Changing gauges

The Emperor’s New Clothes is not about the clothes. It’s about the emperor.

This is Dawlish, just north of Teignmouth in Devon, on the line to Penzance and its many pirates. The photo clearly shows the broad-gauged track—50 per cent wider than standard gauge. Beyond the station can be seen cliffs, and the railway runs on a narrow ledge between them and the sea. It was severely damaged in a storm in February 2014, which closed the line. It was fully operational again two months and ten days later.

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When I was doing railway modelling, certain conventions needed to be learned. You needed to know the difference not only between N and H0, but between H0 and 00, and that’s not an easy task, because the difference between H0 and 00 is S, EM, EM18 and no end of other takes among a wide range of pedantics (specialists) who relish the art of rivet counting, and whose churches never congregate in the same place.

The three-foot rule, more my church, decrees that if you can’t see it from three feet away, it doesn’t exist. This can even be of universal application: anything from household dust, to the kerb when negotiating a three-point turn, to the precise thing you’re looking for.

Rivet-counting references a level of detail, discrepancies in which are unlikely to garner the undue attention of the average observer. I might, for example, cite the random Wikipedia narrative below, on the 1865 Sir Watkin class broad-gauge Great Western Railway locomotive Bulkeley, withdrawn upon that company’s wholesale conversion from its broad gauge of 7 feet 1/4 inch to the standard gauge of 4 feet 8 1/2 inches on the weekend of 21-22 May 1892. However, there is a chance, I hazard, that the level of interest may wane at some point:

This locomotive was named after Captain Bulkeley, a long-standing director of the railway. It was sold to the South Devon Railway in June 1872 where it was rebuilt with a saddle tank, but returned to the GWR when the SDR was absorbed in 1876. In the meantime, the same name had been given to a GWR Iron Duke Class locomotive, so the railway now had two locomotives with the same name. In common with other ex-SDR locomotives it was given a number (2157) in addition to its name.

I do wonder if there was ever genuine confusion when someone saw Bulkeley mark I and mistook it for Bulkeley mark II, the point being that locomotives are named not to identify them (a function performed admirably by numbers) but to flatter people.

This is all utterly fascinating to anyone who has the vaguest idea who Sir Watkin Williams-Wynn was, why the class was named after him and after whom the locomotive(s) in question was/were named. No one actually goes and counts rivets, but, anyone producing a model of the loco who works to that level of detail will likely make sure they’re all there.

I adhered more to the modeller’s rule as is generally applied when standing in the close vicinity of ladies with a daring level of décolleté: one endeavours to maintain a distance of overview (around three feet) but to avert one’s gaze upward to the cornice. The gaze for a railway modeller is invariably the reverse of that when observing a room’s cornice. It is the perspective of God (or, occasionally, a caterpillar, when one wishes to know exactly what it looks like), hence the term the hand of the Almighty is used when moving things on a model railway layout that have either not got their own motor or do, but it’s got gummed up with fluff, plus civil engineering structures, of course. Rivet-counters tend to apply a three-inches rule, or less. I’m more one for the three-foot rule.

To my mind, far more interesting in this whole story of the Great Western Railway is the fact that a major corporation undertook the abandonment of its articles of faith (Brunel has gone for the seven-foot gauge to secure comfort for passengers, safety for operators, and speed for … extra meetings in Bristol) in favour of the standard gauge (the width of two horses’ arses side by side—measured to the accuracy of half an inch …), at no small cost, in order to assure national standardisation. Even if the GWR had been building lines with dual gauge since the 1870s, it saw the inflexibility of running a railway possessing its own distinct gauge (a factor appreciated by those travelling on domestic rail services in Spain and needing to change at Irún for the local to Saint-Jean-de-Luz). Eventually, the GWR was forced to a heart-rending decision: what they’d called narrow gauge would become the system’s standard gauge.

You have to spare a thought for the fact that, for two days, the entire system had to stop. Call it an early experiment with lockdown. The difference with lockdown was that you didn’t know that that was coming and you had to get home … in the new conditions of lockdown. The railway did know it would be converting, but it had to plan where all its rolling stock would be to ensure that, once the 10 pm broad-gauge departure from Paddington, headed up by 4-2-2 locomotive Bulkeley (remember him?) had left on a special all-stations stopping service to Penzance on Friday, 20 May 1892, arriving in the west at 5 am the next morning, nothing, but nothing, of broad gauge rolling stock was left to its east. If it was, there is where it would stay. Because, unlike building a railway, which proceeds mile for mile, conversion of the railway meant all the work had to be done at the same time.

Ex-railwayman Mike Peart wrote a piece on that train and the process surrounding the conversion for the Friends of the National Railway Museum:

It was carrying Inspector Scantlebury who was distributing certificates and instructions to those along the route supervising the work of removing the broad gauge rolling stock and track over the weekend. Thus, the final abolition of the broad gauge took place in the West of England on Saturday and Sunday 21st and 22nd May. Observers of the gauge conversion taking place at Teignmouth station reported that when the last broad gauge trains from Paddington to Plymouth and from Plymouth to Paddington drew up alongside each other, passengers realised the significance of the day. They opened their carriage windows, stood up and joined hands with passengers in the opposite train to sing “Auld Lang Syne” lustily.

