Dear All, here is a sypnosis of a book which will be released soon by Mr.Louis A. Vincent. Quite an interesting narrative journey which illustrates the common lives related to the Malayan Railway from the turn of the century. Please pass the word around.
Here it begins.
"PROLOGUE: MUST EVERY ‘WHY’ HAVE A ‘BECAUSE’?
When I first mentioned writing a book to friends, their initial reaction was: “Well, ok, but why on the subject of a railway? Who is going to read it? It will be such dry stuff; all about trains!”
Well, for a start, I am a third generation railway descendant from both sides of my family. With such a long affiliation to the Railways, I was pretty sure that somewhere round the corner, there definitely was a railway story just waiting to be told. But even more important than that was what happened during my life in the railway districts. And I spent almost nine years in three railway districts. No matter how much care you take, things like track washouts due to floods, derailments and delays do happen. More so in a single-line system such as the one we had here for the best part of our 120 odd years as a railway. On a single-line system, incidents such as these have a snowball effect and result in delays until they are sorted out.
During such occasions when restoration works take some time, it would be perfectly normal to transship passengers between the affected areas by bus, or hold up the train at some station. On occasions such as these, the situation at the rail stations where the transshipment or train detention takes place, would appear seemingly chaotic. You will find people who seem lost, and parents harassed by small children. Everyone would be wondering, “Okay, where do we go now?”
At such times you often hear remarks like, “You know, these people have been running the railways for almost a hundred years and yet they do not seem to have got the hang of it! It is still the same story all over again! When will they ever improve?”
Every time I attended a function outside the Railways [and on time, mind you!], I would hear a remark like, “Ah, that railway fellow is on time for once!” When on the rare occasion you did arrive late, then the other remark would be, “You railways fellows are always late!” It was ‘heads I win, tails you loose’! You never won; the dice somehow always fell on the wrong side of the divide!
At times like that, I used to tell myself that there was so much more to the Railways than just these occasional mishaps and delays. For a third generation railwayman like me, the railway was a way of life with its own culture and practices. There are some things about the Railways that very few people know or have even heard of. Not many know that railway salaries were for a long time paid from a traveling pay train, complete with its own armed police escort and armor-plated pay coaches. The officer in charge of a pay train had his own accommodation and food provided on board the train from start to finish of the entire payment process. And this usually lasted about five days! At one time, the escorts on board these pay trains were also from the Railways’ own police force. Yes, we did have our own police contingent operating between the inter-world war years! The police force was recruited and paid for by the Railways. The food at a derailment site for the workers always comes from the mobile kitchen coach on a ‘breakdown’ train! And not many people are aware of the ‘dead-man’s safety pedal’ on a locomotive that would automatically bring a train to a stop if a driver [God forbid] should keel over dead or unconscious. Or that a large amount of the coal that was used on the steam locomotives of our Railways from the very early days, came from our very own colliery at Batu Arang. We had trains daily just to haul the coal from the coalfields. And then, there was the ‘Sodthi Express’ between the Sentul and KL stations to ferry railway workers. This workers’ train ran a distance of four miles, made three stops on its run and was dubbed an express! I wonder why? These are things that the public today may not be aware of. They are scenes from an era long since gone but still fresh in the minds of an ever-dwindling band of old, retired railwaymen.
During train delays, invariably newspapermen would be hovering around, wanting to know the cause of the incident. It was the only issue of overriding importance to them about the Railways. The cause! The cause! Can we know the cause, please? The rest was secondary. Wanting to know the cause may have been very important to them but to me, giving the ‘line clear’ for the trains was first priority. Giving early ‘line clear’ would also ensure that the wrath of my boss, the ATMO [assistant traffic manager, operations], did not fall on me! I remember telling them on a number of occasions, “Why don’t you guys write about how the rehabilitation work is going at the spot to restore services? At least that would give some degree of balance to your coverage.” But no, that hardly ever happened. On the next occasion, it would be the same question again. “So, Mr. Vincent, could you tell us the cause for this?” When you said that it was still being investigated [and in all honesty, it was], they would respond by saying, “Don’t worry Sir, we’ll not quote your name. We’ll just say that it is from a reliable source! We will not reveal the source. Besides, Sir, this is a matter of public interest.”
