Family in the rail industry - Past and Present

[CapriSpeed]

Do you have or have had any family members besides yourself work in the rail industry?

My great great grandfather started his career at the age of 14 as a clerk at the Stansted Mountfitchet train station, he then became station master at Postland train station (Working for the Great Northern and Great Eastern joint railway) and was then moved further up the line to Blankney and Metheringham train station as the station master there.

Stansted train station is still more or less the same and Metheringham's station is still in use but the buildings are long gone, the tracks at Postland station have long since been removed but the station itself is still there (Being used as a house I believe). Search Fenland Tractors on google as they are based next door to the station and you can see that even the signal box is still there (Quite in a poor state mind you).

Attached is a copy of the newspaper article from when my great great grandfather died back in 1933, telling the story of when he greeted the then king of England to Metheringham Station. This I have been told he was very proud of.

 

[RPM]

I have a wife, daughter and brother-in-law currently working in the rail industry. No previous recent family history on the railway before that, but I do know I have ancestors who worked on the Bristol & Exeter Railway.

 

[alxndr]

No family, recent or otherwise, as far as I've found.

 

[Bromley boy]

A second cousin, recently retired, who joined Hither Green depot in the 70s and spent 40 years driving everything from merry-go-round coal trains to Thameslinks.

Sadly the ongoing Southern dispute and the knock-on effect on TL services were what finally drove him to retire. Although, after that length of service, his decision to retire for a well earned rest does not require any justification in my book.

 

[Cowley]

On my dads side - my grandmother and grandfather for BR and my dad also worked for the railways in the 1960s for a bit.
On my mums side my uncle Frank was a fireman for a while at Colwich.

 

[Calthrop]

I’ve never worked in the railway industry – obviously, volunteer work for preserved lines doesn’t count.

Have only the most tenuous links to railway employment by family members / forbears – too tenuous for any sense-making notions, of obsessive railway enthusiasm on my part having resulted therefrom.

Family lore has it that about a century ago, a cousin-type relative on my maternal grandfather’s side of the family, worked as a passenger guard on the Birkenhead Joint (LNW / GW) system, chiefly on the Chester – Birkenhead route. The son (born 1909) of my maternal grandfather’s brother (which makes him, I think, some kind of second cousin of mine – I have no head for this stuff, I leave it mostly to the hobbits ) often travelled to and from school, on trains on which “Cousin Willie” was working as guard: much to the lad’s pleasure, Cousin W. allowed him to travel with him in the guard’s compartment.

An even thinner -- but quite colourful, and rather sad – family link to work for railways. Another brother of my maternal grandfather, had a somewhat tragic life-history (1880 – 1915). Beset and bedevilled by his extremely dominating mother as regards what he should do for a living, and who he should or should not marry (she strongly disapproved of the girl whom he loved and wanted to marry): in the first decade of the 20th century, he responded to a scheme promoted, for emigration to Canada and pioneering-farming there – and duly set off for Canada, with no informing of parents thereof, beforehand. (Idea being, to set up as a farmer over there, and then send for his sweetheart to join him.) The scheme turned out basically, to be a con-game – requiring clearing of remote virgin forest tracts, impossible for those – such as my great-uncle – without the necessary skills, or funds to hire such skills.

Great-uncle found work of any kind which he was qualified to do, extremely scarce in Canada: in desperation, he ended up working menially, in laundries serving railway construction camps in the west of the country – from context, I figure, on the then Canadian North Western’s under-construction Edmonton – Vancouver route. In the course of this work – which strikes me as in itself, pretty much hell on earth – he contracted, acutely, tuberculosis (to which his family were already prone – and in those days, little to be done about it).

He ended up -- precisely how this came to be possible, I don’t know -- going home to Britain, to die of TB in 1915. Oddly: he was one of five brothers – the other four of whom in one way or another, survived World War 1 unharmed. His death during the war, had nothing to do with the war...

 

[Darandio]

My dad worked on the track from 1953-1995 out of Ferryhill, Co.Durham. A few were offered early retirement not long after Railtrack took over, so he took it aged 62 as the operation was being moved to Darlington (or Durham, cannot remember).

He's 85 next week and still speaks fondly of his time on the railway, particuarly overseeing the period when steam gave way to diesel, and the camaraderie within the group as quite a few of them worked together for much of those 42 years.

He doesn't look back too fondly on the miles and miles of pounding up and down the ballast every day though, he's had two knee replacements in recent years and attributes it to this. He also doesn't look back too fondly at the wages either, which were meagre at best, it also meant that despite working Monday-Friday, he would also have to fit a Saturday night shift in at whichever place in the north required it. I've no idea how they did it, the body clock must have gone to hell every weekend, but after so many years I guess they got used to it.

 

[LowLevel]

My uncle has been known to operate road rail vehicles for sub contractors from time to time over the years but that's all.

 

[tsr]

My great uncle worked in an interesting electrical engineering role at a depot which I now frequent (he's now retired). It bears very little resemblance now to his workshop, though I have set foot on the exact location where it was. Some of my longest-serving colleagues might have seen him around the place, though I have not asked and they probably don't remember much.

Other than that, there is mostly only enthusiasm (and a fair bit of it) rather than employment history amongst my family and friends, so far as we all know, apart from a friend's grandfather who was a secondman at one point.