Quote:
Originally Posted by hairyhandedfool
I don't remember BR having official standbys,
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They did. The first time I drove the royal train, I was booked as the second man on a standby engine at Ferryhill near Durham. The train itself was to drive up to Sedgfield and stay there overnight. The job of our loco was to just stand at Ferryhill in case of breakdown. This was in the years before they put a loco on each end of the train.
The reason I became the driver of the train was because earlier on in the day there was a derailment on the Sedgefield branch, so our loco then had to travel from Thornaby to Ferryhill via Darlington which was a route that my driver didn't sign, but I did, so I was made up to driver for the shift and the driver became my assistant.
Then, because the royal train now had to go to Sedgfield via Ferryhill, it needed our loco on the back of it to pull it, facing road, to Sedgefield, and that task was given to me.
I must admit to being really annoyed with the people in charge of the train on the day. They were all terrified of the job, and also not very good at it to boot. One incident stands out a mile to me. I was driving facing road to the point where the train was to be stabled overnight in the pitch dark. No headlights in those days either. The inspector gave me clear instructions that when I saw a red handsignal, contarary to all my previous training, I was to stop with the red light alongside my cab window. As I approached the red light however, the inspector suddenly shouted "Stop here" when I was about twenty yards off it. I slowly brought the train to a halt, but he had a dig at me because I didn't bring the train to a halt quickly enough. I gave him a piece of my mind saying that I didn't want to bang the train about and he shouldn't have changed his instructions in the middle of what I was doing. F***ing idiot!