It was then that I promised myself that when I had the time, I would sit down and write about the romance, glamour and camaraderie [and also the work stress, heartaches and rebukes from the boss] of my Railways! With retirement from the Railways just round the corner, it seemed as good a time as any to be fulfilling that promise. But the decision to do so was easier said than done! When I started on this in December 2004, it was a very simple decision because I knew exactly what I wanted to do. But as time went by, I felt that I had got myself into more than what I had bargained for. There was always that extra and usually elusive bit of information that was needed to fill up some glaring gap in the story! And that was when the problems started. Information was difficult to come by, and when it did, it was also confusing and contradictory. I started to wonder if I had taken on more than I could chew. But ego being what it is would not allow me to quit! By then, the idea of wanting to write this book had become an obsession. Besides, I had told some close friends that I was writing a novel of railway life. To tell them otherwise would have made my life a little unhealthy! Some would have hounded me all the way to my grave! So, what you find in this book is the result of some perseverance.
At the outset, I must make it clear that this is not a history of my Railways or a need to apologize for some shortcomings. History books are for historians, I am not one. About the only chapter that could be termed as totally historical would be the first chapter. This is a railway story and a historical background of its origins would allow for a better appreciation of the story. If you are not a history purist, you could safely skip that chapter and be none the poorer for it. This ‘first person’ narration is naturally the voice of being part of a sprawling railway community that is now almost 120 years old. In the process of writing it, I have however provided some historical background and footnotes to some of the subjects that I have covered in my book. Some readers may not be from here or, they may want to know some basic background as a matter of interest. To them, these small historical notes may prove helpful. In providing them, I have also not taken any interpretative position on those issues. Nor have I consulted any acknowledged ‘authorities’ for that matter. They are as they appear in most basic history books. In the final analysis, whatever historical background given is also extremely brief.
I have however, consulted a lot of railwaymen [some serving but mostly retired] on a number of aspects, and a lot of what is written here can only be termed as their collective and combined wisdom. Since nothing very substantive is available about what it means to be living and working in a railway community in this country, their recollections and experiences would be the most authoritative and reliable. Where I have speculated, I have mentioned it as such.
Most of what I have written took place within my own lifetime and service; either that or I got to know of them in conversations with relatives, friends and colleagues. A large part of the lifestyle I write about has now vanished into oblivion! Even as a railwayman, I experienced a lot of difficulties in getting the information. People who had worked in the railways when I was a boy were no longer around. They could have provided some information for verification purposes. But their own ‘shelf-life’ on this earth had expired and they had gone to be with the Maker! My father, signalman Joe, would also be one of them. Wherever he is now, I hope he does not find too many inconsistencies in this book or I may have hell to pay when I eventually catch up with him [and the rest of my relatives who served in the Railways] in the next world!
In a sense, therefore, parts of my narration may be incomplete or incorrect. I hope someone later on would fill those gaps. What I did was to put into story format what I and some people would have gone through. Given the age of the Railways, you may not necessarily have gone through some of the practices mentioned here. Your view of them may also have been different, simply because you may have experienced them at a different time. All this I gathered when talking to old railway acquaintances whilst researching for this book.
Certain facts however have to be accepted. First and foremost, Malayan Railways exists and that is a fact. The way it operates is more or less as narrated here. Dates and places, wherever they are quoted, are all real. But the liberties that I have taken in writing stories based on those facts are however, mine alone. Railway systems the world over rely on rules and regulations to govern the safe working of trains. These take on an added significance when the system is of a single-line system. Things can and do go wrong when they are overlooked or ignored. Operational shortcomings mentioned in some of the narration in this book should not be taken as reflective of any error or omission committed by the Railways but rather, serves to indicate what can happen when those procedures are flouted, ignored or simply just taken for granted by the staff.
In my narration, references made to people who taught me this or asked me that, should not be taken at face value to mean some real person. They were merely conduits in making possible my storytelling. In writing this book, I have taken a narrative style. This in no way means that this is an autobiographical work. It is not. It is just that I found this style of storytelling to be the most comfortable way of getting my story across. Some incidents are based on personal experience but not all of them. The story is supposed to give an idea of what it meant to live, grow up and work in a railway community. The narration remains faithful to those objectives. The greater part of my life has been spent living within, or within sight of, a railway facility. As a child growing up in the Kuang railway quarters in the 1950s and early 1960s, the Batu Arang branch line’s ‘down’ home signal post [which governs the entry of trains from Batu Arang into Kuang] was a permanent sight outside our window. My father’s signal cabin at Kuang was our daily playground. As an adult working in the railway districts, I was never far from the sound of a train or sight of a rail track. Looked at from that perspective, I felt I had a unique opportunity to tell a railway story. And this is that story.
