Last Trains

by Charles Loft

  While public ownership of the railways was the long-held aim of a labour movement that wanted to see railwaymen working for the public good rather than private profit, integration, the other guiding principle of the 1947 Transport Act, had been a feature of debates about transport policy throughout the 1930s. There was more than a little truth in the allegation that the railways’ enthusiasm for the concept was based on a desire to handicap road transport. However, the example of the London Passenger Transport Board, established in 1933, demonstrated the manner in which different modes could be made to work together, and the licensing systems imposed on buses and lorries in the 1930s rested on similar principles. The idea that competition leads to a wasteful duplication of facilities may appear outlandish to those readers who have grown up in a country where politicians have, for twenty years, appeared to broadly agree that competition drives efficiency. In a country where rationing still persisted and which had just spent six years of war treating waste as an enemy and imposing central control on all forms of transport (and much else), things looked very different. The plethora of competing railway lines the Victorians had bequeathed to the BTC only lent support to the concept of wasteful competition.

  The integration (or coordination) of transport is often treated – in particular by critics of Beeching – as being synonymous with better rail services and restrictions on road use. The most obvious form of integration by 1951, however, was to replace rural railways with bus and road freight services; or rather to close the rail services that had already lost most of their traffic to road. Progress was slow; the Commission was feeling its way and was wary of imposing a particular mode on its customers. Charged with integrating rail, canals, bus services and public long-distance road haulage in the national interest while making enough money to cover its costs ‘taking one year with another’, the BTC had been given an enormous task. A small body whose members were generally past the peak of their professional abilities, it oversaw a vast undertaking, the structure of which, divided into executives responsible for railways, docks and waterways, hotels, London Transport, road haulage and buses, was hardly conducive to either inter-modal coordination or central direction. In particular the Railway Executive, which accounted for around 80 per cent of the business, was eager to go its own way. Establishing the new organisation was a complicated process and by 1951 the Commission had yet to complete the acquisition of road haulage companies. Just keeping services running in the post-war economic environment was a significant challenge. The railways had endured six years of wartime overuse, bomb damage, under-maintenance and little investment; now fuel, labour and materials for reconstruction were often in short supply. They were still subject to the restrictive regulations the industry had been trying to reform when war intervened, including ‘common carrier’ obligations that hindered attempts to turn away uneconomic freight traffic and the existence of a Transport Tribunal to which the Commission had to apply if it wanted to increase its charges. The costly delays the latter process imposed on increases in charges were a source of persistent complaints by the Commission.

  From the start, the new organisation was burdened with the requirement to pay interest on British Transport Stock that had been used to purchase the nationalised assets. There can be little doubt that the railways were overvalued and the big winners from nationalisation were the compensated shareholders in an industry whose prospects were gloomy (although in the immediate post-war period, with petrol rationed and rail use higher than ever, the full extent of the gloom was less apparent). Whether one uses the Commission’s published accounts or the recalculations made by Terry Gourvish, which make some allowance for this overvaluation, the surplus earned on rail operations in the Commission’s first three years was not enough to cover their contribution to the BTC’s central charges (primarily interest on British Transport Stock) and this was only partially mitigated by the results of the rest of the business. In March 1949 the Railway Executive, under pressure from the Commission, had decreed that each region should set up a committee to investigate branch lines that might be losing money, the whole exercise to be overseen by the Executive’s own branch line committee. By the time the Executive was abolished in 1953, 1,420 miles had been cut from the passenger network (253 miles closing completely) and a further 359 miles of freight-only line had closed. From a post-Beeching perspective, this looks like mere tinkering around the edges of the problem. Several of the early cases were not so much closures as recognitions that a service had ceased to be. Early ‘schemes’ put to the committee included the Old Ynysybwl branch (half a mile of freight line that had seen no traffic since 1944), the Port Talbot railway (‘Traffic: Nil’), the Acton Central–Kew Bridge shuttle (suspended since 1940) and a horse tramway in the Forest of Dean.39

  Unsurprisingly, the remnants of the Stephens empire were soon in the committee’s sights. The East Kent owed its existence to the local coalfield; however, this had not developed to the extent Stephens had hoped. Only one successful colliery, Tilmanstone, was served by the line and most of the numerous extensions Stephens proposed never materialised. The railway stabilised – if that is the right word – around a line that headed east from the Canterbury–Dover main line at Shepherdswell, passed Tilmanstone, threw off the Richborough branch at Eastry, and then gradually turned back on itself towards Canterbury. It terminated six miles from the city at Wingham (Canterbury Road) station, the location of which appears to have been decided on the basis that this was as far as the line had got when the money ran out. In 1948, passenger traffic on the remaining service from Shepherdswell to Wingham was so light that the Railway Executive could name the five ‘regular’ passengers affected by closure:

  Mr and Mrs Tritton of Upper Eythorne travel once a week or once a fortnight from Eythorne to Eastry… Mr and Mrs Oates of Approach Rd, Shepherds Well … travel to Elvington less than once a month and use the train when the weather prevents them cycling… Mr Lovell of Wingham visits Shepherds Well about once in three months.40

  The line closed to passengers in October, before the committee had even begun its work.

