Last Trains

by Charles Loft

  The year 1974 was one of fierce party politics. An inconclusive general election in February was followed in October by a narrow win for Wilson (who had taken office without a majority in March). But the narrow electoral margin made closures harder to propose or implement. In broad terms, the Conservatives did not want rural closures because they tended to be in Conservative seats and Labour did not want them because the rail unions – now vigorously opposing closures – sponsored some of Labour’s MPs. The Railways Act 1974, which enshrined rail subsidies as a block grant known as the Public Service Obligation, although passed by a Labour government was essentially the same as legislation the Conservatives had planned before they lost office. It was accompanied by an instruction to the BRB to provide a service from 1 January 1975 that was generally comparable to existing levels.

  The inability of the Heath government to get a closure programme up and running or to cut the railway deficit arguably typified the wider failure of that government in the face of opposition to its attempts at modernisation, in particular from the trade union movement. By the end of the century, Heath’s name had become ‘almost synonymous with the U-turn’, but there was more to the rejection of closures in 1970–74 than a lack of nerve.271 British Rail argued that closures did little to reduce central costs and would in some cases leave it worse off. Whitehall was sceptical but there was no disguising the fact that even a significant reduction in the network was going to make little impact on the deficit. Politically, cutting investment was much easier. The Treasury saw the 1974 Act as a formal recognition ‘that British Rail is no longer a viable commercial enterprise, and that there is no foreseeable prospect of restoring viability’.272 Tinged with cynicism as it was, Castle’s symbolic halting of railway closures had paved the way for a real halt. A few lines closed in the ensuing years, but despite repeated efforts on the part of some officials a closure programme was never resurrected. The Beeching era was over.

  † Her adviser Christopher Hall had led the campaign against closure of the North London Line while working for Castle at Overseas Development so successfully that in June 1965 it had been the beneficiary of an unprecedented announcement of reprieve without a proposal being published; although Hall does not appear to have been involved in devising rail policy following his transfer, and closure of the North London Line was never likely.

  Chapter 12

  Aftermath: the management of decline

  In the years since 1974, although attempts have been made to revive the idea of a programme of railway closures, they have never looked likely to succeed. Maintaining the size of the network has became a commitment no politician dare renounce. But this trend did not reflect a restoration of faith in the industry. The vagueness of the relationship between the wider social and economic benefits of rail services and the subsidies paid to the BRB left it saddled with an air of failure and did little to encourage investment. By the end of the twentieth century the railways were once again a metaphor for all of Britain’s problems. Meanwhile the railway Beeching and Marples had supposedly destroyed grew as an ideal in the national imagination, emphasising the inadequacies of the industry that had emerged from the ‘destructive’ period of modernisation.

  The impossibility of another closure programme was most dramatically illustrated when in 1982 Sir David Serpell, veteran of the Stedeford Committee, and former Permanent Secretary at Transport and part-time member of the BRB, was asked to lead an inquiry into the railways’ finances and recommend ways of producing better results over the next twenty years. Part of the report sought to discuss long-term policy options. This contained a series of maps illustrating networks of different sizes and estimates of the financial results such networks would achieve in 1992. Only option A, a network of 1,630 miles (essentially the west coast main line plus the main lines from London to Newcastle/Leeds, Norwich, Cardiff/Bristol, Bournemouth, Portsmouth, Brighton/Newhaven, Folkestone, Dover and Southend) showed a profit. Even a 40 per cent cut in the network would leave a subsidy of over £500 million and this would involve closing all the railways in north and central Wales and west of Exeter, in Scotland north of the Glasgow–Edinburgh belt (except the Aberdeen route) and in East Anglia except the main line to Norwich. According to Serpell, the point was to illustrate the impossibility of cutting the network down to a profitable core; but maps do attract attention and these were taken seriously enough by contemporary observers. Their reaction, which helped the BRB sideline the report, indicates how politically difficult further closures would be. ‘As cures go,’ wrote one journalist, ‘it’s a killer.’273

  Even the Thatcher government, so willing to slaughter sacred cows elsewhere, was not about to take on opponents of closures en masse. Nevertheless, the possibility that a significant proportion of loss-making services could be replaced by buses remained on the agenda until 1989 when it was finally accepted that the benefits would probably not be as great as initially hoped, especially if introduced on individual lines rather than as a specific programme. There was no political appetite for the controversy and it appeared that investing in rail services was as good an option. Suggestions that railways might be converted into roads, although investigated, also got nowhere in the 1970s and 1980s. The repeated attempts to revive a programme of rail closures or to replace trains with buses are seen by some as evidence of the inherent bias against rail within Whitehall. This ignores the fact that there are parts of the British railway system whose survival into the 1980s was entirely due to electoral considerations and for which it would be very difficult indeed to present a convincing economic case even today (just as there are other parts whose closure now seems rash). When one considers the dire position of the British economy and the UK government’s finances in the late 1970s and the devastating cuts that were made in other areas of government activity as a result, it is hard to support the claim that the railways were the victim of some underhand conspiracy.

