Folk Tales on the Settle-Carlisle Railway

Review

The locomen would stop overnight at the barracks in Upperby. They were so
crowded that men had to wait for a bed. "The place was really noisy. If you have
a barracks in a loco yard and there are locomotives belching smoke and steam for
twenty-four hours a day, it's not easy to get to sleep."

At Kingmoor,
it was even worse. The men tried to sleep next to the yard where the coal was
tipped. "The noise was appalling. . . . As a man got out of one bed, I got in.
It was still quite warm."

Bill Mitchell's latest book on the
Carlisle-Settle line captures this much-documented railway in a new way. He's
brought together the sayings and tales of the railwaymen throughout the years
and the tales that have gathered round the line. These are the everyday
incidents in a working life. The problems and irritations faced in the day - the
ice in the bucket, the farmer who throws a dead sheep on the line for
compensation, the poor coal that won't fire. And there's the apocryphal tales of
the bruised wife preparing bait for a brutal husband, who baked his leather belt
in his crusty pie.

Always there was humour and comradeliness and
there was nothing better than getting one-up on authority. One ganger, Old Adam,
kept his eye out for the pernickity permanent way inspector. He reckoned that
one way of stopping him entering a cabin "was to heat up t'sneck so it would be
too hot to handle."
Review by Steve Matthews