Last Trains

by Charles Loft

  When David St John Thomas wrote in his survey of The Country Railway that such a line ‘was always part of the district it served’ he was straddling the ground between history and nostalgia, as does Henshaw’s reference to rural lines ‘ingrained into the communities they served; integral and indispensable threads binding the rich tapestry of rural life’.15 This idea resounds, too, in a letter pleading the case for Bridlington station sent to the Minister of Transport in 1967. Having complained bitterly of the effects of bus sickness, the correspondent emphasised that the local station was not simply a functional place but a ‘beloved … [and] precious landmark’ where in two world wars ‘countless servicemen said “farewell” forever’:

  Its lights at night mean a good deal to us who live nearby. We are never lonely when we look out at the back of our cottages and see those lights. Please, please do not have them taken from us.16

  The branch line railway ran through the heart of the place where the English, or many of them at least, imagine they live; an essentially rural nation onto which urban modernity has been rudely imposed.† The image of the steam-operated branch line as an integral part of this imagined land is reinforced by the almost obligatory appearance of a pristine steam train at a beautifully kept rural station in just about any recent film set in England between 1850 and 1960. The essentially rural nature of imagined England encourages the English to preserve the countryside – a desire which at the time of the railways’ construction was often confined to those who owned it, but which is now almost universal. Consequently, nostalgia for the rural branch line railway is fuelled by the association between its demise and increasing traffic, road building and other unsightly modern developments.

  The most perfect evocation of the place of the railway in the countryside is Edward Thomas’s poem ‘Adlestrop’, in which an express is stopped at a wayside station on a hot summer’s day and nothing happens. Contemplating the song of a blackbird the poet seems transported to a higher plain, aware of ‘all the birds of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire’. Noticing the station on Dr Beeching’s list of closures in 1963, a Times correspondent reminisced about his visits to it before linking Beeching’s work to environmental destruction: ‘the economy axe is breaking the spell for hundreds of Adlestrops throughout Britain as we move into the era of the coach crawl and (if Miss Rachel Carson’s warning is not heeded) the silent spring’ (Rachel Carson’s 1962 book Silent Spring was a global catalyst for the environmental movement).17 Surveying the contrast between Thomas’s evocation of the English countryside and the modern site of the closed station, past which ‘sleek bullet-nosed machines thunder’, the poet Richard Medrington asks ‘when was it that we came to equate success with speed and mobility’ and to devalue the experience of being ‘fully present’?18 In a similar vein, the writer and architectural critic Jonathan Glancey, when asked what was lost when the railways closed, answered ‘everything that matters: the poetry of the English landscape’.19

  Where Beeching closed rural railways, Sir John Betjeman – whose writing on railways Glancey has edited – eulogised them in poems such as ‘Dilton Marsh Halt’ and complained of the ‘Inexpensive Progress’ that was creating a world ‘where motor car is master’ (a line which the Council for the Protection of Rural England took as the title of its 1992 pamphlet on transport policy). As Vice-President of the Railway Development Association, Betjeman wrote to the Minister complaining of the ‘diesel-scented traffic jams’ which would be created by railway closures in Cornwall.20 His celebration of the Great Central Main Line is not concerned with its fine engineering but the farms, woods and village churches past which it runs; when the train passes a modern housing estate the poet makes a pointed reference to the regimented ‘cars of parked executives’. The whimsically inappropriate name of Rugby Central station, the whereabouts of which ‘does only Rugby know’, is an asset as far as Betjeman is concerned.21 As the champion of branch line closures, therefore, Beeching is not simply the man who vandalised the railways or deprived communities of a valuable service, but the man who drove the dagger of soulless modernity into the heart of Englishness. He is the anti-Betjeman.

  This impression is bolstered by the removal of steam locomotives from Britain’s railways by 1968, a process Beeching did not start but did accelerate. Steam often returned to branch lines for final services and, for all the suggestions of cost-saving methods involving alternative traction put forward by opponents of closure, the steam locomotive was fundamental to the romantic appeal of a branch line and vital in attracting visitors to those reopened by the preservationists. In ‘Dilton Marsh Halt’ Betjeman looks forward to the day when, the world’s supply of petrol having run out, ‘the horrible roads are finally done for … [and] steam trains will return.’22 When the penultimate scheduled steam service on BR pulled into Blackpool South on 3 August 1968, small boys flocked to the cab to get the autographs of the driver and the fireman. Preserved railways and the continuing popularity of Thomas the Tank Engine, including personal appearances on preserved lines, have transmitted nostalgia for steam to a generation who never experienced it first-hand.

