OUR RAILWAY
Chris Cubitt has been part of the North Yorkshire Moors Railway for over 50 years. In this concluding feature he remembers the opening day, his ‘pet’ engine, and much more.
May 1 1973 was a landmark in the history of the North Yorkshire Moors Railway (NYMR,) in that it was the Royal re-opening of the line, with the Duchess of Kent as the guest of honour. But, while on the surface everything seemed to run smoothly, Chris Cubitt remembers things rather differently.
“The day before, [Lambton 0-6-2 tank] number 29 had leaking tubes and we were in the firebox until 7.30 at night expanding tubes and getting it all ready to go. It’s just something we had to do. Yes, it was a nice sunny day, and I was on my holidays, but the national railways were on strike that day. We prepared the train, the engines and everything to go to Whitby, over BR, and it just fell through. So, the Duchess had to come in the car to Grosmont, and we all just mucked in. It was a very nice day, we enjoyed it, certainly. There was no saying, ‘Yes, well we did this, or we did that’. We all did the job that had to be done and we did it professionally.
“After we re-opened in 1973, we had Ken Saunders, a regular driver, and Ron Chainer
[as] the operating manager. Then it came to 1974, and we expanded the services a little bit more, so we needed another driver and a new operating manager, and Bill Pearson became the operation manager; he was seconded from British Rail. I was going to be seconded for July and August only, but then the regularly paid driver had a ‘misdemeanour’, and I was here from May to October.
“How this came about was that the honorary general manager, John Bellwood, got the company secretary to write to my boss, and Bill Pearson’s boss. We’re all at Thornaby [depot], and our manager was based at Newcastle. They wrote a letter to him asking if they could second us for the period of time they wanted us, and he said yes. It turned out that John Bellwood was our boss at Newcastle. So, he was writing a letter to himself! From May to October that year I was seconded.
I drove steam every day, all day. Five days a week seconded off BR, and on a Saturday and Sunday I’d be driving as a volunteer.”
While Chris was chiefly focused on the NYMR, his steam activities branched out to a few more locations, including one very special event in 1975.
“Then, of course, we came to 1975 when we had the 150th anniversary cavalcade at Shildon. Locomotives would come in to Thornaby shed, including the ‘S15’ [No. 841], which is here now. It had been tyre-turned at Newcastle and [‘Black Five’ No. 4767] ‘George Stephenson’ had turned up from Carnforth… we tripped a few locomotives up to Shildon. I bought [‘V2’ No. 4771] Green Arrow from York to Darlington where was an exhibition of locos. Then, the week before the Cavalcade, they were all ferried up to Shildon. I was on the ‘S15’. I had a choice to go on that or [Standard ‘5’] No. 75029. I think there were five us from Thornaby, firemen, who wanted to go on steam.
The roster clerk was there – “Which engines would you like?” I said, “I’ll go on the ‘S15’”, because I’d been friendly with the lads when it was at Thornaby. The ‘S15’ went back south, and we came back to the NYMR, and continued on and on. Then we had the drought in 1976, when we destroyed an ‘08’ shunter on hire from BR.
That’s when we acquired [D5032] ‘Helen Turner’, the diesel, which was a Bescot engine.”
In what was a precursor to last year’s total ban on steam, the NYMR was forced to find diesel replacements, as Chris wryly remembers.
“We had damaged the [on loan] shunter – it was going down the hill, on the other side of Goathland, and the traction motor windings came out and the bleeding motor seized and bent all the rods and this, that and the other, because the wheels stopped going around [one wonders what BR thought of this… Ed]. This meant we didn’t have anything to haul trains. Because there was a fire risk, we were restricted with steam from
Grosmont to Goathland, so we could only run to Pickering and back from Goathland with steam. We did have DMUs, but it was suggested that we go and ask TJ Thomson [scrap merchant] at Middlesbrough if we could borrow this Class 24 [24032] for six weeks, to see us out. It had been bought as scrap but was a good engine and it later turned out that the owner’s daughter, Helen, was a rail enthusiast. Anyway, we ran a special train with a Great Western saloon and No. 24032/ D5032. At the same time, we named to the locomotive after his daughter… which father would scrap a locomotive with his daughter’s name on? And it’s been here ever since.”
All‑female crew
Around this time, Chris’ involvement with the NYMR led to a much more important change in his personal circumstances when he met his wife, Rosemary.
“She’d been involved in the Girl Guides and used to come camping at Levisham, and she wasn’t really impressed with the train service that they were getting off the NYMR. So, she came to volunteer and became a ticket inspector, then a guard, and finally she became the DMU driver as well. Together with another Pickering volunteer, Marion Godley, they had an all-female crew with a DMU. Then we were married in 1979, and Rosemary was driving the DMUs, and I was on the steam and this, that and the other. After we had my eldest daughter in 1982, Rosemary stopped volunteering but did become the trust board secretary.” 4
By 1974, the railway had got into the swing of things, and was running smoothly. Although there was the occasional problem – as Chris remembers, albeit one that worked out to his satisfaction.
