Irish Railway Record Society

Spirit of the Great Northern

Laurence Liddle

Some time ago the editorial committee of the JOURNAL asked me would I contribute "a personal appraisal of the spirit, ambience and culture of the GNR" to this issue.

It might be thought that such abstract conceptions as spirit, ambience and culture are some distance removed from the hard headed and strictly practical realities of engineering expertise, commercial acumen and organisational ability called for in the running of a railway. However there is no doubt that, particularly in the days of the privately owned companies, each railway did have a distinct individuality, easily recognisable though not so easy to define. Here I am not just talking about such physical characteristics as the liveries of coaches, or the difference between Belpaire and round topped fireboxes, but also, and more importantly, about the general impression which a company created in the minds of those who used its services. Contrast for instance the somewhat easy going approach to life of the Midland Great Western with the comfortless efficiency of the suburban services of the County Down; or again, the very different characters presented by those near neighbours, the Donegal and the Swilly, despite the very similar physical conditions under which each of these narrow gauge concerns operated.

To my mind the most distinguishing feature of the Great Northern during the thirties, forties and fifties was that it was, because it had to be, its own man. Whilst it was inconceivable that the Government in Dublin would let the Great Southern die, and whilst the NCC had mighty LMS behind it (whatever about the County Down), the Great Northern stood alone. Any meaningful state aid, whether in the form of legislation or financial assistance, (such as for instance was made available to the Great Southern at the time of the threatened strike early in 1933), would have required official cross border cooperation, a commodity which in the nineteen thirties and forties was as likely to be forthcoming as the appearance of two teams of one legged men in an all Ireland Final.

Apropos of government aid in the form of legislation, it is interesting to contrast the reactions in the thirties of the authorities in Dublin and in Belfast to the unregulated competition of private bus companies with the railways. Each government enacted legislation to deal with the problem, but whereas south of the Border the railway companies, including the Great Northern, were given powers to buyout private competitors, in the North not only did the companies have to hand over their road services to the newly formed Northern Ireland Road Transport Board, but they were never able to benefit from the promised pooling of rail and road receipts, since this provision of the legislation was never put into practice. In view of subsequent developments in transport legislation in Northern Ireland, one is tempted to speculate whether it was ever seriously intended that the pooling arrangement should operate.

It is easy to see therefore why independence and self reliance became the distinguishing features of the Great Northern, features which found expression in a constant search for economy on the one hand, and new business on the other, the successful attainment of which depended on enlightened and committed management by members of the Board of Directors as well as by senior officers. Equally important was the maintenance of a high standard of morale among staff members of all grades, which itself rests on good management.

Let us consider now a few examples of the search for economy and of standards of morale among employees. Probably the most visible examples of the search for economy and new sources of income was the pioneering developmental work on diesel engined railcars which, originating in the early thirties, ceased only on the demise of the company in 1958. It is surely remarkable that this small concern (along with its partly owned subsidiary the Donegal), should have led the way (in these islands at any rate) in diesel railcar development. So far as I am aware only one of the British Big Four, the Great Western, gave any significant thought to the matter in pre Second World War days, whilst the subsequent proliferation of multiple unit railcars on British Railways did not begin until after the appearance of the first GNR mainline cars in 1950.

Whilst the AEC and BUT cars represented the peak of the Northern's diesel development let us not forget the railbuses which, if they did not produce as many thousands of pounds of savings as were credited to their more glamorous brothers certainly produced their hundreds, not just in economy of operation but in enabling totally new services to be established. Consider for example the Drogheda-Oldcastle branch on which, before the introduction of a railbus, there were just two return Oldcastle-Drogheda passenger services each weekday, which however after the arrival of the bus, were augmented by one return Drogheda-Oldcastle and two return Drogheda-Navan workings each day. The railbuses provided another example of economy in that they were conversions from old road vehicles which had already earned all or most of their depreciation, and thus called for very little capital expenditure. Whether the ingenious Howden Meredith adaptation of pneumatic tyres to run on steel rails gave as comfortable a ride as did the bogies of the main line passenger stock is another matter. My recollection of railbus travel is of rattles, bangs and diesel fumes rather than luxury; however these small vehicles added their contribution to the finances of their owners.

