In April 1965 I said goodbye to working on the tools, or so I thought, and started in the drawing office of the Chief Mechanical and Electrical Engineers (London Midland Region) Offices in Nelson Street Derby, usually simply referred to as Nelson Street. The drawing office was on the top (third) floor of an old Midland Railway office block that overlooked London Road Junction, ‘4 shed’, and the entrance to the Carriage & Wagon (C&W) Works, which provided a distraction at times. The drafting section was manned mainly by young men from the various works on the LMR and consisted of a series of parallel motion boards each equipped with a tall chair and a small cupboard to keep one’s personal effects in. A drawing layout section was in front of the windows overlooking the railway, so considerable time was spent there, while the remainder of the office was occupied by several technical assistants who looked after estimates etc. When I first joined the office it was solely concerned with electrification drawings, but within a couple of weeks there was a reorganization (one of the many that I experienced during my time at Nelson Street), combining the Plant and Machinery Department with the electrification section. This greatly increased our workload and several draughtsmen were transferred to the office, which made the formerly specious drawing area rather more crowded, made worse when we all got our own small drawing layout table.

The work was varied, I drew many fuelling points detailing the pipe runs and conduit layouts, ditto for shore supply transformers and charging points, all based on details supplied and previous drawings. At the same time we learnt how to print properly and layout the drawings, we used tracing paper to draw on, and more than once I had to restart after making serious layout blunders, (the office motto was “plan ahead”). One interesting job was to redraw the “tie on” arrangement used to secure wagons to the rope on the Sheep Pasture incline of the Cromford & High Peak Railway. Meanwhile a neighbouring draughtsman spent all of his time drawing lifting devices to support diesel locomotives in the event of a derailment.

Much time was spent colouring what were known as “double line diagrams”, which showed the name and limits of each section of overhead line (ohl). These were used to indicate to everyone what had to be isolated in the event of an emergency. This colouring was often done on overtime, a useful addition to our meagre pay.

Occasionally we were sent out to the site to confirm and, or, obtain information, but most of the time it was office based. I did however get an interesting job following an accident in east London, where a crane jib hit a very high voltage overhead power line crossing the railway, plunging a vast area of London into darkness and frying much of the signalling equipment in the area. There was a master plan to install notices at each power line crossing point giving the safe height and a similar notice on the crane giving the height at different radii. The job was to determine the height of the highest point of the jib and while we had the drawings for the modern cranes those for some of the older breakdown cranes were absent. As a result I had to visit many Motive Power Depots to measure the cranes and I found it strange to be there as an official from Nelson Street, treated with deference by the depot staff. Following this I was trusted to develop new designs and I did ohl layouts for freightliner depots to allow electric locos to remain on their trains, as well as conversion drawings for cable drum carriers from redundant carriage underframes.

After eighteen months I was transferred to the electric traction office, working in the performance and timing section. This was interesting work as we had to compute the running time over sections of the West Coast Main Line (WCML) then go out with a stopwatch to confirm. All was well except at Rugby where there was a significant and persistent error. I spent hours riding locos, timing trains through Rugby and then, in discussion with the Civil Engineer, it was discovered that the track layout had changed years ago, but the published dimensions had not. After everything was corrected it was all in sync and later I was involved in entering the data in a form that could be computerized. Other tasks included checking water penetration into locos when passing through carriage washing machines and identifying spares requirements.

Promotion was always an aspiration and there was a list of vacancies posted weekly. In March 1967 I was successful in obtaining a higher position in the carriage section of the C&W department of Nelson Street. This was to be my home for the next seven years, as part of a small group of four technical assistants and a manager; reporting to a senior manager. As the railway was organized in a very hierarchical manner, the senior manager reported to the Carriage Engineer who also covered Diesel Multiple Units (but not Electrical Multiple Units) who in turn reported to the C&W Engineer. The work was varied; following up on reports of hot boxes, brake failures etc, which involved reading the daily reports of train delays and incidents, and noting trends. We also wrote instructions and letters on technical issues to both the Divisions and the BRB.

I quickly became involved in the wheel wear problems experienced with high friction brake shoes on the dedicated vehicles used for the Perth Motorail services. The brake shoes had been adopted in an attempt to reduce the contamination happening on highly polished automobiles from the dust created by cast iron brake shoes. This involved many hours recording wheel profiles under trains in Stonebridge Park sidings. After a while I became involved in both the air brake systems and also the extreme wear issues on the articulated car carriers (known as “Cartic 4’s”), this led to a program of repairs at both Swindon and Derby Locomotive Works, in ‘7 Shop’ no less, and it was strange to be interacting with my former workmates.

Another job involved riding issues with the new rolling stock, which was ultimately (and much later) traced to the decision by the Civil Engineers to both reduce the track gauge by 3 mm, and to adopt vertical rails in switches and crossings. These two decisions resulted in moving the wheel contact points to an unstable area. An unintended side result from this was the destruction of BR’s freight services as derailments of two axle freight vehicles increased and consequently train speeds were reduced, thus making rail freight even more uncompetitive and the task of integrating slow freight with high speed passenger trains almost impossible.

Diverse mini projects were also carried out, for example door mounted passenger boards involved spending Sundays fitting brackets in maintenance depots (back on the tools) while a regular Friday afternoon job was arranging for restaurant cars that needed the water systems sterilizing following testing during the week. Other jobs involved such things as monitoring the performance of the automated train announcement systems, investigating why air brake hoses were uncoupling on reverse curves, and attending Research Department test runs.

Slip brake tests were a specialty of mine, this is where new build vehicles were tested to ensure that the actual brake stopping curve conformed to the designed curve. The tests involved a special train with the ex LNER Dynamometer Car along with the vehicle on test and were performed on Sunday along a section of the up fast line between Winsford and Crewe. At the designated speed a special slip coupling was operated, which applied the brake in the test vehicle. The dynamometer car had a contact to record the point of separation, and then, by use of the dynamometer table’s distance measuring capability, after stopping and reversing to the resting point of the test car, the total distance to stopping. One day, in January 1974, a nozzle used to wet the rail fell off and by pure chance fouled (and so operated) the brake release mechanism. The test car’s brakes released and it ran on and collided with the test train, severely damaging the dynamometer car. I conducted the investigation and attended all the inquiries. Shortly afterwards I was appointed one of the two HQ Outdoor Inspectors, which was a management position. It was sobering that the other Inspector had had a forty year career ending as the senior mechanical foreman at Newton Heath Depot, responsible for several hundred steam locomotives before becoming an inspector, while I was just 31. Luckily we hit it off straight away.