“In 1974, we’re running the ‘K1’ [No. 62005] up and down, and John Bellwood said that on the Friday he would let me get away. He’d done the last two trips driving. Fair enough, no problem with that. The day previous, when we put it [the ‘K1’] to bed, the firebar snapped and fell in the ashpan, which stopped it for the Friday, so we had to have something else. My mate Geoff and I walked through the tunnel [at Grosmont] and John was talking to the ops manager in the office down the bottom. It turned out there were only two engines we could have, one was [Lambton 0-6-2 tank] No. 5 and the other one was [No. 5428] ‘Eric Treacy’, the ‘Black Five’. We were saying to ourselves ‘we don’t want the ‘Black Five’. Horrible. Well, not horrible, 3
but we don’t want it. No. 5 can do the job. So, we went in the office and told them what we’d done. ‘Oh.’ John says, ‘Well, if you’re going to break big engines, you can’t have the ‘Black Five’, you can have No. 5.’ We were like, ‘Oh great.’”
Horses for courses
Of all the engines Chris has been involved with over the last 50 years, is there one that stands above all others for him?
“Yes, [Lambton 0‑6‑2T] No. 29 is my pet. It’s horses for courses. It all depends what you want to do. If you want to potter around with two or three coaches, engines like Nos. 5 and 29 would be quite happy plodding up and down that hill – you can put what you like behind them. They’ll plod along at their own speed. Some people want to go up the hill with No. 29 at 25mph, and she’s a carthorse, she’s not a racehorse. She’s big or small enough to do what you want.
“There was a group of us. We had six engines, and each engine had a caretaker. Geoff looked after No. 5, I looked after 29 and Maurice Burns looked after the ‘Q6’. I think it was Terry Newman who looked after the ‘P3’. Each engine had a caretaker. So, if you wanted something doing to that engine you’d go to that person and that’s how it used to be. Now they’re all in a pool…”
One thing from those days that stands out in Chris’ mind is the sense of camaraderie. They were clearly happy times for him – and indeed for the railway in general.
“We used to come here [to Grosmont] and we used to go in the back room of the pub and have singsongs and drinking ale and all this, that and the other. Auntie Dot (we used to call her Auntie Dot) Doreen Bell, the landlady, her father had been a driver at Rosedale and finished up at York. We used to come here every Sunday. We even took the wheels out of No. 5 on the level crossing. The radial truck had run hot. We had no wheeldrop, nothing like that, but we had to run the metal out and it had to be repaired, so how do you do it? We’d never done it before. We jacked it up. We had No. 5 like that, up just this side of the level crossing, on the far side line. One Sunday, we borrowed two 35‑tonne jacks, and we had sleepers and packing, and we jacked it up to get the wheel out then put it back down.
‘Q6’ No. 63395, on its first day in traffic, passes under Darnholm road bridge on June 27 1970. JOHN HUNT
Borrows 0-4-0WT No. 3 receiving attention, along with No. 29 in August 1970. COLOUR RAIL
No. 63395 is coaled by hand from Ron Cana’s lorry on the level crossing at Grosmont in the summer of 1970. JOHN HUNT
‘Black Five’ No. 5428 ‘Eric Treacy’ pilots ‘K1’ No. 2005 round Beckhole Curve in the spring of 1975. JOHN HUNT
Celebrating the line’s 50th anniversary are original crew Terry Newman and Chris Cubitt with the NYMR’s Simon Brockington. CHARLOTTE GRAHAM
“Then we stripped the bearings out and got the bearing repaired. Put it all back together. The following weekend, we jacked it all up and put it back in. We’d never done it before. It was a learning curve. We had to have it done and that’s how it was done. There was no such thing as ‘oh, we can’t do that’. We’d say, ‘we need to do that’ and so we did it.”
This same pioneering spirit carried on into everyday working life, with Chris carrying out other jobs when he had spare time.
“We wanted the little end bush on the right-hand side on No. 29 renewing. We didn’t have a press to get bushes out, and we took it to Thornaby shed and we put it in the repair shed, pressed the bush out, put a new bush in and it was laid under the radiator in the shed. I walked in the shed one day and the foreman said, ‘You, is that yours?’ I said, ‘Yes, that’s mine. We’re taking it there on Sunday.’ He said, ‘Aye, fair enough.’ I brought a conrod in the back of my [Hillman] Avenger estate, from Thornaby. It was only a year old, and the fitter said, ‘I wouldn’t do that with my car.’ The ground frame for the connection from BR to here came from Teesside in the back of my car too. They were bloody solid cars.
“We had some materials. We had the brake rigging of [‘J52’] No. 1247 – damaged, because it came off the road. We had the brake rigging and bufferbeam of 1247 going to Shildon for repairs at the wagon works. We also had the two conrods off [‘4MT’] 80135 and it was all in the back of the little Transit wagon we had, going from the shed here to Teesside. But Esk Valley is a really steep hill, and the wagon couldn’t get up it. So, what did we do? A lad brought his car around and we put a tow rope on the front, and it went up, double-headed. Then we got to Egton and there’s another steep hill. How are we going to get up that hill? Put the tow rope on the front again, and the car helped to pull the wagon up the hill. Then when we got to Egton, we’re all right then, it’s all good running. Yes, that’s the sorts of things we used to do.”
It’s hard to sum up over half a century of hard graft on a heritage railway, but to end I ask Chris to describe – if he can – what the NYMR means to him – and has meant to him since he began there.
“Well, it’s been my life really. Yes, I’ve done everything on the NYMR, from cleaning the pit out, getting married, being on the trust board, being a vice chairman. It’s our railway and you get people coming in and people going, but at the end of the day it doesn’t matter who sits in the general manager’s seat or in the treasurer’s seat. It’s our railway.”