Back To the 1970s - Memories of a Different Time
Heigh ho and back to the 1970’s. Pick a year. 1973.
What did we have nationally? Britain joined the EEC; Capital Radio, Britain’s first legal commercial independent radio station began broadcasting; Pink Floyd issued the LP "Dark Side of the Moon"; there was conflict with the IRA; the latest Bond was Live and Let Die with Roger Moore; Prime Minister Edward Heath originally coined the phrase "unacceptable face of capitalism", and Princess Anne got engaged to Mark Phillips.
It’s hard now perhaps to catch the atmosphere of 43 years ago on the Railway even with the benefit of the recent 1975/76 reconstruction. Wind back the same number of years again from 1973 and it is the period between the wars when Edward Thomas was running the show with just one train; a reminder of the time that has passed.
There was a mix of determination and apprehension as traffic built up year-on-year during the early part of the decade. 1973 was, in the event, our busiest ever year though we did not know it then, and my first as seasonal booking clerk at Wharf.
The volume of bookings held no particular fears for me as my apprenticeship had been served at Whitsun 1967 as an "assistant guard" at the tender age of thirteen in what then passed for uniform (unlikely haircut, Sarah Lund style Norwegian jumper with a TRPS lapel badge - see the picture above) booking the hordes of originating passengers at Aber and Dolgoch, both un-staffed, while the guard looked after the train. This performance was repeated at the same time the next year, after which I was given the first of the then new Assistant Guard grade cards for persistent lunacy.
This takes us to 1st August 1973. Game on. There were 3000 passenger journeys on eight days that year with a peak of 3553 on that day.
It had to be a Wednesday because of the evening train. The 1015, the first train, was the one which made the difference in the day’s loadings as it was rarely full.
I suspect there was a party of individually booked overseas visitors on the 10:15 that day which supplemented the numbers, as I recall that Keith Stretch’s foreign descriptive leaflets, or French letters, if you prefer, were much in demand. The pressure then continued all day until the evening train, slackening off a little for the 16:45 departure.
The evening train itself was well loaded; and for those who knew the railway this train was always an opportunity to see the valley in its glory with the setting sun illuminating parts of the landscape you could not normally pick out. It is a shame the evening train has gone, though it is worth recalling that staff at Wharf and the train crew, if they had worked through, would have been on duty for at least thirteen hours before home time.
It must be said that the number of ticket holders that evening was slightly less than history reflects as the guard ran out of member’s tickets on the van but kept a tally. I pulled the tickets from the Wharf rack to keep the numbers right. I took the un-issued tickets home to Don and Doris Southgate’s where their baby chewed them, a habit she maybe gave up in later life.
Then we did it all again; eleven departures most days; three at a half hour interval, then the hour gap in which the booking clerk could stuff banknotes and change into the till, as there were then no plastic card bookings, sweep away the dust from the Edmondson card tickets, restock the rack and brace for the next onslaught.
There is no question that those August days were tense, particularly for the guards and the platform inspector at Wharf. The booking clerk should usually be able to book to just short of set capacity in twenty minutes. There was no separate enquiry window so time had to be made for concise advice such as suggesting to a group of passengers that proposing to climb Cader in beach-wear with cloud cover at two hundred feet was maybe not wise.
This left ten minutes to finish filling the train after booking had stopped. You did not pre-book for later trains or else you might overbook them, which upset people.
The platform at Wharf would be crowded as train departure time approached. You could well find a veritable herd of grockles prowling up and down the platform chuntering ‘It’s full, it’s full.’ This called for tact, diplomacy, determination and a sense of time from the platform and train staff, which we mostly achieved.
If the booking clerk had time to pause for breath during this process, there was always an odd contrast between the booking window, which then looked up Wharf drive at the vast queue, and the road to adventure much as it had always been, visible under the bridge, and peaceful except for the odd moggy or blackbird.
Traffic somehow seemed to balance itself out in the down direction. The first up path we had from Wharf where there would be stock available to provide for any kind of down relief was at 17:15. The train crews were always keen to run it, but I don’t think we ever did.
This bland statement of balanced traffic does not do justice to the operation which was carried out at Dolgoch many afternoons that year. If the crossing was at Quarry, the up train would find the platform at Dolgoch packed with passengers for the down train. The guard could see the fireman above the crowd if he or she stood on the van footboard. The station staff had to watch the doors as the train started, because there was then no air brake to stop the train quickly if a passenger decided the train had started off in the wrong direction and attempted to get out.
The down train working was fraught, particularly if it had turned wet, and passengers had come back from the Falls in numbers to return to Tywyn. Van packing with all seats full was then the order of the day, and I believe the record was 26 in a van; as maybe the guards from that time will recall.
You can appreciate that I harboured the occasional thought, looking up the drive at Wharf, that the traffic offering that August would swamp us, though the worry should maybe have been that we did not have sufficient traffic staff, or that the timetable would go to pieces under pressure, or that we would not have enough locomotives.
Although three train was not new that year, we still had at that time a problem with staff availability in certain grades. The requirement for Block Persons had gone from one at Brynglas during the years when a maximum of two trains were working, to three, at Brynglas, Quarry, and, following a few problems with casual staffing, also at Pendre. There also needed to be a brave soul with blocking experience to act as platform inspector at Wharf.
