Campaigning Beyond Retirement

Further Info

Funded by Bristol City Council. Watershed has created a new Bristol Stories theme to focus on the area now designated as the Bristol Temple Quarter Enterprise Zone.

The theme engages businesses, residents, and people travelling through Temple Meads and the surrounding neighbourhoods in projects that deliver creative digital representation of the area to ‘animate’ the heritage and personal experience of the area.

As part of this project Watershed worked with Knowle West Media Centre to deliver digital storytelling workshops with a group of ex-railway workers and ex-railway workers widows who lived and worked on the railways in Bristol.

This project was funded by Bristol City Council and delivered by Watershed and Knowle West Media Centre in collaboration with bigger house film

Transcript

My name is David Wood, Rail Maritime and Transport Union. I also a member of Friends Of Suburban Bristol Railways, member of Transport For Greater Bristol Association, and Travel Watch.

Here’s a picture of my dad. He was in the Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infrantry, just after or somewhere in the war years. My mother had it hanging round the house somewhere and I’ve kept it in my wallet.

Seeing his face, I suppose there is a resemblence in the family, with my children, yeah there’s a familiarity there.

I write an article in the evening post every Monday - got my own column, and when they knew I was leaving they asked somebody to go up and write a story about me and my retirement.

It all goes back to when I was a young boy, sitting round and the station and going down there at Summer holidays, getting up to a bit of mischief down there.

We were drawn down there because of the steam trains; we used to love seeing the steam trains go by. Although we shouldn’t have got on the track, we did. We used to put a penny piece on there, stand back, watch the train go by and go looking for the penny piece. It was all squashed and it was hot, and we used to think it was hilarious.

I’ve had a few jobs, and a mechanic was one and I did that for a few years.

Married, young kids, mortgage, so I left one form of transport - working on cars - and went to another form of transport working on the railway.

My uncle Ron worked on the railways and he said if you want a job on the rialways, go down Temple Meads and see two supervisors and you might get a job. So I went down and seen the supervisors and they offered me a job working in the gangs on the railway. Never thought for one moment I would be joining the railways and doing 32 years’ service.

I just got to know it, especially starting off young on the railway. I’ve walked it so many times, I don’t think there’s a place on there I haven’t been, to be honest.

And people do want the railways re-opened; more stations and disused lines like Portishead.

St Anne’s Station was knocked down in 1970, and they knocked down a lot of other stations because if they kept them, they’d have to pay rates on them.

People were using their cars more than ever, they decided to knock stations down.

To the right of me you can see a disused line which is a carriage line. This line needs to go back in to free up train capacity and get more trains on the local network. By freeing up train capacity we should be able to get a 30 minute service to all stations in the Bristol area.

I’d like really to reincarnate some of these people and ask them what they was doing, because it was so silly. The wheel’s turned 360 degrees and it’s come back, and now they’re realising all these closed stations and all these lines they’ve got rid of, now they’re needed because the roads are so gridlocked. There’s too many cars on the road.

Credits