Railway pies: culinary nostalgia from a bygone era

Reconstructed: Ellen brings the “Railway Pie” back to life from the realms of nostalgia.

I have always liked a pie. Of course I like eating them, but I also like smelling them, cooking them, reading about them, thinking about them and writing about them. Of these, the cooking is probably the only disappointment.  I just can’t seem to match the pies my Everloving makes, nor even the frozen ones bought from the supermarket, let alone that crème de la crème of piedom, the steak and mushroom classic from the Vietnamese bakery in York.

Reading about pies always seems to take me back either to Charles Dickens or P.G. Wodehouse. The “fat boy” in Pickwick Papers comes immediately to mind. He only had two phases to his life, eating and sleeping, and when eating it was a pie that he most loved, “plunging in his knife and fork to the very ferules”. I also remember the scene in Great Expectations in which there was the famous exchange …

“How’s the pie, Garj?”

“It worn’t amiss”.

… so beloved of my Grandfather Bill Chandler. We could never sit down to a pie without him asking me the question and expecting the right answer, which I soon learned to give, to his chortled satisfaction.

And then there was Gussie Fink-Nottle (friend of Bertie Wooster and notorious newt-fancier), who loved nothing better than cold steak and kidney pie, and who eventually eloped with the cook who made them specially for him. I am with Gussie there: a slab of cold steak and kidney pie, eaten with the fingers while sitting on a log in the shade of a wandoo tree while the billy is coming to the boil, is very hard to beat.

I am scarcely in the company of Dickens or Wodehouse, but I have also written about pies, including in these chronicles (Endnote 1]. However, today the theme is not so much the literature of pies, or a general ‘remembrance of pies past’, but the recollection of a specific species of the pie genus, viz, the railway pie (scientific name Piensis ralwayii). 

The subject is a poignant one: railway pies once had a unique identity and status, and like some small Australian marsupial, they were once commonplace, then became a threatened species, and now sadly are no more. Railway pies have retreated to the dreamtime …

The dreams may be tinged with poignancy, but are pleasant nevertheless. The railway pie was far more than a culinary masterpiece. In fact, to be honest, in many cases it was not a culinary masterpiece at all. But it has become part of our cultural heritage, a footnote to the proud history of Australia’s great railway era. To people like me, the mental image and the recollected smell and taste of a railway pie comes easily to mind, and as it does, I associate it with that other great icon of the railway era, the steam locomotive. Railway pies and steam locomotives seem to me to have been inextricably linked ... and both became extinct at about the same time.

The death of the railways

Also, virtually extinct in Western Australia, is the passenger train plying the rural rail network of the State. We can easily forget how large that network once was, or its importance as a travel, communications and transport system.  Southern Western Australia was once cobwebbed with railways. They were the principal means of transport for both goods and people – roles now overtaken by the motor car, the bus and the heavy haulage truck.

In addition to the government railways were those run by the timber industry for hauling logs from the forest, timber from bush sawmills to ‘guvvy’ sidings, and firewood to the mines on the Goldfields. This network augmented the cobweb of government lines, crisscrossing the countryside.

Timber industry loco hauling logs on a private railway in the jarrah forest

A 1950s map shows the extent of the railway system at its zenith.

The former railway network in southern WA. These are government lines only – the additional and extensive network built and run by the timber industry (especially in the goldfields) is not shown; nor is the Commonwealth railway running east from Kalgoorlie

Few of the lines shown on this map are still extant, and outside the Perth metropolitan area only two lines still carry passengers; Perth-Kalgoorlie and Perth-Bunbury. Most tragic of all was the astounding decision to close the rail network through the wheatbelt, something that can only be described as political and social madness. Bulk cartage of grain, wool, livestock and other heavy goods is now done by huge diesel-powered trucks, and mostly they thunder along on roads that were originally designed for horse and buggy, or proceed at a snail’s pace with pilot vehicles fore and aft, holding up the traffic for miles.

But enough of politics! And in any case, I need to put in a word of explanation before I get started on railway pies. The pies I am talking about here are meat pies, made basically with minced or chunky meat and with pastry dappled with Rosella Tomato Sauce. Years ago, in America I once asked the waitress in a café for a pie and she asked me: “Apple or pecan?” No Australian waitress would ever ask that question.

How did I get started on a story about railway pies?

It all began with a chance remark, many years ago.  I was driving home after a long day working in the bush with my colleague Jim Edwards, and the conversation turned to food. This was not unusual. In those days young foresters returning from a day of vigorous work in the open air, their empty crib boxes rattling behind them, would invariably begin to reminisce about great meals enjoyed over the years.