The shortage of trained volunteer staff for blockpost duties meant that we had to retain seasonal staff for this work in order to give the traffic volunteers a balance of duties. This was always a contentious approach, and rightly so, but at a time when seasonal staff were sometimes working a seven day week, it was unavoidable.
We also needed staff regularly at Dolgoch and Aber to cope with the crowds of returning and originating passengers. I think staffing at Rhydyronen for the campsite began in later years.
In those affluent times before the disasters of student debt and youth unemployment, there was no shortage of young volunteers available in the peak for both station and train duties and there were occasions during that year when the vast majority of operating staff were in their teens and early twenties. The volunteers on the Talyllyn had come to know each other well by 1973, and worked together to provide a level of service during the peak which consistently surpassed, in my view, other preservation concerns at the time where the overall contingent of paid staff was much smaller, and where volunteers were not so constructively employed. The degree of cohesion between operating volunteers, many of whom only came to Tywyn for maybe a fortnight a year was remarkable, and enabled us to give the service that we did.
In terms of the pressure to run on time, I’ve always thought that the previous 1960’s maximum two-train service was more relaxed, though others may disagree. In 1968, for instance, there were only seven peak daytime departures from Wharf to Abergynolwyn of which only four had tight turnarounds, fifteen or twenty minutes, at each end. This achieved an hourly service from Wharf in the afternoon.
Block working had improved since the sixties, but this contributed to safety rather than options for operation. At its inception, three train service had depended on staff and ticket working beyond Pendre, with an additional paper ticket for the first of the three trains. In practice the hilarious and ineffective Christmas Tree staffs which were introduced did not make things easier; rather the opposite.
By 1973 there was EKT up the line to Quarry or thereabouts, but since of course there was no spare stock or locomotives to take a path until late afternoon, EKT could only assist us in the event of locomotive failure.
You will appreciate that there was very limited flexibility in operation, or time to relax. The timetable had to work.
Making the timetable work required effort. A year or so before 1973, the intensity of three train operation had still been a challenge for some, and timekeeping had on occasions not been adequate. In consequence three newly qualified guards were one day Severely Lectured by the Traffic Manager on the need to Improve Things.
This was too good an opportunity for all the train crews to miss. At the first Brynglas crossing the up train arrived to find the crew of the down train sitting in the two foot with sandwiches and flasks, absorbed in a game of cards which appeared to have been going on for hours.
At the first Pendre crossing the down train passed Rhydyronen on time (just about) and was locked in the loop at Pendre with driver Bill Faulkner off to attend to his paperwork, and the guard having a cup of tea in the messroom before the up train had even stirred from Wharf.
It was fun, and more important we were ready with staff prepared for the peak of traffic which was to come.
Finally, we cut it fine with engines throughout the early 1970s. The locomotive situation has already been described extensively elsewhere. Strange how we often seem to concentrate on talking about locomotives, which remain the same apart from painting, varied names and some new bits, rather than on the people, who came to make it happen when it did.
We were then in the middle of the "crazy service" with sometimes no more than three available engines for three trains. We kept running only because devoted people stayed up late into the night to repair the steamy puffs so they kept working. The sight of up to six steam engines available today still seems to me a bit unreal.
There is a postscript to the August 1973 success which takes us to the first week that September, when we were nearly overwhelmed.
We dropped back to one train doing three trips; the volunteers went home, but the crowds which had peaked in the last week in August simply kept coming. There was apparently a new early September holiday for the West Midlands factories, as in those days there were still factories there which made things.
By the Wednesday of that week, when I was controller, the afternoon train had swelled to a mammoth affair with two locomotives and by the time it left Wharf every seat was taken. Some said that passengers were turned away at the sight of the queues, the only occasion I recall this happening except once when we were completely swamped by two BR excursions arriving, a block behind one another, and unloading at Tywyn on a wet day.
There was a view that the Wednesday train should have been split to provide a relief, a feature which was time-tabled for that week in following years. Even given the flexibility of EKT, it would have been hard for me to organise this, given the half hour warning which was all I got as the huge crowd descended.
In traffic terms that September week was a fitting climax to our best ever season, an exhilarating experience for all involved.
Enough of trains. The fun also did not stop when we put the railway back in its box for the night. We did not then have the luxury of a bar at Wharf with snoozing facilities opposite, of course, so pub trips were made to Abergynolwyn, Llwyngwril, Cross Foxes, Dolgellau, Barmouth (via the footbridge), and Machynlleth on Sundays as Tywyn was then dry. There was also football on the field at the end of Cambrian Terrace, with foul play that would shock even Vinnie Jones, and putting on the green.
I distinctly remember taking a dip in the briny sea that year, but this never became a team sport for the Railway staff, possibly as well for the tourist potential of Tywyn beach.
Close links had also been developed with the FR, through several TR/FR joint members who were foremost in the organisation of drinking evenings, special trains and exchange visits. It was a period of expansion for the Welsh narrow gauge. There is a view that 1973 probably marked the start of the level of social events we enjoy today.
We made it. We survived the 1973 peak. I would not have wanted to be anywhere else. We expected that we would need to do more the next year, including eventually a move to four train set working, as extrapolated traffic predictions showed that our passenger numbers would eventually match Liverpool Street.
Of course, in the event, it did not happen, but as I’ve said, we didn’t know this at the time. We then started to limber up for the extension to Nant Gwernol, but that is another story.
Mark Winstanley
