The railway man : a pow's searing account of war, brutality and forgiveness (3 page)

Further back in the yard several larger, more powerful-looking engines were drawn up, their giant spoked wheels connected by coupling rods that looked as big as the foot-bridge's girders. There was an awesome potential in those linked wheels, rods and pistons - power at rest. A little way beyond Portobello one of the engines was drawn up beside a blackened wooden shed, and from a high door in its side a wooden chute hung out over the tender behind the engine. A man wearing a waistcoat and cloth cap was filling the chute from a big bucket of coal, and the lumps clattered down on to the black heaps which another man, dressed in a rough blackened grey jacket was shovelling and levelling into place.

That was the start of my incurable interest in railways. From that day onwards I spent a lot of time on Park Bridge, and soon became aware of other boys with similar interests leaning out over the engines as they slowed down on their way into the goods yard, or cruised at speed further out on their way up the East Coast main line between Edinburgh and London. For Edinburgh was a rail centre, and I lived at the eastern end of a great loop of lines punctuated by stations, depots, tunnels, repair yards and goods terminals. I could watch the flagship engines of the London and North Eastern Railway rush by, a long procession of carriages drawn after them as they headed for Edinburgh Waverley-the company's very own station and a mecca for train lovers - or catch the smaller, older engines at the head of suburban and country trains. They were all trains, and that was enough for now.

It was like love, my fascination for those huge, noisy machines that were already near the end of their golden age. They moved with such magnificent purpose. They were alive, they had steam, smoke and the smell of minerals; they burned energy without concealment, and you could see their fire. They raced against themselves, losing more heat than they used, running by burning their own cargo of coal; but there was something very human about the need to keep fire going by hand, shovelling and watching, never for a second being able to forget responsibility for the journey and the work. Their waste didn't have to be buried in lead-lined coffins, it was exhaled as carbon, sulphur and nitrogen, or swept and scattered as ash, the unburnt particles of coal settling gently on our clothes and hair.

Some things that humans make transcend their fiinction; instruments can be magical. That explosive, rhythmic sound we call puffmg says more to us about getting under way, about departure, than a petrol-driven snarl can ever do; perhaps it has something close to the beat of our pulse. Even if we were using up and heating the earth too much, and no-one knew that at the time, it would have been worth making an exception for steam engines. They were beautifial machines; the most beautiful machines produced in the industrial revolution.

The Reverend Awdry, author of the railway series of children's books that attracted millions of infant readers long after their parents had forgotten the age of steam, once said that railways 'touch' people, make us seem eccentric; and yet we discover that they have the same effect on almost everybody else. I have certainly felt a little eccentric at times; but I suspect that we are all railway lovers, at some deep level.

The honest power of a steam engine is overwhelming-most of its important parts are on display. You see the great cylinder with cranks and mechanisms outside it, you see the ingenious connection of levers and rods to the enormous wheels and you have already understood that this combination of things will work, and you might even see how. Unlike a motor car or a nuclear ship, there's no secrecy about a steam engine's force. What engineers call the 'motion', the linked shafts and pistons and wheels that drive the engine, is as fascinating as the movement of a watch. And almost as jewel-like, for the couplings and connecting rods were often still chipped and filed smooth by hammer and chisel, after they came off the milling machine. Hands still made parts of these engines, and it is no surprise that drivers spoke of them as individuals. But essentially, the engine was a boiler held in heavy firames on a set of steel wheels.

The simplicity of it fascinated me. Coal burnt in a furnace surrounded by water created steam; steam confined in a cylinder pushed a piston, and linked to wheels by rods that turned the straight thrust of the piston into rotatory motion, the engine moved and worked. The idea that hordes of people and commodities could be carried at such shakingly powerful speeds by a sort of articulated kettle, in which the water could never be allowed to fall below the top of the furnace or there would be an explosion, seemed amazing to me. What made it all so different from today's electric railways, which run at set speeds, was the need to be aware at every moment of the perilous balance of fire and water, which also gave the possibility of going a little faster if the engineman was good, or of disaster if he was incompetent.

