Posted in News/interest Tuesday, December 13th, 2011
It gives me great pleasure to introduce Alan Nichols to the Model Railways blog. Alan who is around two years younger than me, had led a very different life to myself, and our paths or should I say lines had never crossed until we met in an interview room in Basingstoke at the training Centre in 2002. I was there as a manager of drivers to interview applicants for drivers positions on South West Trains.
From the mid fifties to the early nineties the railways had been in decline, convulsed by reorganisations and mass closures. Governments of both colours hoped that it would just crawl away into a corner and die, without causing them any more money or grief. An ageing workforce felt trapped in poorly paid jobs being too young to retire, but too old to change their career. Having said that on looking back I now accept we did not do all that much either, with overtime being the accepted method of boosting your earnings. I am proud of making the quote much used by my able local shop steward Ray Cox that in the late eighties that as far as the railway was concerned “We pretended to work, and they pretended to pay us”.
Following the fragmentation of British Railways, coupled with the high rate of retirements of men who joined the railway after the second world war, most Train Operating Companies T.O.C.s then found themselves short of drivers. Trade unions exploited this situation to force the T.O.C.s into agreeing much higher rates of pay than had been compared to the one national pay rate on B.R.
To give you an example prior to the implementation of Driver Restructuring Initiative D.R.I. on S.W.T. my rate of pay as a driver in 1997 was £11,800 a year, in addition to this I would get time and a 1/4 on Saturdays, time &3/4 on Sundays, time & a 1/4 between 22:00 & 02:00, time & a 1/3 between 02:00 & 06:00, even time and 7/12 if I was on overtime during those hours.
A hangover from the steam days was mileage, you got an hours pay for every 15 miles over 200 in a days work. There was also what was called a one up payment that was 10% of wages for getting there on time each week. It’s a wonder that pay clerks didn’t hang themselves from the nearest lampost because of its complexity. This was all swept away in exchange for a clean break salary of £25,000. My pay went up from £18,000 to £27,000 the following year, and for the first time since the war, the rate of pay for drivers made it a sort after position.
Alan was the second candidate I interviewed that day, I must admit I did not particularly enjoy this part of my job in that there was a format list of standard questions, such as “what are your strengths and weaknesses”, ” what qualities can you bring to this position as a driver”, by the time I had interviewed the fifth or six candidate I felt I had learnt my lines for a part in a play. With Alan it was very different, I soon realized that for a non railwayman he had a very good concept of how the railway operates. Looking back after the event I feel that he interviewed me as much as I did him, but we got on so well that the interview took nearly two hours, rather than the planned hour. I felt he would be an asset to the railway and recommended that he be accepted for training as a driver.
I have thought since that interview how much the railway has changed for the two of us who are nearly the same age, yet who entered railway service over 40 years apart. It took me eight years to get my driver position, learning, and being sworn at by other life time railwaymen. You had to learn the rule book in your own time, I even wrote a lot of it out long hand in an effort to get it to stick in my brain, There were drivers who gave up their own time to run Mutual Improvement Classes some evenings a week to explain the mysteries of the working parts of a steam engine and the rule book. To emphasize the closed society that was the Motive Power Department, even compared to departments on the railway. They would normally only take staff into the footplate grades up to the age of 23 years old, and this system of recruitment was little changed from the dawn of the railway age.
In Alans case he joined the railway as a trainee driver, and in around 15 months was out driving trains, so do I think he had it easy compared to my experience. No I Don’t All of Alans early training took place in a class room. He never had the chance of being given permission by a signalman to pass a signal at danger other than as an exercise, and all the other events I saw on the track as a fireman. I am not suggesting for a moment that new staff should be trained in the same way that I was, that way of railway operation no longer exists. It would be like arguing that before any person is allowed to go to sea in an giant oil tanker, they should have worked at least one trip as a seaman, manning the sails on a wind jammer while rounding Cape Horn.
Its just that I think new entrants have a far steeper hill climb in that they need to have the ability to understand the rules for a safe operation of a railway before they get any hands on experience. It’s a credit to Alan and the other “off the street” entrants, plus the quality of their training that enables them to safely carry out their duties on a daily basis.
I will now pass you over to Alan Nichols who wrote this article for his old bank In House magazine, it has some interesting insights from the point of view of a new entrant to the railway. D.P. is a banking term which stands for Discretionary Powers for lending money. E.P. stands for Electro Pneumatic. It was a type of braking system introduced in 1951 on the new class third rail suburban units on the Southern Region of British Railways. This stock were given the generic name of E.P.s. Because they required a special key to operate the unit, the key became known as E.P. key, even though the same key was used on diesel locomotive built later for the railway during the modernization programme.
Part Two of this blog follows entitled “D.P. club to E.P. club by Alan Nichols“
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