Last Trains

by Charles Loft

  The Sheppey Light Railway has vanished almost without trace, so insubstantial was its construction, and the parts of the East Kent and K&ESR that closed before 1960 are equally hard to find, but these two railways have demonstrated the sort of pig-headed refusal to accept defeat that allowed them to survive until nationalisation. A preservation society was quickly formed to save the K&ESR in 1961 and after a somewhat fractious history involving a battle over the legality of the minister’s refusal to grant a light railway order, trains ran south from Tenterden again in 1974, although it was another twenty-six years before they reached Bodiam. Initial plans to reopen the final section on to Robertsbridge had to be sacrificed to official objections over the delays to cars at level crossings; however, now that steam railways are a recognised part of the tourist industry, there is hope that a way may be found to accommodate the line and a separate charity is slowly rebuilding this section. If the project succeeds, according to the K&ESR website, it will run to Robertsbridge again ‘if there is an economically viable case for doing so’ – what an incongruous phrase!49

  Tilmanstone’s coal traffic kept the last short section of the East Kent open until 1986. For several years afterwards, the track rusted gently, but in 1993 it too reopened as a preserved railway. The newcomer was a much less slick operation than the Bluebell or the K&ESR have become, but still very obviously a labour of love: the yard at Shepherdswell once again a museum disguised as a scrapyard. In its very early days, a scruffy diesel unit, still in the weather-worn livery of Strathclyde Passenger Transport Executive, would crawl along from Shepherdswell through the half-dug tunnel and stop in a field in the middle of nowhere, wait a few minutes and go back – it felt a very authentic Stephens experience. Transport acts come and go, but the determination of the enthusiast to win lost causes endures.

  Chapter 3

  A terrible tangle: the Isle of Wight and the end of integration

  In the first three years of its existence, the British Transport Commission’s operating surpluses were not sufficient to meet its central charges and the resulting accumulated deficit grew to nearly £40 million.† In September 1951, the Labour government’s Minister of Transport, Alfred Barnes, submitted a paper on the Commission’s long-term prospects to the Cabinet which made two recommendations: a speedier process of raising charges to cover any increase in costs and the establishment of a royal commission to examine what role the railways should have in a ‘fully integrated system’. ‘Until this fundamental issue is cleared,’ Barnes’s paper warned, ‘it is hardly possible for the country to have a coherent transport policy … and capital investment in transport will be devoid of firm guiding principles.’50 The paper made three things clear: for Barnes and his officials, ‘a fully integrated system’ meant a more rapid and extensive closing of branch lines than had taken place so far; aside from the benefits of a more responsive charging structure, it suggested that such a programme would be the most likely source of the economies required to balance the books; and it recognised that the BTC’s employees, its executives and its customers would resist these proposals. The regions were already coming under pressure from the Commission to accelerate closures and, even as the paper was printed for the Cabinet, opposition to precisely the approach to integration Barnes envisaged was being organised on the Isle of Wight. The year 1951 would have been a good time for a royal commission on transport. It might have brought the question of what kind of railway the nation was prepared to pay for to the forefront of the public mind before the BTC’s financial position became irretrievable or plans for modernisation were laid – and before the Isle of Wight experience infused the whole debate with an air of suspicion. It was not to be. When Barnes turned up at the next Cabinet meeting, only one item was on the agenda: the dissolution of Parliament and the forthcoming general election. Labour lost power for thirteen years and Winston Churchill returned to Downing Street at the head of a new Conservative administration.

