Last Trains
Page 26
From 1988 investment rose steadily until in 1993 it reached a level higher in real terms than in 1960. However, if the Channel Tunnel was excluded, investment in the existing railway was not that much higher than the inadequate plateau of the 1970s, and making up for the chronic underinvestment that had typified the intervening period would not be a quick process. In 1990 investment again paid the price of the railways’ failure to meet financial targets as the economy entered a recession. It is difficult to prove, but reasonable to suggest, that an over-emphasis on the size of the network as a measure of government policy encouraged the development of this chronic underinvestment. For example, had the 1,000-odd miles of closures identified as saving £3.2 million in 1974 been implemented, they would surely have provoked a public outcry far greater than a cut of ten times that amount in an annual rail investment budget.
At the same time as the railway appeared to be locked in a process of inexorable decline, two associated trends emerged: nostalgia for the lost pre-Beeching railway, which went beyond the memories of those directly affected, and concern at the effect of the motor car on the environment. When Neil Cooper-Key MP questioned whether the BTC should be allowed to close services in outlying districts just because they lost money in 1953, he specifically drew comparison between rural railways and rural post offices. By the mid-1970s resentment over rail closures had been strengthened by the tendency for public facilities to be concentrated in towns. Today the decline of the rural post office and the village shop is a familiar concern, as they give way to the mini-supermarket at the garage on the dual carriageway or the lure of distant superstores. While many closed railway lines have simply merged back into the fields from which they seemed to grow, others are submerged just beneath the surface of this modern landscape. Take the A361 North Devon relief road, which performs the function of the old Taunton–Barnstaple line as a branch from the main network towards the resorts of north Devon. When the main railway line from Taunton to Exeter was first opened, a station called Tiverton Road was provided, which later became Tiverton Junction when a branch was built to Tiverton itself. The town was also served by trains on the Exe Valley line. Both lines closed in 1963–4, leaving Tiverton Junction once again as the town’s railhead. In 1986 it was replaced by Tiverton Parkway station where the railway passes the junction of the M5 and North Devon relief road. The very name of the station illustrates its modern origin, ‘parkway’ being an epithet applied since the 1970s to stations to which one is expected to drive and park. The relief road bypasses Tiverton but throws off a spur to it, the Great Western Way, under which lies the former Tiverton station. One of the locomotives that frequented it – known as ‘the Tivvy Bumper’ – has pride of place in the town museum. Heading north-west, the A361 eventually takes over the route of the Taunton–Barnstaple line from South Molton on to Barnstaple, where the A39 takes over, passing a business park, a superstore and a McDonald’s to arrive at the industrial estate that used to be Victoria station. Barnstaple Junction survives as the terminus of the ‘Tarka Line’ from Exeter. The intermediate stations on to Ilfracombe survive as a private house, part of a holiday-home development, a restaurant and a shop; the terminus has been demolished to make way for a factory. Much of the route is a cycle path or footpath. For a few years Mortehoe station was a children’s amusement park, four coaches having been placed between the platforms to house the attractions. A heritage railway is busy trying to rebuild as much as possible of the narrow-gauge line from Barnstaple to Lynton. Disused railways have provided the foundations for familiar elements of modern England: ring roads and relief roads, car parks, business parks, retail parks, industrial estates, housing estates, B&Bs, tea rooms, restaurants and heritage attractions. One, Wadebridge, is the John Betjeman centre – a road runs along the old trackbed. Oh dear.
