Beeching called in his second report for more electrification and high speed freight trains, all demanding higher levels of investment.

Beeching disagreed with a new Labour government in 1964, and resigned in 1965, being made a life peer while also returning to ICI. He later chaired the Royal Commission that established the present English Crown Court system.

Belfast & County Down Railway

Incorporated in 1846, the first section of the Belfast & County Down Railway, built to Irish standard gauge of 5 ft 3 ins was opened in 1848, running 44¼ miles from Belfast to Downpatrick, with branches to Holywood, on the outskirts of Belfast, the coastal resort of Bangor and Donaghadee, which with later extensions meant that the network reached 80 miles by 1912. Its longest line was to Newcastle, Co Down, close to what later became the border with the Irish Free State, now the Republic of Ireland. The peak rolling stock list comprised around 30 steam locomotives and 3 steam rail motors, 180 passenger carriages and 700 wagons. In 1948, it was taken over by the Ulster Transport Authority, and in 1950, most of the network was closed, with the exception of Newcastle to Castlewellan, which connected with the Great Northern Railway of Ireland, but which closed in 1955, and Belfast to Bangor, which remains open.

Belfast & Northern Counties Railway

Formed in 1860 by the merger of four smaller railways: Belfast & Ballymena Railway, Ballymena Railway, Coleraine & Portrush Railway, and the Londonderry & Coleraine Railway, all of which were on Irish standard gauge of 5ft 3ins, and in 1884 acquired the 3ft gauge Ballymena, Cushendall & Red Bay Railway. In total, it had 201 miles of standard gauge and 48 miles on 3ft gauge, with a main line, single in places, 80 miles from Belfast to Londonderry, which with the line from Belfast to Larne, packet port for Stranraer in Scotland, and the branch to Portrush, remains in use.

The company faced direct competition with the Great Northern Railway of Ireland between Belfast and Londonderry, but had the faster line. In 1903, it was taken over by the expansive Midland Railway, whose livery it adopted, and which paid lip service to local control by establishing the Northern Counties Committee, NCC, which became its name. In 1923, it became part of the London, Midland & Scottish Railway, which provided it with re-gauged versions of its standard steam locomotives and carriages. It was acquired by the British Transport Commission on nationalisation of Britain’s railways in 1948, but sold to the Ulster Transport Authority in 1949.

Most of the lines were closed in the 1960s, other than those to Londonderry, Portrush and Larne. One of the first actions of the UTA was to introduce the ‘Belfast Express’, which was introduced in 1949 and provided 2 hr 15 minute timing between Londonderry and the capital. An unusual feature of the main line to Londonderry is that at one point the line runs across the runway of an airfield built during the Second World War.

Belfast Holyrood & Bangor Railway

Opened in 1848 and extended to Bangor in 1865, this 12½ mile line of Irish standard gauge was absorbed by the Belfast & County Down Railway in 1884, and remains in use today.

Big Four

General term for the four grouped companies: the London Midland & Scottish, the London & North Eastern, the Great Western and the Southern.

Birmingham

Unlike many of the major centres nurtured by the advent of the railway age, Birmingham was already a growing industrial city, sometimes described as the ‘workshop of the world’, before the railways arrived. It was the hub of a canal network that served the Midlands and beyond, with the Grand Union Canal linking the city with London. Many of the canals were to pass into railway ownership. Birmingham was linked to London by rail in 1838 when the London & Birmingham Railway opened its line from Euston. The Great Western Railway’s advance on Birmingham was abruptly checked when the Midland Railway acquired the Birmingham & Gloucester and Bristol & Gloucester companies, to the relief of the London & North Western Railway, as the LBR had become by this time, that had been concerned about the disruption that would be caused by broad gauge lines running into the city if the Great Western was welcomed by the Midland into its terminus at New Street.

The GWR was determined to serve Birmingham, however, and indeed aimed to go further north to Merseyside. Its ambitions were to be satisfied by the acquisition of first the Birmingham & Oxford Railway, which opened in 1852, and followed this in 1854 by the acquisition of the Birmingham, Wolverhampton & Dudley Railway. Unable to enter New Street, a new terminus was built for these broad gauge companies at Snow Hill, which was also in the central district of Birmingham but approached through a tunnel to avoid demolition of valuable properties. All of the companies serving Birmingham, which included the Grand Junction as well as the GWR, LNWR and MR, were slow to develop a suburban network for the growing city, and it was not until the 1860s that suburban branches started to open. In the case of the GWR, its Birmingham branch network concentrated on the towns to the north and west of the city, including Wolverhampton, Dudley and Kidderminster, and south to Leamington Spa, while other areas were reached with the acquisition of the Birmingham & North Warwickshire Railway, which was to become part of a GWR line competing with the MR between Birmingham and Bristol, finally opened in 1907-08. Although Snow Hill was rebuilt in 1912 and in its new form was a spacious and elegant station, local trains also had their own terminus at Moor Street. By this time, a Paddington-Banbury direct route had been opened, in 1910, and the GWR’s timings from Paddington were now competitive with those of the LNWR, whose route was in fact slightly longer. Great Western expresses were then able to cover the 110.5 miles between the two cities in two hours.

Birmingham & Derby Junction Railway

One of three railways authorised in 1836, with the others being a predecessor of the North Midland Railway and the Midland Counties Railway, there were proposals for the BDJR to connect with both these, extending what would be the NMR line from Leeds to Derby, while the alternative was to join the MCR line from Derby at Rugby or Northampton. The BDJR opened in 1839 and was followed by the others in 1840.

The BDJR and NMR both used George Stephenson as engineer until he was replaced by his son Robert in 1837. The line ran through flat country and presented no engineering difficulties,, although trains had to reverse at Hampton. In 1840, powers were obtained for a line from Whitacre into Birmingham instead of the original plan for a Stretchford line – never built – and this opened in 1842.

Competition between the BDJR and the MCR meant that both companies suffered, and the BDJR paid less than 2 per cent dividends. It was not until 1843 that the two companies amalgamated under the guidance of George Hudson, chairman of the NMR, resulting in the creation of the Midland Railway in 1844.

Birmingham & Gloucester Railway

Despite earlier plans for a railway between Birmingham and Bristol, it was not until 1836 that a line between Birmingham and Gloucester was authorised, supported by the London & Birmingham and Grand Junction Railways to prevent a broad gauge line being built between Bristol and Birmingham. The line had the major obstacle of the 300ft change in levels between the Lickey Hills and the plain, which most engineers sought to avoid using a detour. The BGR’s engineer, W S Moorsom, disagreed, and had the support of his directors. The result was a two mile-long gradient at 1 in 38. Locomotives were imported from the USA to work the incline, but had no more success than the British product, and until the introduction of diesel locomotives, the line required banking locomotives for trains ascending the incline. The line opened in 1840.

The opening of the line did not deter the construction of the broad gauge Bristol & Gloucester, which reached Gloucester in 1843, leaving Gloucester as one of the transfer stations between the two gauges. Both companies were absorbed by the Midland Railway in 1846.

Bishop’s Castle Railway

Authorised in 1861, it opened in 1865 running ten miles between Bishop’s Castle on the Shrewsbury & Hereford Railway to Montgomery on the Cambrian Railway. It was bankrupt from the day it opened. It became known for such poor quality that passengers had to have umbrellas in wet weather, and water even entered through the floors. It survived for seventy years because the area it ran through could not even support the much more economical motorbus.

Blackfriars

From its opening in 1886 until 1937, the station now known as Blackfriars was known as St Paul’s. The current name was adopted in 1937 to allow London Transport to rename the Central Line station until then known as ‘Post Office’ as St Paul’s.