  In The Titfield Thunderbolt – an Ealing comedy released shortly before the Isle of Wight provided the first major closure controversy in 1953 – the sort of archetypal English community that had put paid to Nazi invaders eleven years earlier in Went the Day Well? thwarted the attempts of the Ministry and the BTC to close their local line and ran it themselves. The squire and the vicar played leading roles and overcame the spiv-like bus operators with the help of a train-driving bishop. Screenwriter T. E. B. ‘Tibby’ Clarke was inspired to write the script by a visit to the Talyllyn Railway, the first to be preserved (although, unlike Titfield it was not saved from the Ministry and the Commission, having escaped nationalisation, possibly because the Ministry did not realise it was still operating). Although the film was not a huge hit on its release, the best part of half a century later critic Leslie Halliwell considered it ‘among the best’ of the Ealing comedies, in particular because of its ‘immaculate colour production, showing the England that is no more’.23 The film opens with an express crossing Midford Viaduct on the Somerset and Dorset line and then pans to the ‘Titfield’ branch train running beneath (on the Camerton branch of the Great Western which had closed not long before). A series of shots of the train making its way through the countryside establishes it as almost a natural feature, while we see the village come to life as it approaches (albeit that coming to life produces only a handful of passengers). The most revealing line in the film is the heartfelt appeal preached to Ministry of Transport officials by Squire Chesterford (whose grandfather had, in true patrician style, ‘built the line for Titfield’):

  Don’t you realise you’re condemning our village to death? Open it up to buses and lorries and what’s it going to be like in five years’ time? Our lanes will be concrete roads, our houses will have numbers instead of names. There’ll be traffic lights and zebra crossings.24

  The squire (who owned a car) was wrong, the growth of road traffic was happening irrespective of railway closures, but his appeal illustrates the strength of the branch lines’ perception as the sinews of imagined England.

  ‘It’s rather a relief to be drawn by steam through this uneventful countryside and just to hear the noises we heard as children… How nice to see it without a foreground of villas and petrol stations,’ Betjeman said in a televised pilgrimage along the Somerset and Dorset’s branch to Highbridge, broadcast in the month of the Beeching Report’s publication; but the poet knew his defence of ‘comfortable travel’ had to acknowledge the spirit of the times: ‘I am not just being nostalgic and sentimental and impractical about railways. Railways are bound to be used again; they are not a thing of the past.’25 It was a point he must have felt needed to be made because by 1963 the railways had come to symbolise two discernible strands in political debate and cultural commentary: decline and modernisation. This period saw the emergence of a sense that Britain was in
decline which, Jim Tomlinson argues, was widely propagated and instilled assumptions in the public mind ‘with sustained and significant consequences for public debate about Britain’s situation, which in turn had a major impact on the tenor of British politics’.26 These concerns centred on the belief that the British economy was growing less quickly than that of its European neighbours and was bolstered by Britain’s apparent decline as a world military and political power. This mood was expressed in such works as Michael Shanks’s The Stagnant Society and came to focus on what Anthony Crosland called ‘a dogged resistance to change [that] now blankets every segment of our national life’ and Anthony Samson referred to as ‘a loss of dynamic and purpose’. Such complaints went hand in hand with an attack on the amateurish nature of British government and management. A variety of answers was offered to the much-debated question ‘What’s wrong with Britain?’, but by the general election of 1964 modernisation had emerged as a popular solution and both major parties sought to present themselves as modernisers.27 The use of modernisation as a panacea for decline reflects the wider national fascination with modernity that stretched from politics to the young men and women who would lead British popular culture in the coming decade, a phenomenon which Christopher Booker castigated as a kind of mass psychosis in his 1969 book The Neophiliacs. The contrast between the apparently inefficient railways in the last days of steam and the motor car’s encapsulation of the spirit of individual freedom, speed and excitement that so concerned Booker, identified the railways with ‘Old England’ and all its problems.28 The rising standard of living, expressed through increased car ownership, and the growth of new industries more suited to road transport than rail were important factors in the railways’ decline; but this did not prevent that decline from being presented as indicative of a national problem.

  Politically, the response to this mood in the early 1960s included the attempt to join the Common Market, the creation of the National Economic Development Council, the development of an incomes policy, a renewed emphasis on planning and the control of public expenditure and a new expectation from 1961 that the nationalised industries should behave more like nationally owned businesses and less like public services. These moves reflected not only the concerns of politicians and voters but of Treasury officials attempting to come to terms with modern conditions. The Treasury’s ultimate responsibility for the investment programmes of nationalised industries fostered a belief that it needed to develop a picture of future needs against which to judge those programmes. Efforts to apply this principle to transport spending were central to the policy behind the Beeching Report. In turn, the report was one of a series of measures the Conservatives hoped would convince the electorate that they were the standard-bearers of modernisation, and Labour’s opposition to closures sat uncomfortably with Harold Wilson’s attempts to present himself as the moderniser par excellence.

  This book argues that the Beeching Report was the outcome of a genuine modernisation of Whitehall’s management of the economy. Its form and presentation were a reflection of what was imagined to be wrong with Britain; its limitations reflected the difficulties of modernising Britain. It occupied the space in which the nation’s enthusiasm for modernisation collided with its, or at least England’s, self-image and was the point at which a superficially attractive term had to be transformed into a clearly less attractive reality. This last point was emphasised by the contrast between its emphasis on contraction and the more positive tone of the BTC’s 1955 Modernisation Plan. If Beeching attacked a myth of England, his report also punctured the 1955 dream of what modernisation might mean. The Beeching Report represented a recognition that England was not a nation of villages bound together by field and rail but an economy threatened by decline and, in attempting to avoid that decline, the nation could not afford dreams of rural idylls or chromium bullet trains, but would have to take unpleasant decisions. It was ‘the first full-dress statement’ of what modernisation might mean for industries that appeared to be obsolete; and as enthusiasm for modernity waned, Beeching, like the motorway and the high-rise estate, became a symbol of its destructive nature.29

