[PTSD Is My Life]

Originally Posted by Peppermint ↗

Brilliant post, fascinating. My grandad was a railway driver (in the uk) and had many suicides over the years, but amazingly enough the thing that effected him the most was when a cow got on the line. He said the sound and the mess was something else. He couldnt eat beef for years
Nelmser I think he meant this week his 7th suicide happened.

My Granddad was an engine driver here in the UK in the days of steam (he left shortly after the big switch to diesel/electric).
He started life as the son of a "traveling tinker" my great granddad traveled the northwest of England up to Glasgow (where the family settled) in his Bow Top (Gypsy caravan of the horse drawn type) and he fixed pots & pans (in those days pans often burnt through the bottom due to the open fire and furnaces used to cook with. They where not thrown out but where put to one side for when the travelling tinker came to town. He taught himself how to repair HP Boilers - high pressure was the new thing in everyday industry. At 10 my granddad left school and spent 2-3 years travelling with his dad learning welding, lead soldering, boiler sealing and pressure patching etc and at age 14 after he'd been back to school for a further 8 months or so to pass his examinations that he needed to start working for in the Glasgow (which he flew through and gained a scholarship to the local university of engineering subject to another years schooling but he knew all he wanted to was to be an engine driver so started at the bottom of the ladder as a fast cleaner at 14. He made tea and cleaned the fire boxes out on the engines at the end of the day, filthy and hard work but he wanted to learn it all from the bottom up by age 30 he was a fully qualified engine engineer, but was by this time about 2 years into being a stoker on the engine plate, the next job was engine driver and due to his engineering abilities he was on the top end trains and frequently drove the pacific class engines which where the Rolls Royce's of the railway and to drive one you needed to really know your engines hence almost all the drivers where fully apprenticed engineers.
My Granddad was promoted to engine driver after his driver hung out the "doorway" of the engine on a long sweeping bend as the thought they had a brake binding on one of the carriages and they where looking for the tell tale signs of smoke.
Unfortunately the driver lent out too far and for too long and was decapitated by a track side marker. My granddad had no option but to follow company procedures and just keep going. He got to the station at Carlisle where they where to drop the carriages (freight) and turn back around back up to Glasgow, as there where no qualified drivers for the engine class my granddad was promoted there and then and given the cap of his former driver which was basically acted like a pass to anywhere within the railways vast behind the scenes areas. It also gave him access to the trackside Drivers Restroom where only the top end drivers had access. As he said it was like being royalty. When he went for his breakfast at the railway workers canteen he suddenly couldn't pay at the time as it was written in a book for settling at the month end, (the main reason for this was apparently because these top drivers paid a fraction of the price the other drivers did and this way they where not seen paying a third of the price the others did).
So he got his position as driver early due to his driver (and friend of over 20 years) was decapitated right beside him and he continued the next 60(a guess) miles to the marshaling yard at Carlisle and than helped to carry his dead friend off the train and then had to clean the footplate of blood and the majority of his mates now dried on hair and brain matter from the side of the tender with the steam hose from the engine.
He had to report to the main office to sign as a driver. All employees had to wear their hats and he had to wear his dead friends drivers cap as he was promoted insitu and they didn't have a hat handy.........apparently my granddad was upset but said matter of factually that it was his own fault. He had told my granddad to hang out and check and he refused to as there where so many track side obstacles.... in his years on the railways he lost another 3 people on the footplate one was a heart attack and another just stepped backwards off the footplate to check the following trucks but either forgot or something but just didn't even seem to try to hold onto the grab rail, another was something to do with the fire as the stoker shut the firebox door with his shovel the fire "Popped" (something to do with the coal gas i believe) and blew the door back impaling the chap on the spades metal shaft, which doesn't sound too bad but the handle is made from the shaft metal being bent around in a loop so the whole loop went inside. Again he had to just keep going and he signaled to a man operating the Langwathby signal box to send a message forward about the injured man. The signal was a long forgotten (to me) series of peeps on the whistle and a white(ish) handkerchief tied to the top hand grab rail....hell of a way to get promoted and no he didn't keep the drivers cap he passed it to the widow and got a new one as soon as he got off the train when he got back home.
When he was asked by a local paper about these incidents they went onto suicides and when they asked if there had been any with his engine. His answer was sharp and unfriendly. He said something like "I stated driving in the depressed 1930's where men where broken with the shame of poverty. I drove throughout WW2 when mothers, fathers, wives and girlfriends got the news everyone dreads. At the end of that we had a country full of mentally scared men (a lot of the Cumbrian and Southern Scottish troops where former Japanese POW's. So hearing that do you think I had any jumpers? ........they had clean up teams on the railways who checked and collected the bodies in the post war years, it was that bad.

[gimlet]