The construction of Blackfriars, or St Paul’s, was brought about by the success of the London Chatham & Dover’s (see South Eastern & Chatham) extension towards London. The LCDR had been allowed to extend to London by its Metropolitan Extension Act of 1860, which gave it powers to reach Victoria and, more ambitious still, to a junction with the Metropolitan Railway at Farringdon Street, offering considerable long-term potential that was not to be realised for many years. In fact, there was an earlier station with the name of Blackfriars, with the first one, opened on 1 June 1864, on the south bank of the River Thames at the junction of today’s Southwark Street and the approach to Blackfriars Bridge. It served as a terminus for just a little over six months until the railway bridge over the Thames was completed, allowing trains to stop at a temporary station at Little Earl Street on the north bank from 21 December 1864. It was not until 1 June 1865, that Ludgate Hill was opened, it too becoming a terminus until the Metropolitan Extension was completed to Farringdon Street on 1 January 1866. The LCDR had persuaded both the Great Northern and London & South Western Railways to subscribe more than £300,000 apiece towards the cost of the extension with the promise of through running powers, which they soon exercised, along with the Midland Railway, which started running trains through to Victoria in 1875. The LCDR itself sent trains from Herne Hill through to Kings Cross and then as far as Barnet.

The new station at Ludgate Hill and the extension through the City was a considerable success, although not used by anything so ambitious as the Brighton-Rugby services of recent years. Unfortunately, a shortage of space meant that Ludgate Hill offered just two island platforms, which soon proved insufficient for the traffic on offer and, as expansion was out of the question given the high cost of property and the LCDR’s overstretched finances, an additional station was built on a spur off the Metropolitan Extension, and it was this that was named St Paul’s when it opened on 10 May 1886, despite the fact that the name Blackfriars was already in use as the name of the adjacent District and Circle Line station.

Before the opening of St Paul’s, the LCDR lines south of the Thames had been widened and a second bridge had been built across the Thames alongside the original bridge and to the east of it, carrying seven tracks. The new terminus was a necessity forced on the railway and was built as cheaply as possible without any great architectural pretensions, even having a wooden booking office. The cramped surroundings and the presence of the Metropolitan District Railway immediately under the station meant that there was no forecourt and no cab access to the tar-coated wooden platforms, which were reached by a dark and drab staircase. Only two of the platforms were given numbers, simply 1 and 2 between the eastern siding and the up and down loops. Despite this, in incised letters on the stones surrounding the doors, the names were given of fifty-four destinations that could be reached from the station, including St Petersburg and Vienna, with nothing to suggest that the intrepid traveller could expect to make several changes along the way. Rather more practical was the inclusion in this list of Westgate-on-Sea and Crystal Palace. Two through lines were lopped through the station, with another three terminating tracks. The roof was kept as short as possible, and constructed of iron and glass, although canopies were provided above the outer ends of the platforms.

Trains running to Holborn Viaduct generally stopped at Blackfriars, while it also took the City portions of trains from the new Gravesend branch, opened on the same day as the new terminus, and which were later joined by those from the Greenwich Park branch, opened in October 1888. The new station was the only one operated by the LCDR with direct access to the underground network. Ludgate Hill continued to prove inadequate for the traffic on offer and became the butt of much press criticism as it was the most convenient station for Fleet Street, then the home of almost all the national newspapers and of the London offices of many provincial dailies. Holborn Viaduct was generally regarded as being useless, being inconveniently sited. Despite these criticisms, it was not until well after the formation of the South East & Chatham that any attempt was made to remedy the situation, with a minor reconstruction of Ludgate Hill between 1907 and 1912.

The First World War saw a dramatic reduction in services reflecting both the need to save resources and also to allow for the large number of military specials operated. These reductions hit Ludgate Hill especially hard, jammed between Blackfriars and Holborn Viaduct, and postwar, the station was open only during rush hours from 1919. Electrification failed to save the station, but rather hastened its end, with closure on 2 March 1929. Part of the problem was that the station was in too tight a spot for expansion, and its platform was too short for an eight car electric train by some 80 feet – roughly a carriage length and a third.

The Southern Railway introduced electric suburban trains to both Holborn Viaduct and St Paul’s on 12 July 1925, initially from the latter station to Crystal Palace (High Level), Shortlands via the Catford loop, while a service from Holborn Viaduct to Shortlands and Orpington via Herne Hill also called at the station. The running roads at St Paul’s were re-arranged so that trains on the local lines to Holborn Viaduct could operate in parallel with the main line trains terminating at St Paul’s. There were also some modifications to the platforms, including extending all of them to take eight car trains, and at the river end these now provided some fine views of the Thames downstream. St Paul’s, later Blackfriars, saw a steady extension of its electric services up until the outbreak of World War II, culminating in the extension to Gillingham and Maidstone on 2 July 1939.

The services using Blackfriars were reduced as a wartime emergency measure from 16 October 1939, including the complete withdrawal of rush hour services to Dartford via Lewisham. The First World War had spared the City termini from the worst of German bombing, with only the Great Eastern’s Liverpool Street being hit, but the Second World War saw considerable damage inflicted, especially at the height of the 1940-41 blitz. The worst night of the blitz was that of 16/17 April 1941 when a bomb wrecked the old Blackfriars signal cabin on the south side of the river. Immediately, flagmen were put into position to signal trains through the section and work the points, but worse was to come when either a large bomb or landmine destroyed the bridge over Southwark Street and seven flagmen seeking refuge in a shelter were caught by the blast, with three being killed outright, another three dying in hospital from severe burns, and just one surviving to make a slow recovery in hospital. With military help, a temporary bridge with two running roads was ready in fifteen days, but a permanent replacement was not in place until 9 October 1942. The terminal roads at Blackfriars were locked out of use until the end of the war, while temporary signalling arrangements were provided.

It was not until 12 August 1946 that a full restoration of services could be made at Blackfriars, with wartime cuts in services reversed and a new signal cabin at Blackfriars opened on that day and the terminal roads re-opened. The station’s platforms were numbered 1 to 5 from east to west at the same time.

Blackpool

The railways projected Blackpool from being a small seaside resort to one of the leading resorts in the British Isles. Expansion started when the Preston & Wyre Railway reached the town in 1846. A little more than half a century later, the number of visitors annually had soared from around 3,000 to more than 3 million. A second line running along the coast reached the town in 1861, although this was not connected to the line to Preston until 1874, by which time both lines into the resort were owned and operated jointly by the Lancashire & Yorkshire Railway and the London & North Western Railway, but both companies used separate termini, with the LYR using Talbot Road, which later became Blackpool North, and which was rebuilt in 1898 with 15 platforms, and the LNWR using Central, rebuilt in 1900 with 14 platforms. In 1903, the 1861 coast line had an avoiding line built that shortened the distance from Preston by five miles.

Between the world wars, motor coaches made inroads into the summer excursion traffic, and this increased post-war with the added competition from private cars. Nevertheless, the main factor in the decline of Blackpool as a resort and the reduction in railways services has been the growth of foreign package holidays. The direct line was closed in 1967 and services were concentrated on Blackpool North, rebuilt in 1974, while through services to and from London ended in 1992, although there are still direct services to Manchester and Leeds.

Blyth & Tyne Railway

Dating from 1852, the Blyth & Tyne Railway was a merger of a number of small railways in the area between Morpeth, Blyth and Tynemouth. At the time, the export trade of coal through Blyth was growing rapidly, as were landings of fish, and in 1862, the BTR agreed to exchange traffic at Morpeth with the North British Railway. In 1864, the BTR opened a branch line to Newcastle.

Meanwhile, the North Eastern Railway had been attempting to unite the many small railways in Northumberland and Durham, and the BTR remained the only significant independent company. The BTR was profitable, with average dividends during 1854-64 of 9 per cent, and continuing to improve afterwards, peaking at 12.5 per cent in 1872. It was predominantly a freight railway, with passenger traffic providing just a quarter of its revenue. Nevertheless, substantial investment was needed, with the harbour at Blyth needing dredging to allow larger ships to use the port, while the agreement with the NBR had failed to produce substantial traffic. The NER bought the BTR for a substantial sum in 1874.

The wealthy NER started work on the port at Blyth in 1880, by which time the port’s coal traffic had fallen to 235,000 tons, but over the next three decades it rose to 4,164,000 tons, and it was to rise still further to peak at more than 6 million tons in the early 1960s.

Board of Trade

The Board of Trade was primarily concerned with British shipping, but as the railway network grew, it was felt that some form of government regulation would be necessary. The House of Commons appointed two committees to investigate the matters, and they recommended in 1838 that the railways should be regulated by a new board which would itself be answerable to the BoT. In 1840, the Railway Department of the Board of Trade was established. The BoT had already been collecting statistics on railways, and the head of its statistical department, G R Porter, became the first head of the Railway Department. The new department had five people when it was formed, but the entire staff of the BoT at the time totalled just thirty.