  There was, however, one great closure battle left. The 1981 closure of the freight-only former Great Central route between Penistone and Hadfield, amid allegations that it was to be used for the route of a motorway or the site of a government bunker, was undoubtedly controversial, but the Settle and Carlisle became a cause célèbre. By December 1983, when the proposal to close it was published, this duplicate main line, traversing thinly populated moorland, stood out as an apparently obvious candidate for easily achieved savings. The local service Tom Fraser reprieved having been withdrawn in 1970, it had only two stations, Settle and Appleby, two trains a day and a massive viaduct at Ribblehead in need of costly repair. But when it attempted to close the line the BRB walked into its most traumatic individual battle since the Bluebell case a quarter of a century earlier. Accusations of false figures and running down services abounded; legal challenges delayed hearings and expanded the scope for objection. BR restored the local service and found it attracted significant numbers of passengers. The Ribblehead viaduct turned out to be cheaper than originally estimated to repair. Initial ministerial approval was suspended while attempts were made to sell the line and then refused when these failed. Every aspect of the closure battles which had deterred rail managers from a more vigorous approach in the 1950s seemed to be combined and writ large in this one case which reinforced the image of railway management as men whose animosity towards the traveller was only mitigated by the incompetence which prevented them from doing their worst.

  Even when ministers decided to privatise the railways, they remained aware of the political need to maintain the size of the network. An attempt to use the franchising process to withdraw the sleeper service to Fort William, whose handful of passengers were allegedly subsidised to the tune of £450 a head, was lost to what the franchising director called ‘the Scottish lobby’.274 By the time reform of the closure procedure was proposed by the 2004 Railways Bill, the Strategic Rail Authority had ‘been trying for four years to remove one return service from Wales to London Waterloo, which was carrying an average of eight people a
day and cost £500,000 a year’.275 Over 500 of the network’s 2,531 stations were used on average by fewer than 100 people a day in 2010/11. Although rail usage as a whole has grown hugely since privatisation, it is probably only the political impossibility of closing them that keeps some of the lesser-used lines open. A closure programme would face opposition strengthened by the tendency to see the rail network as a part of the nation’s fixtures and fittings and any contraction of it as inherently contravening a consensus on the need to reduce car traffic, irrespective of the use made of the station or line to be cut. It would also have to negotiate a procedure that has deterred the formal closure even of services that have ceased to operate in any meaningful sense.

  In the summer of 2012, the Department for Transport consulted on proposals to withdraw a passenger train service. It posted notices at the relevant stations and published a 32-page consultation document on its website demonstrating that the alternative to closure would be costs of £2.3 million over the next nineteen years, vastly outweighing the benefits of £3,500. The service in question used to run between Wandsworth Road and Ealing Broadway stations as part of a cross-country service removed in 2007. As this was the only passenger service over a few short connecting lines in central London, it proved simpler (until a new franchise needed to be agreed) to run a daily train between Wandsworth Road and Kensington Olympia and a weekly replacement bus to cover the rest, than go through the closure procedure. None of the stations involved will close, the tracks will remain in use for freight and empty stock and there are plenty of alternative services. The consultation ran for twelve weeks and attracted several responses criticising its costings. The department was obliged to admit that it had inadvertently listed for closure a section of line due to be used by the new London Overground service to Clapham Junction. In December 2012 the closure was awaiting ratification by the Office of Rail Regulation. This service is just one of several ‘parliamentary trains’ operated to avoid formal closure procedures, the best known of which is the weekly Stockport–Stalybridge service which for the best part of two decades has been all that stands between the stations of Denton and Reddish South and oblivion. Reading this consultation one cannot help feeling the Department of Transport has published it as an act of penance for its haste at Wells and other places.

