Fire and Steam

by Christian Wolmar

  The mistake in delaying the conversion of steam power to diesel and electricity was then compounded by implementing the changeover too quickly and in a haphazard way that greatly increased costs. The Modernization Plan envisaged the ridiculous number of 174 pilot diesel locomotives to be tested before large orders were placed. But in fact there was a panic to get the work done quickly and orders were placed for hundreds of locomotives before proper testing could be carried out. No fewer than twenty-six different classes of diesel locomotives were ordered, many before a prototype was built, when five would have been sufficient. As a result, British Railways soon had hundreds of unserviceable locomotives, whose frequent breakdowns attracted much unfavourable press coverage. The introduction of the diesel multiple units was a similar mess. More than 5,000 cars were called for in the Modernization Plan and BR which right up to the 1980s built virtually all its own locomotives and coaches, realized its workshops could not cope with such huge demand and commissioned seven private manufacturers to build some at Swindon and Derby. The result was a hopeless mix of engines, transmissions and braking systems that greatly increased maintenance costs. Passengers, too, were inconvenienced because there were at least five different types of coupling and therefore many of these units could not be joined together. Many units, not necessarily the worst but those that happened to have been built in fewest numbers, were soon scrapped as the Beeching cuts (see below) began to bite.

  The Modernization Plan had called for a large programme of electrification of the West Coast Main Line to Manchester, Liverpool and Birmingham, the East Coast up to Leeds, and possibly York and a variety of commuter lines in London and major cities. But the programme stalled, partly as a result of technical incidents such as transformer explosions in both Glasgow and north-east London, and partly due to political changes which resulted in the shelving of both East and West Coast schemes, even though work had started on the latter. This stuttering start was to set the pattern for future BR electrification – wild optimism and enthusiasm followed by rising costs, loss of government confidence and a halt to any coherent programme. Electrification teams were hired and dismissed over the years, knowledge was lost and costs escalated – contrasting starkly with the experience in France and West Germany where the electrification of the main lines and the commuter routes was achieved through five- or ten-year rolling programmes. Even today, there is no plan to electrify one of Britain’s major routes, the lines out of Paddington to the West Country.

  By 1959, it was clear that the Plan was not sufficiently focused on the railway’s strengths, such as rapid connections between major cities and London commuting and as a result, it inevitably failed to turn around railway finances. While British Railways managers were concentrating on creating huge marshalling yards and doing little to improve services for passengers, the upwardly mobile British public were taking to the roads. By 1960, one in nine families owned a car and most of the other eight were saving to buy one. As both freight and passenger traffic went down, losses increased from £15.6m in 1956 (a slight improvement on the previous year) to £42m four years later17 and questions on the viability of the railways began to be asked in Parliament.

  A comprehensive report on British Railways’ finances, published by the House of Commons Select Committee on Nationalized Industries in July 1960, suggested that most of those £42m losses had been incurred on passenger services, particularly on branches and lightly used services. The Committee was highly critical of the Modernization Plan, whose cost had risen to £1.5bn, arguing that the return on the investment was likely to be far lower than expected. The notion of investing out of the crisis was quickly being replaced by the idea that salvation lay in reducing the size of the network and cutting back on services.

  In fact, this process had started before the war, albeit very slowly. From the peak mileage of over 20,000 in the early 1920s, just 1,240 miles of railway were closed to passengers18 during the era of the Big Four, mostly small branches with no hope of ever paying for themselves, such as the Devil’s Dyke, a steep railway that ran up to the top of the Downs from Brighton, which was closed in 1938. Another early casualty with an equally intriguing name was the Invergarry & Fort Augustus branch, completed in 1903, one of the last railways to be built in Scotland. Eventually, it would have reached Inverness as part of a Great Glen trunk route, but, having been built at great expense to main line standards, it carried an average of just six people per day in 1933, its final year of operation.