Here perhaps I may be permitted to digress for a moment in order to relate a story told me by the late Harry Wilson, the Great Northern’s last Mechanical Engineer. Harry had a son who followed in his father's professional footsteps and who, after some years of railway service in one of the erstwhile British colonies, took up employment with British Railways. It happened that one day when Wilson junior was back in Dundalk on holiday he was in his father's office and in the course of conversation said that BR were talking about building a railbus. "Are they indeed?" or words to that effect, said his father who thereupon walked over to a drawer and produced drawings of the GNR's pioneering work of twenty five years previously. The son's comments have not been recorded.

Although relatively few locomotives were ever built in the company's own works every new design was carefully costed, and if the figures worked out on the right side Dundalk was just as prepared to build as were Broadstone or Inchicore, despite the miserably cramped conditions of Dundalk's erecting shop. For example the UG 0-6-0s of 1937. Here I think I may quote Harry Wilson again. One day not long after the break up of the Great Northern, when he had a certain amount of time on his hands, I was having a long discussion with him about locomotives. During the course of our conversation it became very apparent that he had not much time for the standard 4-4-2 tank locos, despite these 25 engines forming the largest class in the company. Harry cited not only the difficulty of fitting the relatively long machines on to the Works traverser but even such a relatively minor item as their non standard size driving wheels. As one whose early railway interests developed in the nineteen twenties alongside the Howth branch, on which one very rarely saw any other type of engine, I felt quite hurt at having my childhood friends so strongly criticised.

The Great Northern had for many years built its own coaches and wagons, but how many railways were builders of road buses? It is true that after the Great Southern acquired the Irish Omnibus Company and their successors CIÉ merged with Dublin Transport, it could be said that those concerns did, but the operations at Broadstone and Spa Road owed their genesis to the former IOC and DUTC; neither the GS&WR nor the MGWR ever built a bus.

Over a number of years, beginning in the mid thirties, all new single decked GNR buses were "home made" although the Gardner engines were purchased as complete units. No doubt this operation also was as carefully costed as any other engineering proposal before being adopted.

There were numerous other examples of innovative ideas for increasing revenue. Here one remembers the tea cars with their ten penny (about six and a half cents) afternoon teas; the two day or Monday to Friday cheap return tickets available between any two stations on the system (Did anyone ever buy such a ticket from Dromore to Dromore Road, or Vemersbridge to Kellybridge?); the combined travel, accommodation and Green Fee weekend tickets available for golfers at Bundoran and Greenore hotels from Dublin, Belfast and other major stations; and even the retention until the fifties of second class travel. Particularly in view of the somewhat Spartan standards of all but the newest third class passenger vehicles, this retention probably succeeded in extracting a few shillings more than third class fares from some of those who could not afford to travel first. (Here I am reminded of a cartoon in "Punch” in the year 1870 when the Midland Railway of England abolished second class. The picture showed a matronly figure, dressed in the voluminous clothing of the era and surrounded by numerous children, on a railway platform. The caption was in words to this effect "O dear, O dear, what can I do? I can't go first and I won't go third, what can I do?”) Nor should a major initiative of the forties, the Bread Containers, be forgotten, an initiative which revolutionised the transport of bread throughout Northern Ireland, for the NCC also adopted the practice.

