by Charles Loft
Although the significant increase in railway deficits during the 1950s was precipitated by government intervention in railway pricing and wage negotiations, it reflected fundamental problems that any organisation – centralised or decentralised, publicly or privately owned – would have struggled to overcome. The most obvious of these were the inability of stopping-train passenger and merchandise freight services to compete with road transport and the implications of a changing freight market; but the legacy of over-capitalisation, outdated equipment and working methods and the effect of intensive wartime use were all factors. Furthermore, for an entire decade after the end of the Second World War, the industry was either waiting for reorganisation to be imposed upon it or coming to terms with reorganisation; and, at times, both. While the 1947 Act arguably gave the Commission a challenging task – to provide an integrated public service while breaking even – and an ineffective structure; the 1953 Act gave it an impossible task and a chaotic structure. The organisation which emerged in the mid-1950s was ill-suited to its role, ill-led and ill-served by governments. By the end of the 1950s the BTC was entitled to wonder whether its chief purpose was to run a public transport service or to provide the government with an extremely ineffective means of regulating the economy and managing industrial relations. One consequence of this combination of failings was an inability to translate the emerging realities of the transport revolution into a consistent policy on investment and network size.
Whether the presentation of the 1955 and 1956 plans as solutions to the railway deficit were acts of incompetence, deception or self-deception on the part of ministers, the mitigation on all three charges is that the government was struggling to get to grips with problems that seemed more important than whether investment in the railways, which was not actually going to take place immediately, would eventually eradicate their deficit. Nevertheless, while the BTC can be criticised for failing to produce better plans and for mismanaging the ones it had, the government had little grounds for surprise when the Commission could not pay off debts that were largely inflicted by government policy and were actually part of the 1955 plan. The one moment in the history of nationalised railways when they were offered a major investment opportunity was in fact the absolute nadir of their treatment by government, because it eventually saddled the industry with an undeserved image of failure. This perception provided an unfortunate context when the nation finally got to grips with the question of the role of the railways in a road-dominated transport sector, some ten years after the first opportunity to do so had been missed.
Although the growth of the deficit made some reform of the BTC inevitable and encouraged the government to make significant efforts to overcome resistance to closures, the key factor in changing policy at the turn of the decade was the evolution of public expenditure control. For the Treasury the loss of large sums in a particular year was less significant than the prospect of an open-ended investment programme earning no return and the implications of this for public expenditure. Addressing this issue led to the setting of clearer targets for nationalised industries and to attempts to estimate future transport trends as a basis for investment decisions. Once it appeared that investing in railways would not reduce demand for road space, the case for investing in rail rested increasingly on the effect of modernisation on the railways’ finances. Cuts in the investment programme began in the honest and reasonable belief that much of it would do no more than reduce losses on parts of the network that were no longer essential. It appeared that these losses could be reduced more effectively by simply ceasing to provide services that did not represent value for money. Officials were aware that their understanding of the changing transport landscape was less than perfect, but they faced a choice between doing what seemed sensible in the circumstances – cutting the railways and investing less in them – or approving investment spending that would increase the railways’ deficit and do nothing to reduce demands for funds elsewhere. Adopting the first course in turn encouraged the view that detailed figures justifying individual closures were more an issue of presentation than policy-making. It is the Treasury’s attempts to control public investment, not the road lobby, that is the key to understanding why Beeching happened.
Whether intended to integrate road and rail transport, eradicate duplicate routes or simply save money, closures tended to take a long time to implement during the 1950s. The problem opponents of closure faced, although maybe not apparent at the time, was that while they were able to make the authorities look silly, untrustworthy or incompetent, they were not able to persuade them that they were wrong. Cheaper means of operation could cut costs and boost traffic but not by enough to turn losses into profits; figures could be picked apart but unravelling them did not reveal hidden treasure; and the consequences of closures were not as dire as objectors warned. The Isle of Wight’s roads did not come to a halt and the Sussex countryside was not noticeably worse off without the Bluebell and Primrose line. Consequently, the more successful the opponents of closure appeared to be, the less favourably the state regarded them. The problem that the state, generally in the form of railway managers, faced was that the more detailed its arguments for closures were, the more it opened itself up to attack. The less detail it revealed the more suspicion it aroused. This was not a healthy debate and in the absence of one, the extent to which the problems of the railways revolved around rural branch and secondary lines may well have appeared larger to both sides than was really the case. If so, this can only have been exacerbated by the drift of government policy after 1951 and the missed opportunities to examine the railways’ problems in framing the 1953 Transport Act or the 1955 Modernisation Plan. The government’s determination to grasp the nettle of railway reform – strong enough to overturn the Conservatives’ taste for decentralisation – led it to reform the closure procedure under the 1962 Transport Act to hamper opposition to closures. This took place just as objectors’ criticism of the procedure reached a crescendo, and just at the point when the closure programme began to deal with services and encounter issues that really did deserve the sort of in-depth analysis objectors called for. The sad irony of the Beeching years is that having struggled with a closure procedure that made mountains out of molehills, the government abandoned it just as it got to the mountains.