Not only was the BoT responsible to Parliament for examining new lines and certifying that they were safe to open, but it also acquired responsibility for investigation of accidents. The engineering expertise needed came from the Royal Engineers, whose officers soon acquired a sound reputation for their judgement and fairness, which was a considerable achievement as their experience was in civil engineering rather than railway operation. Even so, given the novelty of the steam locomotive, in the early days weaknesses of design or construction were sometimes overlooked.

The BoT lost its responsibilities for the railways after the First World War with the creation of a separate Ministry of Transport.

Boat trains

From the outset, ports were important to the railways; what would be today described as ‘traffic generators’. The early railways often linked inland towns or mining areas with the nearest port, a good example being the Liverpool & Manchester.

The London & Blackwall Railway was amongst the first to carry passenger traffic on its services to the pier at Blackwall, but these were not boat trains as such, and more akin to current services between Waterloo and Portsmouth carrying passengers for the Isle of Wight ferries. Nevertheless, there were also attempts to link ferries and trains at Greenock and Ardrossan, but at first disagreements between the railways and the shipping companies made this difficult, not least because ferry schedules were often dependent on tides and weather. These problems affected the quality of the connections provided at Dover and Folkestone between trains from London and ferries to Boulogne and Calais, which started during 1843-44.

The ferries to Ireland used ports that were less affected by the tides, and so the first british boat train was the London & North Western Railway’s ‘Irish Mail’, which conveyed passengers and mail between London and Holyhead at the same times daily. On some routes, notably the Great Eastern Railway’s boat trains from Liverpool Street to Harwich, only steamer passengers would be carried, but on other routes, non-ferry passengers were also allowed. Some railways, including the South Eastern & Chatham, built special sets for ferry passengers with a higher standard of comfort, and this practice was continued by the Southern Railway with its ‘Golden Arrow’ Pullman expresses. The Great Western also did this with its carriages for passengers joining and leaving transatlantic liners at Plymouth.

While the ‘Irish Mail’ was more of a description than a title, many of the boat trains were given special names and were amongst the more prominent named trains: the ‘Golden Arrow’ was one of the most famous, as was the ‘Ocean Liner Express’ between Waterloo and Southampton Docks, while there was also the ‘Ulster Express’ between Euston and Heysham.

Bombing – see Railways at War

Bonsor, Sir H Cosmo, Bt, 1848-1929

A man with widespread interests, Bonsor was MP for what is now Wimbledon, 1885 - 1900; a director of the Bank of England; a brewer; and succeeded Edward Watkin as chairman of the South Eastern Railway in 1898. He was made a baronet in 1925.

The SER was locked in ruinous competition with the London Chatham & Dover Railway, and Bonsor’s contribution to railway history was the creation of a working arrangement between the two companies, the South Eastern & Chatham Managing Committee, of which he became chairman in 1899. The two railways were able to coordinate and rationalise services, and Dover Marine station was built to ease transfer between boat trains and ferries. The ‘new’ railway was in good shape to bear the demands made of it during the First World War.

Bonsor was sceptical over plans to nationalise the railways before and immediately after the First World War. He remained chairman of the SECR until the end of 1922, but faced hostility amongst LCDR shareholders over the terms for the company’s merger into the Southern Railway.

Booth, Henry, 1788-1869

Secretary and treasurer of the committees formed in 1822 for the construction of the Liverpool & Manchester Railway, remaining with the company when it merged with the Grand Junction in 1845, and when this in turn merged into the London & North Western in 1848, he stayed until 1859. Although a corn merchant by trade, Booth became involved with railway technology, including the development of the multi-tube boiler and inventing a screw coupling. He also wrote on railway matters, and advocated ‘railway time’, that is a standard time for all railways throughout the British Isles and the predecessor of GMT.

Bouch, Sir Thomas, 1822-80

After training under Joseph Locke, Bouch became manager and engineer for the Edinburgh & Northern Railway, and is credited with designing the world’s first train ferries to cross both the Forth and the Tay. He designed and built railways throughout Great Britain, although his work, valued for its economy, often required expensive rebuilding later. Nevertheless, his work on stone viaducts was good, and he also was responsible for the towering iron trestle viaducts at Belah and Deepdale on the Barnard Castle-Tebay line. He was knighted for his design of the Tay Bridge, but died early after its collapse in which seventy people died. The blame for the disaster can be shared between Bouch and the contractors, with poor design, poor supervision of work and bad workmanship, and the fact that the bridge was too high in order to meet the demands of the harbour commissioners at Perth.

Bournemouth

Effectively a backwater until the railways came, Bournemouth was by-passed by the main coaching routes, and by the railways when they first arrived in the area with a line from Ringwood to Poole in 1847. Local opposition meant that the Ringwood Christchurch & Bournemouth Railway did not reach the town until 1870, but this was leased to the London & South Western Railway from the outset. Five years later, the Somerset & Dorset Railway reached the town and the following year was leased and worked jointly by the Midland Railway and the LSWR, much to the dismay of the Great Western Railway, although this used the ‘West’ station while the LSWR had the ‘East’. In 1888, the LSWR opened a shorter route from Brockenhurst to Christchurch and Bournemouth, reducing the distance from London to 108 miles, and finally linked its line to Bournemouth West as well as building the new Central station on a branch off the main line.

Prior to grouping, Bournemouth was just two hours from London and also had four trains a day from the Midlands. Post-grouping, the Southern improved services by accelerating trains and introducing the all-Pullman Bournemouth Belle, and had it not been for nationalisation, would have expected to electrify the line during the mid-1950s.

Bradshaw, George, 1801-1853

Apprenticed as an engraver in Manchester, his first notable work was a map of British canals, rivers and railways, published in 1830. In 1838, he started printing railway timetables, and in 1842, with his partner W J Adams, started to produce Bradshaw’s Monthly Railway Guide, which continued until 1961. A companion Continental Railway Guide followed in 1847 and, with the exception of the First World War, remained a regular publication until September 1939. Other publications included the Railway Manual, Official Directory and Shareholders’ Guide, all published annually between 1847 and 1942.

His most famous work, Bradshaw’s Monthly Railway Guide, became the sole standard guide to all railway services in the British Isles, using proof sheets of timetables from the railway companies themselves. While the guide carried the usual disclaimer over inaccuracies, none could ever be attributed to the publication’s own staff. On the other hand, this dependence on the railway companies meant that there was no uniformity to entries or instructions, and it was down to the reader to assess which of two or more competing routes was the best, although a comprehensive index helped. It was difficult to use, not helped by very small typefaces, and its bulk was increased by advertisements by hotels and for some railway services as well. On the other hand, it remains an invaluable insight to the development of railway passenger services, and one publisher, David & Charles, produced reprints of the Guide for significant dates in railway history.

During the 1930s, a companion volume was produced dealing with air services.

Bradshaw was an active member of the Society of Friends. He died early from cholera during a visit to Christiana (now Oslo).

Bradshaw’s Railway Guide – see Bradshaw, George

Brampton Railway(s)

Originating as a group of railways serving collieries to south-east of Brampton in Cumberland and which started as horse-drawn wagonways, many of them dating from the eighteenth century. Initially, only freight was carried, but between 1836 and 1881 a horse-drawn carriage, or ‘dandy’ carried passengers between Brampton and Brampton Junction on the North Eastern Railway. Steam started to be introduced during the 1830s, but conversion was not complete until 1881, when the passenger service was also converted. Services were taken over by the NER, but reverted to the mine owners as many lines closed and after nationalisation the system was operated by the National Coal Board until final closure in 1953.

Brassey, Thomas, 1805-70

Having started his career as a land agent and surveyor, heavily involved in the development of Birkenhead, in 1834 he turned to contracting, with his first project being the New Chester Road at Bromborough. The following year, his first railway contract was for the Pendridge line on the Grand Junction Railway, working with Joseph Locke. The working relationship between the two men continued for the rest of Brassey’s life, and included work throughout Great Britain and the Continent, including the London & South Western Railway and most of the Paris-Le Havre Railway.