There was however more to the Great Northern than just Management's thinking up ways in which to economise and attract new traffic. Generally speaking, and despite the aftermath of the crippling strike of 1933 and the uncertain future outlook, morale among all grades of staff in the late thirties was fairly high, higher perhaps than it was on GSR/CIÉ, still struggling to adjust to the effects of the amalgamation. The Southern, the Midland and the DSE may have been sentenced to death but they took a long time to die. Paradoxically the war of 1939-45 enhanced morale amongst Great Northern staff, on account of greatly increased traffic and burgeoning receipts, particularly, though not solely, in the North. The severe shortages of coal and material for maintenance and repairs had just the opposite effect on the Great Southern. Morale of course ultimately depends upon management, and here the Great Northern was lucky in that it was a small enough concern for most of senior management to be known to many of the staff and vice versa. Additionally, because of this small size it was possible for senior officials to acquire and retain an overall knowledge of both the physical and financial aspects of the company's day to day working. I will not go so far as to say that a junior clerk in the General Manager's office in Dublin would have been able to describe in detail the track layout at Bundoran Junction, but I have little doubt that my good friend Willie Sefton, for many years Chief Clerk in the Operating Office in Belfast, would have been able to describe the main features of every major station on the line. I well remember too Mr Carson, who was acting Chief Engineer at the time of the break up of the company, telling me that he had walked every inch of the Derry Road.

 The familiarity of senior officials with aspects of the company outside the walls of their offices was reinforced by the fact that meetings of the Board of Directors and of its various committees were held in both Dublin and Belfast, thus ensuring that the General Manager, (who had an office and a personal secretary in each city), the Traffic Manager, located in Belfast, and the Mechanical Engineer, whose headquarters were in Dundalk, together with the Dublin based Secretary, Accountant and Chief Civil Engineer travelled frequently over the entire length of the main line: This travelling ensured that not only did these officials have personal knowledge of much of what went on between Dublin and Belfast, but that they were recognised by, and often known to, many members of the staff, which was obviously of considerable value in maintaining morale. Here are a few examples which illustrate this relationship in practice First a story I heard from Campbell Baillie, the company's last Traffic Manager.

At the time of a visit to Northern Ireland by British Royalty a special train was required for the VIPs, their staff and other functionaries from Lisburn to Derry via the GN's Antrim branch and the NCC main line. Whilst the latter company provided the engine and footplate crew for the entire journey, the guard over the first section of the route was to be a Great Northern man. In accordance with custom the senior passenger guard at Belfast was rostered for this job. Unforgivably, some persons who should have known better objected to the guard's appointment on sectarian grounds (he was a Catholic). When Baillie heard of this he asked the guard to come and see him. Baillie then asked the guard had he any objection to working the royal special. The guard said he had no objection, whereupon the Traffic Manager saw to it that he worked the train as rostered.

The point of the above tale is not just that Campbell Baillie was not prepared to truckle to sectarianism, which was of course important, but that here was the Traffic Manager himself, one of the company's most senior officials, personally discussing this regrettable affair with the guard, whom indeed he probably knew well from his regular main line journeys. My next two examples of good relationships between officialdom and ordinary staff come from the Mechanical Engineer's Department.

One day, soon after the end of the Second World War, an engine suffered a minor derailment at Dundalk Junction. Happening to observe the mishap as he walked along the line from his house to the works, Mechanical Engineer Henry Macintosh (‘Big Mac’) commented ‘I didn’t see this’. This was not a serious accident, the M.E. knew that the men on the spot were perfectly competent to deal with the situation and so he left them get on with the job, thereby demonstrating his confidence in them.

My source for the above story was Enniskillen driver Billy Hawthorne, whom I got to know well in the very early UTA days when he was regularly working Derry-Belfast B.U.T. railcar trains between Omagh and Belfast. My next example of an incident involving the Mechanical Engineer is taken from an article entitled ‘An afternoon with Harry Wilson’ which appeared in ‘Five Foot Three’ some years ago.

Among various groups of men employed at Dundalk works were the members of the Wheel Gang, whose job it was to move wheels and axles between the various shops, a task mostly carried out by rolling the wheel sets along the various sidings. Generally these were straight forward operations. However, when wheels had to be moved from the main works, on the down side of the Dublin-Belfast main line, to the wagon shop, which was on the up side, matters were not so simple. It would seem however that the stalwarts of the Wheel Gang were in no way deterred by the minor (to themselves at any rate) problem of getting the wheels across the double tracks of the main line. Wheels would be put on rail somewhere near the Square Crossing, trundled southwards, possibly ‘wrong road’, to near the South Cabin, transferred to the Barrack Street line and so to the wagon shop. Whether the signalmen at the Square Crossing and South cabins were given advance notice of these manoeuvres I do not know. Anyway, advance notice or not, one day a letter from the Traffic Manager arrived on the Mechanical Engineer’s desk complaining about the somewhat unorthodox activities of the Wheel Gang, demanding that they cease immediately and that the persons involved should be appropriately dealt with.