Like everything else we make - like firearms, for example - the simple idea could be endlessly refined, developed and decorated. I discovered trains in their heyday, when steam under pressure had achieved astonishing things. Libraries of books were written on the improvement of Watt's basic idea. More sophisticated valve gears gave more subtle control of pressure; steam could be superheated to get more pressure out of it; more yards could be added to the labyrinth of copper firetubes inside the boiler to give a bigger heating area, and therefore more heat and steam. But it was the way it all worked together that mattered, in the poetry of great engines, their appearance, speed and mystique.

I learned to distinguish machines, to love some more than others. There were, for example, the imposing Atlantic engines, the most powerful Scottish engines of the early century, their four big driving wheels half hidden by 'splashers', like great mudguards, and their lesser wheels chunky with thick spokes. One of these engines, up close, seemed monstrous, the vast tube of the boiler painted a solid dark green, the front a glossy black, resting on its 20-foot long iron frames. One of the driving wheels would dwarf a boy, who might come a little higher than the silver boss at the centre of its ring of black-painted spokes. The linked piston rods were as massive as one of the rails on which the wheels they drove ran so heavily. The rocking levers of the outside valves looked like swimmers' arms frozen in mid stroke. Above were the pipes, flues and stanchions of polished brass and copper running the length of the boiler, and higher up still the top-hat of the chimney.

By the late 1930s, this mighty engine began to look a little archaic, a little steamroller-like, as the last and most fabulous of the dinosaurs matured, running faster and longer than all their kind. These were engines like the Pacifies, which ran on the express route from London to Edinburgh, so heavy and powerful that they needed four smaller wheels in front of their six great driving wheels and two behind, just to balance their own weight. They were epic creatures; machines that looked as though they could drive through the world. Perhaps only the sight of a rare eagle to a birdwatcher can compare to the surge of excitement I would feel when one of these Pacifies, the pride of British engineering, swept by me, its slipstream battering me against the firame of my bicycle.

Even tiiese leviathans could be improved. In the mid-Thirties, some were streamlined. The cylindrical boiler disappeared beneath a sweeping aerodynamic form painted two tones of grey, its steel adding a third richly military colour to the 'Silver Link', which could do the London-Edinburgh run in six hours, often at more than 100 mph. This made it one of the fastest engines in the world. The curve of the wing lifted over the wheels, a whale showing its teeth. It was like an enormous grey knife blade adhering to the rails, cutting a slice out of the landscape with over a hundred tons of metal. To feel this as it tore past was to be carried away into the future.

Of course, the first photograph I ever took was of a Pacific, the most famous of them all: the 'Flying Scotsman', on the opening day of the summer season of its London-Edinburgh run. I pointed my Box Brownie at the line and hoped that its lens would somehow capture the thundering displacement of air that was about to be unleashed on me. The snap came out, like most railway photographs, as a grainy black and white travesty of the real thing.

But what mattered was being there and having seen it. My hobby had grown into an obsession by the time I left school in 1936. In fact, steam engines occupied most of my free hours between 1933 and the moment when I volunteered for the army in 1939.1 read histories of engineering, of companies that were long gone even then, haunting the second-hand bookshops around George IV Bridge in Edinburgh and finding beautiful old books on railways that I could buy for a penny each. Occasionally I would reach out and spend a few pence on some real treasure: a handsome set of Smiles, a book of Victorian photographs.

I had become what is known nowadays as a 'trainspotter', though that is not a word I would use and I do not recognize myself in the lonely boys in anoraks who haunt British railway stations noting the numbers of passing trains. For me this was almost a scholarly passion, a 'subject' as valid as mathematics or French, and I took it just as seriously as any specialist. In any case, the standardized and predictable high-speed engines of the monopoly railway company cannot compare with the magnificent variety of machinery on the iron roads of the 1930s.

