Two decades of escapades recalled in railwayman's new book

Andy, a young chargehand overseeing a British Rail maintenance team in the late 1970s, was invited to join the supervisor on a night shift, to receive a masterclass in man-management.

"The electrician came wobbling down the shed," Andy recalls. His supervisor took the key to the boiler house, and locked the drunken electrician inside.

“Right. In a couple of hours, see how he's doing, if he can stand up we will give him a job,” said the man in charge.

More than 40 years on, Andy still struggles to believe some of the things he saw during his early years on the railways.

"That was, at that time, how we dealt with drinking on duty," he says.

This is just one of the many escapades from Andy's near five decades on the railways recorded in his new book Changing Platforms.

Andy, now 65, was fascinated by trains from a very early age, when he would stand on the window-ledge of his parents' house in Stourbridge to watch the trains go by. Back then, in the early 60s, big changes were taking place, with steam making way for diesel power, and the repercussions of the Beeching report still to make their presence felt.

Starting as a 17-year-old apprentice in 1972, Andy rose through the ranks to become deputy managing director of First Capital Connect and later serve as a non-executive director with East Coast Trains and Directly Operated Railways.

While Andy overall paints a positive picture of his time on the railways – "the railway was like a big family" – but he is also brutally honest about the sometimes weak management, ill-discipline and union dominance which was commonplace at British Rail in the 1970s.

Many of the most colourful incidents happened during his 12-month stint at Duddeston carriage works on the outskirts of Birmingham. As well as the drinking culture – many of the lads prepared for a night shift by sinking several pints at The Rocket pub next to the shed – he recalled a member of the team who kept changing his name by deed poll.

"He was obviously on the run from someone," he says.

"Then there was the guy that wouldn’t speak to you and if you wanted him to do a job you had to ask his colleague to ask him."

There were also a few red faces when it came to dealing with unwanted guests in unused carriages at night. Because the 7am service from Birmingham to Bristol came from Scotland and was sometimes delayed, it was decided to keep a set of coaches warm at Duddeston for use when the normal train was late.

"This set of compartment coaches, which was stabled out of the way in sidings opposite to the depot, was therefore an excellent place for Birmingham’s 'ladies of the night' to take their clients," he recalls.

"So if the train from Scotland was late and the set was required, it was all hands to the pumps to get them out of the train which involved walking down the corridor and knocking on any compartment doors with the blinds down and shouting, 'You need to finish in there we need the train' and moving quickly on."

While he looks back at these incidents with some amusement, there were occasions when they took a darker tone.

"One day a woman rang the office and asked to speak to her husband, not a totally unusual situation then before mobile phones," he recalls.

“'Oh, he is not on duty today,' I said innocently and truthfully. Next day this guy turned up with major burns on his face where his wife had poured the chip pan over him. Obviously he had told her he was at work when he was actually 'playing away'."

Much of Andy's early years on the railways were spent at the Oxley maintenance depot, near Wolverhampton, which was responsible for maintaining trains used on the West Coast mainline, as well as the Telford-Shrewsbury spur which runs off it.

During a spell at British Rail's regional headquarters at Derby, he discovered it was not just the workers on the shop floor who got up to some questionable antics. He says while his direct managers were impeccably behaved, there were plenty of others who were not.

"You didn’t need to move far, in fact literally next door to find a hierarchy of managers that were very different and in fact some were quite obnoxious particularly after a skinful of beer at The George at lunchtime," he says.

"I was not going to fit in that well with these guys and I wasn’t one for taking instruction and not one to fawn to their whims.

"I was used to staff at the sharp end drinking, but having my managers imbibing was a new experience. It was strange that they were held in awe by certain long-serving individuals and that it was believed their behaviour was a result of the pressure they were under.

"Some of these guys would never have survived the modern railway, and did eventually get cleared out."

The job in Derby reacquainted Andy with the 7.30 Birmingham-York service, which he had caught as an apprentice eight years earlier.

"It was still cold, still steam-heated, still often late, and still very much British Rail," he says.

By this time, the buffet service had improved considerably though.

"There was now a regular steward who was quite enthusiastic and made toast for the customers and went through the train shouting 'Fresh toast and sandwiches' at all the passengers shortly after leaving Birmingham," Andy recalls.

"By coincidence it was the same train and steward back at night. He would come through the train shouting, 'Stale sandwiches, get your stale sandwiches here' – yes, he really did shout that."

Despite these shortcomings, Andy says he felt a tinge of sadness when the tired old loco-hauled service was replaced by the plush and efficient High Speed Train in May 1982. It was during this time that Andy met his wife Joanne, a clerk in the railway offices at Derby, and they were married the following year.

Changing Platforms covers the first 20 years of Andy's career on the railways, and he hopes to follow it up with a second volume covering the second half of his career.

While Andy's career took him all over the country, he returned to his home town of Stourbridge five years ago, and now lives in Norton, where he is still close friends with childhood neighbour Alan Carpenter who he used to go trainspotting with.

And while he is quite frank about some of the likely lads he had to contend with during his early days on the railways, he says part of his reason for writing the book was to honour the good guys, the hard-working heroes who kept the trains running during a difficult time.

"There are a number of negatives on how we acted and how we were treated," he says. "Despite that, there are also a number of heroes that shine through in my mind.

"They kept things moving through thick and thin day in day out, sometimes, I am convinced, by magic."