Heritage Rail: Young People

Lord Snape Excerpts

Wednesday 5th June 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Snape (Lab)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow my noble friend Lord Grocott. Like him, I congratulate my noble friend Lord Faulkner on securing this debate and on the work he has done in this field over the years. I also take this opportunity to welcome the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Leeds. All too often, these debates are fairly exclusive; I find we are apt to be known as the verbal gricers of the railway industry. Bishops and railways go together quite well, of course. Bishop Eric Treacy was a well-known figure during my time in the railway industry. There was only one line of the right reverend Prelate’s speech with which I might disagree at some future stage. He said that young people do not need protection under the 1920 Act. Of course, he is right as far as the railway industry is concerned, but if this House ever gets around to debating the fast-food industry, I might take issue with him on that point. However, I commend his speech and his contribution today.

Looking back at the history of the railways, particularly in the context of this debate, it is a sobering thought that the youngest former cleaner who embarked on his first shift on a locomotive and left the depot on the British Rail standard gauge would now be approaching 70 years of age—an ominous warning to all of us of the passage of time. However, the attraction of the railway industry, particularly the heritage railways and steam locomotives, is one that includes all generations.

The “Flying Scotsman” locomotive is currently on tour. There has been some adverse publicity about the thousands of people who have gone to see it, some of whom got a bit closer to the lineside than they should have done because of the attraction of this particular locomotive. I visited the East Lancashire Railway with my grandson towards the end of last year, when the “Flying Scotsman” was there. My grandson is now 15 and if he remembers his grandfather for anything, I hope it is for getting him on the footplate of the “Flying Scotsman” on the East Lancashire Railway.

As my noble friend Lord Grocott said, people do not volunteer for just the locomotive department. There are various other jobs in the railway industry and he reminded us of some of them. On the mainline railway, there are still many hundreds of signal boxes. Of course, the intention is to concentrate mainline signalling on 10 or 12 regional operating centres in the years to come, but there are still lots of manual signal boxes on the mainline railway. Certainly as far as the heritage railways are concerned, operating those signal boxes will continue for many years to come.

The debate is first and foremost about attracting young people to the railway industry, and not just because of steam locomotives, as I have indicated; there are lots of other valuable jobs that they can do and to which they can contribute. Like previous speakers, I will for a moment be somewhat parochial. Towards the end of last year, I visited the Tyseley Locomotive Works just outside Birmingham. I talked there to some of the people who operate the works and the locomotive department. Subsequently its chairman, Mr Michael Whitehouse, contacted me about attracting young people to what is a working locomotive maintenance and operational depot—possibly one of the few left, certainly alongside British Rail. I quote from his letter:

“We already run an apprentice scheme for three students in conjunction with Bournville and South Birmingham colleges. We intend to introduce further training schemes and are already in dialogue with the Office of Rail and Road to establish a training scheme for railway operational staff”.


He says that they are anxious,

“to expand and upgrade our facilities to meet the significantly increasing demand for repairing heritage steam locomotives”.

I hope the Minister will be able to convince his colleagues in the Department for Transport of the need for a ministerial visit to the Tyseley works so that they can see their operational nature, and that any application made to the ERDF, for example, is sympathetically supported by the Minister’s department as well as the DfT.

I would like to draw your Lordships’ attention to another aspect of heritage railways—the need for connectivity between the heritage railway and the main line. If we are to attract young people and to train perhaps young would-be managers in the mainline system, they would certainly find that connectivity between the heritage railway and the main line attractive. It would be enormously useful.

Network Rail has lots of problems, some of which come in for considerable criticism in your Lordships’ House, as well as in the other place. Without adding to its burden, we should point out that occasionally Network Rail shows itself to be both expensive and uninterested in its connection with the heritage railway system. I will give your Lordships an example. Recently, the Swanage Railway was not a consultee on proposed changes involving its main line connection near Wareham, even though this was re-signalled to rejoin the railway with a grant from Dorset County Council. Network Rail is something of a Goliath as far as the heritage railway sector is concerned, but the voluntary sector faces heavy expenditure for track and signalling alterations. I wonder whether the Minister could take back the message that it would certainly be extremely helpful if heritage railways were made a statutory consultee where this sort of work, which might well affect their own operations, is concerned. At the moment, it is very much a matter of whether Network Rail consults them. In the case of Swanage Railway, it did not.

I referred to the fact that there are many jobs that young people could do in the sector, as did my noble friend Lord Grocott. We have heard about the plea and desire to look again at the regulations and the 1920 Act. Of course, it is all very well for the Office of Rail and Road to say that it does not anticipate taking any action under this statute—I welcome that news—but if a young person is injured I am not sure whether the legal profession would take the same laid-back view of its responsibilities. It would be useful if the legislation was withdrawn.

Referring to some of the other work that takes place in the railway industry, I have mentioned signal boxes previously and bored your Lordships with stories of my own involvement. I will try not to do so again on this occasion.

[Lord Berkeley]

Oh, go on!

[Lord Snape]

Well, all right, just this once I will be led astray.

One of the signal boxes in which I used to work, just outside Stockport, is still there—I will not go into the details of why, but it still operates as a mainline signal box. When it was necessary to modernise it, yet still retain the lever frame installed by the London and North Western Railway in 1888, locking fitters had to be brought in from India to do the work because we have largely lost these skills. If we could retain those skills through the heritage railway sector, that would be invaluable. This is probably an apocryphal story—fake news, as a distinguished visitor to our country might say—but I am told that after six months of modernising the signal boxes in my home town of Stockport, they were delighted to get back to India.