Subject: RE: Lyr Req: Eight Freight Blues (Dave Goulder)
From:
HuwG
Date: 02 Mar 22 - 03:53 AM
If you can work the chords out from this video clip, you're doing better than I have, so far.
Some other translations:
"Eight freight" probably refers to an LMS Class 8F freight locomotive. Not a bad design, but was used for the drudge tasks of slow freight, especially hauling coal trains. The line "With a thousand tons of coal behind and a tender full of slack" refers to the common gripe of pulling overloaded trains of high quality coal from colliery to depot or power station, while that supplied to the locomotive was low quality sweepings.
The NUR and ASLEF were at daggers drawn with each other and with British Rail management for most of the sixties and seventies. Their leaders frequently appeared on television and did their best to appear to be hunourless Stalinist automatons. Their uncompromising surliness appeared to have percolated down to their members.
"Full forward gear, with the regulator open wide"; as it sounds, the equivalent of flooring the throttle on a car to accelerate to the next red light, except that it isn't merely a question of forcing more fuel through the injectors, the poor junior on the other side of the cab has to shovel like mad. Oddly, the writer O.S.Nock used to complain of drivers who did the opposite, using just a touch of regulator with full cutoff, so they produced insufficient draught to stop the fire becoming a sullen black slough of barely burning coal.
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sj