At the same time as such terms as ‘parkway’ and ‘drive-thru’ were entering the description of a road-based rural landscape, the branch-line railway became an imagined place, symbolic of a lost and better England. Until rural railways began to close in appreciable numbers, rail enthusiasts were not terribly interested in them, but tended instead to compare the performance of main-line locomotives. As the branch lines disappeared they took on a more romantic aura. I can still recall the moment my mother lifted me up as a small child to look over the bridge in Havant at a derelict track and told me that this was where the ‘Hayling Billy’ used to run. My youthful fascination with these mysterious pathways, dripping tunnels and crumbling viaducts, recognised and encouraged by Elisabeth Beresford’s The Secret Railway (1973) must have been widely shared, as witnessed by the plethora of guides to railway walks that have emerged since the 1970s. A further series, ‘Forgotten Railways’, provides potted histories of all the closed railways in an area with a brief guide to their remains; the Railway Ramblers organisation has been active since 1978. In 1952 H. C. Casserley indicated the growing interest in branch lines with the publication of a slim illustrated list of previous closures, Service Suspended. Now virtually every line that has ever existed has a small volume devoted to its history and, like the railway walks literature, they are laced with regret over closures.
In his 1990 guide to walks along former Southern and GWR routes Jeff Vinter, chairman of the Railway Ramblers, admited that he saw Beeching as ‘a sort of state executioner’, appointed in ‘the sixties [which], after all, were a self-consciously modern and destructive age’.278 In Forgotten Railways (1986), H. P. White recounted his 1958 journey over the 110 miles of the former Midland and Great Northern Line from Peterborough to Great Yarmouth at an average speed of less than 25mph. Reading his account it is easy to appreciate that for ‘the connoisseur of rail travel’ this is a journey to be ‘savoured in the memory’, but as he acknowledges it is not one that would appeal to the normal passenger.279 There were few greater connoisseurs of rail travel than Professor White, who took comfort in planning complex English railway journeys during four years as a prisoner of the Japanese during the Second World War. As first-hand memories of the rural steam-hauled railway receded, it was, naturally enough, the connoisseurs who produced accounts that fuelled nostalgia for the M&GN, the Somerset and Dorset and the rest, and introduced them to a new generation. None of this is a bad thing, but such accounts could all too easily be taken as illustrations of a beauty that Beeching destroyed, by readers who forgot – or had never known – the poor service, the decrepit stock, the slowness and inconvenience of it all. Indeed, White’s description of the M&GN perfectly illustrates why those who could had generally bought cars before their local railway closed.
Within a year of its preservation, the Bluebell Railway was being used as a film location. The starring role of the preserved Keighley and Worth Valley Railway in Lionel Jeffries’s successful 1970 film adaptation of E. Nesbit’s The Railway Children cemented a relationship which has seen the polished locomotive steaming into the well-kept rural station become a handy symbol of time and place for the filmmaker, taking us to an England which we already recognise in our imaginations and which is in turn secured there by its repeated depiction. By the end of the century, Britain’s heritage railways were carrying about eight million passengers a year. In the flesh, as on film, they recreated all that was attractive about the past. In 1993 the pop group Blur sought to reinvent themselves as the harbingers of a new self-consciously English music that would challenge the dominant American sound of contemporary rock. The search for an image for the cover of the album that would launch what eventually became a brief renaissance of English popular culture ended with a painting of the Mallard ‘chugging through the English countryside’, which their biographer describes as ‘a 50s Boys Own comic conceptualisation of an ideal England’.280 In the 1950s boys looking for an ideal England in their comics were as likely to look to the future and Dan Dare as to the past and the Mallard, but that image would not have said ‘England’ in the way the cover of Modern Life is Rubbish did.
In the post-Beeching era the state of the rai
lways seemed to symbolise the failure of modernisation, a network characterised by dereliction and decay even where it was still open. Jeff Vinter’s view of the 1960s as destructive reflects a wider feeling that ‘modernisation seemed to produce dereliction’ which Robert Hewison has identified in relation to a variety of post-1945 environmental changes.281 When one’s local station resembled a vandalised, unstaffed bus shelter placed in a ruin, there was not much the High Speed Train could do to counter this image. BR’s adoption of the slogan ‘this is the age of the train’, espoused by an ageing remnant of the ‘swinging’ 1960s, merely emphasised that it was not. By the 1990s, the combined effect of underinvestment in a ‘lame duck’ railway, nostalgia and growing environmental concern helped to create the idea that there had existed in the past a better railway which, like the nation, had declined since the 1950s, when it should somehow have been transformed into a network of high-speed main lines, efficient commuter services and socially useful rural lines, all justified on a thorough analysis of costs and benefits. The attraction of this perfect railway was made all the greater by the privatisation of the railways – a policy which seemed to sum up all the inadequacies of a government headed for electoral disaster on a rare scale.
