200 years of the railway and its workers
200 years of the railway and its workers
The railway industry is two hundred years old this year, 2025. That is two centuries of hard labour from railway workers, laying the tracks, building the trains and stations, digging the tunnels, maintaining and repairing the infrastructure, driving the locomotives, operating the signals, keeping passengers safe, providing information, selling tickets, feeding workers and passengers, dealing with emergencies and cleaning up after everyone else.
This book records two hundred years of railway workers and their struggles. It educates the reader about the work they did (and do), the conditions that they did (and do) it in, and their struggles to improve their conditions of work.
It sets out the development of railway trade unions, and the fights that they have fought, won and lost, from the nineteenth-century safety campaign, through the great 1919 national railway strike, to modern battles with railway employers.
It records rail workers’ interventions into politics: the railway trade unionists who set up the Labour Party, the railway workers who went into politics, the impacts of nationalisation and privatisation. And it asks what we can learn from that history to guide railway workers and trade unionism in the future.
The book draws on primary and secondary source materials, including contemporary coverage, records of trade union conferences and branches, union publications, unofficial publications such as workplace bulletins, Parliamentary debates, and more. The author worked on London Underground for more than 25 years and is now a railway writer.
Mainly set in the UK, the book also touches on some international experiences. As Karl Marx pointed out, the railways grew first in the countries with the most developed modern industry. This included the USA, Belgium, France and Britain. The railways enabled the capitalist class to transport its goods and the working class to build its movement of resistance. Class struggle under capitalism travelled by rail.
RMT, ASLEF and TSSA have all published books about their particular union’s history. This book is fiercely pro-union, and supports industrial unionism - the strategy of all workers in an industry, regardless of job role, being organised in one union. But it is not tied to the officialdom or the unique perspective of any one of the unions.
Introduction: 200 years of the railway and its workers
Chapter 1. The early years
The navigators
Working on the railway
A lethal line of work
Railway clerks
Women working on the early railway
London’s underground
Workers as passengers
How the railways changed society
Railways and empire
Chapter 2. Along came the unions
ASRS
More unions formed
Demanding a safer railway
New Unionism and the GRWU
1890: Strikes in Wales and Scotland
The first national programme and the All-Grades Campaign
1897: Railway clerks unionise
Employers against unions
Chapter 3. Railway workers, railway politics
Employers running politics
Workers enter politics
Lib-Lab MPs
Railway trade unionists set up the Labour Party
Campaigning for pensions
Early arguments for nationalisation
Taff Vale
1906 general election
The Osborne case
Chapter 4. Coming together
Ashton Clerks’ Dispute
Educating trade unionists
Campaign and conciliation
1911: national strike
1913: Birth of the NUR
Might the unions unite?
A woman’s place is in her union?
A new programme of demands
Talking about nationalisation
The ‘Great Unrest’
Women disenfranchised
Triple Alliance
Chapter 5. On the frontline
Fighting on the home front
Women at war
Keeping the railway public
Conscription
Quintinshill disaster
Conciliation and competition
Organising for pay and control
Preparing for peace
Chapter 6. Between the wars
After the war
1919: The Great Railway Strike
Grouping instead of nationalisation
Black Friday
Rail women organise
Unemployment and Poplarism
Employers attack; ASLEF strikes
Rank-and-file voices
1926 general strike
Pay cuts and rank-and-file response
Chapter 7. Into public ownership
London’s transport in public hands
Thomas changes sides
Fighting fascism
Labour nationalises rail
Chapter 8. Decline and discrimination
1953 Transport Act
Industrial war and peace
Death on the rails
Workplace bulletins return
The Beeching Axe
Beating colour bars
1970s: the decade of union power?
Women up front
Chapter 9. Preparation and privatisation
The unions respond
1984-85: Miners’ strike
Laws against trade unions
London Underground becomes a business
1989: rail and Tube strikes
1990: RMT formed
Tories press for privatisation
1994 signallers’ strike
Protesting for access
When work kills
Chapter 10. Into the 21st century
Multi-fatality crashes
Plundering London Underground: the Public-Private Partnership
The ‘awkward squad’
Fragmentation, cleaners and other contractors
McNulty report
Keeping the guard on the train
Covid-19
2020: Landslip kills at Carmont
2022: strikes
2023: Campaign stops ticket office closures
Chapter 11. Growing voices for equality
The Paddington Guards
Women organising
Legal challenges to discrimination
More equality cmmittees formed
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