The way in which the state viewed transport was made clear on nationalisation. A massive new body, the British Transport Commission, was formed, under the chairmanship of Sir Cyril Hurcomb, a civil servant. The five full-time board members also included John Benstead of the National Union of Railwaymen and Lord Rusholme from the Co-operative Movement, although Lord Ashfield, who had been chairman of the Underground Group and then of London Transport had considerable experience of urban and suburban road and rail transport, as did Sir William Wood, who had considerable experience of railways in Ireland and with the LMS, before working on the Railway Executive Committee during the Second World War. Lord Ashfield died shortly after taking up office in 1948.
The BTC remit included the coordination of transport and it had powers to influence traffic movement through charging schemes to allow the different costs of the individual modes of transport to be used to direct freight and passenger traffic to the most economic and efficient mode for the particular traffic. The environment was ignored. Bus services were intended to be integrated through a series of area schemes that emphasised local monopolies, and which allowed the newly nationalised bus companies to make local acquisitions to strengthen their hold on the network. Even so, there were many local pockets of resistance in towns such as Winchester.
The BTC in effect became a massive interfering bureaucracy sitting between the Ministry of Transport, which was responsible for government policy on transport and for its regulation, including the operation of the traffic commissioners for road passenger transport and the licensing authorities for road freight transport, and the individual modes of transport, which were in turn administered by ‘executives’, of which the Railway Executive, commonly known as British Railways, and the London Transport Executive, were but two. The title ‘British Railways’ had originally been coined during the 1930s to promote Britain’s railways abroad, but then revived during the war years and used in publicity then and immediately afterwards, usually to discourage the public from travelling at holiday periods.
Squeezed between the operators and the ministry, the BTC was unpopular. For its part, the BTC saw the different executives as unwilling to modernise and embrace new ideas. The executives saw the BTC as including not just bureaucrats, but often politically-motivated idealists wishing to test their new ideas on the businesses.
From the start, despite being run by a civil servant, it was the intention that the BTC should pay its own way as a business.
The new British Railways started life on 1 January 1948, with 19,639 route miles of track, a small fall in route mileage since 1930 partly due to some minor pre-war trimming of the network and wartime closures of unnecessary routes. It inherited 20,023 steam locomotives, 36,033 passenger carriages, and a further 4,184 carriages contained within electric multiple units. There were small numbers of diesel railcars and shunting engines. The executive was to be criticised for foot dragging and a reluctance to modernise, but it was also subject to direction by the BTC, which can hardly have encouraged initiative. Enterprise must also have been inhibited by the very scale of the undertaking.
The continuing shortage of materials after the war limited what the companies could do before nationalisation. BR also had to standardise the operating practices of the former railway companies. Although it included the Irish Sea ferries operated by the old LMS and GWR, it did not have control of railway services in Northern Ireland: apart from the LMS-owned Northern Counties Committee. Nationalisation was delayed on the other side of the Irish Sea because three out of the five railway companies operating within Northern Ireland had cross-border operations, and it was not worth nationalising the small Belfast & County Down Railway, the other purely ‘internal’ operator, on its own.
Initially, the boundaries of the old Southern Railway and the Great Western approximated to those of the new Southern Region and the Western Region. There was some tidying up, with Fenchurch Street transferred to the new Eastern Region, while joint lines were each allocated to the most appropriate region. The LNER was divided between the Eastern, North Eastern and Scottish regions, and the LMS between the London Midland and Scottish regions, almost reverting to a pre-grouping structure. On the Southern Region, the old pre-grouping structure continued in the three divisions, Eastern, Central and Western, that perpetuated the areas of the South Eastern & Chatham, London Brighton & South Coast and London & South Western Railways.
After his opposite number at the Great Western turned the job down, Sir Eustace Missenden, the last general manager of the Southern Railway, chaired the British Railways executive. It was to be an unhappy end to his career on the railways and he soon understood why the job had been turned down by his counterpart on the GWR.
Early priorities included a new corporate identity. Members of the executive stood and watched as a succession of steam locomotives, each wearing different liveries, steamed slowly past, each with railway carriages again displaying different liveries. In the end, blue was selected for express locomotives and black for goods and mixed traffic, while carmine and cream became the new passenger rolling stock livery, variously known as ‘strawberries and cream’ or, to the cynics, as ‘blood and custard’. Exceptions were the Southern electric multiple units with a simplified green livery, Pullmans retaining their traditional brown and cream, and, of course, the Night Ferry ‘Wagons Lits’ remained blue. Later, all over red was used for local and suburban stock outside the Southern region, while diesel and electric multiple units were painted green.
A new standard British Railways carriage appeared as the Mark 1, available as a corridor carriage for main line use, with the option of open carriages, and as non-gangway carriage for suburban and other services. There were kitchen, buffet and restaurant car variants, as well as overnight sleepers and a variant for parcels use that could double up as a guard’s vehicle, although second-class and composite brakes were also available. Later, the Mk1 design was also made available for both diesel and electric multiple units, and both suburban and mainline versions were available with corridors or as open stock with gangways. It is worth noting, however, that Southern independence asserted itself with the first versions of new suburban electric multiple units retaining the old Bulleid ‘wide-bodied’ design, but later conformity was all and eventually the standard carriage held sway, indeed, it remained in production for Southern use well after the Mk2 design had been adopted elsewhere. The standard designs were generally pleasing in appearance, and the use of special wood, to which the attention of the passenger was drawn by a descriptive label, in first class, ended utility. The mainline Mk1’s large windows were an attractive feature, especially appreciated by small children who could have a good view from the window seat, not possible with the high sills of later rolling stock.
The selection of a standard design did not mean any great rationalisation of railway manufacturing and production plant, while construction of new steam locomotives continued despite BTC objections. Initially, just one major electrification programme was put in hand by the new British Railways, the Manchester-Sheffield-Wath line across the Pennines, completed in 1954. Exactly why steam locomotive construction continued until 1960 is something of a mystery, as by this time diesel traction was already predominant on many routes and electrification had resumed. The stupidity was all too apparent in 1968, when steam finally disappeared from Britain’s railways, just eight years after production ceased. Indeed, at the end of steam, many pre-grouping locomotives were still in service.
A new Conservative government passed the Transport Act 1953, abolishing the Railway Executive and establishing area boards under the British Transport Commission, with the new chairman of the BTC, General Sir Brian Robertson, becoming chief executive of the railways. This was a way of removing one layer of management and of control, but it is questionable whether it was the right layer. The other executives survived, including the LTE, and it would have seemed wiser to have disbanded the BTC itself and given the executives greater freedom, reporting direct to the relative departments of the Ministry of Transport. Many layers of control remained, with the British Railways regions including divisions and in their turn beneath them came the section and then the area.
The newly nationalised railways had an operating surplus of £19 million (£356 million today) in 1948, small enough given the size and turnover of the undertaking, but by 1955 this had become a deficit of £17 million (around £238 million today). The deterioration was blamed on rising costs and renewed road competition as well as an industrial dispute that seriously affected the railways throughout a substantial part of 1955, and doubtless gave a shot in the arm both to road competition and to the expanding internal air services.
With the railways firmly in its control, the British Transport Commission acted decisively. In 1955, a Modernisation Plan was published.
Subsidies
The question of losses became one of the major issues from the mid-1950s onwards. The solution was to be a combination of writing off losses and subsidy, of cutting the number of lines and of removing duplication, while looking for other ways of cutting costs, such as unstaffed stations or removing ticket inspections.
The question of state subsidies dates from as early as 1817, when the Exchequer Loan Commission was established to provide low cost loans for major public works. Initially it was intended to support town councils, but between 1830 and 1844, five English railway companies, including the Liverpool & Manchester, and four Irish companies benefited from loans provided by the Commission. These could have been seen as an early form of pump priming, for afterwards, few English railway companies were in need of state support as money for their construction flowed in from anxious investors, eager to share in the great boom.
Even when £1 million was set aside for the construction of light railways under the terms of the Light Railways Act 1896, only a fifth of the sum was actually used.
The two significant exceptions to subsidy came in the later years of the railway age, and reflected the need to ensure that some of the remoter parts of Scotland were served.
A more generous approach to providing low cost loans had been the spur to modernisation and employment creation of the Guarantees and Loans Act 1934.
Safety
Just as the change from individual companies to four large groups did not provide any guarantee of safety, neither did nationalisation. At Harrow, a station shared by London Transport and the London Midland Region of British Railways, on a misty 8 October 1952, at the height of the morning rush hour the up-Perth sleeping car express was running late while the low-sun made it difficult for the driver and fireman to see the signals, which they overran at speed and collided with a local train sitting in the station. A down Euston to Manchester and Liverpool express ran into the wreckage, knocking down a footbridge and scattering carriages over a platform on which people were waiting for a Bakerloo tube train. At least 122 persons were killed.
There was a further accident a little more than five years’ later at Lewisham on 4 December 1957. Steam was still in use on the Kent coast services and when the driver of a Cannon Street to Ramsgate express became concerned about the steaming of his locomotive he overran two caution signals at full speed and did not brake until he had passed a red, crashing into the back of an electric multiple unit suburban train stopped at a signal under the flyover carrying the Nunhead line. The steam locomotive then struck the columns of the flyover, which collapsed on top of the wreckage, contributing to the ninety lives lost.
Modernisation did not stop the toll of accidents either, for by 1967, almost all of the lines in the South East were electrified, and for the few that were not, there were diesel multiple units. At Hither Green, on the evening of 5 November 1967, a diesel multiple unit fast train from Charing Cross to Hastings was derailed by a broken rail, killing forty-nine people and injuring another seventy-eight. The casualty figures would have been far higher but for it being a Sunday evening on what was normally a busy commuter line.
In these accidents, the cause was soon established, but that at Moorgate, then the end of a branch of the London Transport Northern Line, on 28 February 1975, has never been found. An early morning Northern Line tube train on the City & Northern Branch ran into the station at full speed, overshot and went into the sand drag at the end and, still in tunnel, hit the cul-de-sac wall; and the first two carriages concertinaed. There were forty-three persons killed and another seventy-four injured.
Travellers themselves can be a source of danger to those around them, and this was the case in a fire at the underground station at King’s Cross on 18 November 1987. A small fire, possibly from a smouldering cigarette end burning amongst rubbish under an up escalator from the Piccadilly Line platforms, developed gradually over fifteen minutes until there was a sudden flash-over and a fireball swept up the escalator and into the booking hall which was below street level. The complex nature of the underground station meant that trains continued to arrive and disgorge passengers for some minutes after the fire started. In the inferno, thirty-one people died. A smoking ban was introduced on all London Underground trains and stations as a result.
The next major accident on the nationalised commuter railway followed resignalling at Clapham Junction on the busy lines of BR’s Southern Region South-Western Division between Woking at Waterloo on 12 December 1988. An up-train had been brought to a stand on a stretch of line recently re-signalled while the signal behind the train continued to show clear. The stretch of track had a tight curve and the driver of the following up train from Bournemouth could not see the stopped train, and ran into it at high speed. This very busy section of line had quadruple tracks, arranged fast up, on which the accident occurred, fast down, slow up and slow down, and wreckage was scattered across adjoining tracks from the accident on the fast up, with a fast down train running into it, while a slow train from Waterloo to Portsmouth only just missed being hit. The cause was found to be a loose wire in the signal. The accident cost thirty-five lives and another seventy passengers were injured.
Modernisation
The 1955 Modernisation Plan was the most ambitious programme ever prepared for Britain’s railways. The initial plan called for investment of £1,240 million (around £14,880 million today) but this was later increased to £1,500 million, which was, ignoring inflation, three times the cost to the British taxpayer of the Concorde supersonic airliner project in the early 1970s, and rather more if the inflation-prone 1950s, 60s and 70s were included.
The plan was the scheme that should have been introduced immediately following nationalisation, and was the brainchild of a Conservative government. It was meant to dispense with the Victorian and Edwardian railway, of which so much was still in evidence, and create a truly modern railway.
