NEW APRIL 2021. This is a 164-page card-covered book published by the National Union of Railwaymen in January 1934. The title is 'Rates of Pay and Conditions of Service of Railway Employees except [Work] Shopmen'. A four-page loose insert is scanned in at the end.

The book provides a summary of all the agreements the union had with the railway companies at that date. You can see its full index HERE.

One striking feature is the sheer range of railway occupations beyond drivers and guards and signalmen and such like - thus there had to be special arrangements to cover lodging-house stewards, letter-sorters and swingbridgemen, for example. To work out what the second engineer on one of their dredgers should get, you needed to know its dredging capacity, whether it was sea-going or not, and whether it had to carry its own soil away to the depositing grounds.

The way to calculate the 'score' for a signalman to fix his rate of pay is undoubtedly fair but remarkably complicated.

A sign of the times was a section to make provision for crews of Sentinel, Clayton and other similar locomotives and passenger cars, as well as diesel-electric shunters.

On page 104 is a table showing the quite large rises and falls in the figure for the cost of living on many dates only a few months apart, ranging from 1 August 1919 to 1 October 1933.

The file is word-searchable and has bookmarks to the main parts. It will be available to download as soon as payment has been made. You go to your account and click on ‘Downloads’. New customers create an account as they place their order.