  At nationalization British Railways still had 19,414 route miles, and the British Transport Commission began to accelerate the rate of closure. It formed a Branch Line Committee which scoured the country looking for the least used lines. There were some easy pickings, with plenty of contenders for the least remunerative line in the country. The winner was probably the Llangynog-Llanrhaeadr-ym-Mochnant branch line in Wales, which netted just £252 annually – 15 shillings per day, but understandable given the village it served had a population of under 300 – but it was a wonder that it survived until 1952. The committee also selected a few slightly larger fish and while the pre-war closures had been uncontroversial, now a protest movement was beginning to stir and some proposals started to attract national press publicity. The biggest fuss was over the Princetown branch from Yelverton (see Chapter 7) which served Dartmoor prison. The opponents of the closure, who included the governor of the prison and Sir Henry Slesser, the former Solicitor General in Ramsay MacDonald’s Labour government who had retired locally, argued that the road was often closed by snow in winter and that the line had considerable tourism potential as it wound around some of England’s most beautiful rugged countryside. Their protests were to no avail and the line was shut in 1956.

  Despite opposition, spearheaded by the Railway Development Association whose principal luminary was the poet John Betjeman, the BTC closed 200 branches with a mileage of 1,500 miles by the time of its abolition in 1962. The pace slowed somewhat towards the end of the 1950s as diesel multiple units began, at last, to be introduced, greatly improving the economics of marginal lines and raising doubts about the closure policy in the minds of railway managers. The BTC’s closures were confined to branches and still left nearly 17,500 miles of railway, served by no fewer than 6,800 stations and 600 marshalling yards.

  But the reprieve for many lines was to be short-lived as doubts about the viability of the railway network in the Select Committee report found a ready audience in government circles. The Transport Minister appointed in Harold Macmillan’s Conservative government after the 1959 election victory was Ernest Marples. Transport Ministers tend to be either pro-roads or pro-rail, and he was definitely in the first camp, not least because he had made his fortune by starting a firm, Marples, Ridgeway & Partners, which specialized in road-building and had been one of the contractors on the M1.19 A hyperactive politician, he was responsible, inter alia, for introducing parking meters, seatbelts and yellow lines, and in an earlier post, subscriber trunk dialling, the ability to make calls across Britain without going through the operator.

  Marples appointed another committee to examine railway finances and it advised him to freeze railway investment, stop work on the West Coast Main Line and to examine the viability of the network. It suited Marples to portray the railways as a moribund business when in fact their finances were not so dire, especially when taking into account the unfair competitive environment in which they were forced to operate. Indeed, in 1959, passenger takings had increased by £2m and operating costs had been substantially reduced and, contrary to the view of the Select Committee on Nationalized Industries, it was the performance of freight, notably coal, that was responsible for most of the losses. Undeterred by such considerations, Marples appointed Richard Beeching to head a revamped British Railways Board, released from the clutches of the now-abolished British Transport Commission, marking the end of Attlee’s experiment with transport integration. British Railways was given a far greater measure of commercial freedom and its debt
s were written off – but there was a heavy price to pay for this largesse: the railways were now expected to be run as a profit-making business, with no consideration of any social obligations, and therefore a sharp reduction in the size of the network was inevitable.

  It is a sad reflection of the state of the railways during this post-war period that someone who spent his time closing lines and cutting services – rather than building them – should be the most famous railwayman of his generation. Beeching, aged forty-seven, was a scientist who was seconded to BR from his job as technical director of ICI, the huge chemicals conglomerate, at the phenomenal salary of £24,000 (equivalent to £500,000 today). He had a rather unprepossessing appearance – balding, with a round face – and would sit behind his desk smoking expensive cigars. Yet he was happy to chat in a friendly and informal way with his colleagues, a very different approach to his predecessors, who were obsessed with formality and hierarchy, as demonstrated by the fact that BR’s headquarters had five different canteens and messes for the various grades. His rather ponderous manner and gravelly voice were misleading. According to Anthony Sampson, Beeching could be mistaken for ‘one of those large phlegmatic men who tell long stories over a pint of beer in a country pub’.20 In fact, he was no pub bore, possessing an extremely sharp mind, an ability to cut to the quick and the self-confidence to shake up British Railways with little regard for its traditions and institutions.

