Last Trains

by Charles Loft

  As if shared costs and depreciation did not make railway accounts complex enough, the intractable issue of contributory revenue was, in many cases, a bone of contention. Contributory revenue is the income the existence of a particular service generates on other services; for example, the revenue earned on the Waterloo–Portsmouth and Ryde–Newport lines and the railway-owned Portsmouth–Ryde ferry by the existence of the Newport–Freshwater branch. The key question here is, if the Freshwater branch closes will those using it who have started their journey in London continue to use the railway to reach Newport (in which case none of the contributory revenue is lost and the case for closure is strengthened), will they make the entire journey by road (in which case all the contributory revenue is lost and the economics of the other two services might be adversely affected to the point where the closure makes no sense) or will they go to Margate by train instead (in which case, the precise balance of lost and new revenue is virtually impossible to gauge)? When one considers that a resort might earn contributory revenue on a wide variety of routes, the complexity of the calculations involved in the pre-computer age becomes clear. The fact that figures for contributory revenue were gross revenue, and therefore took no account of the profitability of the services on which they were earned, adds another complication. The Isle of Wight lines might generate a large amount of additional traffic on the London–Portsmouth main line during the summer; but if that traffic required the provision of extra signalling, coaches, locomotives and staff that were only used on a few summer weekends, it was not necessarily profitable. In 1953 the railways do not appear to have been concerned about this, but it was to prove a key element of Beeching’s approach to lines serving holiday resorts. In short, both the amount of contributory revenue and the amount which would be lost on closure were open to almost endless debate. The Isle of Wight was a less complex case than most, as the significant contributory revenue the island lines earned on the mainland was assumed to be retained after closure because passengers had to break their journey at the coast anyway. The region was criticised, however, for ignoring the revenue earned on the Ryde–Cowes and Ryde–Ventnor lines from traffic through to the rest of the network. Finally, there was always room for objectors to argue that more could be done to cut costs. As we have seen, this was considered and ruled out in the case of the Isle of Wight on the grounds that the gulf between costs and earnings was too great to bridge.

  It was inevitable then, that Melford Stevenson would have much to work with once the objectors persuaded the CTCC to request more detailed figures from the railways and reveal them to the objectors. He ridiculed the ‘interest’ portion of the saving on the grounds that if the same methods had been used for the Commission’s accounts, its profit for 1952 would have been a loss (the answer to this is that the Commission should have been using replacement cost and should have been showing a loss, so Stevenson had a point, although not the one he imagined). On the basis of expert evidence, he claimed to have shown the real saving would only be £20–30,000 not the £90,000 the railways had claimed and that losses were concentrated on the Newport–Freshwater line. Hopkins put up a credible defence and was able to cite examples of inaccuracies that underplayed the case for closure, but the case provided a stark warning of how the difficulties of obtaining irrefutable figures could provide a canvas on which railway officials could be depicted as underhand conspirators against their own services. Towards the end of the final day of the hearing, Hopkins was challenged on evidence he had given that new sleepers were used when track was replaced. Stevenson cited a recent example where second-hand sleepers had been used on the Bembridge branch. Hopkins explained that the railways had intended to close the branch on 8 June to avoid track replacement expenditure, but had postponed closure once the committee began its task and had to operate it safely in the meantime. Using old sleepers to do so was a one-off, short-term exception to normal practice, irrelevant to the argument for closure; but Stevenson fixed on the point as a ‘disturbing’ example of the unreliability of railway statements, drawing an angry protest from Hopkins. Stevenson summed up in full Perry Mason mode, reminding the committee of ‘the terribly important responsibility that rests upon them, and of the great public interests that now lie in their hands’: the railway’s figures were false, a loss of £20–30,000 was quite a different matter, old sleepers had been used – Hopkins could not be trusted. ‘I do not know what confidence you feel in the information you have been given when every test works out that way,’ he concluded. ‘I can only ask you to say that they have failed, and failed hopelessly to establish this case.’68 It was a straightforward demonstration of barristerial hyperbole and of how to use peripheral inconsistencies to undermine a witness’s credibility, but it has stood the test of time. Stevenson’s allegations were repeated in Parliament, and both the Railway Invigoration Society’s 1968 pamphlet The Great Isle of Wight Train Robbery and David Henshaw’s Great Railway Conspiracy treated them as if they were the verdict of the judge Stevenson later became, rather than the point-scoring of the advocate he was at the time.

  The TUCC approved closure of the Freshwater branch, but was unable to reach agreement on the Bembridge branch and recommended that the Newport–Sandown line be retained and reviewed in two years’ time. This was more than the council would have settled for; Stevenson had earned his fee. However, the committee chairman had not been impressed by Stevenson’s allegations and his enthusiasm for public hearings waned. Combined with the Eastern TUCC’s experience over Brightlingsea, the example led the TUCC chairmen and CTCC members to ensure future hearings were not conducted along the lines of full-scale courts of inquiry. They resolved to rein in barristers, avoid lengthy, formal enquiries and prohibit the introduction of matters other than the proposals themselves. The Railway Development Association, which had assisted the objectors, was barred from participation in hearings unless it could show that it was representing people who actually used the service in question. The motive was not to stifle debate but to make the proceedings manageable and preserve the committees as ‘men sitting round a table to hear both sides of a problem, without the frills of advocacy … with the object of producing practical solutions’.69 Nevertheless to opponents of closure this only served to increase suspicion of the committees, as we shall see in Chapter 5.

