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Thursday 3 Oct 2024

National Poetry Day: Network Rail signaller publishes poems inspired by time spent working in a signal box

Region & Route:

Southern: Wessex

| Southern: Kent

| Southern

When he isn’t keeping the railway safe and moving freely, Network Rail signaller Ezra Miles is penning his thoughts down in the form of poetry.

Earlier this year, Ezra successfully published his first collection, The Signalman, which was inspired by his time at Sibsey signalbox, near Boston, Lincolnshire.

He recalled: “It was very peaceful a lot of the time: birds flying into the awnings, insects flying out of the field, punctuated by the heavy farming machinery coming past the box.”

Ezra now works in the Ashford signalling centre on Network Rail’s Kent route – which serves the towns and communities in all parts of the county – but his passion for poetry transcends the railway. He has also worked at the Wimbledon signalling centre on the Wessex route.

Erza explained: “I started writing poetry when I was a teenager and never really stopped. I had a very good English teacher at school, Jane Miller, who encouraged me. I still find poems to be intriguing and precarious in the most exciting way. Poetry is an ancient artform, with its history preceding the written word: religion, myth, song, story – it's all there in poetry, and when you write poems you get to participate and contribute to that history for another generation.”

The railway is known to have a magical allure to many in the country and it was the ‘elegance’ of how it runs that appealed to Ezra. It has also inspired his poetry with one poem recounting the time an absconded prisoner broke into the signal box at Sibsey, drank all the milk before phoning a friend to ask him to pick him up. Police recaptured him as a result of this phone call, as all calls to and from a signal box are recorded as a safety critical measure.

He added: “I used to work for London Transport Museum, where I got exposed to transport infrastructure and its history. I really enjoyed the layers of tradition, the ingenuity of design, the practical usefulness of it all. There are rules and processes, efficiency and a certain elegance that comes from a large system working correctly. I also felt that the railway offers insights into the development of our society in all sorts of unexpected ways, and I enjoyed that. I was also looking for work that was more meaningful: working on the railway is a job of service to the country and its inhabitants. Your decisions, especially as a signaller, affect huge amounts of people. It’s a precise, important and focused job to make the trains run, and that level of responsibility and meaning still massively appeals to me.”

Running a safe, reliable and efficient railway remains Network Rail’s number one priority, however, Erza feels the railway industry also provides scope to be yourself and is a great place to work. 

He outlined: “One of the great things about the railway is that there is a general attitude that as long as you can do your job to a high standard, you are free to explore your interests and hobbies. Provided they don’t distract you from your duties of course. The railway is a bit of a magnet for diverse people from all backgrounds, which is one of the things I love most about it. It’s rare to have an employer where you can really be yourself.”

Ezra’s first collection of poems has now been published, with Black Spring Press Group, putting the collection together.

He recounted: “I had started writing more poems that felt interconnected with each other, and the prospect of a larger piece of work, a book, felt like the culmination of that work and curiosity. I was processing the time I had spent in the signal box – the strangeness of the job, all that time on my own. Writing it was a good way to get it out of my system. I also, rather vainly, wanted to see my name on the cover of a book.”

Readers, especially those who don’t regularly read poetry, may be surprised by how the poems are sometimes presented on the page but, for Ezra, the visual display of words on the page can manipulate the reader into taking in the poem from his eyes, rather than their own. This can be seen in his poems, Hungry Ghost and As Two Men.

He said: “The layout of the poems are an important part of the writing: I often find when I’m editing a poem (writing good poetry is editing yourself, precisely and decisively) that changing the layout in an interesting way will really ‘unlock’ the poem. It makes the reader read each line at the pace you want them to, so you can emphasise or heighten a line. Those two poems have very different shapes: ‘Hungry Ghost’ is about a boy looking out of a rainy window, and so the poem is made up of three straight lines of words, as though they were raindrops sliding down a window.

“The other poem, ‘As Two Men’, is about conjoined twins. The two sides of the poem represent each of the twins' perspectives, and the parts are conjoined into one poem where their voices combine. The tradition of visual poetry, or concrete poetry, is very old, with examples going back well over 2,000 years.”

You can purchase Ezra’s compilation by visiting: https://blackspringpressgroup.com/products/the-signalman 

While not everyone may see themselves as a future poet, Network Rail has a range of signalling opportunities, please see https://www.networkrail.co.uk/campaigns/signalling-opportunities/

You can view Ezra reading three of his poems below: