Text 1: Two hundred miles from one chair, by Lorcan Ballantyne

An original contemporary newspaper feature.

The room that controls the trains across half the county looks, at first glance, like an office where nothing is happening. It is quiet, carpeted and cool. Twenty signallers sit at curved desks facing a wall of screens on which the railway is drawn as a diagram of coloured lines, and the trains as tiny numbered labels creeping across it.

Jo Ferris has the busiest desk, covering the junctions south of the city: two hundred miles of track and more than six hundred trains a day. The computer sets most routes automatically from the timetable; Jo watches, and steps in when something goes wrong. ‘The skill isn’t pressing buttons,’ she says. ‘It’s knowing which train to delay so that ten others don’t have to be.’

Jo began her career in a Victorian signal box at Langley Halt, pulling iron levers that came up to her chest. She was alone there for twelve-hour shifts, with a kettle, a heater and a view across the fields. When the box was closed and its work transferred here, she wept. ‘I miss the trains,’ she says simply. ‘Here I never see one. I see a number.’

While we talk, a call comes in from a driver: there is someone walking on the line near a level crossing. Jo’s voice does not change. With three clicks of her mouse she sets every signal in the area to red, and on the screen the little labels stop moving, one after another, like cars at a red light. She speaks to the police, to the drivers and to a supervisor, in turn and without hurrying. Twenty-four minutes later the trespasser, a teenage boy looking for his dog, has been led off the tracks, and the labels begin to creep forward again.

Hundreds of passengers will reach home a little late tonight without knowing why. Jo writes a short report, drinks a cold cup of tea, and turns back to her screens. Her old signal box at Langley Halt, she tells me, is now a café. She has been once, and ordered a coffee, and sat in the corner where the levers used to be.

Text 2: A night in a signal box, by Walter Bryce

An original magazine article written in a nineteenth-century voice; a period simulation, not an archival document.

In this magazine article, written in 1881, a writer describes spending a night with a signalman at a busy railway junction.

The signal box at Fenby Junction stands upon tall legs above the meeting of three lines, like a heron watching a pool, and to it I climbed at eight o’clock on a November evening with the permission of the Company and a packet of sandwiches.

Its keeper, John Cudworth, is a quiet, grey man of fifty, who has worked this box for twenty-two years. Before him stand forty-two levers in a row, painted red, blue and black, each as tall as a boy and so stiff that he throws his whole weight upon them. Above them, upon a shelf, are the little instruments and bells by which he speaks with the boxes on either side: one beat on the bell, a pause, two beats more, a language of which I understood not one word, but which Cudworth heard and answered as readily as his own name.

Through the night the trains came, the expresses roaring under our feet so that the whole box trembled and the windows rang, the goods trains crawling and clanking for minutes together. For each, Cudworth set the road, pulled off the signal, watched the tail lamp pass, and wrote the time in his book. Between trains he polished his levers with a cloth until they shone, for the inspector, he said, could see dust in the dark.

Towards three the fog came down, so thick that the signal lamps not forty yards away were lost entirely. Then the fogmen went out to the line with their detonators, little charges laid upon the rails which crack like pistol shots beneath the wheels to warn the driver, and Cudworth grew quieter still. ‘In this,’ he said, ‘a man has nothing but his memory. A moment’s forgetting, and there’s forty dead.’ He did not say another word for an hour.

At six his relief climbed the steps, and Cudworth put on his coat and walked home along the line. I have travelled by rail a thousand times and never once thought of him. I shall not travel so carelessly again.

Both of these texts are about the people who control the movement of trains.

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• what the writers say about this work
• how the writers present the signallers and their responsibilities

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