  Beeching’s report, The Reshaping of British Railways, was published in 1963, and was elegantly and persuasively written; it triggered the biggest changes in the railway network since its creation. Its aim, as with the Modernization Plan, was to make the railways commercially viable, but he argued the remedy was not to invest in the whole system but to close large swathes of the network that were considered inherently unprofitable. Investment would then be limited to those areas where it might make the best return, principally the intercity passenger market and trainload freigh.

  Beeching found that the railway was a very unbalanced network, with many assets being greatly underused. A quarter of fare income came from just thirty-four stations (0.5 per cent of the total), while at the other end of the scale, half the rest produced just 2 per cent of the income and generated just 4 per cent of the parcels business. Only 5,500 out of 18,500 main line coaches were in use all year round, and coal trucks, on average, stood idle for two days out of three. Half of BR’s 17,830 route miles carried only 4 per cent of the traffic. And so on. It was a picture of a railway with a few highly profitable lines but around half that did not even cover their operating costs, let alone their maintenance and renewal.

  Beeching set out a fifteen-point plan to bring the railways into profit by 1970. Most stopping services would be discontinued, a third of the 7,000 stations would be closed as would 5,000 miles of track. It would not be just branches – duplicate trunk lines would also face the axe. Thousands of coaches would be scrapped, so that holiday traffic would be deliberately damped down. Bus services, which were far cheaper to operate, would replace many branch line services. There were to be improvements, too, with the modernization of coal and other heavy mineral traffic, but loss-making freight services would also be slashed, using higher tariffs to force these goods on to the roads.

  David Henshaw, a critic of Beeching, suggests that looking at the railways in this way was dishonest: ‘Had the Government paused for a moment in 1960, weighed up the relative worth of various forms of transport . . . the vast majority of minor roads would have been deemed uneconomic. The density of road traffic was spread just as unevenly as rail traffic.’21 As he concludes, ‘it was because railways were deemed to be a secondary, duplicate means of transport’22 that they were considered ripe for closure because by 1962 only 10 per cent of journeys were by train. There is no doubt that the railways at this stage suffered from the perennial bias against them. The government was paying for investment in roads, notably the motorways, so there was a good case that there should be equivalent support for railway infrastructure. However, expenditure on roads has always been deemed to be investment, while rail spending has been classified as subsidy.

  It was not all Beeching’s fault. His terms of reference had been too narrow: he was only supposed to find a way of returning the industry to profitability as soon as possible rather than consider the overall social and wider economic value of the railway or examine the economics of other methods of transport. There was no attempt, for example, to produce a cost-benefit analysis taking into account the extra deaths from traffic accidents as a result of pushing people on to the roads. Such techniques had not yet been developed but in any case logic was not part of the Beeching process. These caveats were quickly forgotten in the orgy of closures that ensued. The Beeching report had been commissioned in order to demonstrate that minor railway lines were fundamentally uneconomic and it was hardly surprising that this was its conclusion. He was searching for that Holy Grail, the myth of the profitable railway.

