Fire and Steam (34 page)

This first military task for the railways was achieved with such remarkable efficiency that it transformed the status of the railways overnight. No longer were they Aunt Sallys but national heroes. The commander of the Expeditionary Force, Sir John French, praised the railways for having performed the task without any delays, saying ‘each unit arrived at its destination [in France] on schedule'.
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Lord Kitchener, the Secretary of State for War, and the man on the famous ‘Your country needs you' posters, went further by telling the House of Lords that the railway companies had more than justified the confidence placed in them by the government and that all grades had worked with ‘untiring energy and patience'.
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Indeed, the unions, for their part, had instantly declared peace. The new National Union of Railwaymen had been planning a further round of action, threatening the companies with a strike in December 1914, but as soon as war was declared the leaders agreed to an industrial truce that was to last throughout the war,
with the exception of a few local disputes and, in 1917, a major standoff which nearly led to a national strike.

Similar large troop movements continued throughout the conflict and the London & South Western, which served Southampton, bore the brunt of this part of the war effort. The South Western had already long been the pre-eminent ‘military line', serving no fewer than ‘176 barracks or camps'
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including Aldershot and Salisbury Plain as well as the naval bases at Portsmouth and Plymouth. Moreover, since 1892 the railway had owned Southampton Docks, which remained the main transit point for forces and matériel throughout the war, with seven million soldiers passing through them. The South Western alone carried 20 million soldiers in the four-year period, an average of 13,000 per day, and ‘no single railway company, large or small, made a greater contribution to winning the war than the London & South Western'.
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The pressure on Southampton was intense. Here the duplication created by competition between the railways bore fruit as it gave Southampton an exceptional position in the British railway network. In addition to the busy London line, the port could be reached by five separate routes, giving access to south Wales, the north and the Midlands and avoiding the congested railways around the capital. Two of those lines, from Salisbury and Basingstoke, were double-tracked while the other three were single lines but nevertheless they were used intensively during the war and stretched the resources of the company to the limit. Moreover, the South Western had to cope throughout this period without its two principal directors, since its general manager, Herbert Walker, and his assistant, Gilbert S. Szlumper, were respectively the chairman and secretary of the Railway Executive Committee. Walker was one of the great railway managers of the period and, as we see in the next chapter, was instrumental in melding the Southern Railway into a coherent network.

The railway credited with playing the second most important role in the war could not have been more different in every respect from the South Western. The Highland Railway was at the opposite end of the country and served an area with the lowest, as opposed to the highest, density of population in the UK. Two of the three main navy bases were located in northern Scotland at Cromarty Firth and Scapa Flow in
Orkney, and the sleepy railway was virtually the sole conduit for all the supplies needed by the fleet. The Highland stretched from its two northernmost points, Wick and Thurso, twenty miles from John O'Groats, down to Stanley Junction, just north of Perth, where it joined the Caledonian. The line ran over the tough mountain range of the Grampians, where the tracks climbed up from Perth, 1,484 feet above sea level on the Druimachdar Pass, where trains could be snowed up for days in winter, eventually descending to sea level again at Inverness. Given the sparse population served by the railway, three quarters of the 273-mile line from Perth to Thurso – virtually the same distance as London to Newcastle – was a single-track line with few passing points or sidings. ‘No railway could have been less well adapted to the performance of this vital military function.'
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The tiny tortuous line, which even today takes three hours and forty minutes from Inverness to Wick or Thurso, twice the time in which the distance can be driven
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– and which, as we saw in
Chapter 7
, had only been built on the whim of a laird, became a vital supply line for the war effort. Normally it was busy only during the tourist and hunting season but now it needed to become a key transport artery. From February 1917 there was even a daily train to and from Euston, largely for military personnel, which took twenty-one and a half hours
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to cover the 717 miles, earning it the nickname of ‘misery special'. A huge ammunition dump for the fleet was created at Inverness where the line was extended to the harbour, and Invergordon, a little village on Cromarty Firth, also served by the Highland Railway, became a massive encampment for 7,000 men as well as an engineering and repair base for the navy. Thurso, a small port at the end of the line, was the staging post for Scapa Flow.

