Sometime, probably during the late 1920s, but certainly no later than 1930, Sir Herbert Walker opened a meeting with his officers with the simple statement: ‘Gentlemen, I have decided to electrify to Brighton.’
Many believe that Walker would have wanted an all-electric Southern Railway, but, this seems unlikely given the infrequent nature of many of the services in Devon and Cornwall as well as some of the lines on the Isle of Wight, although a Solent tunnel from near Lymington to Yarmouth was proposed. The LBSCR had ambitions to operate all of its passenger services, and possibly goods as well, using its ‘elevated electrics’.
There was also an incentive for further electrification. In his budget in 1929, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, the then Mr Winston Churchill, announced the abolition of the Railway Passenger Duty that had first been introduced in 1832, and by the late 1920s was levied on all passenger fares above 1d (0.4p) per mile, on condition that the sum was capitalised and used for railway modernisation. At the time, the Southern had enjoyed some success in stimulating leisure traffic to the main resorts with its special ‘summer fares’, offering third-class returns of 1d per mile. The Southern Railway’s share of the capitalised value of the duty was just over £2 million, while the cost of electrifying the main line from Victoria and London Bridge to Brighton and West Worthing was estimated to cost £2.7 million.