Electrification not only embraced the Southern Region, where the lines to the Kent coast, but not that to Hastings, were to be electrified, but other regions as well. The suburban lines from Liverpool Street and King’s Cross were to be electrified, at last, while the other Eastern Region electrification was to be between King’s Cross and Leeds, and possibly to York as well. On the London Midland Region, the lines from Euston to Birmingham, Liverpool and Manchester were also to be electrified.
Rationalisation was to accompany the Modernisation Plan as an almost inevitable quid pro quo for its implementation. British Railways had already started a number of line closures by this time.
The plan meant the end of inter-regional competition, which did not always provide the savings expected. Birmingham was no longer to be served from both Paddington and Euston, and with electrification in mind for the main lines out of the latter, Paddington lost out. Electrification showed that the railway’s technical resources were wholly inadequate for the full extent of the plan, so that only the Euston schemes could be progressed and plans for electrification out of King’s Cross had to be delayed. This led to the next mistake for the cost-conscious railway management, the failure to create a long-term rolling programme in which skilled personnel moved on from one to the next, maintaining the most cost-effective pace rather than a series of stop-start schemes.
Meanwhile, diesel traction was not simply to be for those lines deemed uneconomic for electrification, but it was seen as a stop-gap measure for the routes being electrified out of Euston and, later, King’s Cross, although, strangely enough, such an interim traction package was not considered for the lines from Victoria, Charing Cross and Cannon Street to the Kent coast on which a straight steam to electric switch occurred.
To replace steam on every branch line, a whole series of diesel multiple units, diesel railcars and even diminutive diesel rail buses derided as being ‘too small, too underpowered and too late’, were ordered from several manufacturers. The lack of experience on what might be described as ‘dieselisation’ led to too many different types of locomotive being ordered, usually without prototypes being built and tested, and not surprisingly many of them were found to be unsatisfactory. As they were introduced, the new locomotives did not follow the Southern Railway’s pre-war practice with its new electric trains and run from the factory to a purpose-built depot, but instead at first lodged alongside steam locomotives and were serviced in steam engine sheds, with all of the attendant dirt and filth that was the unfortunate weakness of the steam age, and again, once this found itself into the more delicate parts of the diesel locomotive, reliability fell still further. All of these problems were compounded by the failure to realise that, unlike the steam locomotive or the electric engine, a diesel could not be worked beyond its maximum power output without incurring mechanical damage.
Too many classes, too little standardisation, too little preparation and too little experiment but with too much haste were all problems with the diesels, but then, the bill was being picked up by the taxpayer, not the shareholder.
Between the wars, much had been made of conversion of relatively new steam-hauled rolling stock to electric operation, especially when the steam hauled stock had already been made up into pre-formed sets for standardisation of train formations and ease of marshalling. The modernisation plan usually ignored such possibilities. Bulleid mainline rolling stock on the Southern was scrapped, all of it within twenty years of construction, while older electric trains soldiered on for almost twice as long. The best of the old LMS carriages were not retained or converted. Even with the BR standard Mk1 carriages, the only time these were converted for an electrification scheme was with the Bournemouth electrification of 1967/68, and to some extent this may have been because the scheme itself was cut price, with electrification running just beyond Bournemouth to the depot, and trains being operated on a ‘pull-push’ basis, with a single four-car powered electric multiple unit pushing one or two unpowered sets as far as Bournemouth, where they were taken on to Weymouth by diesel electric traction.
The other major problem arose with single manning. The new electric and diesel traction did not need a fireman, but these were retained as driver’s assistants, another advantage of the new forms of motive power lost, leaving the railways to negotiate this as a separate productivity deal, a completely new and unnecessary extra cost and source of industrial conflict. When the Southern Railway had switched services from steam to electric, no one even dreamt of having a second man in the cab.
