I’d always thought of them as places of intense activity or intense immobility.
But I’d never really considered them as prisons.
Yet that’s how a signal box was described in 1883.
Yes, it’s the second week of my four-week course on life on the railways in Victorian times run by Future Learn.
This week it’s all about signalling.
There is still endless fascination with the mechanical operation of levers, points, pulleys, signal arms and lights to ensure trains travel safely from one section of track to the next. A visit to the Withyham signal box is one of the most popular activities for visitors at the Bluebell Railway where I volunteer.
F.S. Williams, writing in 1883 about Cannon Street station in London, described the semaphore signal arms rising and lowering as the signalmen operated the levers. He says their “time is entirely occupied in looking through the glass sides of their cell, and in pulling this way or pushing that way some of the levers which are arranged before them.”
Our Iron Roads: Their History, Construction, and Administration, (London: Bemrose and Sons, 1883), p282.
It was that word “cell” which struck me.
I am much more familiar with the signal box as a place of isolation. Charles Dickens, who was no great fan of the railways and was caught up in an accident at Staplehurst in Kent in 1865, memorably described the mental torture of the lone signalman working in a rural location.
In a way, the people who worked in signal boxes were imprisoned in their wooden and glass huts on legs. They worked for 8, 10 or 12 hours at a time and had to be mentally alert as well as physically fit. The boxes were hot in summer, cold in winter.
Whether there were two trains a minute or one train a day passing through, the signaller had to ensure all the correct procedures were followed.
Here are some of the things I learned in the second week of the course:
- Many accidents were caused by mistakes made by signalmen including Britain’s worst railway accident at Quintinshill near Gretna Green in May 1915
- Accidents formed a very important part of the training offered to signallers
- Signallers would indicate fog ahead by placing small fog signals, also called detonators, on the track which exploded and made a loud noise to alert the driver as the train’s wheels went over them
Next week, it’s all about the navvies, the navigators who built the railways.