Perceptions of the Locomotive Driver: Image and Identity on British Railways, c.1840-c.1950

This paper is concerned with some aspects of the way one particular railway occupation – that of locomotive driver – has been perceived in Great Britain from the mid-19th century to the mid-20th. The occupation of locomotive driver is one of the most significant within the railway industry in terms of the identity it projects to the wider community, and the meanings which are in turn read into it. The evidence used in this paper reflects a process of forming, assigning and negotiating cultural significances around the figure of the locomotive driver across a range of discourses that reveal the preoccupations and tensions of a society constantly responding to the threat and the promise offered by the technologically the railway and personified in the locomotive driver.