  The unprecedented nature of the affair left the ministry waiting for the CTCC’s views with bated breath. The CTCC endorsed the findings but came down on the railways’ side in approving closure of the Bembridge branch. The county council tried to get the minister to direct the Commission to retain the lines, but Lennox-Boyd was advised that to go against the CTCC’s recommendations would undermine the procedure and leave him as the final arbiter in closure cases: ‘an unfortunate position’.70 The TUCC and CTCC also recommended that tripartite discussion be established between the council, the Commission and the ministry to examine the council’s ideas on operational improvements and the implications for the roads of further closures. Little progress was made as far as the Sandown–Newport line was concerned and by 1955 it was not earning enough to pay the wages of its staff. It closed in February 1956 and is now a cycle path. Beeching proposed closure of the rest of the network, contradicting an assurance from the BTC in 1955 that it had no intention of closing the lines in the next ten years.† The Cowes line and the Shanklin–Ventnor section both closed in 1966, following another contentious TUCC process, which, combined with the leaking of the railway’s intention to propose closure again in ten years’ time, reinforced the impression of skulduggery formed in 1953.

  By 1968, opponents of closures were citing the progressive diminution of the island’s railways as proof that ‘if you cut the branches the tree will die’, but the lines had been losing money in 1951.71 The 1966 closures did not take place because the system was deprived of traffic from Ventnor West, Bembridge or Freshwater, but because the state was not willing to continue to subsidise the lines involved and the island’s dependence on rail-born
e tourism had declined and appeared likely to reduce still further. As we shall see, 1975 turned out to be slightly different than imagined ten years earlier. Talk of an independent concern taking over parts of the island system and running a commercial railway came to nothing (although the part of the Newport–Ryde route not underneath Newport’s bypass is now a very successful steam tourist line). The tourist trade survived; in the year commencing 19 July 2010 just over 2.5 million people visited the island; in the seven-week summer peak roughly two-thirds arrived by car or coach and a third on foot. Of those staying overnight, over 70 per cent travelled around the island by car, 15 per cent used coaches or local bus services and 3 per cent the train.72 Ventnor is still lovely.

  While the development of the new government’s transport policy in the year after the October 1951 election was somewhat chaotic, its shortcomings should not obscure the fact that integration had made little progress. The Isle of Wight experiment produced little given the volume of work over three-and-a-half years. In 1951 the branch line committee, in the spirit of integration, was seeking examples of lines that, although profitable in themselves, could be replaced by road services at a net benefit to the Commission. The southern part of the K&ESR was touted as an example where this approach could be tried, when the rest of it, which lost money, closed. Here was integration in practice; the trouble was that – thanks to the structure of the BTC and the web of regulation surrounding it – it didn’t work. Although carried by the RHE, the traffic remained ‘railway’ traffic with the RHE acting as agents. As the RHE charged high rates for short distances, it would probably cost the region more to take traffic from the nearest remaining railhead to its destination by lorry than it had previously done by rail and it would not be able to pass these costs on to the customer because of the way freight charges were structured. Moreover, the region intended to leave freight customers to make their own arrangements – and bear the cost – when it closed the northern section of the line, but did not feel it would be able to do this if it transferred traffic from the southern section to BTC road services. Integration could end up increasing costs. In short, there must be real doubts whether the BTC would ever have made a success of the policy, especially given the opposition it encountered on the Isle of Wight. This is only speculation; what actually happened was that the slow development of a ‘properly integrated’ system was cut short by the ill-considered policy of the Churchill government.

  The Titfield Thunderbolt was released in March 1953 and one wonders whether any of the participants in the drama over the island lines saw its depiction of an inquiry and, if so, what they made of it. The film ended in typical Ealing style, with the emphasis on social harmony as, following an inspection of the line by an official, the ministry shrugged its fuddy-duddy shoulders and accepted that their amateur opponents had won a fair fight. The Isle of Wight case could hardly have been more different. Hopkins’s efforts to consult local interests ended in lasting bitterness and suspicion. The islanders initially won more than they would have settled for, but in the long term it probably made little difference. The lesson the railways learned was that frank discussion was a route to disaster and their response was caution and secrecy. The sad reality is that it is difficult to see how things could have been different. Once the islanders knew there was a possibility that at some point the Ryde lines might close, it was always likely that they would bring to bear whatever pressure they could to rule out this risk to the island’s economy as completely as possible for as long as possible – and this made acquiescence to almost any cut unlikely. The case had a significant impact on attitudes to railway closures for the rest of the decade and, together with the 1953 Transport Act, ensured that anything more than a case-by-case piecemeal approach to rationalisation was off the agenda in the short term and harder to put forward in the long term. If this sounds like a victory for the opponents of closures, it does not appear to have felt like one at the time. The events described in this chapter did much to postpone a full-scale national debate over the future shape of the railway system until Beeching delivered his report a dozen years later. Had a royal commission been established in 1951, that debate might have been informed and even a little dispassionate. Instead, by the time the issue came to a head positions had become entrenched, passions inflamed and suspicions aroused on both sides. In this respect, Titfield was pure Hollywood.