The so-called ‘sparks effect’ showed that electrification in particular was popular, but mostly with commuters. The spread of private car ownership has been blamed for the decline in the importance of public transport and for its worsened financial situation, but in 1959, the number of car owners was a sixth of that in 1999. The real culprit was television, ending theatre and cinema trips in the evening. On Sundays, coach trips to the seaside were cheaper and often more convenient than travel by railway. As the working week shortened and the peak period became compressed, the growing gap between peak and off-peak loadings contributed to the worsening financial situation on the railways.
Eventually, the penny dropped. It was no use tinkering around with the executives under the British Transport Commission; it was the BTC itself that was to blame. It had criticised the executives and especially British Railways, for being insufficiently forward looking, but it was itself large and unwieldy, with too few people of any relevant experience at the top. The BTC was by the late 1950s being criticised both for its size and its lack of any commercial sense. It only managed to see through the electrification of the two Southern Region lines to the Kent coast in 1959 and 1961, leaving the residents of Hastings to be served by a distinctly ugly, noisy and rough riding batch of diesel multiple units, costly because they were built exclusively for this line and none of the synergies of using depots and crews for the electrified network could be realised.
Enter Lord Beeching
Mounting railway losses could not continue. The Ministry of Transport had commissioned two reports on the future of the British Transport Commission, one of which was for public consumption, the other for its own internal use. Even so, it was not until the Transport Act 1962 that the ministry grasped the nettle and broke up the BTC into its component parts, establishing the British Railways and London Transport Boards, as well as a holding company for the nationalised bus companies.
The 1962 Act ended the obligation to provide third-class accommodation, it allowed the railways to ‘upgrade’ this by renaming it second class, later changing this to standard class.
Later, other changes to the charging structure followed. Prenationalisation, first-class fares had been around 60 per cent higher than those of third class, but the nationalised railway closed the gap to around 50 per cent. Originally, any third-class (or later, second-class) fare was available as first class provided that accommodation was available, but in order to boost revenues, British Rail abolished first-class day returns. It had the reverse effect, driving people to their cars or to second class, while the under-used off-peak first-class accommodation became the resort for vandals, discouraging season ticket holders and business travellers. First class on many routes was used not only by season ticket holders, but MPs and senior civil servants, as well as railway management and, at one time, members of the National Union of Journalists! The weakness of the measure was soon exposed on many services where the shortage of first-class travellers off-peak was countered by the concept of ‘Weekend First’ for which standard-class ticket holders paid a supplement, and which required the railways to differentiate between ‘first class’ and ‘weekend first class’ accommodation.
Traditionally and in most countries, railway fares were set by the mile, although on some urban railways, so-called ‘scheme’ or zonal fares would group several stations together for the same fare. This was first applied in the British Isles on the Bakerloo Line in 1911. British Rail, as it had become, decided to try to manage its traffic better by increasing peak period fares and reducing off-peak fares, a system sometimes referred to as yield management and practised by low-fare airlines. Of course, a railway is not an airline and the system did not ensure even loadings throughout the day or throughout the week. In the late 1960s, it was also decided to impose higher fare increases on lines with more modern rolling stock or a better service, with one of the lines treated in this way being that between London and Brighton. The new fares structure simply meant that optional travel, filling trains in the off-peak, was much reduced.
For the railways, there was a new chairman from the private sector, Dr (later Sir) Richard Beeching. He had arrived at the BTC in 1961 before which he had been technical director of Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI), at that time regarded by economic historians as being one of the two truly internationally competitive British companies (the other was Rolls-Royce). ICI itself had been the creation of a kind of grouping of its own in the early 1920s, creating a new unified force in the chemicals industry.
Beeching felt that the new British Railways Board required a much simpler structure, and he also felt that it would benefit from an influx of senior managers from other industries whom he felt would be more familiar with developments in management techniques, and would also have a stronger market focus. Few of them stayed for more than a few years, either because they had difficulty in adapting to the realities of transport operation or they found life in a nationalised industry suffocating. They certainly were to get a difficult ride from some of the old school in the railway world, such as Gerald Fiennes, an ex-LNER man running the Western Region, who eventually resigned after writing a book, I Tried to Run a Railway, in which he argued that branch lines should be run more cheaply rather than closed. Many believed Fiennes had a point.