Essentially, all the supplies for the ships had to be carried on the railway as well as, later in the war, the thousands of mines that constituted the Northern Barrage, stretching from the Orkneys to the coast of Norway, designed to protect British shores from attack. The outbreak of the war came at a bad time of the year for the Highland as normally its services would have been winding down in the autumn, its heavily used engines in need of an overhaul after the busy tourist season; instead the little railway faced four continuous years of
intensive working. Not surprisingly, a third of its locomotives had broken down within a few months and the overstretched railway suffered from a shortage of locomotive power throughout the war. The Highland's locomotive fleet of 150 had to be boosted by the loan of twenty others through the Railway Executive.

Fortunately, coal, which was still the principal fuel for most fighting ships, did not have to be carried on the Highland Railway. Before the war, it had been shipped direct from south Wales but the threat of U-boats made this impossible. Instead, it was taken by rail on lengthy trains called ‘Jellicoe Specials' from south Wales to Grangemouth in the Firth of Forth, from where it was shipped north which created considerable extra traffic for the railway south of the border. There were, on average, nine of these large slow trains every day throughout the war, sometimes as many as a hundred per week, all additional to the normal routine of the already heavily used south Wales railways and, as we see below, one of them played a minor role in the run-up to the terrible Quintinshill railway disaster of 1915.

Other railways, too, supplied the military. The South Eastern & Chatham served the Channel ports of Folkestone and Dover which, despite being closed to civilian traffic, were still overstretched. To accommodate the military traffic, a secret new port had to be built at Richborough, near Sandwich, which quickly grew into a large military railway with sixty miles of sidings and branches that could handle 30,000 tons weekly, all of which had to be brought in on the South Eastern & Chatham. A train ferry berth was built at Richborough
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to accommodate three new ships which were capable of gobbling up whole trains: each had four tracks on their lower decks that could carry a total of fifty-four fully loaded wagons. Quantities of railway equipment were sent over to France in that way, including 675 locomotives, 30,000 wagons and 30 ambulance trains to be used on the network of lines that had been built hastily to serve the Front.

Ambulance trains were heavily used in the UK, too. The sick and wounded dominated the traffic in the ferries and ships back across the Channel and initially they were all taken to Dover. Soon, however, the Kent port, far smaller than it is today, was unable to cope and reception centres were opened at several other ports, stretching from Plymouth to
Thurso, and the casualties were taken to large military hospitals by train. These ambulance trains, many converted from existing coaches, were well fitted out and modern, with special carriages for doctors, nurses and even a pharmacy, and they could accommodate up to 500 patients, 200 in beds in the special ward carriages and 300 walking wounded. The sheer scale of the conflict and the role of the railways is demonstrated graphically by the simple statistic that 2,680,000 sick and wounded soldiers
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were carried on the railways during the war.

Even some of those impoverished railways that had been poorly engineered and were loss-making suddenly came into their own, becoming vital arteries for the war effort. One was the ailing Stratford-on-Avon & Midland Junction, formed by the amalgamation of four railways in 1908 and well described by its nickname, the ‘Slow, Moulding and Jolting'. It had been built largely to carry ironstone but had fallen into decline as a result of cheap imports, then flourished again as the war cut off the shipping trade: ‘a heavy traffic in iron ore, iron and steel ran over this serpentine byway to and from south Wales and the Midlands'
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on track that was completely unsuitable for such dense traffic.

Surprisingly, the London Underground also played a significant part in the war. The system offered a route through London on what were called the City-widened lines, a link built soon after the first line opened in the 1860s to allow trains to reach the rail network south of the Thames. This was one of only four rail connections across the capital and was the most direct. Consequently it was used intensively by troop and other special military services with an average of sixteen military trains every day throughout the conflict, in addition to the normal Underground services. At the peak, during one fortnight in the build-up to the offensive early in 1915, there were an overwhelming 210 trains on those tracks daily, one every seven minutes around the clock.

