Posted in News/interest Friday, December 30th, 2011
The Second World War was to be a testing time for our railway system. Once again they were put under government control. The heavy wartime traffic and inability to invest in rolling stock, track and signalling renewal led to a run down system in 1945. This led inevitably towards nationalisation by the Attlee government in 1948. It is difficult to envisage what would have happened if nationalisation had not taken place, as the LNER in particular was in a parlous financial state. Not only were the railways war worn and expensively worked but the ‘poor bag of assets’ as they were described included more than half a million privately owned wagons, most of an outdated design without continuous braking.
Organisationally the new British Railways was managed by the Railway Executive which reported to the British Transport Commission (BTC). This arrangement led to frequent tension between the two bodies and management style tended to be a continuation of the old companies’ policies. In 1953 after a change of government the management of the railways was re-organised by abolishing the Railway Executive (and all of the other executives except London Transport) and making the six regional boards report to the BTC. The denationalisation of road haulage was not accompanied by releasing BR from having to publish its freight rates and remaining a common carrier and thus the transfer of goods from rail to road continued, accelerated in 1955 by a two week stoppage because of a strike by members of the footplatemen’s union, ASLEF. This strike was evidence of the manpower problems affecting the railways with pay levels having fallen behind other industries leading to staff shortages and high turnover. These factors led to the setting up in 1958 of the Guillebaud report on railway workers’ pay, This report recommended in 1960 a range of increases of pay as a result. However no attempt was made to simplify the complex pay structures which in many cases survived to privatisation. The headlining of BR’s increasing annual deficits by the popular press also added to pressure on the government to take action.
The £1,240 million Modernisation Plan announced in 1955 seemed at first to be an answer to the problem by reducing costs and making the railways more attractive to potential customers both for passengers and freight. Considerable electrification was proposed, including the resumption of the Southern third rail electrification scheme ‘east of a line drawn from Reading to Portsmouth’. The East and West Coast lines were included as was London – Ipswich and branches including Felixstowe. In 1958 the plan was revisited owing to continuing annual deficits, the East Coast electrification scheme being shelved. The Western Region was in particular financial difficulty and panic timetable cuts were made in June 1958 reducing services on many lines to a useless level (eg one through train each way daily between Andover and Cheltenham over the former MSWJ line.)
Increasing government concern led to the setting up of a Special Advisory Committee under Sir Ivan Stedeford which notably included Messrs Beeching and Serpell whose later reports were to generate much discussion on the future of the railways. Another member was Henry Benson whose separate report recommended the reduction of Northern Ireland’s railways to the Dundalk (for Dublin), Larne and Bangor lines. A report on BR under Stedeford’s chairmanship was prepared but not published. It is surmised that it proposed increased financial support for a railway network not much smaller than that which existed in the early 1960’s.
The new Minister of Transport in the form of Ernest Marples was clearly unsympathetic to railways (possibly because of his involvement in road construction through the Marples Ridgeway organisation). He reportedly attempted to halt the Manchester – Euston electrification south of Crewe, but as masts had been erected well towards London he was fortunately too late. Sir Brian Robertson (‘Sir BR’) was succeeded by Dr Richard Beeching (‘Dr RB’) as BTC Chairman in 1961 and then in 1962 of the new British Railways Board. The well known Beeching report with its accompanying maps spelling out the fate of many lines was published in 1963. Line closures accelerated and the change of government in 1964 was thought to be the saving of many lines especially in more remote areas. However despite promises made by Labour in the run up to the election, closures continued under the ineffective transport minister, Tom Fraser. His successor, Barbara Castle, reprieved several routes including the Central Wales (Shrewsbury – Swansea) line but allowed closures not included in Beeching’s report such as Oxford – Bletchley and Bedford- Cambridge. Her tenure as minister was marked by radical proposals such as re-financing the railways through the new Public Service Obligation Grant (PSOG) created at this time to pay for the ‘social railway’ and the setting up of Passenger Transport Authorities which were to lead to major improvements in suburban lines as seen on Merseyside and Tyneside. Her successor Richard Marsh, agreed to the Waverley route (Edinburgh – Carlisle) closure and later became BRB Chairman, possibly notable only for allowing steam excursions on BR metals.