  The Conservatives had accepted nationalisation of the railways, as with most of the post-war Labour government’s nationalisation programme, as a fait accompli but nationalisation of the iron and steel, sugar and road haulage industries represented the limit of that acceptance. Under the 1947 Transport Act private hauliers were either bought out by the BTC or restricted to operating within 25 miles of their base.† The haulage industry was typified by the small operator who had built his own business from nothing. He did not take kindly to the state appropriating it, compensation or not. The Road Haulage Association (RHA) waged an intense campaign against nationalisation, offering opposition MPs much practical help in the debates. Both the campaign and the links the RHA forged with the Conservatives continued after the Act was passed, through the election campaigns of 1950 and 1951 and into the life of the new government. Within a week of the 1951 election, the RHA was successfully lobbying to halt the BTC’s acquisition of its members’ vehicles. It was this relationship that lay behind a commitment in the Conservative manifesto to reverse the 1947 Transport Act by giving hauliers whose firms had been nationalised an opportunity to return to the business. This aim required a time machine rather than an Act of Parliament and if one were to seek out a case study of how a new government’s efforts to change policy can go wrong, the genesis of the Conservatives’ 1953 Transport Act would do very nicely. Among its several failings, the Act effectively removed the Commission’s coordinating imperative just as its Isle of Wight test case reached fruition, but this drawback was rather obscured at the time because, as we shall see, the experiment did more to demonstrate the difficulties of integration than its possibilities.

  It is a testament to Victorian optimism that the Isle of Wight, an area of less than 150 square miles, managed to acquire 55½ miles of railway involving eight companies by 1923 when they were all brought into the Southern Railway, despite its attempts to avoid acquiring the long-bankrupt Freshwater, Yarmouth and Newport Railway. The Isle of Wight Central, which emerged from four of the original companies, had occasionally paid a dividend, while the Isle of Wight Railway, which owned the prime route south from Ryde along the island’s east coast to Ventnor, generally offered its ordinary stock holders a regular, but small, return. The key to the island’s railway system was Ryde pier. The two mainland companies that served Portsmouth, the London Brighton and South Coast and the London and South Western, opened the short line from the pier head to connect with the island system at Ryde St Johns Road in 1880; they didn’t operate it, but they profited handsomely from the traffic it brought to their Portsmouth trains and the ferries they owned. Ryde quickly became the point at which the overwhelming majority of visitors to the island arrived. Tourism was central to the island’s economy and on summer peak Saturdays at the end of the 1940s the railway carried 25,000 passengers a day from Ryde. The pier could not carry buses or more than a very few light cars and the railway was only able to cope by diverting those who were not travelling beyond the town onto a diesel-operated pier tramway and by running four trains an hour each way on the, mostly single-track, line to Ventnor, an operational feat much admired by those with an interest in railways.

  Apart from the Ryde–Ventnor line, the island network consisted of a second line from Ryde, heading west to Newport and Cowes; a branch from Newport to the more remote western side of the island at Freshwater; and a third line from Newport heading south and then east to Sandown on the Ryde–Ventnor line. Finally there were two tiny branches: from Brading on the east coast route to Bembridge and from Merstone on the Newport–Sandown line to Ventnor West. In theory it was possible to travel between Cowes and Ventnor by three different routes. In a home service broadcast shortly before it closed, John Betjeman described the approach to Ventnor West in almost ecstatic terms, revelling in the ‘alder-bordered meadows’ and ‘chalky downs … high and golden brown with grass’ and, on emerging from a tunnel ‘between the ash-tree branches, an unexpected silver shiny sea’.51 The island’s railways were part of many people’s memory of childhood hol
idays. The Southern had invested in the system and traffic had nearly doubled by the end of the 1940s to 3 million journeys a year. But this was set against 17 million bus journeys and, more importantly, disguised a huge disparity between peak summer traffic and the rest of the year when overcrowded buses passed almost empty trains. Betjeman was virtually alone on the train to Ventnor West.