Jim had spent his high school years in boarding school in Perth but used to travel back and forth on the train to his home in the Avon Valley at York every weekend. "To get to York,” Jim recalled, “I first took the train going east to Northam and eventually Kalgoorlie. I would get off at Spencer’s Brook and change to the train going south to York and eventually Albany. There was a Refreshment Room at Spencers’ where you could buy a railway pie. I used to buy one on the way home on a Friday night and another going back to Perth on the Sunday afternoon.”

Over five years of this routine, Jim said, he must have eaten hundreds of railway pies, and he could not recall one of them that he did not relish.

I was reminded of this conversation when I called in at Spencer's Brook the other day. The railway line remains, but no longer do passenger trains stop there, and both the station and the refreshment rooms are long gone. What was once a thriving railway junction, with its Station Master and assistants, and its refreshment rooms and navvy gang, was now derelict and deserted, only the remnants of a platform indicating where once travellers disembarked.

The station, refreshment room, staff, family and navvy gang at Spencer's Brook railway station, in its heyday

Visiting Spencer’s Brook reminded me of Jim, and it got me thinking about railway pies. The memories came flooding back.

You have to be aged in your 70s or beyond to share these memories. I was lucky enough to have experienced the end of the great railway era in WA. As a boy and a young man, I travelled many times on passenger trains, including several trips to the Eastern States. In those days the Perth-Kalgoorlie train always stopped at Chidlow (known then by its original name, Chidlow’s Wells), and here there was a refreshment room which sold railway pies. I invariably purchased one.

I also have fond memories of the refreshment room at the Pinjarra station where I used to purchase a pie when I was travelling to the forestry headquarters at Dwellingup where I worked after starting my career in forestry.

This photograph was labelled "Railway Pie" in a museum, but in my memory the genuine article was flatter and oval-shaped. It is a tasty looking pie, but nothing like the classics sold at refreshment rooms in my day

Nostalgia is a powerful and pleasurable thing. The more I remember those railway pies, the better they seem to me to have been. Doubtless my memory is coloured by the fact that I was an active young man with a healthy appetite, and a hot pie on a cold, windy railway station, often at night, provided sustenance and inner warmth as well as epicurean delight.

But I have also always loved trains and the romance of the railways and railwaymen and women. The railway pie, it seems to me, fits smoothly into the larger picture. Nostalgia for the railway pie is also nostalgia for the railways.

Discovering a wider interest

So, what was a railway pie? What is its history? Why were they special? Was it just me, I wondered that day I stopped at Spencer’s Brook, or did anyone else remember them?

Well, it turned out a lot of people remembered them. I put a small note in the Can You Help? column of The West Australian newspaper:

Railway Pies

I am interested in hearing from anyone involved in the manufacture or consumption of railway pies.

Phone or email Roger Underwood

… and I was inundated with letters, phone calls and emails. The responses ranged from people who had made them to those who had eaten them years ago and still remembered them fondly.

Here is a response typical of many I received:

My grandparents lived in Bunbury and as a child I spent many a long hour on the steam train journey from Perth and back. It stopped at every siding/station to drop off or pick up passengers and supplies. The journey seemed endless, and my thoughts were always, "How soon to the Pie Station at Pinjarra?" where I knew my father would leave the train and return with tea and sandwiches for my mother and himself and, to my delight, a pie for me.

Another factor was that the pies were cheap.  A correspondent who had lived in Pemberton as a girl travelled to and from boarding school in Bunbury every term. She recalled:

The train used to stop at Kirup, and they sold very good pies on the railway station. When the train came in there would be a loud bell ringing, and we would pile out and rush to the counter for a pie and cup of tea. Altogether the cost was about sixpence.

Railway pies, it seems, also had a special aroma. Another caller remembered:

When we finally arrived at a refreshment stop, we kids would all be starving. The moment you left the train you could smell the aroma of fresh baking. They were cooked right there on the edge of the platform, and the smell of the hot pies would increase your hunger and their desirability!

On the main passenger runs (Perth-Kalgoorlie for example) trains would have a dining car which served meals, but these were expensive compared to the cost of the fare offered at the refreshment rooms along the way, and people generally were less prosperous in those days. The railway pie thus became almost a destination in itself.

A railways dining carriage - but few were this flash. This was on the Royal Train, set up to carry visiting Royals or Governor-Generals 

History of the railway pie

In fact, they did not start out as a ‘railway pie’, but simply as a pie sold at railway stations.