  † The reader may find it helpful to bear in mind that £1 in 1950 would be worth nearly £28 today. Equivalent figures are (to the nearest 50p): 1955 = £21.50; 1960 = £18; 1965 = £16; and 1970 = £13.

  † Under the licensing system introduced in the 1930s, lorries were either licensed for public traffic (A and B licences) or owned by a trader who only used them to carry their own goods (C licences, which made up 80 per cent of the total). The 25-mile limit, introduced from 1 February 1950, only applied to privately owned A and B licensed vehicles; proposals to limit the range of C licence holders had been dropped after intense opposition.

  † Such earnings are known as contributory revenue, a term explained later in this chapter.

  † Except in London, where – like the deregulation of buses by the Conservatives in the mid-1980s – they did not apply.

  † Depreciation is how accountants ensure that the cost of replacing an asset which will eventually wear out (e.g. a locomotive) is not ignored year after year until suddenly the entire cost of renewal falls in a single year. Allowing for depreciation on a ‘historic cost’ basis means writing off the cost of the asset over a period of time representing its estimated working life, say twenty years. At the risk of stating the obvious, ‘replacement cost’ depreciation is based on the cost of replacing the asset. This is significant in the Isle of Wight case because the rolling stock was generally so old that one would not expect it to incur a charge under historic cost accounting, but of course it would eventually need replacing, so it was reasonable to take some account of this when calculating the savings from closure. By 1960 the BTC was being criticised for the shortcomings of its depreciation provision and Gourvish recalculated its results in 1986 using replacement rather than historic costs to show that its position was (even) worse than it had appeared at the time.

  † There is no reason to suppose this assurance was not given in good faith; the BTC had no intention of going broke in the next ten years either.

  Chapter 4

  Chromium dreams: the 1955 Modernisation Plan

  On 14 July 1951, passengers in the second coach of the 3.48pm West Riding express from King’s Cross to Leeds noticed smoke coming from under a seat at the London end. They alerted the guard, a Mr Nunn, who, having had no training on what to do in the event of a fire, assumed the cause was a hot axle box and decided to have the train stopped at Peterborough. To this end, he wrote a note to throw out of the window at Huntingdon and went looking for a potato in the restaurant car to wrap the note around. His search was interrupted by a soldier from the second coach, who told him that the smoke was now much worse. The floor of the coach was hot; the rubber underlay was melting; a flame had been seen. It had taken the passengers some time to find the communication cord and when one of them pulled it, the driver had not immediately noticed its application. Realising he was now at Huntingdon Number One signal box and having found nothing to wrap his note around, the guard threw it out of a window anyway and returned to the coach, which he now realised was on fire. At this point both the driver, who now noticed that the communication cord had been pulled, and Nunn applied their brakes. The guard attempted to tackle the fire with an extinguisher, only to find it was broken. The interior of the coach was lined with Rexine – leather cloth treated with nitrocellulose, a substance as flammable as it sounds. Flames shot up the walls of the coach and swarmed along the roof, the smoke became so thick that it was difficult to breathe and almost impossible to see, and sixty-five people tried to get out of a single door at the other end of the coach. Caught between the inevitable crush and the flames, some began trying t
o smash windows with suitcases.

  Signalman Munro in Huntingdon Number Two box had watched the train pass by at about 40mph. He could see the passengers clearly and nothing appeared to be wrong, but a couple of minutes later he noticed the train had stopped about a mile away and smoke was coming from the coaches. He phoned the next box to the north to stop traffic on the up line and then phoned Huntingdon Number One to summon help. Back at the scene, driver Cartwright looked back along the train he had just brought to a halt and saw smoke, suitcases, passengers and then flames come flying from the windows behind him. Soldiers among the passengers helped others down to the track. Some, too frightened to jump, had to be dragged through the broken windows before they burned alive. Nunn’s note was found under the platform at Huntingdon the following day; he was lucky it was not his epitaph. He had carried on fighting the fire even without an extinguisher; severely shocked, with burns to hands and face, he escaped through a window and got on with helping his passengers. Twenty-one others suffered cuts and burns, but no one was killed. The fire was probably caused by a piece of burning coal falling from the locomotive (a bar that should have prevented this was missing), hitting a wheel and becoming lodged in a hole in the underside of the coach where the asbestos packing was also missing. It was the third serious fire on a passenger train in two years, during which there had been an average of eighty-seven potentially serious fires a year.