The 1970’s were relatively quiet for the railways under both Conservative and Labour governments. Electrification (now on the 25kv AC system) proceeded steadily on the West Coast main line to Glasgow, and Kings Cross and St Pancras suburban lines. The carriage of containers gradually became a significant freight traffic. Because of the time taken to develop the Advanced Passenger Train, an engineering solution in the form of the diesel High Speed Train (HST) made its debut in 1976 revolutionising travel times on several main lines. This train was possibly the catalyst that later ignited the growth in rail passenger traffic. A negative action in this decade for which we are paying massively today was an infrastructure grant which paid the railways to reduce capacity by measures such as track singling and taking out sidings and loops. Parallel to this action was the very effective BR Property Board in selling redundant land from closed lines, stations and goods yards often making any reopening plans prohibitively expensive.
The election of a Conservative Government in 1979 did not have an immediate impact on the railways except for the divesting of shipping and hotels. However with the economy going into depression in 1981/2, not only was PSOG gradually reduced from 1982 onward, the ability of the BRB to borrow externally was reduced. However BR management under a succession of politically astute chairmen, Peter Parker and the two Robert Reids, were effective in maximising use of assets and developed a market led approach to the passenger business. Having relatively high fares this situation led to BR becoming by the end of the 1980’s the most financially efficient publicly owned European rail system with the lowest level of financial support per train mile. Unfortunately this also reflected the fact that pay levels of BR staff had again fallen well behind the national average and industrial unrest marked the end of the decade. Rolling stock replacement was starting to become a problem and in an attempt to source cheaper trains, experiments with a Leyland National bus based rail vehicle led to the 4 wheel ‘Pacer’ series of trains which are largely still with us today. By the end of the 1980’s BR had been ‘sectorised’ for management purposes into Intercity, Regional Railways, Network South East, Parcels and Freight. The government commissioned the Serpell report which advocated a further significant reduction of the railway network, but fortunately public reaction was quite vocal and the report was effectively shelved.
The late 1980’s saw the possibility of some form of privatisation of the railways being considered at government level. Conservative electoral success in 1992 led to the Railways Act 1993 which enabled privatisation. Three alternatives were considered, BR plc, the re-creation of the four big 1923 companies and separation of trains and track, privatising the freight business and franchising the passenger business as separate geographically based units. It was the last named option which was adopted. With the specialised services such as telecommunications and rolling stock companies, nearly 100 separate businesses replaced the BRB. Privatisation was hastened to ensure completion by the 1997 election, the track owning company Railtrack being one of the last. The incoming Labour government did not stop or reverse the virtually completed process but passed the Railways Act 2000 which replaced the Franchising Directorate by the Strategic Rail Authority, initially chaired by Sir Alastair Morton.
One clear benefit of the privatisation process was the freight business which had steadily declined in BR days after the successive loss of fish, milk, newspaper and most of the postal traffic. A forerunner of the way things were going was the involvement of the aggregates company Foster Yeoman in specifying and obtaining their own main line locomotives for their Somerset – London mineral trains. The three separate freight companies initially set up had to be re-combined in order to achieve a sale to English, Welsh and Scottish (EWS) an American (then Canadian, now German!) owned company. Fairly soon other freight businesses took to the rails including Freightliner, Direct Rail Services and GB Rail.
A succession of accidents, notably Hatfield and Potters Bar, led to the spotlight being focussed on Railtrack’s professional and managerial standards. Financial controls were set in place to regulate the track charges paid by the train operators under the Rail Regulator (ORR) and it was the financial state of Railtrack that led to its abrupt dissolution in 2002 and replacement by a quasi – state owned ‘not for profit’ body Network Rail. Very quickly the new organisation decided to take back much of its maintenance work ‘in house’ rather than relying on contractors.
