Last Trains

by Charles Loft

  While the SAG made important recommendations on the abolition of many of the commercial restrictions hampering the railways and on achieving a closer relationship between costs and charges in setting freight rates, its proposals on productivity amounted, to a large extent, to a call for further studies and greater effort. A programme of closures therefore represented the most tangible way of reducing losses in the short term. An updated BTC modernisation plan covering 1961–4, produced in December 1960, indicated an increase in both the number of proposals and their complexity.† The ministry appreciated that the pace of the process ‘was limited not by lack of knowledge as to how far the railway system should in the long run contract, but by the political difficulties involved in any contraction’.177 Therefore, by the time the Commission, now under Beeching’s leadership, sought ministerial support in its fight with the Westerham Branch Railway Passengers Association in June 1961, officials were already working to ensure that the Transport Bill would reduce the role of the consultative committees in order to speed things up and quieten them down. While officials realised that it would be politically impossible to free the railways entirely from the consultative process as far as passenger services were concerned, the 1962 Transport Act left the BRB free to withdraw freight services without consulting anyone, downgraded the CTCC to a supervisory body monitoring the work of the TUCCs and reduced the latter’s role to an assessment of the hardship a closure would cause and the means by which it might be alleviated. This would then be reported to the minister, who would consider all the relevant factors before consenting to or refusing closure. He could also attach conditions to his consent; for example, that an alternative bus service must be provided and subsidised by the BRB. As it would now be for the minister to weigh hardship against savings, there would be no need for the committees or objectors to be given any figures, nor would there be any need for the committees to take evidence on anything other than hardship and its remedies. The most controversial aspects of the whole process could simply be bypassed. That, at least, was the intention behind the Act.

  This was not simply a question of political expediency. During the SAG’s discussions Beeching had argued that the government rather than the BTC should be responsible for deciding whether or not to retain loss-making lines for social reasons. The Select Committee on Nationalised Industries made a similar point in its report on the railways in 1960. The White Paper, The Financial and Economic Obligations of the Nationalised Industries, published in April 1961, established the principle that nationalised boards should be given clear financial targets and ministers should take responsibility for interventions which interfered with the boards’ ability to meet those targets. The single most important element of the 1962 Transport Act was the division of responsibility between the BRB and the minister. The railways were now legally obliged to break even ‘at the earliest possible date’ before 1 January 1969 and relieved of any social obligations that might cloud their judgement. It was now the minister’s job to temper the drive to solvency should the social cost prove too great. This marked the shift from the concept of nationalised transport as a coordinated comprehensive service to a publicly owned business (although neither the BTC nor the BRB represented an absolute fulfilment of these concepts). It was ministerial interventions over pay and charges that Padmore and his colleagues had in mind when devising policy, rather than the social obligations represented by unremunerative rail services. However, as far as it applied to closure decisions, this change absolves Beeching from the suggestion that he ignored the social consequences of closures out of callousness; it was his job to take a narrower view and if social costs were ignored then it was the government that was to blame.

  This division of responsibility – the very one Watkinson had shied away from in 1956 – was to prove rather more attractive to the Cabinet in theory than in practice. For Marples, however, it was precisely the challenge he loved and it was in exercising this responsibility that he made his name. His perverse combination of dynamic self-image, desire for attention and attraction to the risk of disapproval meant presenting the closure programme as an exercise in dramatic modernisation was a role he was born to play. In this respect Westerham served as a template for his handling of the recommendations in the Beeching Report. Closing the line ‘was my personal decision’, he told the House of Commons. ‘I take full responsibility for it and [objectors to the closure] must not blame anybody else.’ Claiming to have visited the line incognito to see how few people used it, Marples justified his decision in typically modernising terms:

  I know that certain people will be inconvenienced. I know that there is a sentimental attachment to these two coaches which chug along on a Sunday with a little steam engine drawing them, with more people in the engine than in the train. I know that it is a nice sight to see this train coming along a track with grass sprouting up between the lines, but I think that it does not play a part in this third quarter of the twentieth century.178

  This must have seemed a typically dynamic personal intervention given that both announcement and debate preceded publication of the Transport Bill with its new closure procedure. The more prosaic reality was that to have accepted the CTCC recommendation and reprieved the service irrespective of its financial implications would have been at odds with the new policy. It would also have meant rejecting a request from a body chaired by Marples’s own appointee and setting an awkward precedent by defining the consequences of this closure as hardship rather than mere inconvenience. Explaining the decision to the CTCC, Dunnett argued that while the operating loss on a diesel service might be little different from the cost of subsidising additional bus services, the investment involved would be far greater. If Westerham had been the only branch line in Britain this might not have mattered, but the ministry was not about to set a precedent that could derail the whole closure programme and which would be at odds with its conclusions about rail investment.