Beeching was expected by the government to at least reduce the growing railway losses, and ideally eliminate these altogether. In fact, his instinctive reaction was that of an accountant rather than a scientist, requiring, and getting, extensive statistics that showed just how much each section of line and each railway service earned, and how much each cost. He came to the conclusion that many lines could be closed and so too could many stations which showed very poor receipts. There was also abundant evidence of poor utilisation of rolling stock, especially for trains such as summer holiday specials that spent most of the year rusting away in sidings. He published his findings in a report, The Re-Shaping of British Railways, proposing to close some 2,000 stations and end 250 train services. The media presented this as a plan to cut Britain’s railway network by a third.
Few have aroused such fierce passions as Beeching. Some would almost have him as the devil incarnate, while others point out that he merely accelerated a process that had already started. It is true that there were cuts well before Beeching. There are those who agreed with Fiennes. One big weaknesses of his method of analysis was that it concentrated too much on receipts from stations along a line and not enough on the earning potential of these stations. A good example of the way in which these figures can differ considerably comes from stations in resort areas, where the local business, and hence receipts, could be very low, but the station would have considerable earning potential because of the large number of often long distance journeys terminating there each summer. The weakness was one of traffic analysis, since the journeys mentioned would have been credited to the station of departure, which would have enjoyed a double boost to its income due to the fact that almost every passenger would have purchased a return ticket. Insufficient attention was also paid to the impact of branch line traffic on the main lines, what airline managers would describe as ‘feeder traffic’. Ironically, shortly afterwards one of the London clearing banks produced an advertising campaign with the memorable slogan, ‘Our roots are our branches’.
Beeching maintained that main lines could be profitable, but branch lines couldn’t. Commuter traffic was unprofitable by this time, but socially and politically necessary.
To suggest that Beeching himself never actually closed a railway line or a single station is treated by some as if one is engaging in holocaust denial, but Beeching, his predecessors and successors, could only ever recommend closure. What followed was an inquiry and it was the Minister of Transport at the time who then decided on closure, which could be accompanied by conditions, including augmenting the local bus service.
If Beeching has been too severely criticised for his programme of cuts, he was also insufficiently recognised for the innovations he urged upon the railways, no doubt because the former obscured the latter in the perceptions of the media and politicians, and also of the public. In a further report, now little referred to, Beeching advocated continuing to invest heavily in the trunk routes.
While the innovations went ahead, Beeching started an accelerated programme of closures that saw many rural branch lines cut. Cities such as Oxford, a suitable distance for a modern commuter found their railway service downgraded, and Cheltenham found itself not just without the famous Cheltenham Flyer, but with very few direct trains at all. Within the London commuter area, the impact was less, but lines such as those from Guildford to Cranleigh in Surrey, disappeared.
Post-Beeching
Before all of his proposals could be implemented, there was a change of government, with Labour returning to power in 1963 after a long time in the political wilderness, having spent twelve years in opposition. Railway losses continued to rise, and it soon became clear that the closure programme would have to continue. Beeching retired in 1965 after the new government had settled in and was replaced by a railwayman, Stanley (later Sir Stanley) Raymond.
The Conservatives had been alarmed at the direction the railways had been taking, but had given the management a reasonable head, as well as having given the railways their single biggest dose of new investment ever. The new government took a much more interventionist approach, and the new chairman had to suffer the indignity of the Minister of Transport, Barbara Castle, appointing a Joint Steering Group that reported to both of them. This was a recipe for disagreement and friction, as for the first time, a government tried to run the railways directly.
Raymond left office in late 1967, to be replaced by another railwayman, Henry (later Sir Henry) Johnson, who came from the London Midland Region and just overseen the completion of the electrification project.
Having undermined one chairman, Barbara Castle at least helped his successor into office with the welcoming present of the Transport Act 1968, which at a stroke wiped out most of the accumulated deficit and for the first time recognised the existence of socially (and politically) necessary services that could never be remunerative by providing grants for their operation. It was not an entirely open-handed gesture, for some of the gains were balanced by losses.