By 1841, Brassey was one of the country’s leading contractors. With William Mackenzie and John Stephenson, he built the Lancaster & Carlisle Railway and worked on the Caledonian Railway, but Stephenson died in 1848 and Mackenzie became seriously ill in 1849. One of his most important contracts was on the Great Northern Railway between London and Peterborough. He also became involved with other contractors, including Peto and Betts, involving work on the Grand Trunk Railway in Canada. This new partnership financed and built the Victoria Docks on the Thames, and the London Tilbury & Southend Railway, which was one of several also operated by Brassey, a true contractor’s line. All in all, he built more than 6,500 miles of railway, including a sixth of the British network. He was one of the few contractors to survive the failure of the bankers Overend Gurney, doubtless because of his own considerable wealth for he left a fortune of £3.2 million (around £150 million at today’s values).

Brecon & Merthyr Tydfil Junction Railway

Given the size of some of the companies that became constituents of the new Great Western, and the financial problems besetting the Cambrian, it must have seemed strange that the Brecon & Merthyr Tydfil Junction Railway did not become a constituent company of the so-called western group of companies. Nevertheless, the BMTJR was a complex operation, basically being divided into two by a 2.5 mile section of the Rhymney Railway between Deri Junction and Bargoed South Junction, and although possessing running powers, this must have been viewed as a structural weakness.

The northern section of the BMTJR was authorised in 1858 and opened in 1867, running between Brecon and Merthyr Tydfil. South of the Rhymney Railway, the southern section ran to Basseleg and over three miles of the Great Western Railway to Newport. This was also achieved by buying the ‘Old Rumney Railway’ in 1861, and using its route down the left bank of the river to build a new railway that opened in 1865. The Old Rumney’s upper portion was also pressed into use and in 1905 was linked to the Barry Railway so that coal and ore could be brought down for shipment at Barry. This complicated system led to many problems with its neighbouring lines and made profitability difficult to achieve, while much of the 60 route miles were difficult to operate.

Brighton

Brighton was a fashionable seaside resort well before the arrival of the railway, due to the fashion for sea bathing and the patronage of the Prince Regent. By the time the first railways were proposed for the town, with six rival schemes mooted between 1834 and 1835, there were no less than sixteen coach services a day between London and Brighton, with the 50 mile journey taking 5½ hours.

In 1836, Parliament approved the LBSCR scheme, which was the most direct but also the costliest, and the railway opened in 1841. The resort was by this time no longer fashionable, but the railway created the day tripper market and the commuter market. The LBSCR made Brighton its railway town by moving its rolling stock and carriage works there in 1852, bringing to the resort its sole industrial activity. Both the SER and LCDR proposed routes to Brighton, but failed. Having reached Brighton, the LBSCR spread itself east and west along the coast, but also ensured that these towns also received direct trains from London.

The LBSCR had what would be regarded today as an up-market image, although sometimes this seems to have been at the price of neglecting its third class passengers. Pullman trains were operated and even on ordinary expresses, a Pullman car could often be found. This was not so extravagant as it might seem, since the short distances of even its trunk services were such that a conventional dining car would have been able to take just one sitting.

After the grouping, the Brighton line became Britain’s first main line electrification, and in true LBSCR tradition, many of the comforts of the Brighton Belle all-Pullman train were to be found on other services as Pullman cars were inserted into otherwise standard electric multiple units.

Bristol

New docks had opened in Bristol in 1809, but it was not until 1841 that the city was linked to London by the new Great Western Railway. To be fair, the railway could not have been ready to coincide with the opening of the docks, and as many of the early railways, such as the Stockton and Darlington and the Liverpool and Manchester, were short distance and met local needs, the delay in building what was from the start a trunk route seems understandable. At the start of the nineteenth century, an entrepreneur wanting to link two major cities would have been more likely to consider building a canal.

Nevertheless, the GWR arrived in Bristol to find that the next stage of the railway westwards, the Bristol to Bridgwater section of the Bristol & Exeter Railway, was already opened. Both lines were built to the broad gauge favoured by Brunel, engineer to both companies, but it was strange that the meeting of the two at Temple Meads, about a mile from the centre of Bristol, was at right angles, and a tight curving line with a separate ‘express platform’ cutting across the approach to the BER’s station, proved necessary. That Bristol was to be not simply a terminus but a major junction and interchange was soon confirmed by the opening of the Bristol & Gloucester Railway in 1844, again engineered by Brunel, but his ambition to continue the line to Birmingham was foiled when the Midland Railway suddenly acquired both the Bristol & Gloucester and the Birmingham & Gloucester railways in 1845. The first standard gauge trains to reach Bristol were those of the Midland Railway from Birmingham in 1854. It was not until after the opening of the Severn Tunnel in 1886 that the GWR could open its own route to the Midlands via Shrewsbury, followed in 1908 by a route to Birmingham Snow Hill via Stratford-upon-Avon.

Brunel’s dedication to the broad gauge made both him and the GWR unpopular in Bristol, where the influential local merchants and the council felt that it isolated the city from the national standard gauge network. Feeling on the matter ran so high that as early as 1861 the first plans for a standard gauge rival line to London were being promoted, with the Bristol & South Western Junction Railway running forty miles to join the London & South Western Railway line to Waterloo from Exeter. There was another scheme in 1882 and yet a third as late as 1902, by which time the broad gauge was history, but another factor in these schemes was the desire to build a central station in Bristol, although finding a suitable location for this would have been difficult.

Traffic between Bristol and South Wales had been strong for many years, with the distance between Bristol and Newport by sea being just twenty-five miles. A rail link between Bristol and South Wales was introduced in 1852 with trains running over the Bristol & Gloucester and South Wales Railways, although this meant that the distance between Bristol and Newport by train was eighty-two miles. In 1863, the broad gauge Bristol & South Wales Union Railway opened a line from Bristol to New Passage, connecting with a steam ferry to Portskewett, which was on a short branch off the South Wales Railway. The BSWUR line eventually was adapted to provide the route to the Severn Tunnel, which opened in 1886 and with a length of more than four miles was then the world’s longest underwater tunnel. The opening of the tunnel meant that most of the traffic between London and South Wales worked through Bristol and Bath, a shorter and more direct route than that via Gloucester, with an avoiding line keeping through traffic away from Temple Meads.

Meanwhile, in 1878, an elegant new Temple Meads station was built by the GWR and MR, displacing the original station and that of the Bristol & Exeter. The original station became a goods station and then a car park before being used as an exhibition centre more recently. Despite the construction of a spacious new station, continued growth meant that Temple Meads continued to be congested, and several measures were taken, initially to ease pressure on the station and then, later, to reduce distances and journey times, ending the jibe that GWR stood for ‘Great Way Round’. First, the Bristol Avoiding Line was built in 1892, close to Temple Meads, while far more ambitious the Castle Cary cut-off opened in 1906 reduced the route from Paddington to Taunton by twenty miles. Before this, the South Wales & Bristol Direct Railway opened in 1903, and often referred to as the ‘Badminton Line’, cut the Paddington to South Wales route by twenty-five miles compared to that via Gloucester and ten miles compared to the line through Bath and Bristol, and journey times were better than these figures might suggest as the new line enjoyed an excellent alignment. Using the Badminton Line, even the route to Bristol was reduced by a mile, and enabled the GWR to offer a two-hour Paddington to Bristol schedule.

Other routes continued to grow out of Bristol, including one to Southampton and Portsmouth which also shared part of its route with the line to Weymouth. A relatively small port development at Portishead was linked by broad gauge track to the Bristol & Exeter Railway in 1867. Later, both the GWR and the MR built lines to the docks at Avonmouth, where new docks opened in 1877 as ever larger deep sea ships could no longer reach Bristol up the spectacular, but narrow, Avon Gorge. Surprisingly, lines into the existing Bristol Docks did not enjoy the same urgency, although three short dock branches were built eventually. Avonmouth was also connected to the South Wales line.

The lines to Bristol benefited from quadrupling during the 1930s, and both the GWR and the MR’s successor, the London, Midland & Scottish Railway, were given powers to borrow money to finance improvements in the Bristol area and at Temple Meads.

