He left school aged fourteen and had one or two jobs before joining the railway when he was fifteen years old.

He held various jobs for the railway, the first of these was as a junior porter, sorting and despatching internal mail, then as a train reporter in the telegraph office. "The job was what they called Train Reporter. You had a line of telephones all connected up to the various signal boxes up and down the line. Tring, Watford, Rugby, Blisworth and all trains were numbered and you had a number punched out on the telephone saying train number forty-five six fifteen Blisworth you know. That gave the chap in the adjacent control room the position of the train and how fast it was going and where it was at that time, he could then plot the route. There might have been something further up the line that was going slower you could divert that train by doing the contact with the signal boxes".

At age seventeen he worked at Winslow station as a porter, until he was called up for national service in the Royal Navy, serving during the Burma campaign.

Albert met a girl called Betty at Bletchley Park whilst on leave in 1943. They married in 1946, the year Albert was demobbed.

Once more Albert rejoined the railway, as an carriage cleaner, and then as a examiner. “That was a job whereby, it was a music hall joke type of job where a bloke carries a long hammer and taps the wheels. That’s only one part of it you know but it was also shift work, which I didn’t take very kindly to, I liked a day job. Anyway I did carry on with that and then one of the chaps in the sheds retired and his job was looking after all the electrical equipment on the carriages, which were steam, fuelled at that time. That was dynamos, all the lighting and that so I applied for it and got the job. I was quite happy with that because it was a regular day job and also I was interested in the work. I’ve always been interested in mechanical and electrical things. So I carried on with that job until things progressed a bit on the railway and we were supplied with diesel, diesel railcars”. Later he was trained as a carriage electrician.

When asked about wages on the railways Albert said "The wages were rather poor, for instance I had to raise my family on £4.10shillings per week, and rent was the £1.06 pence per week” He added, “In latter years the wages were still not great, but overtime was often available”.

Albert remembers vividly an accident at Bletchley station in the war, during the blackout, of a lady porter who was hit by a train whilst pushing mail over the crossing.

Another, which shocked Albert, was early on in the war when an express passenger train overran a stop signals and crashed into the rear of a stationary train killing several people.

The blackout restrictions were ignored in order to rescue casualties

He also recalls humourous incidents. One of which Albert tells of a chap who was susceptible to practical jokes. He always used to ride a bicycle to work and leave it in the shed, propped up against the wall. One day it was decided that they’d play a joke on him. So they tied a rope to the bike and rigged up a pulley up on the roof and pulled the bicycle up as far as it would go. When he came to collect his bike, and it wasn’t there he swore that someone had stolen it, but of course, there it was looking down at him from above.

This photo was taken of Albert after he was interveiwed for this project in January 2005.