2019 saw us pass the 35th anniversary of the closure of the British Rail Engineering Limited railway wagon works at Shildon in County Durham which happened in 1984, bringing an end to over 150 years of continuous railway engineering at Shildon, the town that was the point of origin of the first-ever steam passenger railway as of 27 Sept 1825.
The closure, orchestrated by a Thatcher led Conservative government determined to see the privatisation and selling off of nationalised industries took away what this proud town saw as being its very purpose, triggering an identity crisis which doesn't seem resolved to this very day.
To mark the occasion, Shildon Railway Institute, in the midst of an existential crisis of its own, felt it appropriate to host a reunion of former BREL Shildon workers and their families on Saturday 5th October.
As part of the commemoration, Shildon Heritage Alliance CIC commissioned this film, to be produced on an entirely voluntary basis capturing the recollections of a number of former workers that offered to come forward to tell their story.
Expressed in their own words, this frank and often humorous reflection by some of the last generations of workers at the works explores what life was like in Shildon prior to the closure as well as a worker's perspective of the events surrounding the closure.
It was screened at the Reunion event as part of an exhibition which included hundreds of photographs of the former works over the decades from around 1900, a collection of wagon plates loaned by Locomotion, the railway museum based in the town, a history display by the Shildon History Recall Society and new banners commemorating the workers links with the Railway Institute and a collection of other films documenting the closure, family life in Shildon at the time of the closure and the 1975 150th Anniversary celebrations.
At the Reunion event a number of other former workers put themselves forward to contribute, at a point in the future, their 'untold stories of the Works' leading to a possibility that the project may be extended to take in those other stories in advance of the 2025 two-hundredth passenger steam railway celebrations. An additional possibility linked in with this may be to explore the return of railway engineering to the area in the form of Hitachi's new works at nearby Newton Aycliffe.
We'd like to encourage anyone else interested in sharing their, or their ancestors' stories of the works with current and future generations to contact Shildon Railway Institute and leave their details.