Williams - Steaming to Victory: How Britains Railways Won the War

In the seven decades since the darkest moments of the Second World War it seems every tenebrous corner of the conflict has been laid bare, prodded and examined from every perspective of military and social history.

But there is a story that has hitherto been largely overlooked. It is a tale of quiet heroism, a story of ordinary people who fought, with enormous self-sacrifice, not with tanks and guns, but with elbow grease and determination. It is the story of the British railways and, above all, the extraordinary men and women who kept them running from 1939 to 1945.

Churchill himself certainly did not underestimate their importance to the wartime story when, in 1943, he praised the unwavering courage and constant resourcefulness of railwaymen of all ranks in contributing so largely towards the final victory.

And what a story it is.

The railway system during the Second World War was the lifeline of the nation, replacing vulnerable road transport and merchant shipping. The railways mobilised troops, transported munitions, evacuated children from cities and kept vital food supplies moving where other forms of transport failed. Railwaymen and women performed outstanding acts of heroism. Nearly 400 workers were killed at their posts and another 2,400 injured in the line of duty. Another 3,500 railwaymen and women died in action. The trains themselves played just as vital a role. The famous Flying Scotsman train delivered its passengers to safety after being pounded by German bombers and strafed with gunfire from the air. There were astonishing feats of engineering restoring tracks within hours and bridges and viaducts within days. Trains transported millions to and from work each day and sheltered them on underground platforms at night, a refuge from the bombs above. Without the railways, there would have been no Dunkirk evacuation and no D-Day.

Michael Williams, author of the celebrated book On the Slow Train, has written an important and timely book using original research and over a hundred new personal interviews.

This is their story.

Michael Williams writes widely on railways for many publications, including the Daily Mail, The Independent, the Independent on Sunday, the New Statesman, The Oldie and the Railway Specialist Press. He is a veteran Fleet Street journalist, having held many senior positions, including Deputy Editor of the Independent on Sunday, Executive Editor of The Independent and Head of News at The Sunday Times. He is currently Senior Lecturer in the School of Journalism, Media and Communication at the University of Central Lancashire. He commutes regularly by train on the 440-mile return journey between his home in Londons Camden Town and his office at Preston in Lancashire.

On the Slow Train
On the Slow Train Again

It was one of those seemingly indelible moments of childhood etched on the memory with an enduring clarity that has continued to shine through the years. Yet there could not have been a greyer and gloomier winters day than 10 January 1965, when my father took me as a young schoolboy to watch the funeral cortge of Sir Winston Churchill pass along the Strand on its sombre journey from the lying-in-state at Westminster Hall to the funeral at St Pauls. The winter mists swirled around Big Ben and Westminster Abbey in a London whose demeanour had not yet brightened from the frown of wartime austerity. I still have the foggy pictures, taken with my Box Brownie camera, of the coffin on its gun carriage, draped with the Union flag. It mattered not that they were taken with old-fashioned black and white film, since the world of the time was monochrome anyway.

Afterwards, as one of the legion of schoolboy railway enthusiasts of the period, I raced over Waterloo Bridge and caught the first service to Clapham Junction, where I could get a clear view of the funeral train on its way from Waterloo to Handborough in Oxfordshire. From the station there, the great war leader would be taken for burial in the parish churchyard at Bladon, close to the family home at Blenheim, where Churchill had been born 90 years earlier.

At Clapham the gleaming green Battle of Britain Class locomotive No. 34051 Winston Churchill emerged from the gloom at the head of its five umber and cream Pullman cars coupled up to the van bearing the coffin. The trains headcode discs had been cleverly set in a formation denoting Churchills trademark V-for-Victory sign, and the locomotives brasswork sparkled, even on that sombre afternoon, from all the polish applied at Batterseas Nine Elms depot. As she leaned into the curve, heading westwards into the fading light, leaving just a wisp of smoke trailing under the Clapham footbridge, there was a heady fusion of emotions. Somehow Churchills wartime victory and the role of the railways in it seemed magically linked for a moment at least in the mind of an imaginative schoolboy. And it wasnt all imagination Churchill himself had in 1943 praised the unwavering courage and constant resourcefulness of railwaymen of all ranks in contributing so largely towards final victory.

I did not think of that scene again until many years later. Not long after her journey with the most important cargo of her life, No. 34051 was retired to the National Railway Museum in York, where she has remained for nearly four decades preserved for the nation for two reasons: as an example of one of the most sophisticated steam locomotive designs ever, and because she bears the name of one of the greatest of Englishmen. She could tell many a tale, said an elderly man alongside me as I was admiring the locomotive in the falling dusk one winters evening. This is when the museum is at its most atmospheric and the ghosts of the long-dead machines can be most easily summoned. The old man had come along to pay a tribute in a different way. He had, it turned out, quite a tale of his own to tell. In World War II, he had been an engine man and had operated one of the trains in the great convoy that brought the troops back from the ports on the fateful day of the Dunkirk evacuation in 1940. His story, as he told it, seemed to me to be part of an unfinished narrative soon to slip from our reach, as the last survivors of a generation, now mostly in the their late eighties and nineties, pass away.

With the fiftieth anniversary of Churchills death being celebrated in 2015, I set off on a journey of my own to record the stories of some of them and to place them into the context of history. It is a tale of quiet heroism of ordinary people who fought a war, not with tanks or guns, but with elbow grease and determination to keep the wheels of Britain turning in its most difficult hour.

Michael Williams, London

January 2013

For my mother, Phyllis Williams helping to
defend Britain was her finest hour.

It was a moment of utter, spine-tingling terror as the driver of the heavy freight train trundling through Cambridgeshire looked back from his cab just after midnight and saw smoke and flames billowing from the leading wagon, just behind the locomotive. For this was no ordinary payload. The train, with its 51 loaded trucks, carried a deadly cargo. On board were 400 tons of bombs, along with a panoply of fuses, detonators and primers. It was enough to blow an entire town to oblivion. Which it nearly did if it hadnt been for the heroism of two extraordinary men.