Originally Posted by PTSD Is My Life ↗

My Granddad was an engine driver here in the UK in the days of steam (he left shortly after the big switch to diesel/electric).
He started life as the son of a "traveling tinker" my great granddad traveled the northwest of England up to Glasgow (where the family settled) in his Bow Top (Gypsy caravan of the horse drawn type) and he fixed pots & pans (in those days pans often burnt through the bottom due to the open fire and furnaces used to cook with. They where not thrown out but where put to one side for when the travelling tinker came to town. He taught himself how to repair HP Boilers - high pressure was the new thing in everyday industry. At 10 my granddad left school and spent 2-3 years travelling with his dad learning welding, lead soldering, boiler sealing and pressure patching etc and at age 14 after he'd been back to school for a further 8 months or so to pass his examinations that he needed to start working for in the Glasgow (which he flew through and gained a scholarship to the local university of engineering subject to another years schooling but he knew all he wanted to was to be an engine driver so started at the bottom of the ladder as a fast cleaner at 14. He made tea and cleaned the fire boxes out on the engines at the end of the day, filthy and hard work but he wanted to learn it all from the bottom up by age 30 he was a fully qualified engine engineer, but was by this time about 2 years into being a stoker on the engine plate, the next job was engine driver and due to his engineering abilities he was on the top end trains and frequently drove the pacific class engines which where the Rolls Royce's of the railway and to drive one you needed to really know your engines hence almost all the drivers where fully apprenticed engineers.
My Granddad was promoted to engine driver after his driver hung out the "doorway" of the engine on a long sweeping bend as the thought they had a brake binding on one of the carriages and they where looking for the tell tale signs of smoke.
Unfortunately the driver lent out too far and for too long and was decapitated by a track side marker. My granddad had no option but to follow company procedures and just keep going. He got to the station at Carlisle where they where to drop the carriages (freight) and turn back around back up to Glasgow, as there where no qualified drivers for the engine class my granddad was promoted there and then and given the cap of his former driver which was basically acted like a pass to anywhere within the railways vast behind the scenes areas. It also gave him access to the trackside Drivers Restroom where only the top end drivers had access. As he said it was like being royalty. When he went for his breakfast at the railway workers canteen he suddenly couldn't pay at the time as it was written in a book for settling at the month end, (the main reason for this was apparently because these top drivers paid a fraction of the price the other drivers did and this way they where not seen paying a third of the price the others did).
So he got his position as driver early due to his driver (and friend of over 20 years) was decapitated right beside him and he continued the next 60(a guess) miles to the marshaling yard at Carlisle and than helped to carry his dead friend off the train and then had to clean the footplate of blood and the majority of his mates now dried on hair and brain matter from the side of the tender with the steam hose from the engine.
He had to report to the main office to sign as a driver. All employees had to wear their hats and he had to wear his dead friends drivers cap as he was promoted insitu and they didn't have a hat handy.........apparently my granddad was upset but said matter of factually that it was his own fault. He had told my granddad to hang out and check and he refused to as there where so many track side obstacles.... in his years on the railways he lost another 3 people on the footplate one was a heart attack and another just stepped backwards off the footplate to check the following trucks but either forgot or something but just didn't even seem to try to hold onto the grab rail, another was something to do with the fire as the stoker shut the firebox door with his shovel the fire "Popped" (something to do with the coal gas i believe) and blew the door back impaling the chap on the spades metal shaft, which doesn't sound too bad but the handle is made from the shaft metal being bent around in a loop so the whole loop went inside. Again he had to just keep going and he signaled to a man operating the Langwathby signal box to send a message forward about the injured man. The signal was a long forgotten (to me) series of peeps on the whistle and a white(ish) handkerchief tied to the top hand grab rail....hell of a way to get promoted and no he didn't keep the drivers cap he passed it to the widow and got a new one as soon as he got off the train when he got back home.
When he was asked by a local paper about these incidents they went onto suicides and when they asked if there had been any with his engine. His answer was sharp and unfriendly. He said something like "I stated driving in the depressed 1930's where men where broken with the shame of poverty. I drove throughout WW2 when mothers, fathers, wives and girlfriends got the news everyone dreads. At the end of that we had a country full of mentally scared men (a lot of the Cumbrian and Southern Scottish troops where former Japanese POW's. So hearing that do you think I had any jumpers? ........they had clean up teams on the railways who checked and collected the bodies in the post war years, it was that bad.

Damn, seems like your Grandad was like Damien in The Omen, almost enough grisly deaths for a sequel (beheading, heart attack, fall into moving wheels, impalement). But serioulsy, the old trains were death traps for drivers and workers, one of the reasons they were among the first unionized workers in the USA. My mom worked for the head of the locomotive union in the 1940's, Walt Disney used to call her boss all the time and she talked to him because her boss and Walt were both avid small gauge train nuts. Thats where Disney Land came from, an area where he could set up his trains. Here is a song for you:

"Drivin' that train, with headless corpse again...
My partners got no head on, watch him bleed
Trouble ahead, got a deadline
Gotta keep a going, to be on-time"

[PTSD Is My Life]

Originally Posted by gimlet ↗

Damn, seems like your Grandad was like Damien in The Omen, almost enough grisly deaths for a sequel (beheading, heart attack, fall into moving wheels, impalement). But serioulsy, the old trains were death traps for drivers and workers, one of the reasons they were among the first unionized workers in the USA. My mom worked for the head of the locomotive union in the 1940's, Walt Disney used to call her boss all the time and she talked to him because her boss and Walt were both avid small gauge train nuts. Thats where Disney Land came from, an area where he could set up his trains. Here is a song for you:

"Drivin' that train, with headless corpse again...
My partners got no head on, watch him bleed
Trouble ahead, got a deadline
Gotta keep a going, to be on-time"

He was an end of an era my Granddad, he died when I was still pre-school age in 1971 he was in his late 80's at that stage!
Born in the 1880's and his elongated journey to driver because he insisted on being a qualified railway engineer first (that alone took over 20 years).
He was due to, and did retire in the early 1940's and became a game keeper.
But as the war continued he was recalled to drive trains and did so well into the 1950's when he finally retired from Engine Driving and became a Methodist preacher and continued to bread gun dogs a hobby he started just prior to his first retirement in the war years.
My Nana said she could tell when there had been a suicide as he would be home later than usual (paperwork) and he would barely speak and would fill and light his pipe straight away something he normally never did until after he had eaten. Furthermore his pet dog (a little Dandie Dinmont) would not jump on his lap straight away but would lie under his old wingback chair until walk time then and only then would he act normally.

It was a different world in his day.

[wiressparks]

Death by train has increased more now due to fences on high bridges and police using non lethal options.
but still the suicide option is piss weak.