Railway enthusiast in clover

In the early 1960s my father published a thesis for his Ph.D. awarded by Sheffield University.  The subject matter was turnpikes, canals and tramways in South Yorkshire and North Derbyshire .  Securing the material for the thesis involved visits to  places where archives were stored: no e-mail or internet in those days.

Often I would accompany him on his visits to York, Manchester and London and also on his field trips to look for the remains of old canals etc.  One field trip took us to Goole and Thorne.  On the way back we stopped off at a railway junction where the line from Doncaster divides: one line ending in Kingston-upon-Hull, the other heading for Scunthorpe and Grimsby.

It was a complicated junction.  The four lines from Doncaster were paired by direction of travel and on the down side (from Doncaster) were sidings to a colliery.  At the junction four lines led off to the left and became two shortly afterwards and were controlled by the junction signal box.  The four lines leading off to the right for Scunthorpe merged into two lines at the next signal box.

The line was busy and the signalman was for ever moving points and pulling off signals.  We sat on a fence watching the trains going by and could hear the block bells ringing in the box on the opposite side of the tracks.

We watched the signalman run down the signal box steps carrying what looked like a baseball bat.  He crossed all the lines and standing in front of us proceeded to thump a piece of line side equipment.  He then scurried back to his domain.  The problem he had was that a rod linked to the points was not moving sufficiently to permit the signal wire to be moved. 

By the time this performance had been repeated a few times we were on good speaking terms and I accepted the signalman's offer to thump the rod when he called me from the box.  One good turn deserves another, and I was invited to join the signalman in his box. I managed to pull some point and signal levers including one which controlled the electrically operated points where the two tracks to Hull joined. 

Bells were ringing all the time so it seemed as trains were offered to the box and then onwards to the next boxes.  The signalman was busy making entries to the train register.  I even managed to offer a passenger train on the main line from Scunthorpe to Doncaster.

Of course the signalman had broken all the rules in the book, but what he did was engender my interest in signalling which has remained to this day.