Up until about 1947 the pies were made by the local town baker or by the proprietor of the refreshment rooms at the stations. These early pies were baked in wood-fired ovens, made to individual and sometimes distinctive recipes and they varied in shape and size depending on the pie-tins used, and on the pastry and the contents. The skill and inclination of the baker were critical factors. To some extent the taste and aroma of the pie reflected the wood used to fire the oven. The more exotic timbers like mulga, salmon gum or Cypress pine would lend a unique flavour to the pie.

There is also the question of sauce. In my opinion no pie can be eaten without tomato sauce, and unless it is Rosella, it is not tomato sauce. Sauce was supplied in little china jugs at refreshment rooms on railway stations in the early days, often homemade from homegrown tomatoes. When I travelled by passenger train in NSW once many years ago, I discovered that the pie-eaters there were using black Worcester Sauce … I considered this sacrilege of the first degree.

The variations between locally-made pies, with different wood firing the ovens and homemade sauces at different places led to the evolution of ‘pie connoisseurs’.  These were the regular travellers who (like wine buffs) claimed they could distinguish the provenance of a pie by its aroma and flavour. They had their favourites. One of my correspondents recalled:

Every time I hear of railway pies I automatically think of the railway stop at Chidlow’s. These were the best pies I ever tasted.

According to several people who contacted me, the best-loved pies on the entire Western Australian railway system from pre-War right into the 1950s were made by Margaret Gettingby who ran the refreshment room on the station at Norseman on the Kalgoorlie-Esperance line. I spoke to her daughter Barbara not long ago, and she revealed the long-kept secret of these culinary masterpieces:

First up, Mum only ever used freshly minced prime beef. She would inspect this when it arrived from the butcher, and she would send it back if it contained fat or gristle. The mince was mixed with sliced onions, black pepper and herbs and thickened with plain flour until she got the right consistency before cooking. She would always add a few drops of Parisian Essence to give the mixture a dark brown colour.

But the real secret was her pastry. It was a sort of semi-puff pastry and she made it by mixing minced suet from the local butcher with hot water (hot enough so you could just get your hands in it), equal parts of plain and S/R flour and a good handful of cooking salt. She would mix it by hand into a dough and then roll out the pastry on a big marble slab, using a heavy wooden rolling pin with an iron bolt through it to give it extra weight. This rolling pin had been specially made for her by the local blacksmith. Mum used good ingredients in her pies but I think it was the pastry that made them so famous.

Another famously tasty pie was made by the local baker and sold at the refreshment rooms on the station at Yalgoo. Only years later was it revealed that the venerable old baker (known as 'Old Mick') invariably used kangaroo as his meat and fired his oven with mulga timber (the best firewood in the world).

Some old railway men contacted me. One recalled:

I did a five-year apprenticeship as a Mechanical Fitter from 1956-1961 at Midland Railway Workshops. As an apprentice we were given two station-to-station passes per year to anywhere in W.A. Albany being the furtherest away, that's where we went, usually about five or six of us apprentices. We would go every long weekend, leaving Perth on Friday night at midnight, getting to Albany at 7am Saturday and leaving Albany Sunday night and arriving in Perth around 7.30am Monday, in time to start work.

We lived on railway pies both ways. The price was around 11 pence, unless you could chat the waitress up a bit.

In the heyday of the railways there were two passenger trains daily making the run from Perth to Kalgoorlie and return. Along the line there were refreshment rooms at the stations at Chidlows, Spencers Brook, Cunderdin, Meckering, Merredin, and Southern Cross. All sold pies. Travelling north from Perth there were famous refreshment rooms at Dalwallinu and Yalgoo for travellers to and from the Murchison goldfields and the northern sheep stations.

The Refresh

The refreshment rooms (known to railway staff as “The Refresh”) at country railway stations back in the day were an institution. At one end of the scale they resembled a classy restaurant, with uniformed waitresses and special "railway crockery". In many country towns the Railway Refreshment Rooms were also the local café/restaurant and food store … townspeople would eat and shop there [Endnote 2]

A 'top end' railway freshment room with uniformed waitresses and starched tablecloths

At the other end of the scale, they were a rough kitchen tacked onto the station, and the food was sold from trestle tables erected on the platform. From these platform-side kitchens came the mouth-watering aromas of baking and woodsmoke.

Another old railwayman recalled:

The family moved to Merredin in 1950 and right from the start I got to know the railway pie. The refreshment room at the station opened at 9.30 pm and closed at about 2 am every night, scheduled to fit in with the trains coming through going east or west. When I was about 19 I used to take my girlfriend (now my wife) to the pictures on a Saturday night. Afterwards a group of us would all go over to the refreshment rooms at the station and lash out on a pie and a cup of coffee. It was the only place to go in Merredin at that time of night.