  Not everyone shared Marples’s view of what did and did not belong in the third quarter of the twentieth century. In Westerham, a plan was formed to run the line using two former GWR railcars for commuters and steam trains at the weekend under the auspices of the Westerham Valley Railway Association. The Association combined a practical appreciation of the wider economic benefits of maintaining an area’s rail links with an echo of Squire Chesterford’s branch line ideology. In an appeal for members headed ‘Growth and not decay’, it argued that ‘a railway line acts as a magnet and the reverse is a truism … a railway line creates roots and traditions, whereas a road – especially a bypass, has the opposite effect’.179 The report of a railway official who attended a meeting at Westerham in April 1962 provides a snapshot of those involved:

  officers of the Association [and] the chairmen of the Westerham and Chipstead parish councils were on the platform, together with certain other persons representing various Preservation Organisations… The local press were represented together with the Sunday Express. The hall was well-filled – about 150 people all told – mostly teenage railway enthusiasts, together with a smattering of older men and what were obviously housewives. So far as I could ascertain only one commuter was actually present.180

  If there was a chance of the plan succeeding, it rested on the Association being able to get the new service up and running quickly, before commuters made alternative arrangements – but this proved impossible. The BTC and the ministry entered into discussions with the WVRA, but the prospect of ‘serious services [operated by] bands of enthusiastic amateurs’ were the stuff of officials’ nightmares; not because they were afraid the amateurs might succeed, but because they feared being left with the consequences of failure: an unmaintained railway; an unprovided service; and – disaster – no statutory procedure for dealing with it.181 The Association was almost certainly being unduly optimistic in anticipating a small profit and was certainly optimistic in hoping to pay a sliding-scale rent linked to the number of passengers transferring to the national network at Dunto
n Green. It also had a habit of rounding up commuter numbers to 200 and hoped to more than double its membership while increasing fees from 2s 6d to a pound. A copy of the proposal in the region’s files has a number of scribbled criticisms and queries, including over the estimate of maintenance costs and discrepancies between wage levels and union rates. The Commission decided in April 1962 that in future it would only transfer lines to preservation societies through outright sale, possibly in response to events in Westerham. The Association continued to lobby for a lease and began looking for the £60–70,000 it would need to buy the railway. In the meantime it leased Westerham and Brasted stations, restoring them and connecting them by telephone for the first time; occasionally a car mounted on a railway truck was driven along the abandoned track. Meanwhile officials had drawn up a set of questions to establish both the safety and the financial stability of the WVRA’s proposed operation. Its answers were only partially satisfactory and, before the remaining queries could be dealt with, the Association abandoned its plan to run a commuter service, precipitating the collapse of the whole effort under a wave of tarmac.

  Marples was fascinated by the prospect of rebuilding urban Britain to accommodate the motor car and was heavily influenced by Professor Colin Buchanan’s 1958 book Mixed Blessing: The Motor in Britain. He appointed Buchanan to produce a report, Traffic in Towns, published in November 1963, which put forward expensive proposals for reconstructing cities to cope with traffic. That such an approach appealed to Marples the construction magnate is unsurprising, but if he saw profits for his kind in such an approach, he was also genuinely inspired – like so many others – by dreams of a new, concrete Britain. In 1962, as Macmillan tried to develop his ideas on modernising Britain into a theme for the next election, Marples proposed retraining tens of thousands of redundant railwaymen and shipbuilders for two massive construction projects: government acquisition of urban areas (between 100 and 200 acres) for redevelopment and ‘the high-quality design and production of living units, such as kitchens and bathrooms’.182 In October that year, he sent Macmillan a proposal infused with what appears now as an almost tragic enthusiasm for modernity:

  We are on the brink of a new motor age. Traffic will double by the 1970s, treble by the 1980s. Present plans will cope with traffic between towns. But in the towns congestion and stagnation will soon become intolerable – unless we radically step up the scale of our attack… [The Buchanan Report] will inevitably show that the problem goes far wider than traffic. The people must come first. They must have environments fit to live in. They need to be saved from accidents, noise and fumes… Most of our old city buildings are ripe for renewal… Whole towns need redevelopment… We need to provide housing for 6 million more people by the end of the century. This is equivalent to six new Birminghams or sixty large new towns… We must arrest the drift of people to the South; the North must be made live and attractive … What does all this amount to? No less than the rebuilding of most of our urban fabric. There is, of course, a lot going on… But much of it is piecemeal and fortuitous. It requires coordination. And it is on far too small a scale… I am sure we could produce something really worth having by mid-1963… The results could be launched on the public in a major campaign. Buchanan’s report would come out as part of the operation.183

  This was Marples speaking, not his officials, and he hoped to be placed in charge of the project, but nothing came of it as Macmillan’s modernisation project focused on short-term goals. Buchanan’s appointment and report helped fuel a conflict in transport policy advice between physical planners and economists which was to fester over the following decade. In hindsight, this diverted attention from the need to develop an effective pricing mechanism for road use by raising the false prospect that the car could be physically accommodated. It might appear that this was the real legacy of Marples’s predilection for road building, but the Treasury’s interest in road pricing had not even begun to address the practical and political difficulties of such a measure in 1959 and the idea received no more encouragement from Barbara Castle than it had from Marples.