Harry Wilson duly summoned the miscreants to his office and, no doubt, pointed out to the dangers inherent in their procedure. He also told them that in future wheels and axles should be moved to and from the wagon shop with a rather greater regard for safety. Reading between the lines of the article in ‘Five Foot Three’ (which was written by Charles Friel and Johnny Glendinning), I rather doubt if the gang members received any punishment. Indeed the Mechanical Engineer is quoted as referring to them as the ‘salt of the earth’. However, the Traffic Manager got a reply to his letter stating that the offenders had been appropriately dealt with. The point here, of course, is that Wilson knew that his men could be relied on to change their practice once he had drawn their attention to its dangers.

Most railway men had a strong feeling, if not, indeed, a conviction, that their particular company was superior to any of the others and nowhere in Ireland did this apply more strongly than on the Great Northern. The Great Southern of course had a far greater mileage and, in its later days, was the owner of the largest and most powerful express passenger steam locomotives ever to have run in Ireland. The NCC, with its Moguls and Jeeps, had a stock of efficient and up to date mixed traffic engines, such as the Great Northern for various reasons could never aspire to. The NCC too had its LMS - financed up to date signalling system at its Belfast terminus which was certainly the envy of the GN. Nevertheless, right to the end and despite the massive politically inspired closures of 1957, the Northern was quite sure that it was the Irish railway, a conviction that was often expressed by individual members of its staff. Here are a few examples.

When the late Paddy Mallon, that 150% Great Northern personality and erecting shop foreman at Dundalk works, during the final years of the company made his first close up acquaintance with a GS&WR J15 0-6-0 his comment was ‘That’s not a locomotive, that’s a monstrosity!’. At the time I was Chairman of the RPSI, which had recently been given the engine by CIÉ, so it can be appreciated that my feelings on hearing Paddy’s remark were, to say the least, somewhat mixed. One day in October 1957 I was in the GNR Operating Office in Belfast, naturally the talk focussed on the recent assassination of the Northern Ireland sections of the Irish North and other lines. Chief clerk Willie Sefton’s main contribution to the conversation was ‘We are still operating the Great Northern Railway’. Some years later, with CIÉ and UTA well established I happened to meet Dublin driver the late Ned O’Grady and Belfast (formerly Derry) guard the late Alec Young (‘Spitfire’) in Great Victoria St. Station. With two such dedicated ex-Great Northern men, the talk was naturally largely devoted to reminiscences of the old company. I cannot remember many details of what was said, except for one sentence of Ned’s: ‘We are all Great Northern men here’. Finally a story told by Irwin Pryce, co-author of that estimable publication ‘Steaming in Three Centuries’, about his father who, after the best part of his life on the Great Northern, ended his railway days as station inspector at Great Victoria St. under the UTA Pryce senior was no great lover of his new masters and soon found a way of demonstrating where his true allegiance lay. Each time he was issued with a new uniform he would carefully unpick the green piping from the seams of the trouser legs and also remove the metal buttons from the jacket. He would then replace the latter with a set of black buttons which some older readers may remember were worn by senior uniformed GNR staff.

I hope that I have not given the impression that, in the Irish railway world the, the Great Northern was the repository of all the virtues and for that other lines were of lesser worth. Such was not the case; the Great Northern had its warts along with its beauty spots, but the fact remains that due to a realisation, by at least a fair proportion of staff of all grades that ‘if we do not hang together we will hang separately’ there was a feeling of cohesion and unity from top to bottom of the organisation which was not always the case on other lines. I cannot imagine, for instance, a remark once made to me by a senior official in the UTA Mechanical Engineer’s Dept; ‘I do not usually speak to drivers’, being made on the Great Northern.

