Memories of a life on the rails

Granville Dobson can remember the day he fell in love with steam trains as if it was yesterday.

It was just after the Second World War, when ten-year-old Granville was taken to London by his parents. His father was keen to see Euston station which, like many railway termini, had taken at least one direct hit during the war.

“This visit was to have a profound effect on me,” writes Wyke-born Granville. “The bustle of passengers, slamming of carriage doors, luggage being loaded, trains arriving and departing and the announcer’s voice over the noise of a major train terminal seemed hypnotic.”

As he looked in awe at a Stanier Pacific, bound for Glasgow, the driver invited him to climb on to the footplate. The young Granville soaked up the smell of oil, the smoke, heat and feeling of “this beautiful piece of machinery, straining to be unleashed.”

“From that moment I was lost,” he recalls.

It wasn’t long before Granville, a grammar school boy, announced to his parents his plans for a career on the railways. Aged 15, he was accepted by British Railways and worked as a footplate man from 1952 to 1966.

As Granville writes, “the footplate of a steam locomotive at speed was a dirty, dangerous, uncomfortable and wildly-exciting place to be.

“The driver and fireman worked together; the fireman feeding an intense fire while perched on a footplate “swaying in every possible direction.”

Granville joined the railways just in time to experience the excitement of life as a locomotive fireman. Fourteen years later, when he moved into management, scrapyards were filled with rusting carcasses of once-grand engines; rotting reminders of a lost era.

In Old Flames, Granville recalls his years on the footplate, and the important role played by employees of the Lancashire and Yorkshire (L&Y) Railway, and later, British Railways, in shaping Low Moor Motor Power Depot.

In its heyday, writes Granville, Low Moor Shed, as it was known, had some of the fastest, most powerful locomotives built by the L&Y and provided power for trains from Bradford to destinations across Yorkshire, Lancashire, Cheshire and the Midlands.

“Much has been recorded about the history of steam locomotive depots in the West Riding... yet strangely, this very important depot, one of the largest in West Yorkshire, and the footplatemen who worked there, have received very little attention,” writes Granville.

In this book, he presents a fascinating account of his working life on the railway and pays tribute to colourful characters he worked with and the “metal beasts” that roared across the country before being shunted away.

A must-read for anyone with an interest in Yorkshire’s railway heritage, it’s also an engaging account of Bradford’s social history, evoking a time when the working man was perhaps made of sterner stuff.

“There was no counselling, no going home sick if you had seen something upsetting and no shoulder to cry on,” writes Granville, recalling fatal accidents and “stomach-churning injuries” he came across.

“This book is about a man’s world. There was no room for anyone who couldn’t measure up and certainly no room for wimps. Footplatemen had to have their wits about them at all times.”

Old Flames is available from Granville Dobson, on (01274) 675382 or dobson@tiscali.co.uk.