Some of the words used in this book may not be acceptable in this age of political correctness. It is not meant to offend. Rows of long, barrack-like structures that housed the lower-grade staff were then called coolie lines but that same term today would be frowned upon. But those were words and phrases in vogue then. Replacing them with today’s acceptable phrases may change the voice of the story and I did not want to do that. So I have used them. Forget those words as giving any offence. Don’t loose track of the train story because of the words!
Lastly, about the title for the book: Signal Right, Line Clear! These two terms would be very familiar to many a railwayman anywhere. They are universal railway terms. On any signal post, its position would be the first thing that a driver and his fireman [assistant] would spot from their locomotive’s driving cab. Here, it has always been the practice for the fireman to shout the position of the signal to the driver. Exclaiming, “Signal right!” to his driver would indicate that there is a green or go aspect for the train to run through. ‘Line clear’ to a railwayman indicates that the ‘block section’ ahead is clear and that the necessary signals have been lowered to the go position for a train to proceed. This is a story of a railway life and these phrases would be apt to describe it.
The cover picture showing the north-bound day mail to Prai [train number 2 Up] on Kuala Lumpur Station’s Platform One very vividly portrays this image. The picture appears in the 1956 Annual Report of the Malayan Railways. Some sources have labeled it as having been taken in 1950. Be as it may, the picture shows the train’s locomotive standing just past Kuala Lumpur Station’s ‘up’ [northbound direction] starter signal post on Platform One. It will also be observed that the starter signal has been lowered [to the off position in rail jargon] for the train to commence its journey. The train is being worked by an O-class steam locomotive, numbered 56418. Based on Malayan Railways’ locomotive register, its name would be Seletar. The absence of heaped coal and the presence of the metal cover on the tender would indicate that the locomotive is an oil burner [it no longer burns coal in the firebox to create the steam]. It may interest the reader to note that this picture was also featured as a miniature sheet in the Malaysian Postal Department’s first-day cover to commemorate the centenary celebrations of the Malayan Railways in 1985.
Each chapter can be read as a story in itself. Though I have arranged the chapters in chronological order, one could still read each chapter in any random order. I feel it is not a requirement to read an earlier chapter to understand the following chapter. I hope you will all enjoy reading about my Railways, and some of the long-forgotten trains that ran over rail tracks that may no longer exist today; about a way of life that is also no longer around! The writing of this book has taken me almost four years but I still somehow feel that it is incomplete! "
Vincent,
Bandar Country Homes,
Rawang, Selangor, Malaysia.
July 2008.
When I first mentioned writing a book to friends, their initial reaction was: “Well, ok, but why on the subject of a railway? Who is going to read it? It will be such dry stuff; all about trains!”
Well, for a start, I am a third generation railway descendant from both sides of my family. With such a long affiliation to the Railways, I was pretty sure that somewhere round the corner, there definitely was a railway story just waiting to be told. But even more important than that was what happened during my life in the railway districts. And I spent almost nine years in three railway districts. No matter how much care you take, things like track washouts due to floods, derailments and delays do happen. More so in a single-line system such as the one we had here for the best part of our 120 odd years as a railway. On a single-line system, incidents such as these have a snowball effect and result in delays until they are sorted out.
During such occasions when restoration works take some time, it would be perfectly normal to transship passengers between the affected areas by bus, or hold up the train at some station. On occasions such as these, the situation at the rail stations where the transshipment or train detention takes place, would appear seemingly chaotic. You will find people who seem lost, and parents harassed by small children. Everyone would be wondering, “Okay, where do we go now?”
At such times you often hear remarks like, “You know, these people have been running the railways for almost a hundred years and yet they do not seem to have got the hang of it! It is still the same story all over again! When will they ever improve?”
Every time I attended a function outside the Railways [and on time, mind you!], I would hear a remark like, “Ah, that railway fellow is on time for once!” When on the rare occasion you did arrive late, then the other remark would be, “You railways fellows are always late!” It was ‘heads I win, tails you loose’! You never won; the dice somehow always fell on the wrong side of the divide!
