Summer work

Back sometime in the early 1970s, I spent a summer working for the southern region of British Rail, as a platelayer. Our job was to keep the track in good condition during the day, called fettling, and to replace sections of rail during the night and weekend. It may surprise you how easy it is for a railway track to get out of shape. Nowadays fettling is done automatically by specialised trains full of sensors and gauges. Fettling trains can measure how level the track is and lift and pack it with ballast accordingly, but fifty years ago, it was all done by eye and hand.

First, the technical bit. A railway track, officially called a permanent way, is constructed by fixing steel rails to concrete or wooden sleepers, laid on a bed of gravel, called ballast. Here is a picture.

We worked in gangs of between six and eight people under the supervision of a ganger. Each morning, around 05:00, we would gather at the trackside hut nearest to where we would be working, light a fire with any wood we could find and start boiling a large black kettle for the first brew of the day.

You need to understand how we were paid in order to understand how we worked. We were paid a low flat hourly rate, plus a bonus for the amount of track we had fettled. The bonus was determined by a track inspector and the only way he could see how much we had done was to count the number of sleeper ends where the oil slick that trains deposited on the ballast had been disturbed. If, like us, you had a ganger who knew the twenty miles or so of track that we looked after like the back of his hand, life was easy. Just go straight to the spots where you knew the ground was unstable, fettle those and then just rake the ballast on a load more sleepers to push up the bonus.

I also learned how to use a scythe. We used to scythe the grass beside the railway track and the secret of scything is rhythm. A sharp scythe blade will easily cut through grass and weeds, but only if it hits at the right angle. There is no point swinging the scythe wildly like some giant golf club. Plant your feet comfortably apart and swing from just outside one foot to just outside the other. This will keep the blade reasonably horizontal. Now just keep swinging and shuffling forwards.

It was hot that summer and you could work up quite a thirst by lunchtime. All jump into the tool truck and head to the nearest pub for a couple of pints of Gale's bitter and a ploughman's lunch. Not the dainty stuff you get served as ploughman's today, just a half pound cob loaf, a quarter pound hunk of strong Cheddar cheese and a large raw onion. Delicious.

I have happy memories of that summer and I was much fitter at the end of it, but I would not like to do the job all year.