Food was served at The Refresh on solid railway crockery, sometimes (at the more classy establishments) this was even embossed. Railway crockery added about 50% to the weight of a cup of tea but it had the value of being basically unbreakable.

Railway crockery, not always as smart as this, but still meeting the most important criterion, which was being unbreakable.

One of the lovely memoirs I received in my search for stories about railway pies came from a woman whose mother ran the refreshment rooms at Dalwallinu on the northern line.  She recalls:

My mother Kathleen Sampey took over the Dalwallinu Railway Refreshment Room in January 1941. The building was on the south side of the railway station platform. It was a weatherboard building, with a small kitchen approximately 3m x 5m, and housed a No. 2 wood burning stove, two benches with cupboards underneath, and a wood box.  There was no water laid on, so we had to bucket the water in from a small rainwater tank behind the building. During the summer when the cooking was being done in the afternoon, the kitchen became extremely hot. Mum would stand out on the platform for a little while to try and catch a bit of breeze. In Dalwallinu in mid-summer, a cooling breeze was rarely available.

The serving room had a counter accessible from the platform. Pies, sandwiches (with three different fillings) and scones (these were served to morning trains only), were displayed on a central table. The pies were made with beef mince, vegetables and a delicious pastry. They were all cooked on the premises. The sandwiches were made in the early evening and taken over to a stall on the platform. Mum's pies made her famous.

To service the early morning trains Mum would start work at about 3:00am, first making the scones and then the pies. When the train pulled into the station my father would walk up and down the platform ringing a large brass bell. These bells were issued by the railways to let passengers know that refreshments were available. Dad liked doing this. Unfortunately, during the War the bell was taken away (as was our school bell) to be melted down for ammunition for the army. The bells were replaced by wooden 'rattlers' which would be swung around the head, making a terrific rattle.

Mrs Samp

Besides cooking for the trains, Mum had regular orders for pies from the Dalwallinu townspeople, and if ever there were pies left over, she would have them sent to a needy family in town. All in all, "Mrs Samp's pies" are remembered to this day. [Endnote 3]

Many of the railway refreshment rooms were licensed to sell alcohol, as my friend the late David Wilcox recalled:

I was a devotee of railway pies. These were purchased at Beverley en route to Brookton, where my brother and I would change to the train to Corrigin. As we pulled into Beverley, there would be a loud clanging of a big brass hand bell. Then there would be a rush of men to the bar for beer, and a rush of women and kids to the counter selling cups of tea, sandwiches and hot pies. I remember that the pies were large and very digestible and that they cost sixpence.

Making railway pies

The work involved in pie making in those times seems astronomical to me. One of my callers helped her mother with pie­-making in the refreshment rooms at Pinjarra during the war years.

At that time there were troop trains coming through on a regular basis and trainloads of hungry young soldiers would be disgorged and expected to be fed. They would be seated at trestle tables especially set up along the length of the platform. With only wood stoves and small ovens, mother and daughter would sometimes make over a thousand pies at one time, and all had to be kept warm for serving to the troops the moment the train arrived. This seems scarcely believable to me when you consider that all the meat had to be minced or diced and pre-cooked, gallons of gravy prepared and acres of pastry mixed and rolled out by hand.

The making of large batches of pies was made slightly easier by special racks of pie tins, welded together, so that multiple pies could be baked simultaneously, but these required a big oven, more likely to be found in a bakery than in a small rough kitchen on the side of a railway station platform.

A rack of welded pie dishes allowing baking of 21 pies at a time

Wood fired baker's oven, capable of making a large batch of pies simultaneously with several pie tin racks

The new era of pie making

But, as the saying goes, all good things come to an end. The era of the unique local pie made by the town baker or the cook in the refreshment room on the station platform came to an end (for all but the most remote stations) soon after the end of the Second World War.

In 1947 railway pie-making was centralised. The Western Australian Government Railways (WAGR) acquired a site in Welshpool, an obsolete wartime munitions factory, and they set up a large pie-making depot. Here they employed a standard oval pie tin and a uniform recipe. Hundreds of identical railway pies were made every day. The cooked pies were stored in a cool room before being packed in wicker baskets, transferred to Perth Central Station in a Railways-green Chevrolet Maple Leaf van, and then railroaded out to the refreshment rooms on the main lines north, east and south. One batch would always be retained for use by the Railways Cafe at Perth Central, where they could be purchased served with peas and mashed potatoes.

