boat families did so, wagon drivers did, fishermen and other seafarers did, farm workers did, coach drivers did and of course railwaymen did as well, it was just how it was. The gradual increase of footplate crew protection with at first spectacle plates and later roofs and side sheets I suspect came about due to increased speed and the need to be able to sight signals at these higher speeds. It was okay to briefly stick your head out in a blizzard to check a signal ahead but at least 90% of the time you had shelter and therefore your vision was protected until you needed to check 'outside'.

I can't back this up, all my stuff being in storage, but I believe there are multiple instances of footplate crew actively resisting the introduction of 'better', ie more enclosed, cabs, despite the conditions they faced. From memory the GNR had this, hence the very minimal Stirling/Ivatt cabs; I believe also the GWR; and when Bouch on the S&DR section of the NER introduced full cabs with proper side windows (for the Stainmore line? - and of course the NER in the end probably had some of the 'best' cabs of any of the pre-grouping railways) these also were resisted. Arguments like 'the snow sticks to the spectacle glasses so you are better off without' come to mind. Also 'give us seats and we'll doze off', although hours prior to the Act, that does seem somewhat plausible.

 

Difficult to work out why, but this sort of thing was by no means uncommon in British industrial labour. There is a long history about resistance from pit workers to the introduction of safety lamps, which seems incredible but is true. Sometimes I suppose it was the entrenched attitude that 'if the management is doing this for us, there must be a catch', or that 'they must be doing this for profit so where's our slice'. And then, think of consultant surgeons who don't reckon there's anything wrong with their juniors working 96 hour weeks because 'it never did me any harm' - not too sure what harm it did to the patients. And the long history, in the pits and elsewhere, of the lads coming out because its unsafe - but for another shilling an hour, suddenly it's safe again. And of course anyone on piecework is likely to reject any safety features (guarding on machines, for example) that might reduce their earnings.

 

Industrial management tends to get a bad write-up, but it can sometimes be 'strordinarily difficult to do the right thing. 

[Nearholmer]

My personal conclusion on this is that the thing British people fear, loath, detest, treat with suspicion, resist etc, more than anything else is any change suggested, or worse still imposed, by anyone else, whatever the change might be. I think that the same more or less applies outside work too.

 

We seem to be the most incredibly conservative, or at least incredibly sceptical, bunch, so that each and every one of us, individually, has to be "gentled round" to accept anything new or different. We seem to be sort of change-phobic.

 

I often wonder why, and whether other nations are any different. Do we, as a people, have a collective experience, built-up over a long period, that 99% of changes turns out for the worse? And, how far back does this go? Or is it that we have such an ingrained belief in past golden ages, and such a well-perfected ability to airbrush the bad bits out of our collective memory, that we find it impossibly difficult to accept that a different future might be better?

 

Anyway, it does make attempting to change things in working environment really, really, really hard going. I personally decided to finish full-time work as we entered another period of change, not because I personally feared the change, but because I'd become jaded of leading people through even quite small changes ...... I was tired of the effort of changing people's minds!

[Martin S-C]

The point I was making was why the change occurred, not how it occurred, or whether it was even thought a good thing at the time by the employees. Clearly being on the footplate of an 1840s engine at 35-40 mph would be very different from an 1860s engine at 60mph. As speeds increased you have to have crew protection. Its a logical progression, you can't easily do any job exposed to a 60mph wind for several hours.

Edited July 28, 2019 by Martin S-C

[Gibbo675]

26 minutes ago, Martin S-C said:

The point I was making was why the change occurred, not how it occurred, or whether it was even thought a good thing at the time by the employees. Clearly being on the footplate of an 1840s engine at 35-40 mph would be very different from an 1860s engine at 60mph. As speeds increased you have to have crew protection. Its a logical progression, you can't easily do any job exposed to a 60mph wind for several hours.

Hi Martin,

 

I agree with your reasoning, having motorcycles both with and without fairings, I can certainly feel the difference between them in the wind buffeting from riding them.

 

Sorry, I know that the livery is pre-grouping, and in an extraordinarily and potentially fruitlessly vain attempt to steer this post back on course, one of my motorcycles is painted in Great Eastern Railway livery, it is dark blue, gold counter shaded lettering, red and black lining the works. No yellow warning panel or white cab roof though !

 

Gibbo.

Edited July 28, 2019 by Gibbo675
Bad grammar !

[SRman]

The comments on resistance to change remind me of problems London Transport and its predecessors had with the Metropolitan Police. Vehicles elsewhere in the country got windscreens to protect the drivers (a bit), but the Met decreed that London's buses and trams should do without because they might obscure the drivers' vision. Windscreens eventually came to London buses and trams in the 1920s (if I recall correctly), but always had to have an opening section until the 1960s regulation changes. 