  In the whole of 1948 the only traffic carried on the East Kent’s Richborough branch had been twenty wagons of sugar beet from Richborough Castle siding and ten wagons of manure and beet pulp the other way. Given that this could be dealt with by a siding on the Dover–Ramsgate line about a mile away, its closure in October 1949 was a formality. It must have raised hackles in the area, however, given the response when the branch line committee turned its attention to the freight service on the remaining section beyond Tilmanstone to Wingham. Here, two trains each way six days a week had carried just under 15,000 tons of freight in 1949, less than a ton-and-a-half per train – not much work for twenty-one staff. Closure would save an estimated £9,150. It should have been a simple case, but there was already significant concern at the effect of branch line closures on agriculture. In March 1950 the National Association of Corn and Agricultural Merchants met the Railway Executive to set out the ‘apprehension and fear’ of its members about closures.41 The NFU had also been active and, together with Eastry Rural District Council and the local chamber of commerce, it went to the local MP to complain. The MP went to the minister, who sent him to the Central Transport Consultative Committee (CTCC) to convey ‘the very strong feeling’ locally that the line should remain open.42

  The CTCC had been established under the 1947 Act along with area Transport Users Consultative Committees (TUCCs), consisting of appointees representing ‘agriculture, commerce, industry, shipping, labour and local authorities’, with an independent chairman and BTC representatives. TUCCs could make recommendations to the Commission and the CTCC; the CTCC made recommendations to the Commission and the minister; the minister could direct the Commission to follow these recommendations. However, as with much of the 1947 Act, little thought appears to have gone into the way consultative committees would function in practice. They had not been set up to deal specifically with objections to clos
ure proposals and procedure was established on the hoof, with the CTCC exerting pressure on the BTC on the basis of what would look proper. As no TUCC had been established for the southeast as yet, the CTCC felt it ought to allow the objectors to make their case at its next meeting and asked them to collate all their points into a single paper. The Southern Region agreed to produce answers to a 41-paragraph memorandum setting out the details of the objectors’ case, arrange a visit to the line by the chair of the CTCC, postpone the closure (which had been arranged for 1 December 1950) and send a representative to the CTCC meeting.

  A delegation of objectors, Messrs Bones and Stythe of the local National Farmers Union, Baynton, a coal merchant, and Parker, the manager of Hamill’s brickworks, took their case to the CTCC in early January 1951. Arriving at the shabby, bomb-damaged offices in the shadow of Euston’s doomed, soot-blackened Doric arch, they saw themselves as fighting for their community against an unaccountable and often dishonest state. The railways, they alleged, were acting unreasonably in divorcing the profitable line to the colliery from the loss-making section beyond it, because they had a duty to serve the area as a whole. The original East Kent company’s reserves and its share of the funds provided by government in return for wartime use had been swallowed up into the BTC’s general funds instead of benefiting the line they belonged to. The BTC, they felt, was in possession of all the facts, but could choose to reveal only those which supported its case. The delegation raised issues that would soon become familiar to the CTCC: the line was overstaffed (staff had been increased on nationalisation, in accordance with union agreements); money had only just been spent on new track (the track was in a dangerous state and the line would otherwise have had to close immediately); the figure of £80,000 on renewals in the next decade seemed too high (the rest of the track had not been renewed since 1912); the service was not properly advertised. Their key question, however, was how industry and agriculture could be expected to meet national needs without the railway? The point was rather undermined by the ‘untrammelled grass on the track’ and generally unused stations CTCC chairman, Major Edgar Cadbury, director of the confectionery giant, had seen on his visit.43 The delegation agreed that, generally, they found road transport much more efficient, but in future they might need to go back to rail. The CTCC approved closure, aware that it was setting a standard for future cases. All that Bones and his companions took home was a request from the CTCC to the Commission that it keep the line open until March, so that the last of the year’s sugar beet could be sent by train and to allow farmers to stock up on manure. Months later, the farmers’ union was still complaining about the increased cost of transport in the area. The case did, however, generate some internal questioning at the Commission. Was it right, some asked, to include as a saving interest on the £80,000 of expenditure required to bring the line up to scratch if it remained open? It was an issue that would dog the BTC for years to come.