Every railway in the land was called up in some measure to the service of the war effort, but it did not all run smoothly. Adrian Vaughan documents the fact that fifty-four loaded railway wagons stood immobile from August 1914 until the end of June 1916 at Harwich's Parkeston Quay.
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There was much pilfering and delay because of overcrowding and the scarcity of basic items like ropes and tarpaulins
to cover wagons. Trains became mobile warehouses as sidings and yards were full and factories needed to get stock out of the door. There were shortages of wagons and even the crucial Jellicoe Specials were frequently held up by overheating of the axles on their Victorian wagons. The railway had to carry whatever the military threw at it and that included very dangerous loads. The most hazardous was nitroglycerine, made at a plant near Pembrey in Carmarthenshire which employed 5,000 people, who themselves had to travel there principally by rail. The highly volatile explosive had to be taken by rail to factories in Kent and Surrey in hermetically sealed vans. With typical gallows' humour, the railway's official telegraphic code for these trains was ‘Ignite', though fortunately ‘none of them ever did'.
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Across the Channel in France, the railways also had a role to play. A network of narrow-gauge railways built and maintained by the substantial railway divisions of the British, American and French armies was the principal method of supplying the frontline. No other war would be fought over such trench-bound territories, whose location moved so little over such a long period, making them very suitable for supply by rail. In 1917, there was again fulsome praise from the military after the summer offensive at Passchendaele. Sir William Robertson, the Chief of the General Staff, praised the railways for carrying 200,000 tons of ammunition and 50,000 of stone for roadbuilding: ‘All these things meant a tremendous amount of railway work . . . I would like to acknowledge the most valuable services rendered to the Army by the railway managers and the railway employees who have gone out to do that work for us in France.'
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The railways coped with all these difficulties and new responsibilities, despite suffering from a further difficulty – the loss of thousands of key staff to the military. Rather foolishly, the government made no attempt to prevent railway workers from enlisting and, consequently, like their fellows in other industries, they flocked to sign up. It was, for example, rather unfortunate for the Highland Railway that the barracks of the Cameron Highlanders was just beside the railway at Inverness and that the regiment was given the task of raising an extra battalion soon after the onset of war. The railway lost vital staff such as signalmen and drivers, and crucially fitters from the works, which became severely
undermanned and therefore took far longer to bring locomotives back into service. The patriotism which took those men to the war was, with hindsight, somewhat misplaced as they would have been more useful in their existing occupations. The government of 1939 avoided falling into the same trap and, at the outset of the Second World War, decreed that the railways would be a ‘reserved' occupation, requiring special permission for any workers to sign up (see
Chapter 13
). And it was not only the unskilled and blue-collar workers who were temporarily lost to the railway. In addition to top managers like Herbert Walker, 2,000 railway officers were ‘loaned' to government to fulfil various important managerial roles. Albert Stanley, later Lord Ashfield, who ran the London Electric Railway Company, the precursor to London Underground, was even made President of the Board of Trade, and Sam Fay of the Great Central was given responsibility for running the War Department's own railways.

It was hardly surprising that railway workers were a source of recruitment. At the outbreak of war, there were 625,559 railway workers, reflecting the fact that the industry was necessarily very labour-intensive in those pre-electronic days. Wages, as we have seen, were low, providing little inducement to investment in labour-saving devices. Porters were required to carry luggage and handle goods at even the smallest station, which of course were all staffed with booking office clerks, ticket collectors and a station-master, though sometimes these tasks were rolled into one. There were countless signal boxes which had to be near the points and junctions they controlled because the tracks were connected directly to the boxes by a system of rods and wires.
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There had to be two men on each footplate – a driver and a fireman – and a guard as brakeman for every freight as well as passenger train. While some of these tasks could be dispensed with, the railway could not function safely without the great majority of these workers. The burden of overwork often fell on the footplatemen, with shifts lasting twenty or more hours becoming commonplace as a result of delays caused by overcrowding on the network. A driver or fireman might end up in charge of a heavily delayed train and not return home for days, sleeping in whatever nook and cranny he could find and scrounging food from the free buffets provided for servicemen –
although, cruelly, they were often turned away: ‘there was no patriotic glow to be got out of feeding sooty railwaymen who were hauling the ammunition and ambulance trains'.
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