Doors were another feature the Met refused. When LT bought the 700 RF single deckers, all of the red central buses had no doors fitted (Green Line and country area buses had doors). Later on, LT fitted doors to a batch of these buses in 1959, the police refused to certify them until the doors were bolted in the open position. It was 1965 before the Metropolitan Police allowed operating doors in central London.

Talk about resistance to change!!

[Titan]

A thought, If modelling diesels in 1959 I would expect none would have the four character headcodes, all would be fitted with discs? Or perhaps the three character system on the western region?

[Martin S-C]

I have a set of stock based in 1959 and none of the diesels have headcodes and almost all have discs, so your thought is correct.

[BernardTPM]

8 hours ago, Titan said:

A thought, If modelling diesels in 1959 I would expect none would have the four character headcodes, all would be fitted with discs? Or perhaps the three character system on the western region?

Yes, the D600s and some of the D800s (as shown here) did use the old 3-character (G)WR codes. The old Trix Warship was modelled in this form.

[Martin S-C]

I don't think the D600s had them. My Kernow plain green ends D604 has discs, as does this one:

[Rugd1022]

D600 - D604 all had disc headcodes fitted and all of them received split headcode boxes later on, the dates being D600 May '67, D601 January '66, D602 December '64, D603 October '65, D604 November '66.

 

D800 - D812 were all built with disc headcodes, D813 (delivered in December '59) onwards were all built with four character headcode boxes built into the nose, the earlier batch were subsequently converted as they went through Swindon Works but it took until 1964 for them all to be done.

 

As for the NBL D63xxs, it's not so easy to pin down the dates when D6300 and D6302 - D6333 were converted from discs to split headcode boxes (D6301 was withdrawn with discs intact in 1967), but there was a concerted effort by Swindon to get them done by 1966.

Edited July 29, 2019 by Rugd1022

[The Johnster]

19 hours ago, Martin S-C said:

The point I was making was why the change occurred, not how it occurred, or whether it was even thought a good thing at the time by the employees. Clearly being on the footplate of an 1840s engine at 35-40 mph would be very different from an 1860s engine at 60mph. As speeds increased you have to have crew protection. Its a logical progression, you can't easily do any job exposed to a 60mph wind for several hours.

A frequent feature of the introduction of, initially, weatherboards, then successively half cabs and full cabs is that the drivers resisted them on the grounds of obscuring visibility.  By the time full cabs began to appear, boilers had got so big that it was a bit of a redundant argument anyway; forward visibility form 20th century steam locos is pretty poor compared to 19th century locos that drivers could clearly see ahead over the boiler from the cab, and which had tall chimneys that cleared steam effectively from his line of sight

[BernardTPM]

3 hours ago, Martin S-C said:

I don't think the D600s had them. My Kernow plain green ends D604 has discs, as does this one:

They were when new. Discs, of course, but train reporting number too.

[Wickham Green]

21 hours ago, Nearholmer said:

............ the thing British people fear, loath, detest, treat with suspicion, resist etc, more than anything else is any change suggested, or worse still imposed, by anyone else, whatever the change might be ........................

Yet a shade more than half the people who had the luxury a vote and chose to use it in a certain referendum three years or so ago DID vote for a massive change ! ............. or are they all still reacting to and trying to reverse another change democratically chosen yonks ago before half the current population were even born ?   [ That's a purely rhetorical question with overtones far too political for RMweb - and probably deserves to get expunged from these pages within seconds.] 

[Nearholmer]

I thought about that as I was typing my micro-rant, and concluded that people had voted to stop a change in its tracks, and revert to an older status quo. It definitely felt like a vote against something, rather than for something.

[TheSignalEngineer]

2 hours ago, Nearholmer said:

I thought about that as I was typing my micro-rant, and concluded that people had voted to stop a change in its tracks, and revert to an older status quo. It definitely felt like a vote against something, rather than for something.

It's a bit like 100% mainline steam I suppose. What was there 60 years ago is gone and can never be brought back in its old form. Life moves on, not back to what people think it was like before they were born. Rationing of food / clothing / petrol, walking four miles from the gas works with a bag of coke for the fire anyone?

[Martin S-C]

Perhaps in a way many people model railways as they once were in a sort of silent plea to have things again that have been lost. There is a lot of nostalgia in what some of us do. Yearning for what has gone might be a part of the reluctance to accept change.

[melmoth]

1 hour ago, Martin S-C said:

Perhaps in a way many people model railways as they once were in a sort of silent plea to have things again that have been lost. There is a lot of nostalgia in what some of us do. Yearning for what has gone might be a part of the reluctance to accept change.

 

Yes, but it's also how things are emphasised in remembrance. Wartime/1940s weekends on preserved railways tend to go long on Vera Lynn and Dad's Army, but less so on whale meat, rationing and polio.

[Gibbo675]

36 minutes ago, melmoth said:

 

Yes, but it's also how things are emphasised in remembrance. Wartime/1940s weekends on preserved railways tend to go long on Vera Lynn and Dad's Army, but less so on whale meat, rationing and polio.

