Last Trains

by Charles Loft

  The memorandum’s figures took account of impending economies for which ‘substantial capital expenditure would of course be required’; but, as central charges were not included in the calculations, the interest on this investment appears to have been ignored. Receipts were broken down by traffic type but expenses were not, so it was impossible to gauge the effect of, say, transferring merchandise traffic to road. The document also admitted that its figures ‘do not represent the financial effect which would result from the closure of the lines’, which hardly encouraged the ministry to consider seriously whether a grant should be paid for such services.147 An independent 1963 study of some of the lines in north Devon argued that by continuing to serve small hamlets, the railways were running slow and inconvenient services, thereby losing the long- and medium-distance traffic between the main towns, but there was nothing in ‘Fringe Areas’ to suggest the Commission had considered how the area might be better served. As a whole the memorandum can only have helped reinforce the suspicion that the Commission’s belief in its social obligations concealed waste and complacency.

  The Commission’s shortcomings were not the only factor at work here. The real bone of contention was not how its debts were to be paid, but its independence. Dunnett wanted a subsidy to be called a subsidy, so that the Ministry of Transport (MoT) could impose greater financial discipline on the Commission. The Commission wanted to avoid a subsidy to preserve its independence, and a grant covering the loss on these lines would make little difference to its overall financial position. In this political battle the issue of social service subsidies fell by the wayside, at least for the time being. Instead, the Commission sought a capital write-off and suggested that the government take over the ownership of track and signalling and rent them back to the Commission. Officials were not interested in the details of the scheme, which they ruled out as a disguised subsidy in January 1960. When, in the same month, ministers raised the question of a general separation of the commercial and social activities of the nationalised industries, they were told the Padmore committee on nationalised industries had examined this and considered it impractical. The Commission had missed an opportunity to provoke a different conclusion, but it had had little incentive to take it.

  Even if the Commission had been interested in pursuing social subsidies, would it have made any difference to Melton Constable? Unsurprisingly, the line there from Sheringham did not survive the Beeching Axe, inflicting the limited, if intensely felt, hardship discussed in Chapter 1. Given the small numbers involved it is hard to imagine that any kind of social analysis would have justified keeping it open. By the 1980s only the Sheringham to Cromer line remained, the population of Melton had roughly halved and the heart of the M&GN was reduced to some relics in an industrial estate and a couple of iron brackets from the station incorporated into a bus shelter. Yet … when the main route closed in 1959 a society was formed with the intention of preserving the entire route as a working railway, not a heritage line. Despite the patronage of Major Cadbury, the former CTCC chair, it got nowhere and parts of the route began to be used for road schemes, notably the King’s Lynn bypass, for which the route was ideally suited. When the Melton–Sheringham section lost its service the preservationists were ready and today the Poppy Line between Sheringham and a new station at Holt (the original is under a bypass) is a successful steam-fuelled seaside attraction. In 2010 the level crossing linking the Poppy Line to Network Rail at Sheringham was restored and there is talk of extending at the other end to Melton and Fakenham to join another heritage line, the Mid-Norfolk, and create the Norfolk Orbital Railway (Norwich–Cromer–Melton–Fakenham–Wymondham–Norwich). Some might say this sounds like a bit of a white elephant, but time will tell.

  Events at the Treasury in 1957–9 represent a tipping point in the course of transport policy in Great Britain and it was public expenditure policy rather than transport that provided the context. In 1956 and again in 1958, closures had been seen as a way of making economies in response to immediate financial problems. Watkinson had wanted a more rigorous approach, but this was still a response to the deficit. By the end of 1959, however, the argument had begun to shift. The issue was no longer how many lines would have to close to eradicate the deficit, but what the railways were there for and was railway modernisation a sensible use of scarce resources? It wasn’t simply that closing lines could save money, but that there seemed no point in a railway system providing stopping-train services or pick-up freight in 1970. The logical implication was a shift away from making the case for individual closures to making the case for individual reprieves; and this change in emphasis can be discerned in the subsequent course of policy. To anyone even vaguely familiar with the economics of transport policy-making today, this chapter probably reads like an account of the stone age and the treatment of demand for transport is hideously over-simplistic. Starting virtually from scratch, Whitehall had little choice but to try to apply logic to a set of unclear circumstances. As one Treasury official complained to Otto Clarke in 1961, the rapid growth of road transport had left Whitehall ‘collectively fumbling after a new policy to meet new conditions which threaten to overwhelm existing outlooks’. ‘Indeed,’ he continued, ‘they may already have done so.’148 Amid the uncertainties, the need for a smaller railway must have appeared reassuringly obvious. In early 1960 senior Whitehall figures were left uncertain, in Sir Thomas Padmore’s words, as to ‘what size or kind of railway system we ought to be aiming at. But everyone concerned is pretty well convinced that it ought to be smaller, perhaps much smaller, and that a great many unnecessary and uneconomic services ought to be cut out’.149 Now they needed someone to do it: enter Ernest Marples.