Bristol & Exeter Railway

Authorised in 1836 and supported by the same Bristol merchants behind the Great Western Railway, the BER also used the GWR’s engineer, Isambard Kingdom Brunel and was built to the same broad gauge. While both companies were independent, the fate of the BER depended on that of the GWR, and in 1840, before it opened, it was leased by the GWR until 1849. Bridgwater was reached in 1841 with a branch to Weston-super-Mare, while Exeter was reached in 1844. Further branches followed to Clevedon, Tiverton and Yeovilton between 1847 and 1853, while the company also worked the Exeter & Crediton Railway until 1862.

With the expiry of the GWR’s lease, the BER took over operations itself, but remained as a partner in the traffic between London and Plymouth. Nevertheless, it suffered when the London & South Western Railway reached Plymouth in 1860 using standard gauge. Meanwhile, new branches were built, including Barnstaple, Chard, Minehead, Portishead and Wells. Between 1854 and 1861, it leased the Somerset Central Railway, but in 1862 the company merged with the Dorset Central to form the Somerset & Dorset Railway, leased to the Midland and the LSWR in 1875. This move is credited with forcing the merger of the BER and the GWR the following year.

The BER had a poor reputation for the quality of its trains and infrastructure, but it was reasonably profitable and was the first major railway to use the block system, operating throughout its life without a serious accident.

Bristol & Gloucester Railway

Incorporated in 1839, the Bristol & Gloucester incorporated a horse-drawn railway of the same name opened in 1832 to carry coal to Bristol from Coalpit Heath, a distance of just nine miles. Using the same engineer as the Great Western, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, and broad gauge, in 1843, three connections with other railways were authorised, linking with the GWR at Bristol; a junction with the broad gauge Cheltenham & Great Western Union Railway, which ran from Swindon to Gloucester, at Standish Junction, and with running powers over this to Gloucester, reached in 1844. At Gloucester, the BGR met the standard gauge Birmingham & Gloucester. The result was that passengers and goods between the two railways had to be transferred, leading to much chaos, delay and extra expense. Daniel Gooch designed special equipment for handling goods, but it was unsuccessful.

The situation at Gloucester led to a Royal Commission on Gauges being appointed as early as 1845, and they visited the city to see the situation for themselves. The Bristol and Birmingham companies agreed to unite as the Bristol & Birmingham, but before this could happen, they were both absorbed by the Midland Railway in 1846. Nevertheless, at this stage the MR was overextending itself, and it took until 1854 before a third rail taking mixed gauge to Bristol could be completed.

British Railways/British Rail

On nationalisation, the operating identity of the new railway managed by the British Transport Commission’s Railway Executive was British Railways. A corporate identity campaign during the mid-1960s saw the shorter title adopted.

British Railways inherited the assets and manpower of the ‘Big Four’ or grouped railway companies, which in order of size were the London, Midland & Scottish, London & North Eastern, Great Western and Southern Railways, four very different companies. The ‘new’ or combined railway inherited 19,639 route miles; 20,023 steam locomotives; 36,033 locomotive-hauled passenger carriages and 4,184 electric multiple unit carriages, with the latter mainly on the SR and to a lesser extent on the LMS. There were also 1,223,634 goods wagons of which half came from private owners, although the majority of these would have been the nationalised coal mines. There were also small numbers of diesel shunting locomotives and a number of diesel railcars, the latter mainly on the Great Western which also had a diesel multiple unit.

The relationship between the BTC and the Railway Executive was uneasy. After the general manager of the GWR, Sir James Milne, had turned the post down, Sir Eustace Missenden of the SR accepted it, possibly out of a sense of duty because it appears to have given him little satisfaction.

The new BR was divided into six regions, with the Southern Region approximating to the former operating area of the Southern Railway, while a similar situation existed with the Western Region and the GWR. The LNER was divided between the Eastern Region, the North Eastern Region and the Scottish Region; while the LMS was divided between the London Midland Region and the Scottish Region. The former joint lines were allocated to the region in which they existed, while the London, Tilbury & Southend was transferred to the Eastern Region. The boundary lines of the regions required some movement of responsibilities. Each region had a chief regional officer as the representative of the Railway Executive.

Naturally enough, one priority was to rationalise working practices and standardise new equipment. Another was to restore the railways to their pre-war standard after the ravages of enemy action and the neglect that resulted from having insufficient skilled maintenance personnel and over-working locomotives and rolling stock to meet the demands of the war effort. There was considerable resistance to rationalisation and standardisation, with chief mechanical engineers in particular feeling that their way was best. One early casualty was Oliver Bulleid of the SR.

Relationships between the RE and the regions improved considerably after Sir John Elliott replaced Missenden in 1951, but his tenure was short as he was replaced by Sir Brian (later Lord) Robertson in 1953, the RE disbanded and area boards were created under the BTC. Nevertheless, the situation was deteriorating as a £19m operating surplus in 1948 became a deficit of £17m by 1955. That year, in an attempt to gain complete control of the development of the railways, the BTC published a modernisation plan valued at £1,240m, but soon increased to £1,500m, over fifteen years. This was meant to mark the replacement of steam by electric and diesel traction; widespread use of larger fitted (ie air or vacuum braked) goods wagons in place of smaller hand-braked goods wagons; modernisation of passenger and goods stations, with large mechanised goods yards replacing many small yards.

The truth was, of course, that after the war the RE had allowed steam locomotive construction to continue, and while wartime losses may have made some production necessary, no attempt had been made to switch to diesel or electric traction. The BTC had been unhappy about this.

Commitments under the Modernisation Scheme included the long-delayed electrification of suburban services from Liverpool Street, as well as those from King’s Cross and the Glasgow suburban network, and the main lines from London to Birmingham, Liverpool, Manchester and Leeds, and possibly also York, and a grudging commitment to electrify the Southern Region lines into Kent. Where electrification was not regarded as viable, diesel locomotives would be introduced, with diesel multiple units for the less busy passenger services.

Priority was given to the London, Midland Region electrification, which was delayed because of the decision to switch from the proposed 1,500 V dc overhead system to the new 25kV ac system – the correct choice as it turned out. It was also beyond the available technical resources of both BR and industry to handle more than one significant scheme at any one time. By contrast, the introduction of diesels went ahead at a reckless pace, with too many locomotives of different types ordered in quantity, many of them underpowered and, ultimately, under-utilised before early withdrawal. The lack of experience in ordering diesel traction and multiple units also showed in the arrangements made for maintenance, often using steam depots with a consequent impact on reliability. Vacuum brakes had been specified for the new goods wagons, but this had to be reversed in favour of air brakes. The new marshalling yards were, in some cases, a waste of resources as freight traffic continued to decline. Nevertheless, within fifteen years, the railway was transformed, although electrification to York had to await electrification of the East Coast main line to Edinburgh, while also missing was electrification of the busy, and profitable, line to Southampton and Bournemouth, even though the Southern’s 1937 electrification had taken the third rail as far as Brookwood, more than 25 miles from Waterloo. Not everything was as it should have been, with the new diesel locomotives, for example, continuing to have a two-man crew, despite not needing a fireman and indeed having the benefit of a dead man’s handle!

The delay in electrifying to Glasgow and Edinburgh meant that as an interim solution these lines had to have diesel locomotives, and after the West Coast main line was electrified first, to provide a suitable standard of service to Edinburgh, the famous and successful Inter-City 125 or High Speed Train had to be introduced. What this meant was that the West Coast had within a few short years two generations of modern equipment, and the East Coast three, while a more comprehensive electrification scheme would have meant a straight steam to electric switch and better value for money.

The so-called ‘sparks effect’ meant that traffic on the newly electrified lines soared, but despite this the financial situation continued to worsen. The lines to Kent were in fact electrified in 1959 and 1961, using the Southern’s less costly third-rail dc system. One conclusion that followed was that the BTC was too costly and unwieldy, and its demise lay in the Transport Act 1962, which broke it up. Its chairman, Dr Richard (later Lord) Beeching became the new chairman of the British Railways Board. The new organisation was much smaller, but many of the senior managers recruited by Beeching from outside the railway industry did not remain long.

