If you look up ‘The Railway Club’ on Wikipedia, you read, ‘The Railway Club was a society for railway enthusiasts, formed in 1899. It provided regular meetings of general railway interest, and members had access to a club room and library located in London, United Kingdom.’ The entry is a ‘stub’ and if I had any free time, I’d fill it out a bit.
When I joined Club ( ‘the oldest society of railway enthusiasts in the world’, according to The Oxford Companion to British Railway History ) in 2005, I knew it wasn’t long for this world. I seemed to be the youngest member by about twenty years. The Christmas dinners – always held in one of those faded hotels near King’s Cross – began with a toast to the Queen, and while the dress code was ‘informal’, the men wore suits and ties, and the women (not so many of those, of course) dressed commensurately.
New members were issued with a booklet, written by B.D.J. Walsh (the Club was keen on initials) recounting the Club’s history. Walsh begins by pointing out that in the mid-Nineteenth century, there were few rail enthusiasts as such. If you were keen on railways at that time, you got involved professionally in this exciting, booming business. Walsh mentions one early enthusiast, the Reverend C.W. Dod, who was aboard the Scotch Tourist Express when it derailed at Wigan on 2 August, 1873. In the subsequent inquest, Dod described himself as a keen student of railways who frequently timed trains with his stopwatch. Many early enthusiasts were vicars, the Marxist explanation for which would be that they were rich enough to pursue the hobby and had sufficient free time (since they only worked on Sundays). Whether clerical or lay, the first enthusiasts were a patrician cohort, known ‘as train watchers’, and not to be confused with the adolescent ‘trainspotters’, that cult arising from Ian Allan’s publication of books of locomotive numbers from 1942.
At a meeting held in 1899, in the Birmingham offices of the North-Western Locomotive Journal, a Mr S. Cotterell noted that a demand seemed to have arisen, ‘as if by a kind of magic…for the formation of a railway club.’ In August of that year, a ‘London Centre’ of the Club was formed at Willesden Junction, under the chairmanship of Mr J.F. Gairns, who would go on to edit the Railway Magazine (founded 1897).
Meetings were held, at which papers were read. For example, the London branch heard one by a Mr Potter (who doesn’t seem to have had any initials) on the naming of locomotives. The Club was loco-oriented, and in June 1902 an Engine List Sub-Committee was formed to prepare a complete list of all the locomotives in Great Britain, a work which, Mr Walsh notes, ‘was sadly never completed!’
In 1905, the Annual Dinner included songs and recitations by members, a feature introduced by Mr B.M. Bazley, a prominent member and an amateur actor. Also in 1905, the London branch (which quite quickly became the only branch) acquired rooms at 92 Victoria Street, SW1, premises evoked in my novel, The Baghdad Railway Club, and now replaced by a glass tower.
By 1909, the Club had a membership of 190, which would remain a record for fifty years, but later in that year ‘the Great schism’ occurred: some members split off to form the Stephenson Locomotive Society. It is possible that the Railway Club at the time was not very clubbable – elitist, in modern parlance. In 1911, a Cambridge University branch of the Club was formed, and this became the Cambridge University Railway Club, which survives to this day, but I think the Oxford University Railway Club (which folded in 1996 and will be the subject of a future post) was much more interesting. (Full disclosure, I once wrote to the CURC asking whether they’d be interested in a talk: no reply.)
The Annual Dinner was cancelled during the Great war. In 1917, it was decided, wisely I would have thought, that no steps be taken to recover unpaid subscriptions from members on War Service. In 1927 it was decided to discontinue the musical entertainment and recitations by members. (‘To my mind happily!’ writes Mr Walsh, who didn’t actually join the Club until 1950, but he perhaps knew of these performances by repute.) In 1930, a suggestion was made that ‘the Club should open its membership to ladies’, but the Committee found this ‘not practicable or desirable.’
In 1932, the Committee approved the installation of a cigarette machine selling sixpenny packets of Wills Gold Flake cigarettes in the clubroom (which by now was at 57 Fetter Lane), ‘but the following September the firm supplying the machine went bankrupt and the machine was removed.’ In 1935, the Club visited the Kelvedon & Tollesbury Light Railway, and it would be interesting to know what the members made of that ramshackle line across eight miles of Essex marshes, whose station buildings were old (even then) railway carriages. Walsh cites Club member, and railway author, R.W. Kidner as authority that ‘the only occasion non-railway subjects were discussed by the Club was when a radio was brought to the Annual Dinner in 1936, to enable members to listen to King Edward VIII’s abdication speech!’
In the 1950s membership grew quite rapidly, and this was perhaps a spinoff from Ian Allan’s popularisation of rail enthusiasm. In 1962, the Club visited Dringhouses Marshalling Yard, a mile from my boyhood home, and whose sonorous clanging – as goods trains were thoughtfully assembled from the raw material of other goods trains – I found lulling in the small hours. In 1973, the Club travelled in open wagons along the goods line from Harpenden to Hemel Hempstead and back. In 1988, ‘applications for membership of the Club were received from two ladies.’ These provoked an Extraordinary General Meeting, which voted overwhelmingly to admit women.
In 1992, the Club moved to a small room in the building at 25 Marylebone Road belonging to the Methodist Missionary Society, this through ‘the good offices of Mr L.A. Mack’, a Club member and secretary of that Society. The Club’s library – which I found useful for its complete run of Railway Magazines – was kept in the dusty basement of number 25.
During my membership, the tone of the Club’s letters (it never had a website) became increasingly bleak, as old members died and new ones failed to appear. In 2005, two new members joined (one of whom was me), but three died and two resigned. The Club was wound up in 2010, and shortly thereafter, I discovered that a North London public library held a run of Railway Magazines. I called in, requesting to see the back numbers of 1911. When I handed the volume back, the librarian said, ‘Do you want this?’ I said, ‘You mean this volume?’ and he said, ‘No, the whole lot. You’re the first person to ask to see it for ten years.’ What happened next is another story, but it strikes me that this was occurring during the nadir of British rail enthusiasm, before the various remaining societies could get their acts together on the internet, which that one-time rival of the Railway Club, the Railway Correspondence and Travel Society (founded in 1928), certainly has done.
I miss the Club, for the elegance of its letters, addressed to me as Mr A.J. Martin, which might begin, ‘Now that the autumnal equinox has passed…’; for the friendliness of its members, and the cheap access to railway publications that informed my historical railway novels. At their dinners, the second toast, after the one to the Queen, was to the Club itself, and so I raise my metaphorical glass to ‘The Railway Club!’
Lovely, lovely piece….the gentleman “railwayac”of the past had many virtues. I knew a few through the Bluebell. Taught me so much. RM Archive has all copies since July 1897- but a nightmare to navigate if your not really up to speed. No advanced search