HOLDING THE FORT
Tom Tighe on the ‘Jacobite’ in the ’80s
“Fort William will always be special.
We had four and a bit years up there. The people we met and the friendships that were formed, it will always be special to look back on.”
Tom Tighe, joined at the hip to ‘Black Five’ No. 5305 since September 1968, admits that the thrills and spills that he and his gang of (then) Hull-based volunteers spent on the 42-mile West Highland Line Extension ranks as the most cherished period of those five decades.
“When I think about it, of all the things in which I’ve been involved, Fort William would be number one.”
This town, nestled on the shores of Loch Linnhe in the shadow of Ben Nevis, has been the focal point for one of main line steam’s biggest success stories; a wonderful revival that was reignited in 1984 thanks to the enlightened ScotRail division of British Rail and later manifested into the ‘Jacobite’.
A year later, the luxury ‘Royal Scotsman’ land cruise train was inaugurated. Life-served BR senior manager David Ward was responsible for allocating the steam locomotives that hauled the sections to Mallaig, as Tom recalls, having been alerted while on the shop floor at Doncaster Works.
“David Ward rang me at work in September 1986. He said they had a problem with [‘Black Five’ No.] 44932 and they’d got six ‘Royal Scotsman’ trains to operate out of Fort William. Would I be interested in sending 5305 up there?”
His initial answer was ‘no’ because the group had no spare support coach at that time.
“He said, ‘don’t worry about that, I’ll get you one. Are you interested, because I can’t get anyone else and we’re contracted to steam-haul the train?’
“So I said we’d do it, not having thought of how
I was going to man it! Thinking it through, we had people who were retired who I knew would go, but I wanted to go an’ all.”
Standing between him and the chance to operate the LMS-liveried 4-6-0 to Mallaig for the first time was his employment as a BR fitter.
“I went to see my shop superintendent, Brian Walshaw, who was a good manager. I said, ‘cards on the table, I’ve been approached by a guy called David Ward who’s the passenger marketing manager for British Rail board in London and he wants 5305 to go to Fort William for six weeks, but I’ve got nobody to look after it while it’s there. Is there any chance I can have six weeks’ unpaid leave?’
“He said, ‘well how are you going to get paid?’ That was his first concern. I said that it would come out of the hire fees. ‘Get this David Ward to ring me,’ he said. I rang David back and asked him to put my superintendent’s mind at ease.”
Later that day, Brian called Tom back: David Ward would cover his wages and his leave was granted.
SPOTLESS ENGINE
“We went up and Wardy got one of the brake vehicles from the ‘Scarborough Spas’ sent across to [Hull] Dairycoates. And that was the start of four and a half years of absolute enjoyment, making new friends and being part of the Fort William scene.
“When we got there, the crews couldn’t believe the sight of this spotless engine; even in the cab, everything was spotless. And we kept it like that all the years we were running there.
When we got there, the crews couldn’t believe the sight of this spotless engine TOM TIGHE
“Like we’ve said many a time, once you get on top of it, the rest is easy. You just keep at it with a light dust over, and that’s even being outside at Fort William.
“It was just a dream time. You didn’t have an inspector, apart from Eastfield depot in Glasgow on the move up to Fort William, someone called George Steele – an ex-Caley man. If he took us up, around March time, he’d say, ‘you’re here until October, and all I’d say is enjoy it, but be careful. I’ll pop up in the summer to make sure everything’s alright.’”
It’s perhaps easy to take the Fort William-Mallaig line for granted, especially as it now carries around 300 return steam trips every year under the auspices of West Coast Railways. In the Eighties, however, it was still finding its feet; the heritage traction having only just returned for the first time after an absence of a quarter of a century.
And if the volunteers of the Hull Locomotive Preservation Group thought that they might be a nuisance to the British Rail staff at Fort William depot – still then a vibrant operational diesel locomotive hub – then they would be pleasantly surprised.
“The people at the depot, the management, crews were brilliant. They couldn’t have made us feel more welcome. We’d regularly be out with them in the evenings for a drink and a meal.
“In 1987, one of the drivers, Ewan Maclennan, big bloke, came over to the coach one evening and said ‘the missus wants you all to come to dinner on Thursday. Don’t argue and don’t bring anything, just yourselves’.
“So off we went to 11 Inverlochy Place, where he and Betty welcomed us at the door. Before, during and after a dinner of braised steak, Ewan was pouring the whiskies, and then we staggered back… And that became a regular thing.
“Ewan was ever so funny, even on the footplate. “Beyond Glenfinnan, we’d be level with the loch [Eilt] and at the same point every day, he would turn around, open the locker and get a glass Schweppes bottle out containing brown liquid (which, I subsequently learned, was tea). He’d open it, pour it down the hatch, and then throw it out of the window and into the loch. It was automatic: door, bag, bottle, gone. I often said to him that there must be hundreds of Schweppes bottles in that loch.