In relation to both transport as a whole and the railways in particular, the gradual development of government policy during 1958–74 was more significant than the apparent changes wrought by new governments or new ministers. Although the election of a Labour government in 1964 and the subsequent appointment of Barbara Castle as minister made it harder for Castle’s successors to pursue a draconian approach to closures, the search for a profitable core network was never likely to result in every line outside that network being closed, because Whitehall consistently appreciated that loss-making lines might be socially necessary. The pattern of official advice and refusals before October 1964 suggests that even a Conservative government with an overwhelming majority and led by Ernest Marples could not have implemented the final conclusions of Beeching’s studies without legislating to abolish the consultative procedure altogether, completely altering the way in which closure proposals were considered within Whitehall, quelling considerable internal dissent and either completely ignoring the wider social and economic impact of closures or spending large sums on road improvements, not to mention resigning itself to a spell in opposition. While it would be a mistake to see the stabilisation of the network by 1974 as an inevitable outcome, Network for Development was not very different from the network Marples would probably have arrived at, had he continued to follow advice from officials given on a basis consistent with that given during 1963–4. A minister other than Castle might have tried to establish different criteria and drive the closures forward, but the political difficulties such a course would have encountered are pretty clear (indeed they defeated those who tried to renew the drive for a profitable railway after 1970). However, if Castle was
to achieve the party unity over transport that she was appointed to produce, it was essential to portray her policy as a significant change of course.
Following the publication of the Modernisation Plan, Enoch Powell argued that ‘there must be concealed … in our present railway system, as a sculpture is concealed in a block of marble, the railway system of the future which does pay and does correspond to the economic needs of the country’.288 This idea remained a feature of debates over railway policy for the following twenty years. The search for a slimmer, financially solvent railway eventually revealed that if Powell’s sculpture existed it was a tiny ornament, not a statue. The quest was abandoned because the prize no longer seemed worth its political price. This reflects not only the determination of the rail lobby and users of individual lines, but the political significance of rail services in Scotland and Wales, where their maintenance had become symbolic of a supposed political commitment that far outweighed the real value of the services involved, by the 1970s. The existence of separate government departments for Scotland and Wales and the rise of nationalism made it harder to close lines there; but this in turn made it more difficult to close lines in England where losses were smaller, and so helped bring the entire process to a halt. The closure programme has been characterised as an act of ruthless disregard for the consequences inflicted on individuals. In fact, it is evidence of the limitations on the state’s ability to act ruthlessly. Had Whitehall been able to close the lines officials felt served no useful social or economic purpose, the rail network would be smaller today. But had financial criteria overwhelmed any wider social and economic considerations it would be far, far smaller.
Explaining why the closure programme in the Beeching Report was produced is easier than judging the policy’s merits. Because the report reflected the railways’ side of the new relationship between government and the nationalised industries, it emphasised financial questions rather than social factors, encouraging the erroneous impression that the latter were being ignored. While it is true to say that the reform of the nationalised industries involved a tendency to treat them as if they were ‘commercial undertakings, not social services’, setting financial targets was not an attempt to end their role in providing social services.289 If politics was the overriding barrier to further closures by the mid-1970s, the shape of the remaining network was influenced by official advice as well as by politicians’ nerves. The consequences of the closure programme for the holiday trade, regional development and urban congestion, and the extent to which closures left hardship were all considered, but were the judgements made correct? This is largely a matter of opinion and it would be foolish to try to retrospectively second guess contemporary views, but let us try anyway. On urban closures Beeching was wrong to dismiss the cost–benefit case for the urban lines listed for closure in Reshaping. Although the government had the right policy in recognising the value of these lines and rejected many of his proposals, it did not apply it widely enough. Croydon, Nottingham, Manchester and Sheffield have demonstrated that heavy rail can be rejuvenated as light rail in urban areas. The failure of officials in the 1960s to anticipate fully the potential for rail to relieve congestion in the smaller conurbations is regrettable, albeit easier to see in hindsight. In dealing with lines to holiday resorts, however, Whitehall correctly identified a trend rather than created one, although in the short term the loss of rail connections probably accelerated the move away from holiday travel by rail in specific cases. If Bude, Hunstanton or Ilfracombe could still be reached by rail would holidaymakers flock there by train today? I suggest not. Mablethorpe may not have prospered in the absence of a railway, but Margate has hardly prospered in the presence of one. The dismissal of day-trip traffic, for example at Hornsea, Withernsea and Porthcawl, may have been more damaging. In depriving itself of any say in railway freight closures the government obviously hampered its own efforts to influence regional economies. While this appeared insignificant because rail was not considered a key factor in regional development, that judgement compounded the error rather than negated it. Some local authorities today see improving links to London as significant transport aspirations because of the economic advantage this brings. The value of a railway is not simply in the traffic that uses it but in the potential it brings to a place. When an area of significant size has no railway its attempts to attract investors are likely to be hampered by that fact; not because there is no other way of getting there, but because the absence of a railway suggests that ‘this is a backwater’.