At times like that, I used to tell myself that there was so much more to the Railways than just these occasional mishaps and delays. For a third generation railwayman like me, the railway was a way of life with its own culture and practices. There are some things about the Railways that very few people know or have even heard of. Not many know that railway salaries were for a long time paid from a traveling pay train, complete with its own armed police escort and armor-plated pay coaches. The officer in charge of a pay train had his own accommodation and food provided on board the train from start to finish of the entire payment process. And this usually lasted about five days! At one time, the escorts on board these pay trains were also from the Railways’ own police force. Yes, we did have our own police contingent operating between the inter-world war years! The police force was recruited and paid for by the Railways. The food at a derailment site for the workers always comes from the mobile kitchen coach on a ‘breakdown’ train! And not many people are aware of the ‘dead-man’s safety pedal’ on a locomotive that would automatically bring a train to a stop if a driver [God forbid] should keel over dead or unconscious. Or that a large amount of the coal that was used on the steam locomotives of our Railways from the very early days, came from our very own colliery at Batu Arang. We had trains daily just to haul the coal from the coalfields. And then, there was the ‘Sodthi Express’ between the Sentul and KL stations to ferry railway workers. This workers’ train ran a distance of four miles, made three stops on its run and was dubbed an express! I wonder why? These are things that the public today may not be aware of. They are scenes from an era long since gone but still fresh in the minds of an ever-dwindling band of old, retired railwaymen.
During train delays, invariably newspapermen would be hovering around, wanting to know the cause of the incident. It was the only issue of overriding importance to them about the Railways. The cause! The cause! Can we know the cause, please? The rest was secondary. Wanting to know the cause may have been very important to them but to me, giving the ‘line clear’ for the trains was first priority. Giving early ‘line clear’ would also ensure that the wrath of my boss, the ATMO [assistant traffic manager, operations], did not fall on me! I remember telling them on a number of occasions, “Why don’t you guys write about how the rehabilitation work is going at the spot to restore services? At least that would give some degree of balance to your coverage.” But no, that hardly ever happened. On the next occasion, it would be the same question again. “So, Mr. Vincent, could you tell us the cause for this?” When you said that it was still being investigated [and in all honesty, it was], they would respond by saying, “Don’t worry Sir, we’ll not quote your name. We’ll just say that it is from a reliable source! We will not reveal the source. Besides, Sir, this is a matter of public interest.”
It was then that I promised myself that when I had the time, I would sit down and write about the romance, glamour and camaraderie [and also the work stress, heartaches and rebukes from the boss] of my Railways! With retirement from the Railways just round the corner, it seemed as good a time as any to be fulfilling that promise. But the decision to do so was easier said than done! When I started on this in December 2004, it was a very simple decision because I knew exactly what I wanted to do. But as time went by, I felt that I had got myself into more than what I had bargained for. There was always that extra and usually elusive bit of information that was needed to fill up some glaring gap in the story! And that was when the problems started. Information was difficult to come by, and when it did, it was also confusing and contradictory. I started to wonder if I had taken on more than I could chew. But ego being what it is would not allow me to quit! By then, the idea of wanting to write this book had become an obsession. Besides, I had told some close friends that I was writing a novel of railway life. To tell them otherwise would have made my life a little unhealthy! Some would have hounded me all the way to my grave! So, what you find in this book is the result of some perseverance.
At the outset, I must make it clear that this is not a history of my Railways or a need to apologize for some shortcomings. History books are for historians, I am not one. About the only chapter that could be termed as totally historical would be the first chapter. This is a railway story and a historical background of its origins would allow for a better appreciation of the story. If you are not a history purist, you could safely skip that chapter and be none the poorer for it. This ‘first person’ narration is naturally the voice of being part of a sprawling railway community that is now almost 120 years old. In the process of writing it, I have however provided some historical background and footnotes to some of the subjects that I have covered in my book. Some readers may not be from here or, they may want to know some basic background as a matter of interest. To them, these small historical notes may prove helpful. In providing them, I have also not taken any interpretative position on those issues. Nor have I consulted any acknowledged ‘authorities’ for that matter. They are as they appear in most basic history books. In the final analysis, whatever historical background given is also extremely brief.
I have however, consulted a lot of railwaymen [some serving but mostly retired] on a number of aspects, and a lot of what is written here can only be termed as their collective and combined wisdom. Since nothing very substantive is available about what it means to be living and working in a railway community in this country, their recollections and experiences would be the most authoritative and reliable. Where I have speculated, I have mentioned it as such.
Most of what I have written took place within my own lifetime and service; either that or I got to know of them in conversations with relatives, friends and colleagues. A large part of the lifestyle I write about has now vanished into oblivion! Even as a railwayman, I experienced a lot of difficulties in getting the information. People who had worked in the railways when I was a boy were no longer around. They could have provided some information for verification purposes. But their own ‘shelf-life’ on this earth had expired and they had gone to be with the Maker! My father, signalman Joe, would also be one of them. Wherever he is now, I hope he does not find too many inconsistencies in this book or I may have hell to pay when I eventually catch up with him [and the rest of my relatives who served in the Railways] in the next world!