Or for that matter death, destruction and ruinous tragedy.

 

Gibbo.

[Martin S-C]

Its human nature to recall the good times and suppress the bad memories. We'd end up mental wrecks if we did both, presumably suppression of bad memories is an evolutionary benefit of some sort. We should invite David Attenborough into the thread to enlighten us on that.

[Pandora]

On 27/07/2019 at 09:43, jim.snowdon said:

Many operators of model railways have little or no idea of how the real railway operates, or the dynamics of getting a train started and stopped. And it frequently shows.

 

Jim

In the case of  crash shunting, we can offer the excuse of the rule book in force in the mind of the operator and of the "historical era" of the layout,  it is correct that for at least 20 years, the rule book states approach and stop 6 feet short and then ease up to the stock,  failure to comply is classed as a train accident,  similarly,  the ease back after uncoupling is 2 feet .  the rules on shunting on the railway is a subject of itself,   certain  depots yards and sidings have local rules and instructions which may be read in the Sectional Appendix, those local rules  permit use of ropes or road vehicles to perform shunting of stock ,  but as a rule a traction unit is standard,  one thing I cannot see in the Sectional Appendix, any references to fly  shunting, loose shunting,  or use of horses.

 

Edited July 30, 2019 by Pandora

[Martin S-C]

Yes, there's all kinds of historical excuses and local rules but I think what people are commenting on is the speed at which a model loco will whack into a wagon, stop dead like a UFO and instantly go off again the other way, or worse still, continue propelling it down a siding at an unsafe speed without even stopping to give the shunter time to flip up its brake lever. While real practices did vary, there's no excuse for the train-set physics some operators employ in front of a paying audience.

[SRman]

Inspired by the 'driving' experience most sound decoders give, I program all of my models with high inertia and momentum values to match. It does mean I sometimes misjudge stops and crash heavily into rolling stock or buffer stops though. It's all part of the learning experience for driving my stock!  

It is enjoyable, even with silly mistakes. It does make for more realistic starts and stops in normal operation, though.

[The Johnster]

On 28/07/2019 at 18:14, Martin S-C said:

The point I was making was why the change occurred, not how it occurred, or whether it was even thought a good thing at the time by the employees. Clearly being on the footplate of an 1840s engine at 35-40 mph would be very different from an 1860s engine at 60mph. As speeds increased you have to have crew protection. Its a logical progression, you can't easily do any job exposed to a 60mph wind for several hours.

A frequent feature of the introduction of, initially, weatherboards, then successively half cabs and full cabs is that the drivers resisted them on the grounds of obscuring visibility.  By the time full cabs began to appear, boilers had got so big that it was a bit of a redundant argument anyway; forward visibility form 20th century steam locos is pretty poor compared to 19th century locos that drivers could clearly see ahead over the boiler from the cab, and which had tall chimneys that cleared steam effectively from his line of sight

[The Johnster]

44 minutes ago, SRman said:

Inspired by the 'driving' experience most sound decoders give, I program all of my models with high inertia and momentum values to match. It does mean I sometimes misjudge stops and crash heavily into rolling stock or buffer stops though. It's all part of the learning experience for driving my stock!  

It is enjoyable, even with silly mistakes. It does make for more realistic starts and stops in normal operation, though.

This will improve your driving technique.  I once heard the job of the driver being described as 'to stop the train at the locations and times specified in the timetable', which of course means keeping a suitable speed and braking gently to a controlled stop.  Any driver will tell you that any idiot can make a train move, but it takes a particularly specific sort of idiot to stop it properly.

 

Nobody wants to throw the passengers about more than they have to, and in the case of a loose coupled freight train it is possible to seriously damage the guard with rough driving, which means he is not in a fit state to protect the train in rear when you break a coupling; it's a balance between fortune favouring the brave and softly softly catchee monkee.  Real driving standards varied considerably, but one was on thin ice mentioning this to the parties concerned, unless of course one was talking about another driver...

 

You learned a lot about driving standards as a guard in a brake van.  Brake van seats have shoulder pads for a reason, and it is advisable to sit on the side nearest the brake wheel so that you don't have to leave the seat to apply the brake.  If you do have to move about the van, to attend to the lamps for example or feed the stove, the rule is the old sailing ship one; one hand for the ship and one for yourself.  Even the best of drivers could not avoid a violent 'snatch' on routes where downhill banks were followed immediately by uphill ones; he has to try and keep the coupling tight through the dip but he's probably had to brake a bit and even with the van brake hard on some will have bunched up, so there will be a consequence when he opens the throttle to power up the bank the other side of the dip.  A rough driver had to be 'endured'...

 

'The guard is the man who rides in the van, 

the van at the back of the train.

The driver, in front, 

thinks the guard's a big (insert something suitable rhyming with front)

and the guard think's the driver's the same'.

Edited July 30, 2019 by The Johnster