by Charles Loft
The worst railway accident in English history took place on a foggy October morning at Harrow and Wealdstone the following year. The guard of a packed commuter train had just told some passengers they could ride in his van and turned to shut the doors in the two coaches behind when, to his horror, he saw a 500-ton overnight express about to smash into the rear of his train at 50 or 60mph. He hurled himself to the other side of the platform and sheltered behind the platform edge until the succession of hideous impacts subsided. When he emerged, he found the three coaches he had helped to fill completely destroyed. The express locomotive, having smashed into his train, had deflected to one side and collided head-on with a second express, sending that train’s two locomotives scything across another platform. Three trains and part of the station’s footbridge had become a 30-foot-high pile of wreckage and people. One hundred and twelve were killed and 157 injured. Many of the passengers were railway employees on their way to the London Midland Region’s Euston office; three of whom got out of the fourth coach from the rear of the local train, which was partially destroyed, to play key roles in organising the rescue of the injured. As the driver and fireman of the first express died in the crash, it was impossible to be certain why they had ignored three successive signals, but it is possible that the driver did not see the first one in the four seconds it should have been visible to him and, continuing to look for it, missed the next two which were mounted at a higher angle. Whatever actually happened, the inquiry demonstrated that the safety of hundreds of people on the busiest main line in the biggest city of a relatively wealthy nation should not depend on one man who had spent nearly four hours looking at signals through fog and night not being distracted for four seconds. It also showed how much more resistant post-1950 coaching stock was to the impact of a crash than older vehicles. It implicitly made the case not only for an enhanced warning system but complete conversion of the line to colour-light signalling. There was more to these accidents than underinvestment, but the lack of modern safety measures – the missing bits of kit, the semaphore signals, the steam traction, the construction of the coaches on the nation’s premier main lines – helps to explain why by 1954 even a Treasury official could say that ‘everybody wanted and expected the railways to spend money’, without complaint.73
In 1969 Christopher Booker looked back at the preceding two decades and concluded that in the late 1950s and early 1960s Britain had been caught up in a collective ‘vitality fantasy’, a significant element of which was ‘the sense of being carried into a modernistic future’. As this fantasy progressed from dream to nightmare, a struggle took place between ‘New England’ and ‘Old England’, culminating in the latter’s defeat in the ‘terrible year of 1963’. Booker said little about the railways and he probably did not have the Treasury in mind when he wrote that by the mid-1950s ‘as prosperity went on increasing, people were beginning to forget the past and turn their imaginations with ever rising expectation to the future’.74 But it wasn’t only the public who had money to spend; while the increasing ownership of cars and televisions transformed Britain, the Treasury authorised huge investment programmes in the nationalised industries. At a press conference on 24 January 1955, anxious to stress the newness of what he was proposing and to prevent the railways appearing anachronistic, General Sir Brian Robertson (GCB, GBE, KCMG, KCVO, DSO, MC) launched the BTC’s Plan for the Modernisation and Re-equipment of British Railways (the Modernisation Plan). At a cost of £1,240 million over fifteen years, the plan promised ‘a thoroughly modern system’, featuring high-speed track, colour-light signalling, automatic train control, modern telecommunications, ‘several thousand electric or diesel locomotives’, modern coaches and computerised marshalling yards, which would allow the railways to earn at least £5 million a year more than was required to meet their central charges by the early 1970s.75 By 1962 Robertson’s appeal to the mood of the times had failed. In that summer’s bestselling Anatomy of Britain, Anthony Sampson described the railways, with their ‘picturesque, feudal and delightful way of life’ as ‘the most embarrassing of all Britain’s Victorian leftovers… [A] kind of caricature of all Britain’s problems.’ Sampson found Beeching ‘reassuring’.76 He did not interview Robertson. That Old Englander had retired the year before, with a hereditary baronetcy, to run boys’ clubs in Gloucestershire and take a seat on the board of a sleeping-car company. The Modernisation Plan came to be considered so disastrous a failure that it poisoned relations between Whitehall and the railways for two generations. The 2004 White Paper The Future of Rail, which condensed the industry’s entire history into seven paragraphs, still found space to refer to the ‘ill-fated modernisation plan of the 1950s’, the failure of which to reverse the decline of rail traffic led to the ‘Beeching closures’.77 So what went wrong?