  While the railway was a quaint delight for many visitors, it was considered vital by the Isle of Wight County Council and the island’s Chamber of Commerce, not because islanders used it, but because it was fundamental to the holiday trade upon which the island economy depended. It is ironic then that it should have been the Chamber of Commerce that planted the idea in the minds of the BTC that the island would be the perfect testing ground for transport integration. The Chamber wrote to the Railway Executive in November 1949 complaining of overcrowding on buses and at bus stops on the island, while the trains were lightly loaded except on summer Saturdays. It suggested reducing train fares to the same level as bus fares and introducing a common ticketing system. Shortly afterwards the BTC told the Railway, Road Passenger and Road Haulage executives to look at how the passenger and freight operations on the island might be integrated. An initial study, reporting in April 1950, looked at all aspects of integration – how joint headquarters and maintenance facilities might work, for example – but, as general merchandise was already dealt with entirely by road, there was little to be done on the freight side. On the passenger side, raising bus fares to benefit rail was ruled out as something the licensing authority, to which such increases had to be submitted, would not approve of. The key finding was that Southern Vectis, the BTC-owned island bus company, believed it could carry all rail passengers except the peak summer traffic on the Ryde–Ventnor line. This prompted an immediate call from the Commission for another report, followed by nearly a year of wrangling between the executive and the region, the main outcome of which was that the Ventnor West branch, which had been about to close, was reprieved while the branch line committee went back to square one to look at the entire island. In February 1951 the region concluded that all the island lines were losing money; expenses exceeded receipts by £121,845 a year in total, to which could be added £92,931 under the heading ‘interest’.52 Nevertheless, Ryde–Ventnor had to be retained for holiday traffic and the region felt Ryde–Cowes might as well be too, as most of it would be required for freight to Cowes’s Medina Wharf, and that the lines from Newport to Sandown and Freshwater, on the face of it both obvious candidates for closure, should be retained pending an investigation of a common fares and ticketing system for rail and bus (a suggestion Southern Vectis appears to have opposed). This left only the Ventnor West and Bembridge branches to close, although part of the latter would be needed for engineers’ supplies. The Railway Executive, which had already raised the possibility of reducing the entire operation to a summer-only service on the Ryde–Ventnor line, took a much less favourable view and asked for another report on the practicalities of closing everything except Ryde–Ventnor. A year later it was still waiting.

  The investigation had proved immense and provoked complaints that the 3,000 hours of work it had generated in the accountant’s office by January 1951 diverted the region’s already meagre resources from other more straightforward cases. Nevertheless, the region was dragging its heels. Like the Southern Railway before it, the region regarded the Isle of Wight lines as the extremities of the Portsmouth main line. It suspected that the ends of many main lines would appear unprofitable if their finances were considered in isolation from the rest of the network, but that they encouraged enough traffic on the rest of the line to justify their existence. This view needs to be seen in the context of the £715,510 earned by traffic to and from island stations on the mainland network as a whole.† The region’s attitude was also influenced by concerns about the effect on the island’s economy and the difficulty in redeploying the island’s railwaymen. This was not usually a problem in the early 1950s, indeed railway managers frequently complained of labour shortages, but being an island, the Isle of Wight was a special case. The region also correctly anticipated that local opposition would be formidable and damaging to the BTC’s reputation, a view strengthened by the surprising level of interest in the East Kent closure. In the summer of 1951, rumours of the BTC’s plans began circulating the island. The BTC met the council and Chamber of Commerce to discuss them in August and, in November, received a memorandum arguing against closure of all but the Ventnor West line and making numerous suggestions as to how the island railways’ deficit could be reduced. These were taken seriously and factored into the investigation, prolonging it, but the region concluded they would make little difference.

  In June 1952, after further pressure from the executive, the region finally confirmed what the bus company had said in the first place, that all rail traffic other than between Ryde and Ventnor could be accommodated by road without any great difficulty. Closure of the Ventnor West line was already underway and took place in September 1952. Chief Regional Officer C. P. Hopkins recommended a staged withdrawal of the Freshwater, Bembridge and Sandown–Newport services by September 1953, but wanted the Cowes line reviewed in three years and retained until at least 1958. He hoped this would mollify opposition, with which he clearly had some sympathy:

  We have done so much in the past to develop the Isle of Wight and no doubt in the process incurred losses in certain directions to be more than recouped in others, that a gradual approach to a policy of closing the railway in the island would be more consistent with past practice and more easily accepted than an abrupt reversal of previous policy.53

  By the time this report finally emerged, the political atmosphere had changed significantly and the project that had started out as a test case for integration was beginning to look like its last hurrah. This was not because the new government wanted to keep loss-making railways open but because, while ministers wanted to free road haulage from the claws of an acquisitive state, they were far from comfortable with the implications of doing so for the railways and far from confident that they knew what to do about them.