  Of course many of these branches and lines were not viable and were ripe to be axed, but the closure programme went too far, with little regard for the future needs of the railway once the roads filled up.23 Most of the mistakes were made after Harold Wilson became Prime Minister following Labour’s narrow victory in the October 1964 election. Whereas in opposition, the Labour party, backed by the unions, had strongly opposed the shutting of lines, in government it performed a complete U-turn, and increased the rate of closures. After much prevarication, Wilson finally announced in March 1965 that he did not have the power to stop any of the thirty-eight line closures put forward by Beeching, twenty-five of which had already been made. Far from being reviewed, the closure programme was speeded up by the new Transport Minister, Tom Fraser, with the closure of 1,071 miles in 1965, eighty more than in the previous year under Marples. Moreover, Wilson announced extra closures such as the Oxford–Cambridge line, which even Beeching had not suggested. The biggest casualty was the Great Central, which provided an alternative route from London to the Midlands and the north-west, and while it duplicated other lines, it would have been very useful for freight and as a diversionary route. Other mistakes included shutting the alternative route between Exeter and Plymouth, which avoided Dawlish where flooding over the sea wall causes perennial problems; the Somerset & Dorset, which provided an important connection in an area with a rapidly increasing population; and, as mentioned above, Oxford–Cambridge which not only provided an east–west route avoiding the capital but served the new town of Milton Keynes which was scheduled for rapid expansion. One particularly damaging cut was to deprive the sizeable Lincolnshire port town of Boston, once a main line station, of its direct London link – which means it can now only be reached circuitously via Sleaford and Grantham – just to save sixteen miles of track.24 Another nonsense was to cut the direct link from London to Stratford-upon-Avon, one of Britain’s biggest tourist attractions, and turn it into an outpost of the West Midlands suburban system. Henshaw recognizes that the completely uneconomic branch lines had to go but reckons that a third of the lines closed by Beeching, around 1,200 miles of passenger railways, ‘should never even have been contemplated for closure’.25

  As if to reinforce the inconsistency of Labour’s policy, some Beeching targets were reprieved for reasons of political expediency, such as Glasgow–Stranraer and the central Wales line which serves very isolated communities with marginal constituencies. The East Suffolk branch was saved by Gerard Fiennes, a lifelong railwayman who would later make his name by writing a book called I tried to run a railway,26 which earned him the sack from British Railways. He sketched out the concept of a basic railway, using diesel multiple units and minimal repairs to maintain passenger numbers while slashing costs, that made the line viable and it was retained. Had similar calculations been made on many other lines by equally enterprising managers, today’s railway mileage would be considerably longer. The anomalies left by the ill-thought scheme were legion. While relatively busy lines, with the kind of effo
rt demonstrated by Fiennes, could have been made viable, isolated communities in rural areas like mid-Wales, the Scottish Highlands, Cumbria and Norfolk were left with stations that are seldom used by more than a handful of passengers per day.

  Beeching’s fundamental mistake was to underestimate the contribution of branches to the economics of the railways and he was wrong to assume that people who travelled by rail would happily shift to buses. The Oxford Companion to British Railway History sums up the Beeching era thus: ‘Unfortunately, he was expected to produce quick solutions to problems that were deep-seated and not susceptible to purely intellectual analysis.’27 Beeching himself viewed it differently: ‘I suppose I’ll always be looked upon as the axe man, but it was surgery, not mad chopping.’28

  Overall, the closure programme was a haphazard process based on flawed logic and the assumptions by Beeching about the lack of profitability of many lines were proved wrong. Even in cool economic terms, Beeching’s closures were never going to turn around the finances of the railways. He calculated they would save around £30m annually, at a time when the railways were losing nearly three times that much. In February 1965 Beeching produced a second report29 which suggested even further cuts, reducing the railway to 3,000 miles of main line which would be intensively developed and 4,500 miles of other routes that would be maintained to a minimal level. He had overstepped the mark and Wilson sent him back to ICI a year before the end of his contract.

  Viewed in the context of the long-term history of the railways, Beeching merely accelerated a process of closures that had already started. Nevertheless, the figures for the 1960s are startling. By the end of the decade there were just 3,002 stations, compared with over 7,000 in 1961, and nearly 6,000 miles had been closed, leaving just 12,098. As with the conversion of steam to diesel, the process had been too slow for many years, but then proceeded too fast to retain any coherence and to fulfil strategic aims. Contrary to Beeching’s protestations, it was slash and burn, with marginal closures justified by dubious figures drawn up by British Railways staff intent on fulfilling narrow short-term financial targets. His figures for revenue were skewed because the data was collected in April – outside the holiday season when many marginal lines made huge profits.