A LIFE ON THE FOOTPLATE
Carlisle driver Gordon Hodgson reflects on a career spanning nearly 60 years
Main line steam driver GORDON HODGSON was within weeks of completing 60 proud years on the footplate - but in July last year he failed the medical - and in an instant, his career was over. Here he tells DAVID WILCOCK of the despair he felt at that moment, and reflects on the highs and lows of nearly six decades of ‘marriage’ to the railways.
FI CAME BACK HOME FROM THE MEDICAL, AND I’M NOT ASHAMED TO ADMIT IT, I HAD A GOOD OLD CRY
or almost 40 years, since the 1978 revival of main line steam in the North West, Carlisle engineman Gordon Hodgson has been one of the stand-out names in the ‘top link’ of men who drive and fire our steam charter trains, week in, week out. A proud and articulate professional who began his apprenticeship as a fireman on the Waverley Route as long ago as 1957, Gordon’s ‘oneness’ with a locomotive and his predilection for ‘driving to the full’ has been a trademark long acknowledged by footplate colleagues, and one certainly appreciated by enthusiasts. At just 5ft 6in in his stockinged feet, there have long been jokes and banter among footplate colleagues about him needing a stepladder to get the regulator handle down from the roof, but Gordon’s record speaks for itself: holder of the ‘Blue Riband’ for the fastest run to Ais Gill summit with a Class 7 engine, fastest recorded time between Carlisle and Shap summit with 12 coaches, the highest sustained power output (2,900bhp) up Beattock (all, coincidentally, with the ‘A2’ class ‘Pacific’ No. 60532 Blue Peter) and many more besides. Locomotive fitness and efficiency may be variables, but the name ‘G. Hodgson’ on a steam crewing notice has been the nearest you could get to a guarantee of exhilarating, polished performance. As he says: “There’s a fine margin between using and abusing an engine, but for me, express locomotives should always be driven at full regulator, to get the maximum benefit out of superheat.” In July last year though, Gordon’s name suddenly disappeared from West Coast Railways’ crewing roster. There were no reports to say he had been ill - and retirement for a man so passionate about steam and so staunchly wedded to the footplate was quite unthinkable. He was simply there one minute, and gone the next. Some days later, the grapevine brought the news that Gordon, then 77, had failed his six-monthly medical - on his hearing. His footplate career - just six months short of 60 years - was suddenly at an end. That he was still as fit as a flea, demonstrated the mental agility of men half his age, and walked England’s highest fells on his days off, counted for nothing.
DEVASTATED
Friends and followers met the news of Gordon’s enforced retirement with sadness and sympathy, but to the man himself, it was a devastating, lifechanging thunderbolt. It felt as though the bottom had fallen out of his entire world. “I came back home from the medical, and I’m not ashamed to admit it, I had a good old cry,” he admitted when I met him at his Carlisle home a few weeks ago. “It wasn’t how I’d expected to retire from the railway. I was so hoping to get that 60 years in, at least. “I always knew that the hearing in my right ear wasn’t as good as in my left, but I never had any fears or qualms about the medical. The doctors used to say to me that considering the environment I’d been working in - on a noisy footplate over so many years - my hearing was generally better than might be expected. “The practical test involved hearing someone speaking at a certain distance away, and checking that I could use radios and telephones without any difficulty. I’ve got a hearing aid, and that’s fine when I’m working a diesel - but it was useless on a steam engine because there’s so much ‘percussion’ and echo in the receiver that it’s difficult to differentiate one noise from another. Everything was being drowned out. “I asked the doctor if I could take the test again - but he said no. He was sorry, but he had to draw the line somewhere. I was devastated. I’d expected to pass the practical test again - but as the doctor said, if anything happened as a result of my hearing - any incident - it would come back on him, and he would be out of a job. “During previous medicals, some of the doctors had asked me how long I intended to continue on the footplate. I always said that I’d carry on for as long as I still felt capable, confident and happy doing it - but the moment I felt uncomfortable doing it, I’d stop. I never reached that stage. “One of the biggest disappointments was losing the last year on the Settle line, following the major landslip in the Eden Gorge near Armathwaite, in February last year. Sixty or seventy per cent of my work was on the Settle & Carlisle.
FOOTPLATE FIX
“Footplate work is a bit of a drug really. One of the biggest things that I’ll miss is the companionship of other railwaymen, not just on the footplate, but the mechanical staff, the fitters - everyone. The railway has often been described as one big family, and that’s how it has always felt to me.” You wouldn’t have to speak to too many railwaymen at the sharp end of today’s main line steam activity in the North West to learn of the special regard in which the name Gordon Hodgson is held. His pedigree, professionalism and prowess almost suggests that he was born into a railway family. Actually, his father was a roads foreman with Cumberland County Council, though he tragically died in a motorcycle accident when Gordon was just a lad of 11. The young Gordon Hodgson grew up ‘in the sticks’ at Hutton-in-the-Forest, a rural hamlet some seven miles north west of Penrith, noted for its historic country house. Most of his childhood was spent helping out on the two farms either side of the cottage where he lived. He remembers it as “an idyllic upbringing, away from the pressures of life”. Many years later, when asked by his wife Rachel what his favourite toy had been as a kid, his straight answer was “a Fordson tractor”. He’d been driving one since the age of nine, for as he points out: “there were no health and safety regulations on farms then.” Farm work was pretty much the only real employment to be had locally, so when Gordon left school at 15, he became a farm hand. “I didn’t have ambitions to join the railway then,” he explains, “but from an early age I was smitten by steam traction and the power of them. Bill Dowthwaite, a family friend who ran an agricultural contractors business, used to take steam engines and threshing machines around all the farms, and occasionally we’d go for Sunday tea at the Dowthwaites. “There would usually be a threshing engine in steam, ready to go out on Monday morning, and we used to trundle down the field outside his house on one of these traction engines. It was great fun, and my interest in steam grew from that. “I really liked farm work, but by the time I was 18 I could see the prospects for progression weren’t brilliant. Nearly all the farms around us were tenanted, and belonged to the Hutton House estate, and I could see myself still being a farm worker at the age of 65 - so I thought I’d try the railway.” There was, though, another motive for Gordon to ‘try the railway’. He was approaching the age of compulsory national service in the armed forces… and he knew railwaymen were exempt. Like many boys of his age, he found the prospect of two years in the Army less than appealing - so he wrote to British Railways in Carlisle, and declared his hand. He wanted to make his career on the footplate as a fireman, and ultimately as a driver, he said.