  It was the physical approach to the car problem that finally finished off the Westerham branch. The fact that the M25 has subsequently been built over most of the route has raised suspicions that it was closed in order to facilitate road building, but in fact the railways division of the ministry had no idea ‘there was a line on a plan somewhere’ indicating the route of the road, until it began discussing the sale of the trackbed after closure.184 The South Orbital Road, as the M25 was then called, was originally planned to run along the northern side of the branch and Kent County Council initially argued that closure should be postponed until the road could be opened, in order to minimise the traffic on the A25. Once the line closed, however, the council soon expressed an interest in using its route for the road and, although it agreed to stand aside until the outcome of the WVRA’s efforts was clear, it no longer felt bound by this agreement once plans for a commuter service were dropped in 1963. The cost of providing a bridge over the line for the Sevenoaks bypass was the catalyst for the Association’s capitulation, but this was only part of the eventual savings. By 1964 the dream of reopening was dead and by the end of the decade the lovingly restored stations had been razed to the ground. Legend has it that the platform of Chevening Halt lies buried in the vicinity of the M25/M26 interchange, waiting for the oil to run out.

  The Westerham case illustrates the gulf between objectors and ministry officials by 1960. Objectors started from the view that the existence of a railway line was a good thing and closure was something to be avoided if possible. Therefore, they attached significance to the argument that a loss could be reduced to a negligible level with a bit of effort and investment. However, following on from the developments discussed in the previous chapter, the basic objective behind railway policy was now to reduce investment that did not earn a return. Showing that losses could be reduced – even to zero – was largely a waste of time. Officials were only really likely to be influenced by arguments demonstrating the very assumption objectors made to start with, that closure was a bad thing. This required strong evidence of significant hardship, which was virtually impossible to produce in the case of a line as lightly used as Westerham. The objectors’ argument on costs was not accepted by either the ministry or Commission in any case; but even if had been, it was unlikely to make much difference, which helps to explain why the ministry appeared to objectors to want to close lines almost for the sake of it.

  There is a certain irony in the fact that while green belt regulations were a factor in closing the line, because they ruled out significant future traffic growth, they did not stop it being submerged beneath a couple of motorways. Perhaps the enthusiasts should have questioned whether a steam railway would attract visitors once the South Orbital ran alongside it, but if their efforts were doomed from the start, the lasting bitterness the case engendered can be heard in the closing paragraphs of the line’s history:

  If the story of this small railway seems to have been told in great detail…the refusal by authority to allow the preservation of this line for some slight advantage [in building the motorway] … must represent one of the worst environmental follies of recent years, and many people must feel that some slight comfort can be taken from an adequate preservation at least in print.185

  There can be few places where rural England has died more horribly – at least in recent years – than the Darent valley. At one point the future of the very river itself seemed in doubt, so low had its water fallen. Now the tranquillity of Brasted Station in the afterglow of a woodland stroll on a summer’s afternoon has been replaced by the incessant roar of the motorway; the wild flower cuttings and silent platform obliterated by concrete and tarmac, strewn with shreds of old tyres – The Titfield Thunderbolt remade as a video nasty.

  † Civil aviation was transferred to a new Ministry of Aviation.

  † At the same time the House of Commons Select Committee on Nati
onalised Industries cross-examined the ministry and the Commission for its own report on the railways. This increased the pressure on both and its recommendations required a White Paper containing the government’s response, but it had little if any direct impact on policy-making. A railway strike was averted in February by an interim award and Guillebaud’s recommendations were largely implemented under an agreement reached in June, the ultimate cost of which was over £40 million. The problem of how to continue funding the BTC was eventually solved by including the sums as spending rather than lending in the 1960 Budget.

  † It referred to a possible 2,554 route miles of passenger closures to be considered by the commission. This was a significant increase on the 1959 Reappraisal’s reference to the possible closure of 1,800 route miles (including some freight-only closures), but still only half of the Beeching Report’s concrete proposals

  Chapter 8

  The nitty gritty: shaping Reshaping

  On 27 March 1963, Dr Beeching presented the world with the report that would make his name, holding it up for the cameras like some eleventh commandment he had brought down from a technocratic mountain-top. Here was the truth. The Reshaping of British Railways was accompanied by a series of maps. Map nine, the one that everyone looked at, showed the lines it proposed to close, while maps one to four showed how little traffic they carried. Others showed the network of bus services that could take the traffic forced off the railways (rather misleadingly, as it gave no indication of their frequency) and the flows of freight that rail could win back. The report itself offered an easy progression from ‘The Nature of the Problem’ (two pages) through ‘Analysis of the Problem’ (seven pages) and ‘More Detailed Consideration of the Main Groups of Traffic’ (thirty-seven pages) to ‘Operating and Administrative Economies’ (two) ‘Reduction in Manpower’ (four) and ‘Financial Consequences of the Plan’ (two). A couple of pages on ‘Other Factors’ assured the reader that social cost–benefit studies and future development would not make any difference except to suburban services. Sandwiched between over thirty pages detailing the traffic studies Beeching had based the report on and two brief appendices on liner trains and rolling stock reduction, came the section everyone turned to, Appendix Two: thirty-four pages listing the services to be withdrawn and the stations to close. It would have been easy to miss the introductory paragraphs to this section, which warned of a continuing process of reshaping during which additions to the lists would be made.