  Chapter 7

  Westerham, Marples and the M25

  ‘I like my estate as a man might like his garden,’ complained one landowner at the prospect of a railway along the Westerham valley in 1876. The line would cut his land in two and he would have to ‘see the smoke of the engine from the time it starts from Dunton Green till it gets to Westerham’. What would the poor man say if he could see what the branch’s historian, David Gould, calls ‘the concrete monstrosity of road interchanges which now befoul the area’?150 Whatever the merits of the M25 and M26, which meet in the vicinity of the former trackbed, few who are familiar with this part of London’s green belt would dispute Gould’s judgement. The Westerham Valley Railway, on the other hand, typified the way such lines seemed almost a permanent part of the countryside by the 1950s and the objections to their construction bizarre, outdated nonsense. The nearest steam-operated line to London south of the river, this simple, single-line branch left the former South Eastern main line at Dunton Green just north of Sevenoaks and ran for four miles through what was, even in 1960, the fairly rural downland valley of the Darent River, past the tiny Chevening Halt, near nowhere in particular, and one equally secluded intermediate station – its name, Brasted, picked out in white stone on the ground opposite the single platform. Over streams and through coppices, it continued to a charming, slightly ramshackle terminus not too far from the centre of Westerham. Church spires, oast houses and the grounds of Combe Bank house, with its lines of Lebanon cedars, could be glimpsed through the trees along the track. With its fifty-year-old rolling stock and chatty guard who knew all the regulars, it could have been the model for Titfield.

  The guard would undoubtedly have been aware of John Francis Archibald Browne, the sixth Baron Kilmaine, although he probably talked about his lordship – a formal type who expected deference – more than he did to him. An infrequent user of the line, Lord Kilmaine, resident of Brasted, was nothing if not public spirited. A ‘recognised doyen of trust administrators’, he played a significant role in preserving the nation’s historic churches and mediaeval wall paintings and was a pioneering supporter of industrial archaeology.151 When, in November 1951, he heard that the branch might close, he felt he ought to do something for those of his neighbours who depended on it daily, and wrote to an
old Oxford contact in the Railway Executive in an attempt to verify the rumour ‘before making the usual kind of public fuss and mobilising one’s MP etc’.152 Reassured that no such decision had been taken, Kilmaine expressed the hope that in considering the branch the Executive would not simply look at its economics. He warned that there was

  a growing feeling abroad that these large nationalised undertakings no longer consider the idea of service to the public as of great importance, but tend more and more to be influenced only by the question of whether a particular activity is remunerative.153

  He compared the Commission unfavourably to lawyers and doctors, who he believed did not abandon clients or patients simply because they were ‘unremunerative’ but cross-subsidised them from earnings elsewhere for ‘the goodwill’.

  Westerham was on the branch line committee’s list for investigation in 1951 and maintenance was reduced to a minimum in anticipation of the result; but rather than close it, the Southern Region decided in early 1955 to cut weekday trains outside the peaks and reduce the weekend service. Similar steps had been taken in the early 1930s in response to bus competition; a familiar tale of road services running through the centre of the villages and taking passengers directly to Sevenoaks, where most of them wanted to go. However, electrification of the main line had improved traffic, or at least expectations of it, sufficiently for the cuts to be reversed before the war. A second investigation of the branch’s performance was already underway towards the end of 1956, when the civil engineering department warned that the £16,000 backlog of maintenance would have to be addressed in 1957 or the service might cease abruptly. Typifying the railways’ mid-decade reluctance to close lines, the money was spent despite expectations that the case for closure would be a strong one. By the end of the decade, Westerham typified the BTC’s treatment of branch lines. Losses had been reduced but not eradicated, nothing had been done to modernise it and there was no prospect that if it were modernised there would be any significant upturn in its fortunes.

