Intrepid Carpets Home Page

Shunting

Shunting is the hardest and most dangerous job that I’ve done in my life, and I only stuck it for about three months, including a 2 week shunting course.

I had just dropped out of a degree course at University, and in some ways I found it more intellectually demanding than doing a degree. The platforms in York Station faced in 4 different directions, South to Selby, North to Durham, East to Scarborough and one other direction I forget. The first thing you had to do was to memorise the name and relative spatial position of every track in and around the station, including the various sidings, particularly the sidings at Clifton where a lot of stock was kept. Then you had to remember the position of every signal and shunting disk, including those which were not positioned correctly. But more importantly, if you wanted to move a train facing Selby to a platform facing Scarborough, for example, you had to understand the relationships between all these different pieces of information. In this example you would first pull the train towards Selby (and because the train might bend the junior shunter might have to run out across the main line tracks in order to signal to the senior shunter that the signal had cleared), then push towards Clifton, then pull towards Selby (reversing the direction of the train in the process) then push in to the platform. To learn all this complex spatial network and its relationship to the working timetable was something I certainly never mastered during my time as a shunter - I had the greatest respect for the senior shunters who not only knew all this stuff by heart, but could work in the 10 or so additions and deletions to the working timetable that appeared every day. A lot of people have the idea that the driver makes the decisions about what movements are to be carried out, but it is actually the shunters who give instructions to the driver. Some drivers are resting from main line work, and understand little about shunting movements, but those who have retired to shunting can give extremely useful advice, and it is more of a team effort.

Shunting is an extremely demanding job physically. At the end of every carriage is a buckeye coupling, which weighs (I think) 98 lb. When it is not coupled to another carriage, it hangs down in a vertical position. To prepare two carriages for coupling, it is necessary to grab hold of it from a crouching position, and swing it up to horizontal. You hold it with one arm on your belly while reaching for the steel pin and trying to slide it into place. There is actually no safe way to lift it properly, and it’s the kind of thing which would give health and safety inspectors convulsions.

A lot of time is spent underneath carriages, either sitting or squatting, when trying to connect air and vacuum brakes, electrical cables, steam pipes etc. These can be require a lot of strength to connect together, especially new ones - I remember on one occasion it taking about 15 minutes to connect two new pipes. You get covered from head to foot with oil and filth while working under carriages.

Shunting is highly dangerous. The nearest I came to grief was when I mistakenly started to drop of a platform to uncouple an engine from a train which had just pulled in. Luckily a senior shunter stopped me, and the train set off about 2 seconds later. On another occasion I was working underneath an unbraked train in a siding where I had pulled the points to make sure no-one would send down any more stock and told the signal box. However, a driver came and after pulling the points, put down a train on top of mine. You’ve never seen anyone get out from under a train so fast. Luckily it was up against the buffers and I only got hit about the head by a few cables, but I remember being furious with him. Working with steam pipes was something you had to be careful with; if uncoupled in the wrong way you could get badly scalded.

But there were quite a few things which were completely against the rules, even, with fly shunting, against the law. Fly shunting was when you received trains of post office vans, going to several different destinations, which had to be broken up into trains for each destination. The senior shunter would go down the train and mark the destination for each van on a list, which he gave to the junior shunter. Then he would uncouple each van, or vans going to the same destination, at the front of the train, in turn. The shunting engine would give a push, then stop, and the last van or vans to be uncoupled would continue towards the siding for which the points had been set. It was my job to wait for the van to go past, pull the points (having consulted my list) for the next destination and then to run after the van, which was probably doing 10 miles per hour, and brake it before it collided with the other vans in the siding and derailed something. If I was lucky the brake was a lever or wheel on the outside. The worst case scenario was if you jumped onto the van and discovered the door was locked. So, hanging from the van with one arm, you dug furiously in your pocket for your carriage key and even when you got the door open, you might find a load of brutes (parcel carrying trolleys) between you and the wheel. If you didn’t reach it before the van hit, you could get thrown all over the place.

Another highly dangerous operation was coupling unbraked vans together when the engine was pushing them about 4 miles per hour. You had to duck under the buffers of each van in turn and walk up the track with the train as you were coupling up. One slip and you would have had it. We also shunted the section of an Aberdeen car train carrying the vehicles onto the section carrying the passengers, another illegal operation.

All of these operations were of course, perfectly well known to the station management, who turned a blind eye to them because there was not remotely enough time or manpower to do them safely. During the time I was there the shunting team was about 50% understaffed, because of the difficulty and danger of the job and the ridiculously low pay. As a consequence most of us were doing absurd amounts of overtime - I remember taking home £84.50 for a week of 82 hours on night shift.

However one thing that impressed me very much was the way management were trained. In theory, a station manager had to be able to do every job in the station, and all of the management trainees had to come and spend some time doing each and every job. The way it worked, if there weren’t enough people to do a particular job, then the next person up in the managerial hierarchy had to do it. But York station was so short staffed, that on one occasion the station manager had to come and work as a shunter for several days. He didn’t really have a clue what he was doing - he just carried out instructions given to him by other shunters, but I don’t know of any other industrial situation where a manager is required to muck in when the going gets tough, and I know it was appreciated - with some amusement.

I was also impressed with some of the one day courses we were sent on - on how to shunt 125s, which were just coming in, for example. We were given a lecture for an hour on the history of various innovations on the railways, and how some very sensible plans had been stopped half way to completion by a different government coming to power and cutting expenditure in the middle of implementation, meaning that the rail network had quite a hodge-podge of different schemes.

As I said before, I am full of admiration for the railwaymen, many of whom had worked on the railways since leaving the services 30 years before, and who referred to non-railwaymen as ‘civilians’. It often did seem like being in a war working there. But I also heard of semi-feudal arrangements made by senior management, which sounded very strange in a public company. For example the manager of the Eastern Region would use a train of pullman cars to take him and his guests grouse shooting in Scotland in August, and apparently this train was supplied with hampers of food and all the best wine.

Still, I look back with affection to my short period working on the railways - apart from the difficulties, danger and bad pay, it was one of the most interesting jobs I’ve had.