  By 1951 the Conservative Party had abandoned plans to sell off the entire BTC Road Haulage Executive (RHE) as impractical and intended to pass a limited Bill abolishing the 25-mile limit on private hauliers’ operations quickly, with major reform delayed until the details could be worked out. Although it was pledged to halt the nationalisation of bus companies, the party proposed to leave the majority of nationalised road transport in public ownership, abolish the BTC’s various executives and set up regional boards to coordinate publicly owned transport, within a competitive environment in which the BTC was to be given greater freedom to set its charges. Once in office with a majority of only seventeen, however, ministers decided that both road haulage and iron and steel should be denationalised as soon as possible, in order that the process could be completed before the next election returned a Labour government committed to halting it. The task was entrusted to Lord Leathers, the Secretary of State for the Coordination of Transport, Fuel and Power, one of several ‘overlords’ Churchill appointed to coordinate the work of individual ministries, an innovation not generally considered a success. Leathers lacked the political experience and skill needed to steer what was to prove a very difficult Bill through Parliament and his shortcomings were not significantly ameliorated by the assistance of John Maclay, a Minister of Transport and Civil Aviation whom Churchill bullied into a nervous breakdown in just over six months.

  It is fair to say that ministry deputy secretary Sir Cyril Birtchnell found it difficult to adjust to the change of government. Horrified at the prospect of damaging the Commission and abandoning integration ‘without having any considered plan for transport as a whole to put in its place’, he tried unsuccessfully to revive the idea of a royal commission.54 Lord Hurcomb, former permanent secretary at the Ministry of Transport, was now chairman of the BTC. Latching on to Hurcomb’s reported warning to Leathe
rs that even a modest relaxation of the 25-mile limit on private haulage would inflict major damage on the BTC’s haulage operations, Birtchnell recommended that the whole of the RHE would have to be sold off after all. Hurcomb later denied making the comment and events proved this fear unfounded and the sale impossible. As it was felt necessary to arrange the demise of the RHE in a manner that would prevent its employees finding out any sooner than necessary, Hurcomb was not consulted and so the ministry was unaware of his denial until it was too late. Meanwhile, ministers turned their attention to the even greater fear that the BTC would be left with a loss on the sale of the RHE, while deprived of the surplus from its operations, and an increasing loss on rail operations in the face of road competition. Alarm bells rang at the Treasury, and the Cabinet set up a committee to consider the details. After nine meetings, the committee remained divided over Birtchnell’s proposed solution: imposing a levy on road transport.

  The levy would be paid by hauliers and consisted of two parts. The simple part, part one, would compensate for the loss on the sale of the RHE. The absurd part, part two, would compensate the BTC for the financial effect on the railways of any loss of freight traffic as a result of road competition minus any savings that the Commission was able to make as a result, or that it should have made – a reference to closures made possible by a loss of traffic to roads. The levy summed up the dilemma the government faced between wanting competition and not wanting a railway deficit, a dilemma which arose from the fact that fulfilling the pledge to free road haulage was far more important than any ideological imperative. Administratively, part two of the levy required a calculation of impossible complexity. Economically, it made no sense at all to introduce competition and then, as one minister put it, to ‘tax road hauliers to the precise extent of their economic superiority over the railways’.55 Politically, the levy was bound to be opposed by the Road Haulage Association – the one group who might otherwise have been the chief cheerleaders of the government’s policy. It was a poll tax on wheels. Under constant pressure from Churchill, backbenchers and Conservative supporters to announce a policy, the committee only reached a decision once Churchill tinkered with its membership. Few liked the levy but no one was able to come up with a better way of allaying the Treasury’s fear that it would have to bail out the railways (a move it warned would remove any incentive to efficiency and release the brake both on pay claims and the public’s ‘desire … for wasteful transport services’56). Despite the levy’s obvious shortcomings, despite the likelihood that it would prove impossible to sell the entire RHE or to ensure that any part of it was bought by an expropriated haulier and despite the opposition of some ministers, a White Paper proposing both the sale and the levy was published in early May, a few days after Maclay resigned through ill-health, and a Bill followed in July.