While the railways were at last being placed on a sound financial basis, there was also much else to give grounds for hope for the future. Almost twenty years after nationalisation, a new generation of electrification programmes were finally reaching completion. This meant that electric trains could operate between Euston and Birmingham, Liverpool and Manchester, but third and fourth rail remained in use between London and Watford, without any attempt to standardise on the new overhead system.
Productivity was at last beginning to improve. Belatedly, the management was pressing for single manning of electric and diesel locomotives, while also looking to remove guards, and by definition brake vans, from fully-fitted goods trains. At the end of 1971, the railway network’s route mileage had been cut by 41 per cent since nationalisation, while stations had been cut by 67 per cent. The longest line to have escaped passenger station closures completely was that between London Waterloo and Portsmouth Harbour via Guildford, the ‘Portsmouth Direct’, but even on that line the goods stations have 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 from London Waterloo stations remained open until one reached the New Forest, to the west of Southampton. Many short spurs had been closed, including Bournemouth Central and the old terminus in Southampton. It was soon no longer possible to use the line through Alton as an alternative if the main line to Southampton was blocked, or to reach Brighton via Uckfield and Lewes if the Brighton line was blocked. Elsewhere, the number of points and cross-overs had been reduced, sometimes compromising flexibility of working during engineering works or following the failure of a train.
In this light, it seems ironic that the new logo for the renamed British Rail was a double arrow symbol, which bore more than a passing resemblance to two lines joined by sets of points. The new name and new logo was matched by a new livery, with all-over blue for suburban and local trains, and blue and grey for mainline services, even replacing the Southern Region green, while elsewhere all-over maroon had earlier replaced carmine and cream.
As further evidence of improved productivity, and especially the improved use of assets, the number of passenger carriages had fallen from more than 40,000 to just 17,000, and the 20,000 steam locomotives inherited on nationalisation had been replaced by 3,633 diesel and 317 electric locomotives. This last statistic can be misleading as many more of the railway carriages were in self-propelled ‘multiple unit’ trains.
High-speed trains
Of greater potential benefit, work on the Advanced Passenger Train was not being adequately funded by the government, even though this train, with its tilt mechanism, was intended to lift the maximum speed on Britain’s railways to 155 mph, and to be able to take curves at speeds of at least 20 per cent and as much as 40 per cent greater than could be managed by existing rolling stock. This meant that the train offered the chance of a high speed railway without the need to build costly new high speed lines, itself not just an economy but a saving of massive disruption and land use in a densely populated country. The APT project was finally scrapped in 1986, by which time British Rail was investing heavily in other rolling stock and on a programme of easing, but never eliminating, curves to achieve higher line speeds.
Failure to persist with the APT cost Britain dearly. It set a British speed record of 163 mph, which still holds on ‘historic’ track. Once other European railway equipment manufacturers mastered the problem, Virgin Trains had to buy tilting train technology from Italy.
The substitute for the Advanced Passenger Train was the IC125 or HST, High Speed Train, a non-tilting diesel electric train, in effect a long single multiple unit with a driving power car at each end. In what almost amounted to a re-run of trends in the late 1930s, streamlining was back in fashion on Britain’s railways. First entering service in 1974, the HST was streamlined with well swept and rounded ends, made possible by the use of glass fibre technology to achieve curves that would have been difficult and expensive to produce using steel or aluminium. The carriages were officially termed as Mk 3, and followed the later versions of the Mk 2 in having air conditioning and sealed windows. Unlike the Mk 2, however, the Mk 3s were a comprehensive spread of carriages, with kitchen and buffet vehicles, whereas passengers had become accustomed to leaving the comfort and smooth riding of the Mk 2s to be served in a noisy and rough riding Mk 1 buffet, while the dining car crew attempted to cook meals in similar conditions. Later, suburban variations of the Mk 3 followed.
