The LNER Encyclopedia

I admit to being very ignorant about LNER but would be grateful if someone could answer a couple of questions to enable me to know where to start tracing some records about my father.

He was a Colchester man and joined the railway at 14 (in about 1929) working in a signal box. Would this have been in the LNER area? He worked for the railway til he died in 1973. By then he was working at Liverpool St Control Office at Hamilton House.
2ndly Does anyone know would there be records of bomb damage to signal boxes from ww2? I believe he may have been injured by flying metal when a doodlebug hit a signalbox? Or so he told me

Yes Colchester is firmly in LNER country, part of the ex Great Eastern Railway. I do have one bomb damaged signalbox in my collection though it was American bombs that blew it up! During repainting we found glass embedded in the woodwork...

Hello paulaanne. Yes, plenty of bomb damaged signalboxes on the GE Section of the LNER - one or two, like Bow Junction were even burnt out. The old Control Office in Hamilton House was on a wing of the building (Room 97?) and used to straddle part of the station. A very busy place (although the whole building was a hovel basically - bomb damage evident there, even in the 1970s), with some odd notions (at least to those of us who worked in other Control Offices!) - things like they used to change over at 6 am for early turn because it was thought that the bloke who started the morning peak should see it through to conclusion. This meant some poor devils had to get out of bed in the middle of the night to get there. Over to the west, Kings X Control changed over at more civilised 8 am and Euston at 7 am (much less intense peak hour services of course). There are still some controllers of that vintage about - have you tried getting in touch with them?

R pike Thanks for that info now know which companies to look up for staffing. It also seems probable that the scar on his neck was the result of flying debris. He talked about the doodlebug and hiding under the table!

hq1 Hitchin -thank you

Wow you have brought back memories Room 97 OR 99 certainly rings a bell .
It was a long thin noisy room and even as a small child I was aware it was scruffy. Dad was very tall and bought two pairs of trousers with each jacket because his legs couldn't fit under the tables and the knees went! The shifts were 6-2 2-10 and 10-2. He left home at 4.30 am when he was on mornings.

In case anyone reading this is a controller from that period his name was Bob Pritchard.

Room 99 might well be right - it certainly was a dump, anyway. When you consider that was where the whole of one of Britain's busiest railways was controlled from, they didn't do bad - did they?

Have cast our bread upon the waters, let's see if any old controllers (apart from me) have access to email...

An ex controller? I have a vacancy for a controller..... Are you familiar with Ely?