Yet another Railways Act in 2005 abolished the Strategic Rail Authority, civil servants at the Department for Transport (DfT) becoming the overseeing authority. This has led to a degree of micro management on matters such as rolling stock allocation and timetables. The regional passenger watchdog bodies were abolished in 2005 and subsumed into a national body – Passenger Focus, responsible now also for bus and internal air passenger matters. Devolution has led to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland all adopting a more progressive attitude to railways compared with England, at least outside of London. Fortunately we have had a very pro-rail Transport Minister in the form of Lord Adonis, sadly in the last days of the previous government, but Phillip Hammond, his successor has also shown a good understanding of the potential of an efficient rail system. Passenger franchises now look like being let on a longer term basis, possibly learning from the example of Chiltern where considerable investment in infrastructure has taken place in a 20 year franchise. Whether British state ownership of operation will return as has happened temporarily with the East Coast franchise is a question for the future. Ironically much of our railway system is now owned or operated by French, German and Dutch state interests!
Rail passenger and freight usage has continued to expand and capacity demand alone justifies proposals for a duplicate (high speed) route along the London – North axis of Britain to add to the successful High Speed link to the Channel Tunnel. At the local level, Community Rail Partnerships have helped increase revenue on rural lines, many significantly. Sadly our railways have moved from the top of the European financial ‘league table’ for the least subsidy per train mile to the bottom as the most expensive railway. This led to the government in 2010 engaging Sir Roy McNulty to examine the value for money aspect of our railways. His report identified trends which have led to the situation and advocated a target of 30% improvement in financial efficiency by 2018. Measures suggested include devolved responsibility (particularly in the p.t.e. areas), closer working between Network Rail and operators including consideration of experimental vertical integration. He did not propose network reduction but advocated a more sensitive approach to rail fares. A Rail Delivery Group was set up to oversee implementation. A recent report by the Jacobs Consultancy for the DfT advocates reduction of franchises by six , including combination of East Coast with Cross Country and the breaking up of London Midland into electric (added to West Coast) and diesel sectors (added to Chiltern).
In conclusion one thing is certain, it is unlikely that the existing organisational structure of our railways will remain unchanged for long, but it is clear that government will need to have a more positive attitude to their future role in Britain than has been the case in much of the latter half of the 20th Century.
Commentary – with the benefit of 6/6 hindsight!
The story of transport in Britain, whilst rich in variety, is not a totally happy one and certainly not one which fits in with the other achievements of the 19th Century’s most powerful nation. It is true that being a pioneer meant that we were saddled with some early ‘bum’ decisions -eg narrow canals, limited railway loading gauge. However compare the French decision to build the 150 mile Canal du Midi across the south of France, linking Bordeaux to the Mediterranean in 1681 and the abortive attempts to link the English and Bristol Channels. At least the Thames and English Channel were linked until the 1870’s by the barge sized Wey and Arun Canal. Where the government was directly involved, some strategic links were achieved notably the Caledonian Canal engineered by Thomas Telford.
It is worthy of conjecture to consider if the canal age occurred just two decades earlier, allowing them to develop more fully and had railway companies been prevented from acquiring them, whether the railways would have been as an important carrier of goods as they became. This was the situation in the Netherlands but the topography of the two countries is very different! Had the development of durable road surfacing occurred earlier in the 19th century, again it is probable that the impact of railways would have been less as by the 1830’s considerable progress had been made in the design and construction of steam road coaches by Goldsworthy Gurney and others, but their effect on road surfaces as well as the horse carriage interests led to their disappearance by means of very high turnpike tolls.