For the London commuter, the HST bought cities such as Bath, Bristol and even York and Cardiff into the commuter belt. To describe many of the traditional commuter strongholds as ‘dormitory towns’ was in any case often inaccurate with Guildford, for example, having more people commute into the town than out of it to London. Many commuter towns were certainly sufficient in themselves, rather than being dormitories for London workers, who in any case, had to be well paid to afford the high cost of a longer distance season ticket while these were not places known for cheap property.
One missed opportunity of the HST was the decision, on grounds of economy, not to include power-operated doors. It was wholly unnecessary since trains built for the Wessex Expresses for the final extension of electrification from Bournemouth to Weymouth some years later used the Mk 3 body shell and had power-operated doors. The omission of power-operated doors was to have one unforeseen consequence. The Mk 3 enjoyed integral construction, what is known as monocoque construction, with the body providing all of the strength needed and no separate underframe, but instead with bogies and anything else attached to the body. This method of construction combined lightness with strength, but what had not been foreseen was that such bodies, in order to survive and avoid metal fatigue, had to flex while running at high speed. A long series of mysterious deaths amongst passengers standing in or passing through the vestibules at the ends of carriages was first attributed to suicides, before finally being traced to doors suddenly flying open at high speed when the draught sucked the hapless passenger out. Power-operated doors would have saved lives.
The HST brought modular construction to railway carriages for the first time, so that the same construction was used for carriages of either class, but only in first class did seats match up with the windows.
The HSTs offered acceleration and an official maximum speed of 125 mph, when track condition was good enough, although on a test run; just over 143 mph was achieved, setting a world record for a diesel which stands to this day. They revolutionised inter-city railway travel, but were often not utilised efficiently.
THE LONDON BUS IN MATURITY
After the Second World War, the changes in the London bus fleet were less dramatic than between the wars, with all vehicles having a covered top deck and pneumatic tyres, almost certainly the two features that were most noticed and appreciated by the ordinary passenger with little or no interest in the vehicle itself.
In fact, there were some significant changes. Although a small number of half-cab front-engined single-deck buses entered service shortly after the war, and some non-standard Leyland Titans served with London Transport before being sold off to what was then Yugoslavia, the fleet soon standardised on two basic types, the RT double deck bus and the RF single deck bus. The RT was purely conventional, except for the standardisation on a pre-selective gearbox which made driving in congested city streets much easier. Two variants were the Leyland-built RTL, distinguishable only by a different fleet number and a different radiator, and the RTW, which was 8ft wide as against the RT’s 7ft 6in. The RF, or Regal Four, was an underfloor engined single-deck bus seen in red central and green country versions, but also best known in its Greenline version. There were 4,250 RTs, 1,250 RTLs and 250 RTWs, as well as 700 RFs. The oddity in the fleet was the RLH, of which only around 150 were operated, and which looked like a distinctly nondescript provincial bus, and which had a lowbridge body with an offside sunken gangway upstairs. This was awkward to a conductor having to reach across to get the fare from the passenger sitting next to the window. It wasn’t much fun for passengers either, as downstairs the offside had limited headroom, and upstairs the passenger sitting next to the window when the bus was full was squashed, while the unfortunate sitting by the gangway held on for dear life with one buttock on the seat cushion and the other swinging over the gangway! There had been lowbridge versions of the STL.
The Routemaster or RM class first appeared in prototype form in 1956 when the RT was still in production. This integral bus without a chassis but using monocoque construction brought the automatic gearbox and power-assisted steering to London, although country and Greenline versions had semi-automatic gearboxes. One reason for choosing the automatic was because this was the trolleybus replacement vehicle, and it made it easier to retrain trolleybus drivers if they did not have to worry about a gearbox. Eventually, the RM and its stretched version, the 30ft-long RML, started to replace the RT family, although later versions were also replaced by standee single deck buses, albeit with more seats than the Red Arrow vehicles, and by front entrance, rear engined double deck buses. For the enthusiast, the change was a cause for deep dismay, but the bus drivers fought a rearguard action against one-man-operation on double-deck buses for many years, and this may well have been another motivating factor in the quest for fare systems such as the Travelcard and the later Oystercard.