In a sense, therefore, parts of my narration may be incomplete or incorrect. I hope someone later on would fill those gaps. What I did was to put into story format what I and some people would have gone through. Given the age of the Railways, you may not necessarily have gone through some of the practices mentioned here. Your view of them may also have been different, simply because you may have experienced them at a different time. All this I gathered when talking to old railway acquaintances whilst researching for this book.
Certain facts however have to be accepted. First and foremost, Malayan Railways exists and that is a fact. The way it operates is more or less as narrated here. Dates and places, wherever they are quoted, are all real. But the liberties that I have taken in writing stories based on those facts are however, mine alone. Railway systems the world over rely on rules and regulations to govern the safe working of trains. These take on an added significance when the system is of a single-line system. Things can and do go wrong when they are overlooked or ignored. Operational shortcomings mentioned in some of the narration in this book should not be taken as reflective of any error or omission committed by the Railways but rather, serves to indicate what can happen when those procedures are flouted, ignored or simply just taken for granted by the staff.
In my narration, references made to people who taught me this or asked me that, should not be taken at face value to mean some real person. They were merely conduits in making possible my storytelling. In writing this book, I have taken a narrative style. This in no way means that this is an autobiographical work. It is not. It is just that I found this style of storytelling to be the most comfortable way of getting my story across. Some incidents are based on personal experience but not all of them. The story is supposed to give an idea of what it meant to live, grow up and work in a railway community. The narration remains faithful to those objectives. The greater part of my life has been spent living within, or within sight of, a railway facility. As a child growing up in the Kuang railway quarters in the 1950s and early 1960s, the Batu Arang branch line’s ‘down’ home signal post [which governs the entry of trains from Batu Arang into Kuang] was a permanent sight outside our window. My father’s signal cabin at Kuang was our daily playground. As an adult working in the railway districts, I was never far from the sound of a train or sight of a rail track. Looked at from that perspective, I felt I had a unique opportunity to tell a railway story. And this is that story.
Some of the words used in this book may not be acceptable in this age of political correctness. It is not meant to offend. Rows of long, barrack-like structures that housed the lower-grade staff were then called coolie lines but that same term today would be frowned upon. But those were words and phrases in vogue then. Replacing them with today’s acceptable phrases may change the voice of the story and I did not want to do that. So I have used them. Forget those words as giving any offence. Don’t loose track of the train story because of the words!
Lastly, about the title for the book: Signal Right, Line Clear! These two terms would be very familiar to many a railwayman anywhere. They are universal railway terms. On any signal post, its position would be the first thing that a driver and his fireman [assistant] would spot from their locomotive’s driving cab. Here, it has always been the practice for the fireman to shout the position of the signal to the driver. Exclaiming, “Signal right!” to his driver would indicate that there is a green or go aspect for the train to run through. ‘Line clear’ to a railwayman indicates that the ‘block section’ ahead is clear and that the necessary signals have been lowered to the go position for a train to proceed. This is a story of a railway life and these phrases would be apt to describe it.
The cover picture showing the north-bound day mail to Prai [train number 2 Up] on Kuala Lumpur Station’s Platform One very vividly portrays this image. The picture appears in the 1956 Annual Report of the Malayan Railways. Some sources have labeled it as having been taken in 1950. Be as it may, the picture shows the train’s locomotive standing just past Kuala Lumpur Station’s ‘up’ [northbound direction] starter signal post on Platform One. It will also be observed that the starter signal has been lowered [to the off position in rail jargon] for the train to commence its journey. The train is being worked by an O-class steam locomotive, numbered 56418. Based on Malayan Railways’ locomotive register, its name would be Seletar. The absence of heaped coal and the presence of the metal cover on the tender would indicate that the locomotive is an oil burner [it no longer burns coal in the firebox to create the steam]. It may interest the reader to note that this picture was also featured as a miniature sheet in the Malaysian Postal Department’s first-day cover to commemorate the centenary celebrations of the Malayan Railways in 1985.
Each chapter can be read as a story in itself. Though I have arranged the chapters in chronological order, one could still read each chapter in any random order. I feel it is not a requirement to read an earlier chapter to understand the following chapter. I hope you will all enjoy reading about my Railways, and some of the long-forgotten trains that ran over rail tracks that may no longer exist today; about a way of life that is also no longer around! The writing of this book has taken me almost four years but I still somehow feel that it is incomplete! "
Vincent,
Bandar Country Homes,
Rawang, Selangor, Malaysia.
July 2008.