A casual reader of the 1955 Modernisation Plan could be forgiven for thinking that it was related to a specific set of detailed proposals to begin within five years and be completed in fifteen years. In fact, although the plan set out the main principles of modernisation (improving track and signalling, replacing steam, new rolling stock, continuous brakes for goods wagons, marshalling yards), turning these principles into specific projects was the responsibility of the area boards established by the 1953 Transport Act to manage the railway regions (Southern, Western, Eastern, London Midland, North Eastern and Scottish). There is no precise point at which one can say modernisation under the Modernisation Plan began; by the end of the 1950s it had emerged that the BTC saw modernisation as an ongoing process with no definite end either. Significantly refined under Beeching and his successors, modernisation delivered the elimination of steam traction by 1968 and the electrification of the west coast main line between London and Manchester/Liverpool, alongside a variety of improvements in safety, efficiency and comfort. Most notably, it laid the groundwork for the undeniable success of the High Speed Train and the success that the Advanced Passenger Train could have been had the country not lost faith in publicly owned industry in general and rail in particular. All this had its roots in the 1955 Plan; nevertheless, much of the criticism of the BTC’s modernisation programme is justified. Travelling north on the west coast main line out of London’s Euston station today, you may notice, as you approach Bletchley, a flyover rising beside the main line on your left, crossing it and descending again on the right. It is not one of those brutally simple ones the railway builds nowadays that seem to have been designed to say ‘please note that we have not spent a penny more than necessary on this’; the Bletchley flyover is a slightly more delicate affair with retaining walls of patterned concrete which offer a little nod to the ornate balustrades and other ostentations one associates with the Victorian railway. You have just passed a monument to the failure of modernisation.
A key element in the perceived failure of the plan was that it did not concentrate sufficiently on those traffics best suited to rail (bulk freight, long-distance passengers and commuters). On the passenger side, this was not really the Commission’s fault, as we shall see in the next chapter, but its freight strategy is harder to defend. In terms of both freight ton-miles and market share, the railways’ freight business appeared much healthier in 1946 than in 1938 and passenger mileage (including London Transport) rose from 21,700 million to 31,700 million in the same period. This traffic was carried with a significantly reduced maintenance budget, however, and the railways were left in a poor condition. By the mid-1950s the railways were faced with a restoration and intensification of the sort of road competition they had experienced in the 1930s. The number of commercial vehicles in 1945 was only slightly below the 1939 figure at 570,000. This doubled by 1950 and had reached almost 1.5 million in 1960 and 1.64 million by 1969. Although the railways’ freight ton-mileage remained fairly steady until 1954 and only experienced a slow decline in the following three years, rail’s market share declined continuously from 1946, when it was more than 50 per cent, and in 1955, at 40 per cent, fell below the 1938 figure. The fall would
have been greater had the Commission not overestimated the traffic, in particular general merchandise traffic, that could be retained as a result of technical improvements and changes to its charges scheme.