Beeching immediately started to analyse the income and expenditure of the railway, line by line, train service by train service, he proposed substantial closures and withdrawal of many services in his report, The Re-Shaping of British Railways. This was announced to the public as cutting the railways by a third. Beeching became synonymous with rationalisation and closures of lines and stations in the public mind. In fact, much work had already been done. Many lightly-used rural lines had already been closed, including all but two lines on the Isle of Wight, while Paddington had lost its services to the Midlands and Waterloo lost its services beyond Exeter. It was also the case that Beeching called for more investment and the introduction of new services more in tune with the needs of industry, such as the ‘Liner Trains’ of regular timetabled fast container trains that preceded the ‘Freightliner’ concept, and the ‘Merry-go-Round’ coal trains running nonstop from coal mines to power station, loading and unloading as they moved. Completion of modernisation was another Beeching initiative in a second report.

On the debit side, Beeching’s method of analysis has since been proved to be faulty. As an example, the analysis of receipts at stations did not allow for inbound traffic with return tickets, so many stations at holiday resorts showed a far worse passenger figure than was in fact the case. The role of branch lines in feeding the main lines was not given due weight, while the scope for lower cost branch operations was ignored. In short, the railway needed to be trimmed and productivity improved, but not as drastically as was in fact proposed. At the same time, before stations or lines could be closed, there had to be a public enquiry and the findings had to be confirmed by the Minister of Transport, so Beeching was never the sole culprit in closures.

Beeching retired in 1965 having been elevated to the peerage, and he was succeeded by Sir Stanley Raymond, but the deficit continued to rise and a new Labour administration with Barbara Castle as Minister of Transport introduced new arrangements, including a Joint Steering Group that reported to the BR Chairman and the Minister. The scene was set for constant friction. Raymond left under a cloud in 1967 and he was succeeded by a career railwayman, Sir Henry Johnson, who had been in charge of the London Midland electrification. Much of the pressure that had faced Beeching and Raymond was eased by the Transport Act 1968, which wrote off most of the capital debt of BR, and also provided a system for making grants to cover loss-making socially necessary services. A new National Freight Corporation took over the burden of small consignments, or ‘sundries’ traffic in railway terms, but also received the growing Freightliner network. In addition, passenger transport authorities were established for the major conurbations outside London with the power to provide subsidies for local railway services which they regarded as essential for the local transport network.

The previous year, the London Midland electrification had been completed, and in 1968, Euston station’s own reconstruction was completed. The line to Southampton and Bournemouth was also electrified in 1967, although diesel locomotives had to continue the journey for those trains terminating at Weymouth. Steam trains finally left the BR network in 1968, with a number of the locomotives being retired after less than a decade in service.

Line closures continued, but the decade saw a new modern logo, meant to represent ‘coming and going’ and a new blue and light grey colour scheme, which for most multiple units was blue all-over. The title of British Rail was adopted, although the legal entity remained the British Railways Board. Today, only the logo remains as the standard railway station logo on direction signs in Great Britain. Behind the scenes, attempts were made to improve productivity, with single manning of locomotives and the withdrawal of the guard from goods trains with a continuous brake, while some closures continued, so that within less than a quarter of a century after nationalisation, BR had cut route miles by 41 per cent; passenger and goods stations by 67 per cent; passenger carriages by 57.5 per cent; goods wagons by 22 per cent; while 20,000 steam locomotives had disappeared leaving operations to 3,633 diesel locomotives and 317 electric engines, as well as a much larger number of electric and diesel multiple units. The longest railway line to have escaped passenger station closures completely was that between London Waterloo and Portsmouth Harbour via Guildford, known as the ‘Portsmouth Direct’, but even on that line the goods stations had been closed and many of the sidings surfaced to provide much-needed car parking for commuters. The longest stretch of line in the country without a station closure was on the Waterloo to Weymouth line, where for more than eighty miles stations remained open until one reached the New Forest, to the west of Southampton.

When Johnson retired in 1971, he was succeeded by a former Labour Minister of Transport, Richard, later Lord, Marsh. Yet another Railways Act in 1974 abandoned the provision of subsidies for unremunerative, but socially necessary services, with a lump sum known as the Public Service Obligation. Grants were made available to industry to build private sidings in an attempt to get freight back onto the railways. Even so, Marsh was openly critical of the limitations on investment imposed by the government. On the debit side, after much work by BR and by SNCF, the French nationalised railways, plans for a Channel Tunnel were scrapped. After difficult trials, the Advanced Passenger Train (APT), with its new tilting technology was scrapped, but in 1974, the first diesel High Speed Trains, or HSTs, also known as the IC125, were introduced and proved a great success. The brand ‘Inter-City’ was also created for fast long distance express services offering seat reservations and catering. Electrification continued, with the so-called Great Northern scheme from King’s Cross to Welwyn and Hertford North, completed in 1976.

That was the same year that Marsh left to be succeeded by Sir Peter Parker, who agreed with Marsh that the railways needed further investment, and famously coined the phrase, ‘crumbling edge of quality’. New investment did continue to be authorised, and Parker’s early contribution was approval for electrification of the lines from Moorgate and St Pancras to Bedford, while the London, Midland electrification finally crossed the border to reach Glasgow in 1974, and that city’s suburban electrification also continued to grow. Yet another Transport Act in 1978 saw Freightliners returned to BR from the NFC, while ‘Speedlink’, a timetabled fast long-distance freight trains augmented the original Freightliner concept, but had to be abandoned in 1991. Bulk traffic remained steady, although ironically, private owners’ wagons, for so long the bane of the railway manager’s life, were returning in greater numbers.

Productivity remain elusive, for despite earlier agreements on single-manning, opening of the electrified services between London and Bedford were delayed on this issue until 1983.

In the meantime, a Conservative government had been elected in 1979. BR was told to sell off its non-core activities, disposing of its ferry services, marketed as Sealink, and hotels, while British Rail Engineering was created to take control of the railway workshops, and a division was created between maintenance and manufacture, with the latter sold off in 1989. To make the railway more business-orientated, BR itself was divided into sectors, of which the main ones were Inter-City; London & South-East; Other Provincial Services, and Freight. Area management became more important, regional management less so. Sectorisation had its supporters, but created problems as the sector judged to be the main user of any stretch of track took responsibility for its maintenance, leaving Freight to complain about the high costs of track maintained to Inter-City standards, while Other Provincial Services would complain about track maintained to Freight standards.

One of the railway managers involved with sectorisation was Sir Robert ‘Bob’ Reid, who took over from Parker in 1983. Reid was probably the strongest leader BR ever had, and this was coupled with political awareness. In the five years to 1988, he maintained a tight control on railway finances, which were boosted by a property boom that enabled the British Rail Property Board to become a useful income generator until the property slump of 1988. In the meantime, Reid also managed to persuade his political masters to electrify the East Coast main line to Edinburgh, while work was under way in completing the Eastern Region (which had been merged with the North Eastern in 1966) main line electrification. A low cost electrification had seen the third-rail reach Hastings, albeit with single-line working through the Mountfield Tunnel with clearances too tight for standard rolling stock, and with no additional rolling stock ordered, having to stretch productivity of the existing Southern Region emus.

At the same time, the railways had been subjected to another thorough review, which resulted in the Serpell Report, officially a ‘Review of Railway Finances’, published in January 1983. Sir David Serpell, who chaired the committee that produced the report, was a former permanent secretary at the Department of Transport and in retirement a part-time member of the British Railways Board. Serpell almost became a ‘Beeching Mk2’ as it concentrated solely on the commercial network and would have closed the railways north of Edinburgh and Glasgow, west of Cardiff and Bristol, while the Portsmouth line would have suffered the ultimate nonsense of being cut outside the city at Havant. Edinburgh would have been reached via the West Coast main line as the line between Edinburgh and Newcastle would have been closed.

If Beeching’s methodology had been flawed, that of Serpell was completely devoid of reason and ignored the fact that most railway lines became less profitable towards the end, what might be described as the ‘country’ terminus. There is with bus and railway routes, a taper effect. Perhaps realising this, a compromise report based on a reduced support network was produced, bringing Dundee and Aberdeen back into the network, but leaving Plymouth out of it.

The big problem that hit BR during Reid’s tenure was the miners’ strike of 1984, which cost BR £200 million in revenue, and by virtually killing off the British coal mining industry, struck a harsh blow at the bulk loads traffic, including the ‘Merry-Go-Round’ trains. Looking for further cuts, Broad Street was closed, but Marylebone survived despite plans to convert it into a coach station.

