Just as Saturday, 27th September was the 200th anniversary of when the world’s first passenger train ran, between Stockton and Darlington, for the Chandler family, railways have also been a way of life, with an accumulated total of over 200 years of service.

Tony Chandler has worked on the railway for 37 years, and is currently a Shift Signaller Manager at the Wimbledon area signalling area.

He followed his father and grandfather into a career on the railway, where they each served for 50 years. His brother has also worked on the railway for 38 years, and his uncle for 30 years.

Tony’s son Joseph is continuing the family tradition by working as an isolation planner on the Wessex route, making it four generations of Chandlers to work on the railway.

Tony started his railway career as a booking boy at Woking signal box before moving to Waterloo to gain further experience, which he thought was an incredible and amazing experience.

Tony’s grandfather joined the railway as a goods guard in 1937. In the 1970s, he was promoted to senior railwayman at Strawberry Hill station, before finishing his railway career at Feltham, where his two sons were senior railmen. Because the railways was a protected occupation, and he joined the railway before the outbreak of war, he didn’t get called up. It was long hours and dirty work, but that was the progression into the driving grade.

In 1956, Tony’s father started work on the railway as an engine cleaner aged 15, later becoming a fireman at Feltham Marshalling Yard for three years, and in 1966, he was appointed as a driving instructor, training the next generation of drivers.

Tony moved from Waterloo to Wokingham signal box, then in 1994 he moved to Wimbledon Signalling Centre, which now controls Waterloo. He was involved in the Feltham to Wokingham resignalling scheme, where he trained new staff in axle counters. Wimbledon Signalling Centre replaced 15-20 smaller boxes, in the same way that the Basingstoke Rail Operating Centre has replaced many smaller signal boxes.

As part of Railway 200, a search was undertaken to find the UK’s longest-serving railway family, with one of the contenders being father and son Mike and Andrew Lamport, who can trace their railway lineage back to 1846. In May 2024, Merseyrail honoured one its employees who had clocked up 53 years service on the railway.

“I joined in 1989, it was probably inevitable. I asked my dad to get me on for six months as I needed something to do and I never left. When I was a box boy at Waterloo, we had a train describer system that would describe the trains as they’d come on to the panel. When this failed, we weren’t sure what trains were coming. We used to open the window at the end of the box and they would send me out with a pair of binoculars and tell the signallers the train headcodes. I thought they were joking and I couldn’t believe it at first. The memories of doing that always stuck with me.”

Tony Chandler