Although decades of underspend meant they did not look it, by the early 1990s the railways were well run, well organised and cost-effective. They had developed, in total route modernisation, an effective approach to investment (under which all elements of a route were modernised at the same time), an approach applied to the commuter services out of Marylebone with excellent results. If only the nation had at this point resolved that it wanted a modern, efficient railway and was prepared to pay for it. Instead the industry was privatised in the hope that this would somehow reduce or even eliminate subsidies and solve the problem of underinvestment. The first of these hopes was probably always a delusion and has obviously not been fulfilled. The privatised railways carry almost twice as much passenger traffic (in terms of passenger/km) today as they did before privatisation, but unit costs have not fallen. Meanwhile, the post-privatisation investment in improving infrastructure has increased the Regulatory Asset Base (i.e. the debt which must be serviced) from under £5 billion to £42 billion, incurring an additional £1.5 billion annual charge. In other words the railways carry more people on newer trains and cost around half as much again as they did before privatisation.282 British Rail could have done this. It is tempting to conclude that the only real benefit of privatisation is the greater willingness of government to give taxpayers’ money to private railways than to ones they actually own. However, as much of this money has been given to Network Rail, which is publicly owned, even this advantage is questionable. It is probably fairer to say that government has been more willing to give money to the railways since it was able to pretend that their spending is not public spending, because of the ingenious creation that is Network Rail (the structure of which means its borrowing does not count towards public expenditure liabilities).
With the benefit of hindsight, privatisation offers two lessons: if we want a better railway we need to pay for it; and if anyone thinks that reorganising the railways will make them better they should probably think again. If all the energy and money and time that has gone into working out how to deliver railway services since 1990 had gone into actually delivering railway services, we would all be better off. Certainly, the BTC’s management of its investment programme seems rather less profligate when set against the farce into which Railtrack’s modernisation of the west coast main line descended as it became clear that it would cost more to get a train from London to Manchester at 140mph than it would cost NASA to put a man on Mars. If there was ever a hope that privatisation might solve the fundamental difficulties that stem from the dependence of the railway on public subsidy, it was misplaced. The government continues to be held responsible for the quality of railway services to an extent that is not true of the privatised utilities, for example. Closures, subsidies, fares and investment are still subject to a political contest between ministers, officials, rail managers and the public – and will remain so for the foreseeable future.
The chaos into which the privatised railway appeared to have collapsed by the turn of the century significantly enhanced the industry’s status as a metaphor for Britain’s perceived decline. On 17 October 2000 a rail disintegrated under a passing express on the east coast main line at Hatfield killing four passengers and injuring many more. In the ensuing panic a host of speed restrictions were imposed by the private rail infrastructure company, Railtrack, which was unable to guarantee that a similar incident might not occur anywhere else on the railway. The consequences were horrendous for the country. Hatfield was still causing delays a year later as Railtrack went into administration and was one of a series of accidents that tore at the railways’ reputation in practically the only area – safety – where rail had not been seen as failing in the thirty years before privatisation. Nor did this disaster come out of the blue; rightly or wrongly Hatfield appeared to be the fulfilment of persistent criticisms that privatisation had imposed chaos on the rail industry and benefited no one but the shareholders of the companies involved.
Given that Railtrack was paying dividends to shareholders with one hand and taking subsidies from the taxpayer with another after Hatfield, it is hardly surprising that the railways came to symbolise ‘fat cat’ Britain for critics such as playwright David Hare (The Permanent Way, 2003) or filmmaker Ken Loach (The Navigators, 2001). In 2003 Ian Marchant wrote that:
the railway that you sit on every morning on your way to another shitty fucking pointless day in a drab office in the company of drab work-related acquaintances, is the fruit of political corruption, institutional indifference and short-term profiteering. No one loves it because it is unlovable.