Despite the merger of the Eastern and North Eastern regions earlier, and the growing importance of the sectors, a new Anglia Region was created in 1988. The sectors were also divided into sub-sectors, giving many the impression that privatisation was looming. The Freight Sector divided into Railfreight Distribution, which was merged with Freightliner, and Trainload Freight, while parcels survived for a period as a separate sub-sector. ‘Other Provincial Services’ became ‘Regional Railways’, which no longer sounded as if it consisted of the odds and ends that no one wanted. The London & South-East Sector became ‘Network South-East’ with an identity of its own. The regions eventually disappeared in 1992.

Meanwhile, the Channel Tunnel project was resurrected in 1986, and BR became heavily involved with Union Railways, a company intended to design a high speed link between London and the tunnel, while European Passenger Services was created to organise the railway services.

Cost cutting continued, with the increasing use of unstaffed stations, with growing vandalism, and conductor guards, which especially on crowded trains led to an increase in fare evasion. BR had the best productivity and lowest government funding of any European railway. Nevertheless, the East Coast main line was finally electrified, with an extension to Glasgow Central via Motherwell, a lengthy route because the direct line to Glasgow Queen Street ended at a terminus with very short platforms and little scope for expansion.

By this time, the West Coast main line was in dire need of modernisation, while on Network South-East, old slam door trains still ran, even though questions were by this time being raised about their safety. The upgrading of the main line between London and Folkestone, with new connections to enable trains to reach a new station at Waterloo International, in preparation for the Channel Tunnel made excessive demands on the funding being given by the government, or the taxpayer, and led to neglect in other areas. Indeed, in the south, passengers on the line to Portsmouth, at the time highly profitable, had to make do with the original 1937 electrification stock until 1968-69, while those on the London Midland had had two new fleets of carriages and first a diesel service and then electrification during that time.

Confusingly, ‘Bob’ Reid was followed by ‘Bob Reid Mk II’ when he retired in April 1990. The new Sir Robert ‘Bob’ Reid came from a very different background, having been chairman of Shell (UK), and faced a scene dominated by the needs of privatisation.

British Transport Commission

The railways were not the only form of transport nationalised under the Transport Act 1947, which also included canals and the docks, ferry services and bus companies owned by the railways, as well as the railways’ hotel, road haulage and carrier interests. The operations of the London Passenger Transport Board were included for good measure. The ultimate intention was to nationalise all inland transport, but given the fragmented nature of public road transport and road haulage, this was impractical at the outset. Most narrow gauge railways also escaped. A number of major road hauliers were also taken, and two of the major bus operating groups, Thomas Tilling and Scottish Motor Traction, were also added, but the British Electric Traction Group avoided nationalisation until the late 1960s, although some of its bus companies had minority railway shareholdings that passed to the BTC.

The Act imposed on the BTC a duty to integrate all inland public transport and to balance its books, ‘taking one year with another’. Clearly, the LPTB was to be a model, but the BTC was on an unprecedented scale.

The BTC operated through a series of executives, of which the Railways Executive and the London Transport Executive were just two, with others covering inland waterways, docks and road haulage. Over the executives at the BTC board, of which the first full-time members were the chairman, Sir Cyril (later Lord) Hurcombe, a retired civil servant; Sir William Wood, formerly of the London, Midland & Scottish Railway; John Benstead of the National Union of Railwaymen and Lord Rusholme from the Co-operative Movement. It seems clear that only one of these had substantial transport operating experience, and only two experience of managing a substantial commercial organisation.

Despite having delegated power to the executives for each mode of transport, the BTC’s own staff duplicated much of their work by producing area schemes each of which was intended to produce regional monopolies, while for goods traffic, charges schemes were intended to draw traffic towards the most efficient and economic form of transport. These ambitions made little progress as at the level of the executives and below at company level, or in the case of the railways, at regional and area level, management dragged their feet. Staff attitudes were also hostile. Relations between the BTC and the executives were poor and especially so with the Railway Executive, which even the BTC considered over-centralised and resistant to new ideas.

In 1953, a Conservative government passed its own Transport Act, which retained London Transport but abolished the other executives, and attempted to establish area boards to decentralise the railways. The duty to integrate transport was dropped, while around two-thirds of the road haulage companies were sold off. All of the operations apart from London Transport reported directly to the BTC, which had to expand its own bureaucracy rapidly to cope with the demand. A new chairman, Sir Brian Robertson, a retired army officer, inherited a cumbersome operation. On top of this, growing road competition and increased car ownership, plunged the railways into loss, and in an attempt to reverse the situation, a Modernisation Plan was launched in 1955. Nevertheless, this struggled under pressure to show early benefits and from resistance from the railway unions.

When Robertson retired in 1961, he was replaced by Dr Richard Beeching from Imperial Chemical Industries, and when the BTC itself was abolished by the Transport Act 1962, Beeching became the first chairman of the new British Railways Board.

The BTC cannot be regarded as a success. It failed to achieve the elusive goal of integration, and the other goal of financial self-sufficiency also faded away. It was a classic example of a political ideal being out of touch with the reality of business life.

Broad Street

No longer in existence, Broad Street was built as the City terminus for the North London Railway, which opened in 1850 as the East & West India Docks and Birmingham Junction Railway, dominated by the London & North Western Railway. The name of the original company showed that goods traffic was the aim, but by the time the simpler title of the North London Railway was adopted in 1853, it was clear that passenger traffic was of growing importance. At first the LNR used Fenchurch Street on the London & Blackwall Railway, but this involved a four-mile detour around East London.

The small NLR could only afford a terminus – sited at the junction of Broad Street and Liverpool Street – because the LNWR agreed to meet most of the cost as it needed a goods station in the City. To obtain Parliamentary approval for its extension, which was doubtful because of the number of homes that needed to be demolished, the NLR promised to provide workmen’s trains from Dalston for a return fare of just one penny. Design and construction of Broad Street was entrusted to the LNWR’s first chief engineer, William Baker. Three tracks connected the station with the rest of the LNR network. The platforms were approached by an external staircase on the eastern side of the station frontage, itself showing a mixture of styles and no record can be found of an architect.

Broad Street operated as a joint station with two booking halls, one for the NLR and the other for the LNWR, on either side of the clock tower. At platform level, there were two train sheds, initially having just four tracks between them. Opened on 1 November 1865, the initial service was a train every fifteen minutes to Bow, and another to Chalk Farm, as well as a service every half-hour to Kew via Hampstead Heath. In 1866, a service to Watford was introduced and in 1879, some Chalk Farm workings were extended to Willesden, but were cut back again in 1917. The LNWR goods yard was below the passenger platforms and wagons were raised and lowered by hydraulic lifts, but the goods sidings were to the west of the passenger station.

Despite having been built as cheaply as possible, the NLR and Broad Street proved to be a great success. The NLR’s traffic doubled and increased still further when from January 1875, trains ran through to Broad Street from Great Northern Railway suburban stations. At one time, Broad Street was one of the busiest of the London termini, handling 712 trains daily with 80,000 passengers in 1906. A fourth track into the station had been completed in 1874, while the station had eventually grown to have eight stone platforms, although tracks were laid over engine pits, while each pair of platforms shared a coaling stage, an indication of the intensity of suburban working. In 1912, a booking hall was built beneath the forecourt of the terminus for the Central London Railway’s extension from the Bank to Liverpool Street.

Before 1910, Broad Street handled local trains only, but to compete with the Great Western Railway’s improved service to Birmingham, the LNWR introduced a weekday restaurant car express between Wolverhampton and Birmingham and Broad Street, and which had as a special feature a typist who would type letters for passengers during the journey. This service only lasted until the outbreak of the First World War and was never reinstated.