“One night, we wanted to go into Fort William for some food and it’s a fair trek from the depot. I went into the offices and there was Ewan and Colin Ross, one of the other drivers, as I’m coming out. Colin was doing the relief foreman’s job. He asked me what I was doing and I said I was just about to nip to the supermarket.
“‘Hang on’, he said, picking up the phone. ‘Is that Mallaig Junction? Right, Class 20 into Platform 1 at Fort William’ and put the phone down. ‘Right, he’s going to start the Class 20 up and take you to the station, you go and do your shopping, then he’ll bring you back’.
“So we had a Class 20 taxi!”
“You were part of the team. That was just how they were up there. They made us feel part of their environment so when we left we went and bought two cases of whisky and said ‘there you go lads, thanks for all that you’ve done and see you all next year’.
‘And it got better year on year.”
SMOKE ON THE HORIZON
Characters abounded the Fort William steam scene. Someone else fondly remembered went by the moniker ‘Kilty MacPrune’; a volunteer on the train who would provide a narration over the public address system from a compartment at the end of the train.
A Church of Scotland minister, ‘Kilty’ offered his services to read out the prepared commentary on the outward journey as the train went along, written by renowned railway historian Ann Glen.
Once on the move, he would begin the commentary, but never kept to the script. At that time, Class 37s were still about and whenever one was passed at Glenfinnan or Arisaig he would announce that a ‘Deltic’ had arrived, thus annoying all rail enthusiasts. When a buzzard could be spotted from the train his response was to alert the passengers to the appearance of a golden eagle, at which all ornithologists on board were up in arms.
‘Kilty’ was fond of his whisky and as the journey progressed, he indulged from supplies brought with him, supplemented by miniatures from the trolley, leading to his commentary getting more dissociated from the landscape and the history of the area.
“You’d be saying ‘what’s he on about?’ It was drivel a lot of the time. He was there every time the train ran, so by the time you’d got part way through the season, you’d had enough of him, because all you wanted to do was disconnect the speaker. On one occasion, we actually did.”
His real piéce de rèsistance, however, came at Mallaig. The locomotive propelled the stock out of the station and ran round. It then had to propel the coaches back into the platform. At this point ‘Kilty’ would stand on the platform and (unofficially) take over the guard’s role, waving the train back with his arm in full view of the driver. Of course, the driver totally ignored him, but the performance tended to confuse passengers who weren’t savvy with the railway.
And members of the support crew weren’t beyond displays of eccentric behaviour, either.
“John Ombler, bless him, was in the desert in the war. Every morning, at 6 o’clock, you’d hear his compartment door slide open and he could never open it without banging it on the stop and waking everyone up. And then, that was followed by bang, bang, bang, bang. A pause. And then bang, bang, bang, bang once again as he knocked each of his upturned shoes on the floor.
“After a while, I asked him why he did it: ‘Just making sure there are no scorpions hiding in them. It’s a habit from the war – it drives the missus up the wall’.”
She wasn’t the only one. “I said, ‘well there won’t be any scorpions hiding in them up here, in Fort William’.”
Then there was the notoriously cantankerous lady who ran a small business near Morar Crossing: “We used to put oil bombs in the firebox and smoke her out of the shop because she was always moaning.
“We’d get enough momentum to get over the crossing, then shut the regulator and the smoke used to curl out. She’d come out, giving it what for, shaking her fists.
“Then she’d ring the depot and complain, so in the end the management told us to give it a rest. One of them told me: ‘I know she’s always moaning, but I’m the one who has to pick the phone up to her, so it would give me a break!’
FIRE STARTER
But perhaps the most infamous sketch was thanks to driver Willie Corrigan on a baking hot spring bank holiday Sunday in 1987.
Right, he’s going to start the Class 20 up and take you to the station, you go and do your shopping, then he’ll bring you back’
“I was on the ‘Five’ with Willie and we were going along the loch side, through Lochailort and up the hill. We were going by the white church at Polnish and I looked back and above the hill, in the distance, all you could see was this great big pall of smoke.
“‘Bloody hell, Willie, have you seen all that smoke? What’s that caused by? I hope it’s not us’.
“Anyway, we carried on to Mallaig and didn’t think owt else about it.
“On the way back, we came up from Loch Nan Uamh Viaduct, past the Black Loch on the bend, and started to drop back down to the white church.
“Then, in the distance, there was this great fog. As we’re coming down to the first tunnel before Lochailort, it looked like a nuclear bomb had gone off on the hillside above the tunnel. It was just frazzled.
“I said ‘where’s all the vegetation gone?’ to which Willie replied, ‘oh yeah, it looks like there’s been a good fire up there’.
“Oh my God, I thought. There was nothing left. Just smouldering bits.
