Early Life and Great Northern Railway
He was born in Invercargill, New Zealand to William Bulleid and his wife Marian Pugh, both British immigrants. On the death of his father, Bulleid returned to Llanfyllin, Wales in 1889 with his mother, where the family home had been. In 1901, after a technical education at Accrington, at age 18 he joined the Great Northern Railway (GNR) at Doncaster as an apprentice under H. A. Ivatt, the CME. After a four-year apprenticeship he became the assistant to the Locomotive Running Superintendent, and a year later the Doncaster Works manager. In 1908, he left to work in Paris with the French division of Westinghouse Electric Corporation as a Test Engineer, soon promoted to Assistant Works Manager and Chief Draughtsman. Later that year he married Marjorie Ivatt, Ivatt's youngest daughter.
A brief period working for the Board of Trade followed from 1910 arranging exhibitions in Brussels, Paris and Turin. During this time, he was able to travel widely in Europe, including a trip with Gresley, Stanier and Hawksworth to Belgium to see a metre-gauge bogie locomotive. In December 1912, he rejoined the GNR as Personal Assistant to Nigel Gresley, the new CME. Gresley was only six years Bulleid's senior. World War I intervened; Bulleid joined the British Army and was assigned to the rail transport arm, rising to the rank of Major. After the war, Bulleid returned to the GNR as the Manager of the Wagon and Carriage Works.
Read more about this topic: Oliver Bulleid
Famous quotes containing the words early, life, northern and/or railway:
“They circumcised women, little girls, in Jesus’s time. Did he know? Did the subject anger or embarrass him? Did the early church erase the record? Jesus himself was circumcised; perhaps he thought only the cutting done to him was done to women, and therefore, since he survived, it was all right.”
—Alice Walker (b. 1944)
“Every age, every culture, every custom and tradition has its own character, its own weakness and its own strength, its beauties and cruelties; it accepts certain sufferings as matters of course, puts up patiently with certain evils. Human life is reduced to real suffering, to hell, only when two ages, two cultures and religions overlap.”
—Hermann Hesse (1877–1962)
“You’ll wait a long, long time for anything much
To happen in heaven beyond the floats of cloud
And the Northern Lights that run like tingling nerves.”
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)
“Her personality had an architectonic quality; I think of her when I see some of the great London railway termini, especially St. Pancras, with its soot and turrets, and she overshadowed her own daughters, whom she did not understand—my mother, who liked things to be nice; my dotty aunt. But my mother had not the strength to put even some physical distance between them, let alone keep the old monster at emotional arm’s length.”
—Angela Carter (1940–1992)