He was obviously not writing just about the railways.283 Marchant’s anger may have been directed first and foremost at contemporary Britain and its privatised railway but he knew where to look for the defining example of the failure of politicians to sort out ‘Britain’s ageing transport infrastructure’ – the failure of the Modernisation Plan and its reversal by Marples and Beeching, who ‘decimated Britain’s railway system, only five years after the investment of the Modernisation Plan. So what hope for [any modern transport minister]?’284 If the industry symbolised the need to modernise in 1960, by the early years of the twenty-first century it had become a metaphor for the failure of modern Britain itself. At the heart of this view was the popular memory of Beeching the axeman, Marples the road-builder and their heartless, dishonest assault on the railways of a better England.
Chapter 13
Conclusion: ultra-modern horror
The significant memory Harold Macmillan took home from 24 October 1961 was the bizarre juxtaposition of debating a Russian H-bomb test of unprecedented ‘ultra-modern horror’ (‘the “bomb” statement went off quite well’), and the meeting he went into immediately afterwards.285 This consisted of a 45-minute plea from a deputation including Betjeman, demanding that Macmillan and Marples save the Doric arch at Euston station from the BTC’s modernisation of the west coast main line. Macmillan appeared ill-informed and disinterested; perhaps his mind was elsewhere. Alan Jackson’s history of London’s termini described Euston in 1959 ‘as a place to get away from as quickly as possible’ for most passengers and the Doric arch (or portico) as ‘filthy and sad’. ‘When we heard,’ he continues, ‘that at long last a new Euston was to be built, no one was much troubled. The old place would go without many tears, and everyone assumed without a second thought that some way of saving the Great Hall and the portico would be found.’286 It was not. The cost was too great, although the Commission’s figures were, of course, strongly contested (this was the first major campaign of the Victorian Society, formed in 1958). The portico was torn down and dumped in a river on Hackney Marsh. In recent years bits of it have been dredged up. There is talk of a resurrection when a new station is built following the demol
ition of the 1968 Euston, which, though a functional improvement on the previous station, has never lived down its association with the demise of the arch. That was the modernisation of Britain, that was.
The demolition of Euston’s portico encapsulated the clash between enthusiasm for the dream of a new modern England and the increasing hostility that accompanied the emerging reality of modernisation during the 1960s. Ironically, the negative reputation of Ernest Marples as a dishonest, anti-rail minister owes much to his willingness to be honest about the choices facing the nation as far as the railways were concerned. For advocates of modernisation the railways had become symbolic of the nation’s problems by 1960 and opposition to rail closures was associated in their minds with a refusal to accept reality. Defending the Beeching Report in the House of Commons, Marples warned that ‘if we funk reshaping the railways, we funk everything, because this is the most patent case for change and change reasonably quickly’.287 The image of the railways as encapsulating Britain’s need to modernise in the late 1950s was an accurate one. Initially, modernisation was conceived primarily as a technological process, but by 1960 the railways, and transport policy in general, were being modernised in a more genuine sense, as part of a wider process that saw the Treasury try to master the complex environment in which it operated. As the nationalised industry with the greatest problems, the railways influenced this wider process of reform. Marples was a dubious character, but there is no evidence that there was anything corrupt in his handling of railway closures, which while hawkish was in line with official advice. The policy of cutting the rail network and investment in it while spending more on roads was not one he conjured up to enrich himself or as part of a conspiracy with the road lobby – indeed he did not conjure it up. Nor is it right to characterise the closure programme as a ruthless cost-cutting exercise in which the wider transport picture or the social and economic consequences of closures were ignored. The Beeching Report, although aimed at reducing the railway deficit, had its origins in studies of future transport requirements, the belief that responsibility for providing social services should lie with accountable ministers rather than rail managers and, above all, the need to control public investment. The need for the report rested on the failure to address either the railway industry’s problems or the difficulties of closing lines in the preceding decade.