Revolt of the Cog

Joseph Henry Harley had traveled thousands of miles in his 32 years with the London, Midland & Scottish Railway, but he never left the bustling gloom of the Crewe railway yard near Liverpool. He was just a cog in its sprawling machine, driving a dumpy, asthmatic shunting engine back & forth, day after day. He never married, he never made many friends, he never talked much. He just watched the majestic trains passing him from places he had never seen, bound for places he would never know.

At 2:40 a.m. it was the grand Irish Mail chugging from Holyhead on the shores of the choppy Irish Sea. At 3 a.m. it was the glamorous, slightly mysterious Night Scot, running up past the misty green Lake District to salty Glasgow on the Clyde. In the evening it was the Comet from Manchester, pulling through the yards and spitting scornful clouds of steam. As the years and the big trains rolled by, Harley's dream that he would run one some day went up in the sooty smoke of Crewe. His passion for the glorious trains rotted away into consuming hatred.

A few years ago railway police began to notice that more & more big locomotives were having accidents at the Crewe yard. A check of timecards showed Harley had been on duty whenever an accident occurred.

One morning last January (the engine casualties had risen to 19), Joseph Harley slipped from the cabin of his shunter and cautiously hurried across the tracks to the locomotive of the Royal Scot. He swung onto the engine's footplate, manipulated levers and throttles inside. Then he scuttled back to his own engine and drove off while the Royal Scot careened backward down the tracks, and crashed as it left the rails.

A fellow worker, Frederick Hibbs, stepped from a hiding place with two detectives. Hibbs and Harley had been schoolmates and friends for 35 years, but Hibbs would not condone railroading's worst crime -- deliberate wrecking. The detectives were kind. "Why don't you say you had a brainstorm?" one of them suggested. Harley stuck with twisted dignity to the standards of the job that had warped his frustrated life. Said he: "I couldn't do my job of engine-driving if I had brainstorms."

Last week at Chester Assizes the cog that had rebelled against the machine age was sentenced to five years in prison.

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