As in many cities, most passengers on London’s buses are travelling for a relatively short distance, and one reason why London lagged behind other cities in putting platform doors on its rear entrance buses, of which the Routemaster was the last, although forward entrance versions were built for British European Airways (operated by London Transport) and Northern General, and a front entrance rear engined prototype was also built for London Transport. After a rear-engined Leyland Titan was built mainly for London Transport, LT stopped buying specialised buses and started buying the products on general sale. Not all of these stood up to the stresses of London traffic, and the Daimler Fleetlines were especially failure prone. Another bus that had an uncertain introduction to London use was the Mercedes articulated single deck bus or ‘Bendybus’, which at first seemed prone to catch fire.
In 1985, London Transport started a similar tendering system to that imposed on British Rail’s passenger operations, with individual routes or sometimes groups of routes tendered to operators. The system applies only to what would have been the central area as the break-up of the National Bus Company, which had the country area operations of London Transport passed to it, saw these privatised. London Transport also became Transport for London, TFL, awarding tenders, monitoring operator performance and marketing transport within London, including some river services. Whereas operators outside London have the right to operate a service for as long as they want or for as long as they are capable of operating it to the satisfaction of the traffic commissioners, those in London operate only for the period of their tender. The process has been described as unfair as it is generally the operator charging the lowest price that is awarded the tender and operators who have invested heavily and done much to improve a service have often lost it when re-tendering became due. Buses are often passed from one tendered operator to another, and the Routemaster had an extended lease of life in this way, and some of the vehicles were in fact extended or ‘stretched’ themselves to become even longer, but the Routemaster has gone from London except for ‘heritage’ services.
Despite Transport for London insisting that buses are predominantly red in colour, to maintain what it regarded as a tradition, the London bus scene is much less full of a unique character than in the past. London buses today are simply red versions of buses operated elsewhere.
Nevertheless, the HST was a success. Reliable, long-lasting and comfortable, it brought time for Britain’s railways offering attractive scheduling without the need for special track. Single-handedly, it made railway travel fashionable again, with people actually remarking to their acquaintances whenever they had travelled on an HST.
Short of money, electrification went forward in a series of one-off schemes rather than a rolling programme. It also seems that London commuters were penalised while money was spent ‘in the regions’. At a time in the late-1960s when the Waterloo-Portsmouth service was making an annual profit of around £750,000 and the service to Bournemouth around £500,000, investment in new rolling stock for the thirty-year-old Portsmouth line original electrification stock was denied until it could be shown that a return of 6 per cent could be achieved. Nevertheless, the King’s Cross to Welwyn and Hertford ‘Great Northern’ electrification scheme was completed in 1976, resurrecting an old pre-grouping title more than half a century after it had disappeared. That same year, authority was obtained for electrification between both St Pancras and the more convenient new City of London terminus at Moorgate, and Bedford, the so-called ‘Bedpan Line’, but the full introduction of new services on the former was to be delayed until 1983 by an industrial dispute over single manning.
The big success in railway and marketing terms over the period following the introduction of the new ‘British Rail’ corporate identity had been Inter-City, advertised under the strapline ‘Heart to Heart’, to drive home the message that railway stations were closer to the centres of urban areas than airports. Yet, on the Southern Region the often very short turn round times, especially during the morning and evening peak periods, meant that the promised seat reservations could not always be provided, especially at the busiest periods when this service was most appreciated and sought after by the traveller. Progressively, the brand was removed from these services, including even the Waterloo-Southampton-Bournemouth-Weymouth service, which over its entire length was considerably longer than London to Birmingham or Bristol.
The period since the end of the Second World War had been marked by a consensus in British politics. This ended at the 1979 general election, when, spurred by a ‘winter of discontent’ that had seen the worst industrial unrest experienced in the UK since the year of the General Strike, the voters returned a Conservative administration under a new leader, Margaret Thatcher, determined to reverse the tide, with lower taxation, deregulation and denationalisation, although this latter policy was to be given the title of ‘privatisation’, probably justified by the fact that not only was the state to discard its own business interests, but so too were local authorities. Yet, even Margaret Thatcher, the ‘Iron Lady’, did not tackle the railways, leaving that to her successor, John Major.