  At the same time as it had approved proposals to close the East Kent, the branch line committee had also approved closure of the former Sheppey Light Railway. This meandered along the largely unpopulated north of the Isle of Sheppey on the Thames estuary in the hope that its terminus, Leysdown on Sea, would become a major holiday destination rather than the ‘straggling resort of bungalows and bus bodies’ that it had turned into by the outbreak of war.44 In its final summers, the route offered an Arcadian journey: lineside trees and shrubs ‘all bowed in the wind created by our passing and in several places bloom-laden blackberry bushes … brush[ed] the train’.45 None of its intermediate stations were conveniently sited – two of them were nowhere near anywhere – and a better bus service was available on the parallel road. The average passenger-train load was less than five and each passenger journey was subsidised to the tune of about a pound. Nevertheless, the closure proposal produced demands for a public inquiry, threats of legal action, letters to the minister, a suggestion from a parish council chairman that he take it over and make it pay and accusations that branch lines lost money because fares were too high. Surveying the furore, the BTC’s public relations department warned ‘these closures of branch line services are going to give us plenty of trouble’.46

  Even at the start of the 1950s, the extent of losses being made on branch and other stopping-train services was becoming clear to some at the BTC, but this realisation took time to displace the long-standing railway practice of maximising traffic in order to maximise gross revenue. When a derailment on the K&ESR line in March 1949 raised the question of whether track renewals had been deferred pending its closure, the Southern Region insisted that far from planning to close it, the line

  has considerable agricultural traffic … passenger traffic has suffered because of the lack of enterprise of the former light railway company and [the region is] bringing into operation a new and improved service… They say that there is more potential traffic capable of being fostered on this line, than many other secondary lines in the Southern Region.47

  They were not saying this for long. By mid-1951, as the BTC exerted pressure to find more savings from closures, the region was coming to the conclusion that the line should close to passengers. However, the preparation of closure cases was already proving an administrative burden and the Southern Region’s commercial superintendent responded to demands for more closures with the complaint that

  no machinery exists within the commercial department for the ascertaining of revenue on a branch or at an individual station and this results in all such information having to be obtained from the accountant, in whose department all cases fall to be assessed by one group of staff who have their ordinary work to do… A somewhat similar position exists on the expenditure side.48

  It took the region until early 1954 to implement closure of the K&ESR, nearly a quarter of a century after Sir Herbert Walker had found its situation hopeless (the line’s southern section remained open to freight until June 1961, when the Colonel’s first commission, the Hawkhurst branch, also closed).

  The 1896 Light Railways Act represents the high-water mark of railway development in Britain: a time when, in the absence of an alternative, it seemed necessary to stimulate the extension of railways into the most rural parts of Britain, so that they too could enjoy the prosperity brought by modern transport. It is ironic that Stephens, who began his career as a pioneer extending the boundaries of the modern world, is now remembered as a staunch defender of the quaint and outdated, holding back the flood of modernity with his dogged refusal to surrender to the lorry and the bus. What the story of his lines shows is that, even in cases where services had been losing money for a decade or more before the war, their users could be relied upon to fight for their retention, and that the work involved in closing individual lines was stretching the resources of the BTC and the machinery of the consultative committees. When the little party of objectors took the fight for Eastry to Euston, they blazed a trail that would be regularly followed in the 1950s; yet their expedition can seem almost comical when viewed across six decades that have seen Hawick, Padstow and so many others lose similar battles. An obvious modern parallel with the closure of rural railway lines is the closure of rural post offices; a more accurate one, in terms of understanding the reaction that these early closures produced, may be to imagine that the Royal Mail has refused to deliver letters to a swathe of rural east Kent because it cannot do so profitably. The authorities point to the fact that so many local residents prefer electronic communication to writing a letter that it collects from near-empty pillar boxes and sends postmen out with empty sacks. Villagers are offered PO box addresses in Canterbury or Sandwich instead, to which they must also travel to post a letter. It is this kind of universal service, always available when desperately needed, however little one uses it the rest of the time, that was being taken away. It was a service that businesses had grown used to, run by an organisation that was supposed to take the rough with the smooth. Passenger closures could be seen in the same light, especially by a
generation that had grown up accustomed to branch lines with much lower passenger numbers than were common before the arrival of buses.

  As the first case to be considered in such detail by the CTCC, the East Kent closure occurred at the start of an ad hoc development of procedure which became increasingly burdensome for the railways without ever satisfying critics. Much of this dissatisfaction stemmed from the disparity between what objectors wanted from committees and what they had been set up to do. The committees existed to provide a forum for the Commission to discuss issues with transport users and find a consensus (for example, in its first year the CTCC took a great interest in the adequacy or otherwise of services to Hastings). However, objectors expected them to act as impartial tribunals, sitting in judgement on the Commission’s closure proposals, and were understandably dissatisfied to find one of the parties in the case – the BTC – had a seat on the bench, while passengers were only indirectly represented via local government. The railway official commenting on the Sheppey case probably had no idea how right he would be proved, but by 1950 it was already becoming clear that almost any contraction in the rail network would be controversial. Within a few years closures would dominate the work of the committees almost to the exclusion of everything else and their original conception became increasingly impossible to sustain. The consistent and growing friction between committees and objectors from 1950 provides the context for the way in which Beeching and Marples went about closing railways, and the same controversies they provoked are evident in these long-forgotten minor cases.