Rail services were maintained if their closure would cause hardship, but hardship was defined in such a way as to enable a service to be withdrawn where it was possible to replace it with a bus service for those whose journeys were economically necessary and whose numbers were economically significant. Is it fair then to conclude that former passengers suffered ‘a degree of hardship and inconvenience that does not appear to be widely appreciated by people involved in making decisions affecting rural transport’?290 There can be no doubt that for many people the closure of their local railway represented a significant deterioration in the quality of their life. The problem officials faced was how to balance the very real hardship caused by rail closures against the notional reduction in other forms of hardship that the savings from a closure produced. Every penny spent on a loss-making rail service was a penny not available to the health service, education, defence or for tax cuts which might generate greater benefits in the long run. My point is not to argue that the balance struck was correct, but to recognise that it had to be struck somewhere – somewhere short of keeping the Great Central main line open for the benefit of a woman in Woodford Halse who needed it to visit her mother. Deciding where to strike that balance was not only difficult, but impossible to do without turning one’s back on the consequent misery someone suffered.
The criticism of the programme that seems to carry most weight today, albeit with fifty years’ hindsight, is that put forward by David St John Thomas in a postscript to his Rural Transport Problem, published in the same year as Reshaping. Thomas argued that the procedure under the 1962 Act would make it easy to show that closing little-used stations with inadequate alternative facilities would cause hardship, even though it made no sense for the railways to serve them. It would be much harder, however, to demonstrate the economic damage done to towns with ample bus services by withdrawing busier long-distance trains. This reflected something of a failure to appreciate the potential value of fast rail services between reasonably large towns. Closure of the Oxford–Cambridge line was delayed – and halted permanently as far as the central section between Bedford and Bletchley was concerned – due to the difficulty of providing buses to the relatively small places between the main towns, yet the potential of the route as a link between the main lines north out of London, with accelerated services connecting the university towns to Bedford, Milton Keynes and Bicester was dismissed on the basis that few people used its slow existing services for this purpose. An even stronger example was the outcome of the proposal to close the Okehampton–Plymouth line and its branch from Bere Alston to Callington. The local geography meant that it was impossible to provide adequate replacement bus services, so the main line was retained between Plymouth and the junction at Bere Alston and the branch kept open as far as Gunnislake, for the benefit of a couple of villages. Meanwhile the link between Exeter and Plymouth via three reasonably sized towns (Crediton, Okehampton and Tavistock) was severed and Tavistock lost its railway completely. It is difficult to describe this decision as anything other than stupid, but it might be fairer to say that such reprieves were intended to be only temporary transitional measures, such was the faith that, as car ownership spread, the retained lines would no longer be required.
Did Beeching place too much faith in the financial benefits of rationalisation? The recommendations in the report were not pursued in total or with the vigour Beeching envisaged, but even if they had been the railways would almost certainly have remain
ed in serious financial difficulty. In 1972, Whitehall estimated that £115 million had been cut from railway operating costs in the four years to 1967 but that this had been largely consumed by increases in wages and other costs, despite improvements in productivity (the workforce was cut by nearly half in 1960–73). Direct savings from closures and withdrawals, including freight, were expected to account for £34–41 million of the £115–147 million total financial improvement envisaged in Reshaping. However, much of the rest of that improvement depended on indirect savings which would emerge as the cumulative effect of groups of closures (an expectation that needs to be seen in the context of the problem of ‘shared costs’ discussed in Chapter 3). The figures published in relation to individual closures from 1963 onwards were not therefore a summary of the entire financial effect of withdrawing a particular service. This helps to explain the apparently blanket condemnation of rural railways and the approach taken in the Wells case.