Red Arrow arrives, and Greenline departs
While commuters to London always like to live on a line that has a terminus close to their place of work, for many, there is an onward journey. That is why, for example, Waterloo’s isolation was such an issue before it was served by the Underground. London’s dependence on deep level tube lines for most of its Underground network, and for all of the lines crossing the central area, means that a substantial amount of time is lost getting to and from the platforms.
As demand rose, and the cost of building new lines or even finding space for them even underground, something new had to be tried. In 1966, London Transport introduced new express central area bus services linking the main termini with the main centres for work and shopping, known as the ‘Red Arrow’ network. These buses were London’s first ‘standee’ buses. Until then, the rule had been that buses should have no more standing passengers, or standees, than a third of the lower deck capacity subject to a maximum of eight. Trade union objections limited London buses to five standing passengers. The Red Arrow buses, rear-engined AEC Merlin single deck vehicles, with a separate front entrance and centre exit, carried no less than forty-eight standees, with just twenty-five seats, all at a raised level aft of the centre exit. A flat fare of 6d (2.5p) was charged, but instead of having a ticket, the passenger paid the money into a machine that allowed him to go through a turnstile.
The initial trial services linked Victoria Station with Marble Arch during the peak, and did a tour of Oxford Street and Marble Arch shops off-peak.
The cramming of forty-eight passengers into the space between the two doors, less the considerable amount of space required by the two turnstiles, meant that seldom did the buses carry their maximum number of passengers. Buses of similar layout, but without the turnstiles, were allowed to have forty-seven seats with sixteen standees, just ten passengers less than on a Red Arrow, and in fact would probably have made better use of the space as well as being more comfortable. However, London commuters were used to discomfort, and the network expanded, including two routes between Victoria and Waterloo.
When the trials started, the then Minister of Transport, Barbara Castle, a noted left-winger, dismissed press concerns about so many standing passengers by saying that she was sure that a ‘gentleman would give up his seat for a lady!’
By contrast, one of the most comfortable options for commuting was the Greenline Coach, and probably the one that most closely went from doorstep to destination as, while there were fewer stops than on normal red or green London bus services, there were more than on the railways, and the Greenline services served many places off the railway network. While these survived the creation of the National Bus Company, which assumed control of London Transport’s country services in 1969, the country services were broken up into manageable units and it no longer became a single operation, even before privatisation of bus services. There was another problem, even before deregulation of bus services outside London, long-distance coach services were deregulated. Around the London commuter area there was an explosion of new express commuter coach services running from outlying districts, and especially those without a railway station, and this also undermined the viability of the Greenline services. London Transport had introduced Routemaster double deck coaches to most of the Greenline services, and then followed these by a variety of mainly AEC single-deck coaches that could be one-man-operated. For the first time, many Greenline services had real coaches rather than buses with extra padding on the seats, but the service was proving too costly, and with different operators at each end of a route, control was weakened, especially when relief vehicles were required. Gradually, the Greenline network contracted, and today just a few isolated routes survive, running into the centre of London, operated by privatised bus companies.
All change at London Transport
This is to jump forward many years for much had happened in London in the meantime. The London County Council had become increasingly a Labour Party stronghold as it consisted of inner London, with the more affluent leaving the rundown districts in the centre (albeit many returned later when gentrification became fashionable) for the outer suburbs and the older dormitory towns. In 1965, the LCC was abolished entirely and replaced by the Greater London Council, which absorbed much of Surrey, to the extent that the county’s offices were left in Kingston, part of GLC territory, all of Middlesex, and parts of Berkshire, Bedfordshire, Hertfordshire, Essex and Kent. This recognised that one had to go beyond Surbiton or Slough to find open countryside. The GLC itself was abolished in 1985.
London Transport, which had become the London Transport Board on the winding up of the British Transport Commission, became the London Transport Authority in 1970, before becoming London Regional Transport in 1985, but remained state-owned.