We might just dwell a moment on the huge logistics of that work over that weekend:

The route mileage which had to be converted over a weekend was 171 of which 42 miles was double track. The 4,200 platelayers, labourers and others who had been drafted in to do the work stayed in waiting rooms, goods sheds and tents over the weekend. They were sustained with a thin porridge mixture of oatmeal, water and sugar which was cooked up at various points along the route. No alcohol was provided or even allowed.

That is the three-foot view. The view that is always from above and which surveys not just the rivets holding together the plates of the boiler to prevent them exploding in the face of an unwitting victim of metal fatigue, be he modeller or otherwise, but zooms out to the human view, the passengers’ view, the organisational view, the emotional view. God’s view.

One weekend to convert 200 track miles of layout, sidings included, is one of the most accomplished physical feats I have ever heard of, especially in the state of technological advancement in those times. When people mention the track gauge change, however, it is not rivet-counting detail that they look at. The things that preoccupy them are aspects like what the labourers were given to eat, and their accommodations, the fact booze was prohibited, and the reasons, and how that is testimony to the control over workers’ lives that industrialists had acquired in barely a hundred years, and the condescension with which they handled their workers, or the outstretched hands from one train to another at Teignmouth to sing Auld Lang Syne; and the fact that Director Wills of the GWR board gave each man 2 ounces of Westward Ho! tobacco as a thank you. From his heart, no question.

How the workers were treated is an insight into how industrial relations deteriorated in the late 1890s (this was the age of the robber barons) and right up to the outbreak of war in 1914. Workers were cannon fodder long before they ever got to face a cannon. I doubt many of you are all too conscious when you travel by rail of what the inner track gauge is on which you roll; yet the GWR had been founded in 1835 by a supreme engineer who reached for supreme technology to provide the supreme quality of service. Seven feet and a quarter inch was the best option, and Isambard Kingdom Brunel, the line’s engineer, knew it. But, as would so often happen, the best solution is not the solution that is ultimately gone for. Nowadays, cost is what determines the best solution, and these rail passengers in Teignmouth, who knew that they were on the cusp of exchanging the best for something else, might probably have suspected that it could cost them in other ways. Hence the dewy-eyed sentimentality. Seriously, could you imagine that today (I mean, even if you could open the windows)?

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Apparently, over in Washington, D.C., they’re all under martial law. Is that what I’ve heard? First Los Angeles, and now the troops have been called in to deal with a lawless city whose crime rate has … let me get this right … fallen 35 per cent since … whenever it fell 35 per cent from. Here’s a picture of the people involved in this government announcement:

I must admit, I needed to go to a website explaining the members of the US Cabinet (even then, the one on the right wasn’t in it) in order to get their names. They are, left unto right, Doug Burgum (Interior), Pete Hegseth (Defenc/se), Donald Trump (President), Pam Bondi (Attorney General) and, the guy on the right is Kashyap Patel, who runs the FBI.

Now, say cheese is not said for nothing. It is the cue for the assembled photographic subjects to prime themselves for the snap moment, or to court disaster if they’re not of a photogenic nature. Not saying cheese gives the subjects no advance warning of their—photographic—capture, so they need to assume a pose of photographic suitability whatever, and that can be asking quite a lot when Mr Trump mounts the podium. From Kash Patel, for example, who, in the moment, appears to be under the influence of a hypnotist.

My own take on the US Cabinet generally is that they don’t on the whole give a damn what people who take their photos think of them. And we are more or less in the tip point of this realisation: that those who are solidly counting up the indiscretions, dances with the devil, contraventions of law and constitution, brain farts, signs of dementia, signs of arrogance, signs of indifference, and, broadly, criminality are doing historians a great service by documenting the controversies, most of which are resolved conclusively and without question by means of a … denial.

Previously, governments did what they wanted and, when someone said, “You can’t do that,” they would say, “We shall look into it, have an investigation, inquiry, definitely,” before then just carrying on as they wanted to. That bit in the middle has now fallen away. Governments do not need inquiries to tell them whether they are right or wrong. In effect, the only thing these days that tells a government it’s wrong is a firing squad. And there’s many a slip ’twixt cup and that particular lip.

Watching government has now become like the duty of a prefect to prevent the class from fidgeting. Every instance of fidget must be documented and forcefully rebuked. However, rebukes do not prevent fidgeting, not in my experience. In fact, the thing best suited to preventing a class from fidgeting is a man armed with an AR15. In the presence of one of those, a class can be so silent as to belie its very existence.

But let us assume a three-foot view for a moment. If one does not want a class to fidget, then they must be occupied in a manner that precludes fidgeting or that, if it occurs, is unnoticeable. But totting up a totting sheet of instances of fidgeting does nothing to prevent the fidget-instances or to divine the cause of each fidget. They slowly but surely blur passim into a litany of fidgeting, from which no particular instance can be recalled as distinctive, or extraordinary, or more dumb than shocking: the rivets lose their ability to rivet us.

What gets remembered from such episodes is the human cost, the view on the before and after, the examination of trends that led to, and trends that were established, and the action that finally relieved one, if relief one sought. After all, the issue with the Emperor’s New Clothes was not that he had no clothes on. It was the fact he was the emperor.