A VIEW FROM THE PERMANENT WAY

RMT helpline 0800 376 3706 :: may 2015 :: RMTnews 24 I don't know if it's a Birmingham thing or a railway navvy thing but a lot of the P-Way gangs, the workers who lay the rail track, are Brummies and Yam-Yams, though we also see Welsh and Donny gangs on occasion. P-Way lads also have the habit of calling one another 'brother', where others might just say 'mate' or whatever, and it isn't because they're trade unionists, which many regrettably are not (yet). I could be entirely wide of the mark here, but I like to think the habit has its origins in the collaborative nature of the work of the P-Way gangs and the collective mentality it inspires. This mentality is less common on the other gangs, including my own Civil Engineering (Civils) troupe of ground workers, chippies and machine drivers with their tradition of short term, casual employment rooted in the building industry. A Civils man loves his tools and, for most, our principle tool is the shovel. If it is sufficiently lightweight, the right shape, and of a decent quality, then it is his ticket to finishing the job quicker and going home sooner. Where ‘job and knock’ doesn't apply, it is still the difference between staying fit and healthy or his muscles aching all week from the strain of using a poor quality tool. P-Way men are generally less well paid, less versatile, less qualified, even less physically fit than us Civils boys, but they are entirely dependent on the functioning of the gang as a united team. If one cog isn't functioning so the whole shift takes longer for everyone. And for all that there are often a lot of tough and bloodied ex-cons on the P-Way gangs. If you ever find yourself seconded onto one of their gangs, you'll amaze yourself at the patience of the trackmen with you and all your unfamiliarity with pandrol clips and pads and stressing kits. It's normal for them to juggle experience with inexperience. So a Civils man loves his shovel, but a P-Way man loves his brother. By virtue of the scale of the work we are engaged in - the construction of an entire new railway, - our work groups are often large, twenty men or more. But amongst us Civils men we are ten or twenty individuals or pairs of mates or brothers, each going home in their own car, while the typical P-Way work group will be constructed of four or five gangs, each going home at the end of the shift to their own village or housing estate many distant miles from labour-hungry London. So this Easter I was working again with the P-Way boys and took to thinking again on last year's tragedy that befell one of those P-Way gangs. Running into a friend from the Brummie P-Way crew, I asked after the ghosts of the Welsh gang that perished around this time last year. I remember running into the lads before it happened, but oddly I remember nothing about them, nothing at all but the hum of an accent, as if they were already ghosts in my mind when I met them, briefly and insignificantly, hours before their death. The poor boys were driving back to Wales at the end of their shift from somewhere on our great Crossrail Project, driving the economy of the South East. All sleeping children in the back of the van, tiredness overcame the driver and he joined his brothers in the land of nod, and in fire and a crush of ripped steel in the layby. That much I knew, but only through rumour. The Brummie was stoic in his reply, stoic with beautiful skill in his iron dignity. Three lads were killed, all young enough, but old enough to leave families. All killed except two, including the driver, who probably survived as they were the only ones in their seatbelts. They'd since removed the bull bars from the backs of the company vans, as apparently they'd impaled two A VIEW FROM THE PERMANENT WAY