Not that all was always sweetness and light between the GNR employees themselves. When Derry driver John Breslin on railcar A left Carrigans in the up direction in a snow storm, leaving guard Greer to start to walk to St. Johnston, there was little good will evident when Greer (first name regrettably forgotten) was picked up when John, informed of the situation when he got to St. Johnston, brought the railcar back to rescue his colleague.

But then things happened on the Derry Road. Like the time, for instance, when, just after the introduction of the B.U.T. railcars, a certain driver, well known for his amorous proclivities, stopped a Belfast-Derry train in the middle of nowhere between Sixmilecross and Carrickmore to set down his current lady love. Nearly 50 years have passed since that incident, but I can still see the lady walking across the field to her house in the far distance. Then, there was the Dundalk driver in 1958 when the closure of the Irish North west of Clones led to the successor of the ‘Bundoran Express’ a railcar running to Omagh. Beyond Dungannon the driver was served a tray lunch by one of the buffet car staff. Nothing flagrantly criminal in that perhaps, though it is hard to imagine it happening on the main line.

Although the actual spirit and ethos of the Great Northern are no longer extant (after all no one under the age of about 65 can have many clear memories of the company) many physical reminders are still with us. At the RPSI base at Whitehead, Co. Antrim are the three 4-4-0s: V class compound No. 85, S class two-cylinder simple No. 171 (the survivor of what was probably the most outstanding group of traditional 4-4-0s ever to run in Ireland) and Qs No. 131, one of the stalwarts of the Derry Road in the 20s and 30s. Nor should JT class 2-4-2T No. 91, in the Ulster Folk and Transport Museum, be forgotten. Perhaps the least said about restaurant car No. 88, also with the RPSI, the better. Major alterations to its interior by the UTA and a recent repainting in CIÉ green and renumbering in that company’s catering vehicle series have meant that it is scarcely recognisable as a ‘Northern’ vehicle. However, and thanks again to the RPSI, we can still see the former Directors’ Saloon in the once familiar livery dating from as far back as 1880.

Facing up Talbot St. towards Dublin city centre stands the erstwhile Amiens Street station, terminus of the Dublin & Drogheda Railway, its façade unchanged in more than 150 years. Although the steel spans of the Boyne viaduct were renewed more than 70 years ago, the massive masonry arches of the approaches on either side of the river remain unchanged since Dublin & Belfast Junction Railway’s days. Take a walk down Drogheda’s north quays, stop when you reach the bridge and look upwards. The armorial bearings of the D&BJR are still there. The beautifully maintained passenger station at Dundalk Junction (no longer an actual junction) which dates, I think, from the 1890s, remains as a representative memorial to the distinctive yellow, red and black buildings scattered throughout Great Northern territory, many of them themselves still extant.

Nor should we ignore the entire line through the Gap of the North, between Dundalk and the present Newry station, formerly Bessbrook. Whether it be the beautiful stonework of the overbridges, evident for instance in the skewed arch near Mountpleasant, or the great Bessbrook viaduct, the Great Northern strides today as impressively through and across the Leinster-Ulster divide as ever it did in bygone days. And let us not forget the heritage listed passenger station at Moira, dating from 1842, nor indeed the more modern relic, albeit an 80 year old one, the roundhouse shed at Clones. What a pity that the station master’s house at Cavan, with its thatched roof, has not survived.

To summarise: for political, as well as financial, reasons the Great Northern was forced to rely almost entirely on its own efforts in order to survive; this led to a constant search for economy and for new business. The realisation by staff of all grades that they alone could ensure their own survival led to feelings of unity and common purpose, whilst the relatively small size of the company and the dispersal of senior staff ensured that ‘They’ at Head Office and elsewhere were not just remote and anonymous figures, a powerful factor in creating and maintaining morale.

Copyright © 2008 by Irish Railway Record Society Limited
Revised: January 04, 2016 .