Despite the promising first forty years or so, by its very nature Broad Street’s traffic was amongst the first to be seriously affected by the electric tram, the growth of the London Underground network and then the arrival of the motor bus. This first started to become noticeable in 1901, and by 1911, traffic was falling steadily. The answer lay in electrification, and although considered as early as 1904, it was not until after the LNWR took over the operations of the NLR in 1909 that progress began to be made. The LNWR’s 1911 scheme used the third and fourth rail system and electric trains started operations to and from Broad Street in October 1916, when services to Kew Bridge and Richmond were converted from steam. Rush hour services to Watford followed in 1917, but the off-peak service was not introduced until 1922, by which time there were also electric trains to Dalston. The LNWR passed to the London, Midland & Scottish Railway on grouping, by which time an intensive electric service was being operated, but steam trains continued to run to Poplar, Tring and a number of stations on the London & North Eastern Railway. The LMSR lengthened platforms 1 and 2, and operated services to Grays, Tilbury and Southend from 1923. Despite this, traffic continued to decline, and the LNER service became rush hour-only, while enlargement of Fenchurch Street saw the Southend and Tilbury services disappear in 1935. The situation wasn’t helped by the LMSR still using old NLR four-wheeled carriages up to 1938 on the Poplar service.

Fenchurch Street suffered some air raid damage during the First World War, with a thousand panes of glass being shattered, a wall demolished and horses wounded by bomb explosions in September 1915. This was nothing compared to the Second World War, when the terminus was put out of action on the night of 3/4 October 1940, and remained closed for several days. It also had to close on 13 October and 11 November following further enemy action. Services to the LNER were cancelled to make way for war traffic, but reinstated post-war. Heavy air raids on London’s East End also meant the withdrawal of services east of Dalston Junction, which were not reinstated after the war.

Post-war, Broad Street once again saw longer-distance trains as services to Cambridge were diverted to ease the pressure on King’s Cross. Nevertheless, during the 1950s, the terminus saw further reductions in its services so that eventually its main traffic consisted of electric rush hour services to Watford and Croxley Green, as well as peak diesel services to and from Stevenage, Hertford North and Welwyn Garden City, with only the Richmond service operating through the day. By 1969, just 9,000 passengers were using the station daily, the trainshed cut-back and the number of platforms reduced to five, mainly without a roof. It was closed in 1986 and redeveloped as office space.

Brunel, Isambard Kingdom, 1806-1859

One of the most famous of the great railway engineers, Brunel’s name is eternally associated with that of the Great Western Railway and the broad gauge. Brunel was born in Portsmouth of French parents, and educated in Paris before training in a watchmaker’s workshops. He worked with his father, Marc Isambard, on the Thames Tunnel before producing the winning design for the Clifton suspension bridge over the Avon Gorge in Bristol.

Possibly as a result of his work in Bristol, he was appointed engineer for the GWR’s main line between London and Bristol, using the 7ft broad gauge which he regarded as superior and which provided greater stability at high speeds. With the system of major companies sponsoring others providing useful extensions to their lines, Brunel was engaged as engineer on many other projects and altogether a thousand miles of track were laid as broad gauge.

One of the last leading engineers not to specialise, his work included major steamships such as the Great Britain and Great Eastern, while he also worked on dock projects and designed prefabricated hospitals for the Crimean War. Much of his work was outstanding, including the Royal Albert Bridge over the River Tamar at Saltash and Box Tunnel near Bath, but his enthusiasm for innovation also led to problems and cost overruns, as with the original plan to work the South Devon Railway using atmospheric propulsion. To the public, he was an inspiration, and did much to advance the status of engineers in Victorian society, but he could also be overbearing to his subordinates and intolerant of opposition, as when he attempted to use force to remove the contractors at Campden Tunnel in 1851, despite the presence of armed troops and the reading of the Riot Act.

His single-minded advocacy of the broad gauge also landed his clients in serious difficulties and they incurred unnecessary expense when they had to eventually adopt the standard gauge. He was right to argue that the broad gauge had benefits, but ignored the extra costs, and the fact that the broad gauge would not be suitable in many areas. His weakness as an engineer was his indifference to money, whether his own or that of his clients.

He died in 1851, almost certainly due to overwork.

Bulleid, Oliver Vaughan Snell, 1882-1970

Oliver Bulleid was, like his predecessor Maunsell, a man of considerable experience at home and abroad. He started his career as an apprentice under Henry Ivatt on the Great Northern Railway, but in 1908 moved to become the assistant manager of the Westinghouse works in Paris, before returning to the UK in 1911 to become personal assistant to Nigel Gresley, again on the GNR, for which company he was assistant carriage and wagon engineer in the three years before the grouping. Bulleid again became assistant to Gresley in 1923 when the former became the chief mechanical engineer of the new London & North Eastern Railway.

Bulleid took over as chief mechanical engineer at the Southern Railway in 1937, and inherited a railway in which development of larger and more powerful locomotives of the kind favoured by the LNER had been neglected, partly due to the demands of electrification., but also because of weight restrictions on many lines. He pressed successfully for the introduction of powerful 4-6-2 locomotives, and despite severe wartime restrictions on the type and size of locomotives that could be built, by claiming that his new designs were for mixed-traffic duties, succeeded in building no less than 140 Pacific locomotives of the Merchant Navy, West Country and Battle of Britain-classes, introducing many new features such as completely enclosed chain-driven valve gear and welded fireboxes, and an improved working environment for the enginemen. At the other end of the scale, he produced an austerity 0-6-0 freight locomotive, the Q1-class, of outstanding ugliness. The Bulleid Pacifics incorporated many features that were to be introduced into post-nationalisation designs, and were also more economical in their use of coal than the Britannia-class which in rebuilt form they closely resembled in appearance, but also had their weaknesses, including poor forward visibility and were prone to often catastrophic mechanical failures. His attempt at producing a steam locomotive capable of working at express speeds in either direction and based on current thinking on electric and diesel designs resulted in the Leader-class of C-C or 0-6-6-0 layout, which failed to pass the prototype stage, not least because of the great discomfort suffered by the fireman.

Far more successful and enduring was his work on new passenger rolling stock, using a design with widened bodies to provide greater comfort on mainline stock, and additional seating on suburban stock in the 4 SUB classes, with these features later carried over post-nationalisation onto the early 2 and 4 EPB and 2 HAP classes.

Post-war, Bulleid worked on a successful design for a prototype 1Co-1Co diesel-electric locomotive, the precursor of 350 locomotives for British Railways, but his anger at the rebuilding of his own Pacific classes, despite some of their features being incorporated in the new British Railways standard-classes, led him to resign in 1949 and join Coras Iompair Eireann, the Irish transport undertaking, as CME for the railways. He introduced diesel locomotives to Ireland and worked on new carriages and railcars as well as goods vehicles using welded production, and, as a final gesture to the steam locomotive, built yet another C-C design, but on this occasion designed to run on peat. He retired in 1958 to live in Malta.

Burry Port & Gwendraeth Valley Railway

Burry Port, to the west of Llanelli and south of Carmarthen, was one of the ports developed by the owners of the coal mines in response to the growing congestion at the older ports, despite the opening of new port facilities. The Burry Port & Gwendraeth Valleys Railway linked the port, which never became sizeable, with the mines in the Gwendraeth Valley, and was very much a minor player. The line was twenty-one miles long and officially not supposed to carry passengers, who arrived on the line as ‘trespassers’, but were tolerated so long as they paid 6d (2½p) for the carriage of their shopping basket.

Bus services

From early times, the railways were allowed to operate bus services that fed into their railway stations, which in many places was an operational necessity given that a considerable number of railway stations were some distance from the towns or villages they purported to serve. It was not until 1929 that the railways received the powers to operate bus services independently of their own network, and the Big Four moved quickly to either buy bus companies outright or take a shareholding in them. In some cases, they collaborated with railway companies operating in the same area sharing ownership of a bus company. The existing railway bus services were integrated into the companies that were acquired, sometimes to acquire an interest but often as a means of rationalising services. Different rules applied outside Great Britain, and in fact bus operation was the salvation of the Londonderry & Lough Swilly Railway and of the County Donegal in Ulster, which became bus operators, while in Guernsey the railway company never operated trains but went straight from trams to buses.

In some cases, the railway companies imposed a form of branding on the bus companies, with the Southern Railway having Southern Vectis on the Isle of Wight and Southern National in Dorset, for example, but this was not always the case and Hants & Dorset kept its name unchanged. One beneficiary was the National Union of Railwaymen, which started recruiting amongst the railway-owned bus companies.