A Government Railways wicker basket, for transporting pies (photo courtesty of WA Rail Museum)

The new ‘standard’ WAGR pie was made of diced beef cooked in a battery of pressure cookers and then added to cauldrons of shin bone gravy. The mixture would be ladled into pastry-lined pie tins, a pastry ‘lid’ applied to each pie, and the trays of pies transferred to large industrial ovens, each batch taking about 20 minutes to cook. The pastry was machine-made, the ingredients being flour, dripping (or lard) and water.

The centralisation and mechanisation of the railway pie had one significant consequence: the day of the unique pie at a unique railway station kitchen or town bakery was over. As one of my correspondents observed, remembering trips from Perth to Albany:

It didn’t matter where you bought a pie, from Spencers Brook to Mt Barker, they all tasted the same. Only some were hotter.

Nevertheless, they were universally popular. I may be wrong here, but the use of dripping or lard may well have been one of the secrets to their success. They make a far tastier pastry than the vegetable oil mostly used these days, although probably they are not as good as suet. (Mind you, not many people I know buys or cooks with suet anymore).

One of my correspondents told me a charming story about those Welshpool railway pies. For some years in the 1950s he worked as a junior clerk in the WAGR Head Office, and one of his daily duties was to go down to the pie factory, get a pie and deliver it to the office of the Chief Commissioner of Railways. The Chief would then undertake a Quality Control Test. This involved him consuming the pie with his mid-morning cup of tea.

Of all the people who contacted me to talk about railway pies when I was doing my research, only one complained: he claimed to have been poisoned by one. Another old fella laughed as he passed on the standard joke of the day:

Q: What is worse than finding a mouse in your railway pie?

A: Finding half a mouse.

And there is the snatch of classic dialogue from the music hall:

Refreshment Room waitress: What do yer want?

Weary traveller: How about a cup of tea, a pie and a few kind words?

Waitress: There’s yer tea. There’s yer pie. That’s two and sixpence.

Traveller: What about the few kind words?

Waitress: Don’t eat the pie.

But mostly the predominant memory of the people who contacted me was that railway pies were "bloody tasty", the very words one caller used when talking to me over the phone. I could hear him pause, and smack his lips.

What was it, I wonder that made these pies so memorable? Surely they cannot have been that tasty. The recipes I have seen mostly appear very basic: meat, gravy and pastry with salt and pepper.

I can easily see how the batches of pies lovingly hand-made by the local baker, or by skilful bush cooks like Mrs Sampey (who included vegetables) or Mrs Gettingby (with her secret pastry recipe), or the baker at Yalgoo (who used roo meat), might have been special, probably as good as the pies my wife makes for me now and again as a treat. But the ‘standard’ industrial pie, mass-produced in the departmental factory at Welshpool cannot really have been such a culinary masterpiece as to have captured the memories of so many people. I think the reason they were so memorable is that the railway pie has become something more than a well-remembered delicacy. It was an institution, an ingredient in people’s memories of the great pre-1960s era of railway travel.  In the memory of the generation who knew it, the railway pie is synonymous with steam engines, coal smoke, grimy engine drivers, country stations, refreshment rooms, porters, uniformed Station Masters with a watch on a chain, dinging level-crossings, clickety-clack, and cinders in the eye.

Furthermore, the pie was eaten when people were hungry. Travellers did not carry eskies of food with them in those days, and most could not afford a sit-down meal in the dining car. As they built up a hungry anticipation of the refreshment room somewhere ahead up the line, they would be overcome by a mental image of a hot meat pie (with a dab of tomato sauce) and a freshly-made pot of tea. No wonder we wolfed them down with such enthusiasm.

Even more than all this, the railway pie was an ingredient in that great adventure now gone and lost forever: the railway journey. As the poet Millay put it:

My heart is warm with the friends I make,

And better friends I'll not be knowing,

But there isn't a train I would not take,

No matter where it's going.

To which I would add:

And never a time would I deny

The siren call of a railway pie.

ENDNOTES

1.      If you are interested, scroll down on the blog to the stories Lunch at Mataranka and Pigeons on the grass, alas.

2. The film of Noel Coward's famous play Brief Encounter takes place almost entirely within a railway refreshment room. This was in England, but the atmosphere is familiar - the little tables and wooden chairs, the counter behind which serves an imperious waitress, the comings and goings of travellers and railway staff, and the background noise of steam trains thundering through, blowing their whistles.

3.      My sister Jennie lived at Dally in the late 50s and remembers ‘Mrs Samp’ and her pies with a thrill of pleasure. The pies were famous not only on the railways, but throughout the district.