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The North Western Railway in India was formed in 1886, by the merger of the Sind, Punjab and Delhi Railway, Indus Valley State Railway and the Punjab Northern State Railway. The southern Punjab Railway also merged into it in 1930. At the time, the North Western Railway was the longest railway operating under one administration, and it was here that a British engineer, Norman Charles Watney, spent much of his career. The railway even had its own auxiliary regiment – the North Western Railway Battalion – in which Watney, a fellow of the IMechE and member of the Institution of Locomotive Engineers, was an officer.
Watney was born in 1901 in Hendon, Middlesex. He attended the General Engineering College in Earls Court, London, before heading north to begin an apprenticeship with Beyer, Peacock and Co in Gorton, Manchester, in 1922. He spent three years there, and then went to work as a skilled fitter in the Kentish Town running shed, which was part of the London Midland and Scotland Railway.
After a year at Kentish Town, Watney was appointed assistant locomotive superintendent on the Indian State Railways, and was posted to the North Western Railway. In 1929, he transferred to the mechanical workshops at Moghalpura as assistant works manager – eventually becoming production engineer and deputy chief mechanical engineer.
Watney wrote regular articles for The Railway Gazette about innovations to both stock and track, and, in 1940, he penned a paper for the IMechE on the ‘Application of Gantt charts to running shed management’, a topic in which he had much practical experience.
He travelled extensively while he was in India. In 1941, “my services were lent to the War Transport Board”, he says in a letter dated 1948 – an arrangement whereby he was to make an all-India railway tour to report on the production of gas for public service vehicles. During this tour, he took many photographs.
By 1948, Watney had become superintendent of mechanical workshops, where he was responsible for “all the locomotive and C & W [carriage and wagon] workshops consisting of a staff of about 18,000 with three works managers and nine assistants”, he states in a letter dated 1952. He retired and left what had, by then, become Pakistan in March 1948.
Even after retirement, he continued to take short-term contracts in India, returning to work for Tata in Jamshedpur and for Marshall & Sons in Bombay. Clearly a man with a passion for railway work, he continued to work both in the UK and abroad until 1966. He died in 1998.
The IMechE’s collection is full of material that Watney gathered during his time working in India on the railways. As well as photographs of locomotives, there are railway timetables, passports, clippings about cricket in Northern India, driving permits, copies of the North Western Railway magazine brochures and technical photographs of railway stock.
Did you know?
The North Western Railway Battalion was an auxiliary regiment made up of railway staff who, during troubles on the North West Frontier, often supported the regular military forces by manning armoured trains.
In 1947, at partition, much of the railway was transferred to Pakistan. In 1961, it was renamed Pakistan Western Railway and, in 1974, became Pakistan Railways. The remaining smaller part stayed in Indian control after partition.