Conserving Heritage - The People of Workington
Glynn Thompson
Glynn started in 1965, one of the last two men to be taken on at the shed. He was 16. It was still a very busy shed with plenty of “trip work”. There were five or six pits in the area as well as the steelworks. There were iron ore mines and chemical works. All of these provided freight traffic, including oil tank trains (twice daily), clinker trains destined for Scotland and Blue Circle cement. In terms of passenger work there were short run commuter trains for workers at Sellafield – steam hauled covering all the workers’ shifts. There were school trains picking up at Seascale. The shed was booming but work started to dry up quite quickly when the pits were shutting.
There were about 30 engines allocated to the shed, which was quite a lot. There were three shifts of men and of course two men on every footplate. There was a wide variety of motive power including Class 8s, Ivatt 2s and Fowler class 4s, but by the end of 1965 those had almost disappeared. There weren’t that many diesels around, though the MetroVickers Co-Bos did make some appearances.
“As a passed cleaner, you’d be floating spare. You might spend a week with one man, or two weeks with another.” Even though he was 16, he was still allowed to drive engines.
“If you were on ‘shed turning duties’ you would move them around and assist in preparation for their next duties. You might put them in the shed for wash out the next day so the fire was dropped. If you were moving them then you had to be very careful, as without a fire, there was no steam and without steam there’s no vacuum brake. Even experienced men would fall into that trap. You might move small engines or big engines, including visiting Class 9s. You were trusted. Most of the experienced men were good teachers and would answer any question. They wanted you to understand how the engines worked.”
“You were a jack of all trades as a cleaner, helping the fitters, helping the boilersmith, cleaning fires, coaling engines. That’s was before you got firing.” With the shed being run down and people leaving, he only cleaned for about six weeks (and considers himself lucky) before he was firing all the time. There was a real variety and he even worked on the footplate as far away as Crewe. “That was how you learnt. If you were in a local link you wouldn’t have seen anything.”
It was still a big complex with wagon shops, prefab fitters’ cabins, a turntable, a weighbridge, a water softening plant. In 1965 there were two apprentice fitters left.
There was a blacksmith’s on site. He bent tubes and repaired things on the locomotives, using the forge. Smokey Joe was his nickname. The blacksmith fixed Willie Curnow’s leaking radiator header tank and was also good at making exhausts out of old boiler tubes. The result would often outlast the car!
The social life never stopped. It was normal for the men to go to the pub during a shift with the foreman’s knowledge.
The shed closed in February 1968 (though engines would be stabled on the front for many years after). Running up to the closure the atmosphere was very bad. The choice for the younger men was to move to another shed or be laid off. Glynn transferred to Birkenhead. He was 19 years old. “It is a life that’s gone. There were a lot of good lads that should have been drivers but didn’t make it."