“We were then coming down to Lochailort station and all the hillside was on fire.
“‘This isn’t good, it must be us’, I remarked.
“Near the causeway, there were loads of people out with fire beaters trying desperately to put it out. And as we went round the bend, where, in the morning there had been a wooden platelayers’ hut, was now a ball of flame. “‘Aye, doesn’t matter’, he said… ‘less to burn tomorrow’. “It was just the way he said it… ‘It’ll be fine. We’ll be running tomorrow’.
“‘I doubt it’, I replied.
“Anyway, he was right, but the beaters were still there the next day.”
They may have been droll, and most certainly friendly, but the former steam crews who took charge of No. 5305 during its spell on the ‘Road to the Isles’ were also highly skilled enginemen.
“Colin Ross was someone we didn’t have often; a little bloke, quietly spoken. But he stood out from the rest of the Fort William lads and I could never fathom out why. We got him one Sunday on the engine and I thought, you know how to handle a ‘Five’, and I said to him, ‘you’re not originally from Fort William shed are you?’
“‘Ooh, no he said, I’m not. I started at Aviemore. I passed out on a ‘Black Five’; that’s why what you see is how we used to work them on the Highland Main Line’.
“What got me about him was a simple thing. When he shut off, he’d shut the regulator then start to tap it open. Then he’d work the cylinder cocks, look out and see if there was steam there and once he was happy, that’s where he left it. The engine used to coast as silent as a mouse.
“‘You think’, he said, ‘coming down off those hills in the Highlands, you had to have everything right with these engines. This is how we used to work them’.
“To watch and compare him to some of the original Fort William lads, who again, had worked ‘Fives’, was chalk and cheese. He was a lovely bloke. They all were in their way, but Colin, and Ewan for that matter, really stood out.
“Colin retired in 1987, meaning that we only had two years with him. But we’d asked the management whether there was any chance Colin could work our end of season charter train back south to Glasgow?
“But it really annoyed me that they wouldn’t give him the job and one last steam turn, because someone else had signed on a few minutes before and kicked up a fuss. So they left things as they were to keep things even.”
Sadly, Colin died not long after.
THANKS FOR EVERYTHING
For Tom and his Hull gang, the Scottish music stopped in 1990; the last year that No. 5305, with a major overhaul looming, would ever run over Glenfinnan Viaduct.
“At the end of the season, and although I hadn’t told the lads, I knew that we wouldn’t be going back. And I didn’t say owt until then because I didn’t want to spoil the return railtour south for them.
“I said at Fort William to Mick Welsh and George Steele whether I could fire the engine from Bridge of Orchy round the Horseshoe Curve, to which they agreed.
As we went round the bend, where, in the morning there had been a wooden platelayers’ hut, was now a ball of flame
“As we topped the summit at County March, I turned to the crew and said, ‘well, that’s it, lads. Thanks for everything you’ve done. It’s been brilliant’.
“I’ve got a video of that day coming down from Bridge of Orchy over the viaducts and up the hill to County March. It’s always nice once in a while to watch it; the engine with its regulator wide open, virtually full gear at the top, really giving it what for with seven on.”
While the ‘Black Five’ has subsequently gone through three overhauls since 1990, and still retains a main line certificate, there remains little chance of it returning to Fort William 30 years later.
“I’ve always resisted going back when we’ve been asked. West Coast has asked a couple of times and I refused because we’ve got such good memories of how it used to be. Anything else would be a pale imitation of how it was.
“I wouldn’t want anything to spoil the priceless memories I’ve got.”
HIGHLAND HIKE?
But the ‘Black Five’ did return north of the border, for a sixth time, this time post-privatisation, when, in April 2012, Tom’s organisation, now operating under the banner of 5305 Locomotive Association, agreed to participate in the Railway Touring Company’s epic ‘Great Britain’.
Wearing late BR lined black and numbered 45305, rather than its synonymous LMS guise, the 4-6-0 took on the spectacular sawtooth route between Inverness and Kyle of Lochalsh (slipping to a stand on the infamous 1-in-50 Raven’s Rock bank) and piloted Ian Riley’s own ‘Black
‘un’ No. 45407 on the equally demanding slog to Stranraer Harbour.
For a machine that has covered much of Britain’s railway network over the past 50 years, these one-off runs represented two important ticks in the box for Tom.
Yet, there remains one Scottish route that has long been high on the ‘to do’ list – another steeply graded line where the class gained the appropriate moniker, ‘Hikers’.
“One of the things I’d like to do is get it over the Highland Main Line. When we were at Fort William, we’d even discussed it with the SRPS, but things never seemed to line up for it to happen.
“Remembering Colin Ross and what he used to say about working there, it would be nice to go over there and think about him and everything he did for us.
“With six or seven on, roaring over the summit at Druimuachdar… I couldn’t think of anything I’d rather see and hear.”