  One legacy of the Beeching era is that maintaining the size of the network has become synonymous with a positive transport policy to such an extent that the BTC’s treatment of that horse tramway in the forest of Dean looks positively draconian. However, the policy of maintaining and subsidising the railway from 1974 was more an admission of defeat than a declaration of confidence. Ideally rail subsidies should be a payment to the industry for a service provided to those who do not actually use the railway directly and pay to do so through fares or freight charges. This service might be the reduction of congestion, pollution in general and carbon emissions in particular, the economic benefits of having a rail connection, such as tourism, or the simple pleasure of knowing it is possible to travel to Thurso by train even if one does not actually do so. However esoteric the inputs, a value can be attached to them, a calculation made and the costs and benefits of a service weighed. In the absence of this idea subsidies were simply linked to the loss made by a line which it had been decided should remain open, rather than an arrangement whereby the social value of specific rail services could be overtly recognised. Whether or not this made any difference to the size of the network, subsidy became a badge of failure rather than an income earned. As a consequence, the level of subsidy tended to equate to the level of government dissatisfaction with railway management and this in turn consistently influenced the political willingness to invest in the rail network, even though the case for investing in, for example, high-speed rail services might have nothing to do with the reasons for increases in subsidy.

  While investment levels picked up from 1969, they stabilised in the mid-1970s at an unsustainably low level. This owed much to the enduring Whitehall folk memory of the Modernisation Plan, but official scepticism had been reinforced by the failure of every subsequent plan to deliver the promised results and continued to be reinforced by failings on the railways’ part. By the early 1970s officials had learned that

  [t]he experience of the past quarter of a century suggests that the only safe rule is that if the figures show the future prospects of the railways in a favourable light they are probably wrong.276

  If this seems to back up the idea of an anti-rail ministry, it is worth emphasising that this was a view based on experience and backed up by examples. Asked to evaluate the Advanced Passenger Train (APT) on the basis of reduced traffic levels, BR showed that the rate of return improved. While officials attempted to understand how this could happen, the project was approved; it later emerged that the Board had simply reduced capital assets and expenditure in line with the reduced level of traffic. The embarrassing story of the APT’s abandonment in 1986 after more than a decade of development sums up the failure to invest in railways post-Beeching. Whitehall’s investment scepticism was encouraged by technical and project-management failings on the railways’ part. However, with hindsight there are elements of self-fulfilling prophecy here in that had the project been more enthusiastically supported its difficulties might have been overcome. Peter Parker bemoaned it as exemplifying a British habit of ‘wishing for the moon and not willing the resources’, which in this case represented a fraction of the sum lost on Concorde.277 Parker’s attempts to get government endorsement for a major electrification programme were rejected by the Conservatives in 1981, despite a favourable joint BRB/ministry study. Mrs Thatcher’s famed dislike of publicly owned railways and the scepticism regarding their prospects attributed to her trusted adviser Alan Walters cannot have helped matters, but the railways’ inability to achieve planned reductions in the subsidy or obtain union cooperation on productivity deals were major handicaps to the Board’s case. Although results did improve in the late 1970s, published surpluses were revealed to be losses once inflation was taken into account. When the economy went into recession from 1979, the railways’ losses seemed once again to be spiralling out of control at a time when the BRB and the government had agreed a reduction in subsidy.

  By the late 1970s the railways’ investment position was becoming desperate. BR was refurbishing multiple units built under the Modernisation Plan in order to extend their lives rather than purchasing new stock. The future of lines such as Inverness–Kyle and Shrewsbury–Aberystwyth was called into question by the postponement of 3,000 miles of track renewal in 1977. Most disappointing was that, following the completion of electrification to Glasgow in 1974, no main line electrification, and little suburban, took place during the decade. The great investment success of the 1970s, the High Speed Train, the world’s fastest diesel, was nevertheless a reflection of Britain’s failure to electrify much of its main line network. A 1979 study showed that British Rail received less investment per train/km than any other EU railway; this was still true in 1989, only more so. The consequences were thrown into the spotlight by the appalling disaster at Clapham Junction in 1989. Here thirty-five people died and over 500 were injured when one packed morning commuter train – that should have been stopped by a signal – ran into the back of another whose driver had stopped to report a faulty signal; a third train hit the wreckage – fortunately it was empty. The signal which caused the accident had been improperly rewired, but the crash revealed unacceptably dangerous working practices on a project that should in any case have been carried out several years earlier (the technician involved had worked every day for over ninety days with completely inadequate supervision and this was not an isolated problem). This – and the poor crashworthiness of the ageing stock – raised concerns over the safety implications of BR’s financial constraints.