  When the BTC proposed complete closure in April 1960, it was because the times had changed, as discussed in the previous chapter, not the circumstances of the line. The 1955 investigation compared gross passenger receipts of £13,254 against a saving of £20,622 if the line was closed. It concluded that, as around £8,000 a year could be saved by the service reductions described above with little effect on gross receipts, the branch would just about pay for itself. However, the line’s gross receipts included the full fares paid by passengers travelling on to London, which the overwhelming majority did. The branch was only paying for itself if one assumed these passengers would abandon rail travel entirely were it to close and all of the income from each journey was entirely lost to the railway. If, however, they simply got the bus to Sevenoaks and caught the London train there, only a small proportion of gross receipts would be lost on closure and on this assumption the line was nowhere near to paying for itself. It was this argument that prevailed in 1960, when the region calculated that complete closure would produce a £9,000 annual saving (plus £2,740 a year on renewals) even after a subsidy of £6,500 to London Transport for an improved bus service. The line was being used by fewer than 150 people a day during the week and 100 a day on summer weekends; even the busiest trains averaged fewer than forty passengers. Yet it was immediately clear that this would be a difficult case and its glacial progress through the consultative machinery was a source of great frustration at Waterloo. A Westerham Branch Railway Passengers Association was formed to coordinate opposition, with support from the county council, Sevenoaks council and the relevant parishes. The initial TUCC hearing was postponed so that the railways could provide more detailed figures requested by the association and when the hearing did take place, in July 1960, all it produced was a request for more figures and a further postponement until October. As the objectors generally (and understandably) accepted the argument that commuters would still use rail for the major part of their journey, debate revolved around the adequacy of the alternative bus service, congestion on the A25 and whether the 30 to 55 minutes added to daily travelling times represented unacceptable hardship given the savings involved. Using the figures the railways supplied, the objectors put forward an apparently credible case for saving almost as much by getting rid of station staff and signalling and operating a diesel railcar service.

  By the time the TUCC met again in October, the Southern Region had produced detailed responses to a list of questions posed by the objectors. The committee, convinced by these answers, approved closure by nine votes to one. However, the CTCC sent the case back the following month on a technicality. The objectors had not been given a chance to challenge the region’s answers, contrary – so Sevenoaks council argued – to the practice of ‘any normal Court or Tribunal’.154 The TUCC set up a working party which went over the ground yet again and endorsed the railways’ case for savings of nearly £9,000 a year from closure against a loss on a rail-bus service of £15–17,000 a year and capital costs of about £32,000. However, when the committee received this view in February 1961, a significantly different set of members attended and, although only one of them actually changed their vote, it rejected the proposal on the grounds that it would cause undue hardship. Despite lobbying from the Commission and a certain amount of wavering, the CTCC endorsed the finding in May, perhaps influenced by the fact that one of its number, Sir Charles Pym, was a user of the line and testified to the inadequacies of the A25.

  Behind the scenes, the region had begun making preparations for defeat even before the first TUCC hearing by investigating the finances of operating diesel or electric services on the branch. But attitudes were hardening at Waterloo. At the end of 1960, having established electrification as the most practical option if the branch could not be closed, Hopkins resolved that his request for BTC authorisation of the necessary expenditure would be ‘calculated to bring to a head at the highest level the BTC, and possibly the ministry, attitude towards a planned branch line closing that is clearly justified on grounds of economics but that may go against us on social grounds’.155 At least one senior railwayman thought nothing should be done to prepare for electrification and ‘if we find the decision goes against us and after withdrawing steam in June 1962 we cannot maintain the service, it is just too bad’.156 The frustration of men who had spent their lives running railways only to find that they were not allowed to do so because everyone from the minister to the man on the 18.07 from Dunton Green thought they could make a better job of it was growing. When the CTCC’s recommendation reached the ministry, attitudes to closure did indeed come to a head. The protestors must have felt satisfied with their efforts – it had been a model campaign. But the Commission, at the region’s prompting, was lobbying the ministry to overrule the CTCC and authorise closure. The objectors had reckoned without what Anthony Sampson called ‘the disturbing phenomenon of Ernest Marples’.157

  Appointed as Watkinson’s successor as Minister of Transport after the Conservatives’ victory in the 1959 general election,† Marples has been seen as ‘opposed to railways’ more or less from the moment he took office and is still subject to accusations that he was part of ‘a conspiracy between ministers, civil servants and the road lobby to shift investment from rail to road and disinvest in a substantial proportion of the rail network’.158 David Henshaw’s Great Railway Conspiracy describes Marples as ‘a Minister of Transport who was not only road-biased, but a successful road-engineering contractor into the bargain’, who used the railways’ financial plight as ‘an opportunity to humble’ them.159 Marples’s announcement – on 2 August, just before Parliament rose for the summer – that he had approved closure of the Westerham branch has long provided grist to these mills. The minister’s unprecedented rejection of a CTCC recommendation was greeted with such outrage that he was obliged to justify it in detail to Parliament when it resumed in October; not that there was any danger of the debate changing his mind. His speech emphasised the cost of the line to
the taxpayer (who met 88 per cent of the costs versus the 12 per cent covered by fares) and dismissed his critics with a backhanded compliment:

  They have marshalled their forces with great tenacity. In fact they presented a petition signed by 2,400 people – an impressive number. Alas, only 167 people use the line regularly. I should like to get a petition signed by 167 people with 2,400 travelling on the railway.160

  What could better illustrate Marples’s central role in the conspiracy to destroy Britain’s railways at the behest of the road lobby than his overturning of the established procedure to close a line that stood in the way of the M25?