While the 1953 Transport Act encouraged a closer relationship between costs and charges, the latter remained subject to an interminable process of approval. The Commission had not finished work on a merchandise charges scheme it had started drawing up under the terms of the 1947 Transport Act, when it was obliged to begin again in response to the 1953 Act. After five months of consultation with customers, the scheme was submitted to the Transport Tribunal, which, having considered objections for sixteen further months, asked the Commission to modify its plan. It was not finally implemented until July 1957. In the interim, the prospect of the scheme’s introduction took on something of the status of the rapture or the revolution: an almost magical event that would make everything all right. Similar faith was placed in the effects of modernising freight operations. As a result, while the Modernisation Plan talked of concentrating on the bulk carriage of passengers and goods, the railway carried traffic at a loss which it hoped to be able to carry profitably in future. Marvellous computerised marshalling yards were built at great expense, never to be fully used. The Bletchley flyover was built as part of a London freight bypass carrying goods traffic from such a yard at Swanbourne, in the middle of nowhere, on the line to Oxford, over the west coast main line towards Bedford, Cambridge and another vast yard in the middle of nowhere at Whitemoor near March. The London freight bypass scheme was abandoned in the 1960s, by which time it seemed obvious to an experienced and intelligent railwayman like Gerard Fiennes that ‘railways must live by concentration and not dispersal’.78 The through route between Oxford and Cambridge closed at the end of 1967. It is arguably the most regrettable of the 1960s closures. The flyover has a future as part of the proposed east–west route and the whole route would probably be reopened tomorrow if it had been kept intact – but at the time it was quicker to travel between the two university cities via London.
Between 1957 and 1963 the decline of rail freight accelerated significantly (ton-miles fell by nearly a quarter from 20,900 million to 15,400 million) and by the end of the 1960s rail’s market share was 18 per cent. This was largely a result of a shift in the balance of the economy from heavy industry (providing the sort of traffic best suited to rail – bulk minerals) to new industries better suited to road because they required door-to-door delivery and careful handling. Pilkington Glass was the example later used by officials when they explained to a Labour government hoping to shift freight from road to rail why there were only limited prospects for such a policy, but any manufacturer of the white goods that characterised the growth of consumerism would have served as well. By the mid-1970s freight was rail’s secondary activity, but as late as 1967 railway managers still saw freight as the most important part of the business. The enormity of this change should not be understated: the railways were built for freight and it had been their core business for nearly 150 years.
Strategic shortcomings were compounded by technical failings. The Commission embarked on a programme to equip all wagons with vacuum brakes before deciding air brakes would be better and installing them. Many of the diesel locomotives built under the modernisation programme proved inadequate and the Commission’s purchasing procedures were subjected to heavy internal criticism, an inquiry and a White Paper. Government interventions were not helpful. The chief example being that government policy encouraged diesel locomotive orders from British manufacturers, rather than more experienced foreign firms. The Commission intended to test a series of prototypes and pick the best for mass production, but government pressure to accelerate modernisation in order to bring forward its financial benefits cut short the tests and led to a plethora of incompatible types, some of which represented very poor value. In particular, the government’s desire to reduce unemployment in Scotland led it to encourage the BTC to give some orders to the Scottish-based North British Locomotive Company, leaving the Commission saddled with an unsatisfactory collection of overpriced, underperforming machines.
At the heart of the problems with railway modernisation lay the 1953 Transport Act. The abolition of the Railway Executive under the Act left the BTC with the dual role of overseeing all nationalised transport and acting as central authority for the railways, an arrangement its Financial Comptroller, Sir Reginald Wilson, called ‘a first-class English mess’.79 For the first fifteen months after the Executive’s demise, an interim organisation was in place. This was superseded in January 1955 by a new organisation which Gourvish describes as ‘a great semi-military bureaucratic edifice’, which lacked a clear chain of command, confusing and demoralising railway managers.80 The fact that the Modernisation Plan was produced during this disruptive double reorganisation of 1953–5 contributed to its shortcomings. The new area boards, staffed with part-time appointees, were too weak to satisfy the Conservatives’ hopes for decentralisation but were strong enough to hamper the BTC’s attempts to run the railways effectively. The BTC was responsible for making policy in regard to investment and the withdrawal of unremunerative services, but in both cases individual proposals came from the area boards. If the Commission’s attempts to adapt the railways to future needs were flawed, then the area boards’ tendency to ignore those attempts was as significant a problem. The most obvious example of pointless decentralisation was the decision of the Western board to order diesel locomotives with hydraulic transmission while everyone else favoured diesel-electric (although it did make trainspotting more interesting).