It is hard to envisage what the railway geography would be if there had been some degree of planning in building the main line network. Certainly there would be less duplication of lines in industrial areas such as West Yorkshire or South Wales. The focus on London would probably be similar to that existing today but probably with fewer terminal stations. Three separate principal stations in cities such as Leicester and Liverpool and four in Manchester and Glasgow certainly would have been avoided. We may even had better east – west links. On the other hand, would a planned system been as able as the private companies in catering for later developments such as the growth of seaside resorts? One area where the attitudes of the railway companies did affect residential patterns is the approach to London suburban traffic- compare the Liverpool Street and Euston based suburban services in the early 20th century. The GER needed the cash flow after their bankers, Gurney Overend, failed in 1866, whilst the LNWR (the self styled ‘Premier Line’) seemed to regard commuters as an undignified necessity, possibly not to be encouraged.
Moving into the 20th century, it is reasonably clear that the avoidance of nationalisation after the First World War was a mistake. The four big companies were just one of the options considered and it is unfortunate that the option of putting the five Scottish companies into a single group was not followed. We ended up with the nonsense of the Great North of Scotland Railway detached from its parent LNER group by about 35 miles of LMS main line. One aim, remarkably, was to reduce competition, even though there was competition on the network interfaces, eg London to Birmingham, Edinburgh, Leeds, Manchester, Nottingham, Plymouth as well as suburban systems in the West Midlands, West Yorkshire, Thames Valley, Glasgow and Edinburgh. ‘Penetrating lines’ (eg the LNER around Wrexham, the LMS around Swansea) were left with the parent companies.
The fact that the new companies were private concerns led to the new Ministry of Transport becoming to a large extent a ‘Ministry of Roads’. Fears again of monopolies led to the railways being divested of their direct bus operating powers, but being allowed to have non controlling shareholdings in the regional bus companies with usually Tilling or British Electric Traction being the other main shareholder (eg the Eastern Counties Omnibus Company was ultimately owned before nationalisation by Thomas Tilling 49%, LNER 46%, LMS 3% and ‘outside’ 2% – rounded percentages). This tie up with bus companies led to some early branch closures in the 1930’s but fortunately the railways did not carry out a major stripping of local services that some of the larger bus operators advocated.
What in 1923 had amalgamations been permitted with aim of competition? A Midland – GSWR working against a LNWR – Caledonian combination would seem obvious. A GNR- NER – North British merger would seem logical on the East Coast, but where would that leave the GER? An interesting combination would have been a GWR – GCR tie up which would have covered several major industrial areas. What about south of the Thames? Would there have been any possibility of trans- Thames mergers (eg LNWR with the LBSCR). What about the minor lines- the Hull and Barnsley going into a Midland based company, the MSWJ going into the LSWR instead of being run down by the GWR? What is interesting is that the franchising process has effectively recreated in many cases the pre 1923 company systems which possibly demonstrates the logic of that size and shape of network in management terms.
Coming back to reality and the present day, we have a railway system with growing passenger and revived freight use. We are paying large sums for schemes to put back capacity (such as reinstating double track on several less important main lines), catching up with backlogs of maintenance while at the same time there is a desperate need to reduce costs as evidenced by the McNulty report. Whether we shall see vertical integration of track and train as advocated, at least on a trial basis, has yet to be decided. At last further electrification is back on the agenda with the London-Bristol/Cardiff and north west infills. Trans-Pennine electrification also now looks imminent with the huge increase in passengers (and overcrowding) on this key route. We should be moving toward a rolling programme so that electrification teams have continuous work thus reducing unit costs eg Bedford- Sheffield- Leeds should follow on the current schemes – and for freight haulage, Felixstowe –Ipswich / Stowmarket – Ely – Peterborough – Leicester – Birmingham should not be too far down the list. This would allow electrification of several passenger services (eg Birmingham – Stansted). By this means we start to create electrified networks rather than separate electric main lines.
Concluding, one further factor is that the ‘micro management’ by the DfT of our railways is not an ideal structure for the future. A body absorbing the Rail Regulator as an agency of the DfT- not unlike the Highways Agency in charge of our trunk roads – might be an answer. However we should heed the warning of that well regarded railwayman, Gerard Fiennes who wrote in his autobiography ‘I tried to run a Railway’ – “Reorganise and bleed!” Food for thought!
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