I didn't just sit and dream about trains, but travelled to look and see, waiting on cold embankments and cuttings in the hope of catching a glimpse of some rare and famous locomotive. I thought nothing of riding fifteen or twenty miles on my bike to watch an engine hammer past on a rural line, and turning around to ride back to my parents' house as happy as though I had seen a girlfriend.

Until 1923 there had been 120 railway companies in Britain, but then they were grouped into four great combinations. The local combine in East Scotland was called the London and North Eastern Railway. The engines in Edinburgh were different from those in East Anglia, and no engine from Cornwall would penetrate as far north as Newcastle. An engine could sometimes run on a foreign system of track, but it was not always easy: Great Western engines were risky outside their territory for they were wider than others, and could clip a bridge or a platform in alien country, with disastrous results. Locomotives from the northeast of England would often decouple from trains at Berwick; the border was a technical as well as historic boundary. A Scottish engine would then haul the train northward.

But now the engines evolved in isolation were infiltrating each other's territory, and you could see some exotic from the far south nosing on to the buffers at Waverley Station. The incredible varieties remained: the old companies' engines were still in use, locomotives developed in the time of Victoria still working in the age of aircraft. I was among the last witnesses to this overlapping, inefficient and utterly wonderfiil chaos. I felt like Darwin on the Galapagos.

And just like species in their habitats, these creatures with their gleaming layers of paint and elegant steel and brass mountings had often still to be tracked to their native ranges. We talked the language of birdwatchers: rare engines were 'elusive' or 'difficult'. The world of railways was as surprising and complicated as the natural world: there seemed to be more kinds of locomotive than there were different birds in the Lothian Hills. There were at least 28,000 steam engines in Britain on the main lines; and several thousand more in private employment, cast-offs and survivors from the big lines working for breweries, mines, ironworks. The LNER, my local railway, had been built up from great lines like the North British Railway and tiny local companies like the East and West Yorkshire Union Railway, four battered engines lugging coal between some pitheads and the sea.

I rescued the most obscure railway in the British Isles from oblivion by writing a little article about it for Railway Magazine when I was sixteen. On Unst, the most northerly of the Shetland Islands, I found some overgrown tracks of a tiny 2-foot gauge running from chromite quarries in the island centre to the nearby pier. Stocky little ponies were pulling ramshackle wagons full of the chrome-iron ore in hot July sunshine. In another part of the island I found more lines radiating out from another chromite pit, the workings completely derelict. The tracks were covered in rough grass and nettles and dockweed; the rusty side tipping wagons were lying in the positions in which they had been abandoned by the side of the track. I felt I had reached the ultima Thule of the railway world.

For me it was a question of mapping and understanding that man-made world, of tracing the genealogies of engines, designs and companies. My habits of precision and of needing to know where I was, which may have attracted me to the spider's web of railways in the first place, would later get me into the most awful trouble on the worst railway in the world, but that need to locate myself and to imagine ways of escape would never leave me. And I was drawn to the railways so much that they have been a backdrop to almost every turning-point in my life, and have led me into unhappiness and torment, as well as some of the only real contentment I have ever known.

Railways are an intensely personal mania, but I was always aware that mine was not exactly a secret passion. Train study was one of the most popular pastimes in Britain. There were always other boys, standing stifiQy alert, taking notes and photographs, on platforms, on sidings, at level crossings out in the country. Guardedly, we traded information. We would hear of curious sightings, of locomotives straying out of their areas like big birds blown off course by a storm. The storm was an economic one, homogenizing the local railway systems in the face of the world slump; for the moment, the Depression and all it brought with it was our opportunity. We didn't hear the storm coming closer.

We got permits to visit engine sheds and workshops; saw still, silent herds of the great locomotives in sidings on Saturday afternoons or Sundays. There was a fine illicit thrill about climbing aboard the platform of a steam engine, nine or ten feet off the ground, and standing in firont of the wall of instruments, the gleaming levers, throttles and stopcocks that regulated so much power.