The one single factor that was to mark out the 1955 Modernisation Plan as a beacon of public sector misspending was the failure to deliver a solvent railway. The Modernisation Plan indicated that at the end of the modernisation period the railways would deliver a net annual surplus of £5 million.† In 1956, a White Paper entitled Proposals for the Railways, supposedly the result of more detailed thinking, estimated that the Commission would break even on its operating account by 1961 or 1962. A reappraisal of the plan in 1959 put this estimate back a year. The railways did not just miss these targets, they made a mockery of them. While the plans described a sober journey to solvency, the Commission careered off on a trail of profligacy, laughing and waving out of the window as their promises became less and less credible – or at least that is how it must have looked. In 1954 the railways had operated at a profit, although too small a profit to pay the interest on stock issued to shareholders at the time of nationalisation; by 1962 the operating deficit alone was over £100 million and half that again was incurred in central charges – the real picture was worse. It was this disparity between promised and actual financial performance (the ‘angle of unreality’ as it later became known in the ministry81) that saddled the Modernisation Plan with its toxic reputation and did so much to brand the railways as the lamest of lame ducks. Although there were other reasons for modernising the railways, the financial benefits were absolutely central and there is no doubt that the sketchy calculations in the three plans were deeply flawed and hard to relate to any detailed work within the BTC. The Commission certainly made errors in the financial justification for modernisation, for example by calculating a return on ‘betterment’, the difference between the cost of renewing existing equipment and the cost of modernising, which was not a valid calculation if the original equipment was operating at a loss. The most striking failure of the original plan was that its calculation made no allowance for the cost of paying interest on the investment while it was taking place and before its benefits emerged, which wiped out the apparent surplus. No wonder many in Whitehall looked back to the Modernisation Plan’s publication as an almost inexplicable error. Yet, whatever the failings of railway management, the fact that the plan published in 1955 contained thoroughly misleading figures was entirely the fault of government, as the story of the plan’s genesis shows.
Although the government wanted the railways modernised, it
s real purpose in approving publication of the plan in January 1955 was to justify the cost of avoiding a strike by the National Union of Railwaymen, and ministers knew, or ought to have done, that its figures were misleading. For all Lennox-Boyd’s talk of commercial freedom during the debates over the Transport Bill in 1952, the greatest restriction on the railways’ commercial freedom in the 1950s was the government’s tendency to treat the nationalised industries, in the Treasury’s words, as the ‘handmaidens of other policies’, by constantly involving itself in their pricing decisions and industrial relations.82 The electoral success of the Conservatives during the 1950s was largely dependent on convincing potential Labour voters that the Conservatives could be trusted to deliver prosperity while maintaining full employment and avoiding confrontation with the unions. This was particularly important in 1951–5, when the Conservatives had only a small parliamentary majority. At the time, railway wages were subject to a complex and almost constant process of annual negotiation, the shortcomings of which were evident in dissatisfaction over pay, poor productivity, difficulty recruiting staff and regular threats of a strike. Railwaymen were not only significant in terms of the massive disruption they could cause through strike action, but as a benchmark for other workers. As a result, Conservative governments in the 1950s were never more than a year away from the potential collapse of their industrial-relations policy (and electoral strategy) over railway pay and this issue dominated the government’s relationship with the BTC. It is said that when Churchill appointed Robertson as BTC chairman in September 1953, he told him ‘the money doesn’t matter, what matters is the chaps’; he certainly told the Cabinet much the same thing.83 Indeed Robertson’s appointment only really makes sense if one sees the railways as a collection of officers and men (the words used to differentiate management and non-management within the industry at the time), rather than a business. A proven administrator, Robertson had very limited business experience. He was almost immediately persuaded by ministers to buy off a strike in late 1953, despite his reluctance to pay more than had been recommended by the extensive negotiating process. As a good soldier he could usually be relied upon to accept an impossible position.