  The starting point for many of Beeching’s critics is their dissatisfaction with the transport system. Whether or not that dissatisfaction is coloured by a sense that something more fundamental than a transport service was lost when railways closed, they would like a larger and better rail network than we have. Convinced that this is what should have happened, they then seek an explanation for the past’s failure to bequeath it. Beeching and Marples are obvious targets because they were the public face of an apparently proactive period of transport policy-making – a time when government actually seemed to be shaping the transport network rather than breathlessly attempting to keep pace with its development. Add in the secrecy and dodgy figures and it is all too easy to lay blame at the feet of a cabal of anti-rail officials or a conspiracy of pro-road interests. This book is not a defence of the outcomes of the Beeching era, but it is something of a defence of those responsible for it. By looking at the years that preceded the Beeching Report and trying to appreciate the perspective of those charged with solving ‘the railway problem’, it attempts to explain how government and the railways arrived at a point where the policies of the early 1960s seemed right and the manner of their implementation justified. It goes on to look at why the conclusions of Beeching’s studies were not implemented and how the seeds were sown of the popular memory of Beeching today. The chapters that follow take a chronological approach to the development of government policy around the contraction of the railway system but are generally structured around individual cases, because it is impossible to make sense of either as history without the other. The closure of railways throws into sharp relief the relationship between the individual human beings charged with making and implementing government policy and those challenging and opposing it. I hope the reader will emerge with some sympathy for both.

  † I have not ignored Scottish and Welsh closures in this book in as much as they relate to the overall development of policy, but it is no coincidence that only English cases are discussed in more detail. The significance of railways as part of an imagined rural England cannot be simply superimposed on to the way in which the Scots and the Welsh imagine their countries; perhaps the general lack of preserved steam railways in Scotland and the distinctive nature of the preservation movement in Wales as ‘the Great Little Trains of Wales’ reflect a different role for the railway in Scottish and Welsh imaginations. In any case, for both Scottish and Welsh nationalists, railway closures could be depicted as indicative of the negative effects of living in a ‘united’ kingdom, and their significance as part of the development of nationalism and its narrative seems to me to be a question worthy of its own study.

  Chapter 2

  Colonel Stephens’s lost causes: the railway problem 1914–51

  The great railway age effectively ended in 1914, but the railways were still the most important form of transport in Britain. It is the inter-war period of the ‘big four’ companies, the Southern, the London Midland and Scottish (LMS), the London and North Eastern (LNER) and the Great Western (GWR), the age of the Flying Scotsman and Auden’s ‘Night Mail’ that encapsulates the golden age of steam in popular memory today. It was to this period that some, John Major among them, looked when considering the merits of a privatised railway in the early 1990s. If all the romance of the inter-war railway could be distilled into a single day, 3 July 1938 would do well. It being a Sunday, the ‘silence and peace which once characterised so many branch termini’ would have been even more pronounced than usual.30 Sundays were the best time for irregular workings and, on the LNER main line just north of Grantham, a small group of railwaymen prepared to take the next step in their struggle of engineering and public-relations expertise with the rival LMS. Almost three years earlier, the LNER had launched a new Silver Jubilee high-speed service between London and Newcastle using streamlined locomotives and coaches. Th
eir modern look caught the imagination of the public and the LMS felt obliged to respond, even though its west coast main line was less suited to high speeds. In 1937 a train hauled by the LMS Coronation broke the steam speed record at 114mph before careering to a halt in Crewe station where the broken plates in the dining car could be cleared up. The following year, under the cloak of ‘brake trials’, one of the LNER’s newest express locomotives, Mallard, was sent out to win back the title. The locomotive’s aerodynamic casing was not just for show, it produced the extra speed required to approach the record as it accelerated southwards from Grantham. Germany had already achieved speeds of over 120mph with diesel and electric traction but, while Sir Nigel Gresley, Mallard’s designer, was influenced by streamlined German trains, Britain had rejected proposals for a twenty-year programme of main-line electrification in 1931 and Mallard was the best steam could offer. Its limit was reached that Sunday in July 1938, shortly after roaring down the long, straight descent of Stoke Bank and through the quiet wayside station of Little Bytham at 120mph, when driver Joseph Duddington smelled violets, a scent given off by a safety device installed to warn him that the big end was overheating. Nevertheless, he decided to push on and, during a three-mile run at over 120mph, reached 126mph for a few hundred yards. The Mallard’s fame was ensured and the LNER regained its crown. In presenting this brief, unsustainable glimpse of main-line speed as their public face, the LNER were playing to the railways’ strengths, a point Dr Beeching would reiterate in his report some twenty-five years later. Two-and-a-quarter hours were cut from the London to Edinburgh journey between the wars; the high-speed trains of the 1930s were real technical achievements, operated by skilled men and providing an excellent service; however, they were the proud face of an empire in decline.