BACK in the day, before the war, old train engines, and coal tenders, and passenger carriages, all took ages to be dismantled. Thomas Lane, now a foreman, was then part of the break-down squad at the Cowlairs yard in Glasgow, and he remembered how the crews would hack at wagons with hammers and chisels; the process took three times as long as it did now, in the November of 1961.
And now? With Blue Trains having made a comeback, there were a lot of old, unwanted steam engines, and many of them ended up at the British Rail yard at Heatheryknowe, on the city’s eastern boundary, one of the biggest break-down centres in the country.
The trains arrived in the middle of the night - old locomotives made in the 1890s, newer but distinguished ones like Baron of Bradwardine, once of the LNER line; coal tenders, wagons, carriages. The Blue Trains in and out of Airdrie zipped past every five or ten minutes. It was no place, a Glasgow Herald writer observed, for soft-hearted steam-engine enthusiasts.
Six men with acetylene burners tackled each engine, with colleagues waiting to strap its component parts onto a crane. After a day and a half, the engine would be no more. Coal tenders took less, and wagons even less than that. Passenger carriages were the easiest of all: jack them up, tip them over, and set them on fire.
Mr Lane, the foreman, said he would back his men against any break-down squad in the kingdom. He spoke of the way it used to be, before the war. But he loved the work, he added; train-breaking was deeply satisfying to the urge of destruction. And, he continued, it was good to see the steam engines give way to the Blue Trains.
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