Last Trains
Page 28
While it is obvious that there were flaws in the figures used to justify individual closures this should not distract from the reality that, as a whole, passenger and freight trains serving all stations on rural lines lost money. Where they were the only traffic on a line, that line lost money. The idea that cutting the branches damaged the viability of main lines was undermined by studies in the 1970s; the main lines tended to have been built first because they linked major centres of traffic. Closing the Wells–East Dereham line did not help the economics of the other routes from Dereham, which subsequently closed. However, while these were not listed for closure in Reshaping, the accompanying maps revealed low traffic levels and they were not part of the system Beeching’s further studies identified (i.e. the implication of Reshaping was that they would close). Their closure did not fundamentally affect the economics of the main lines to Norwich or King’s Lynn. More could have been done to invest in efficient operation for rural railways, but should it have taken priority over spending on parts of the network that were either profitable or had an obvious social value? Gerard Fiennes’s account of how he drew up a plan for operating the East Suffolk line as a ‘basic railway’ in the 1960s has encouraged the view that this should have been done more widely; but it is worth remembering that Fiennes did so only after the political battle to close the line was lost and that he rejected the view that such measures could have saved the neighbouring Cambridge–Marks Tey route.291 When we consider the limited extent of main line electrification and the abysmal state of some commuter services in the north of England today, for example, it seems perverse to argue that the great failure of railway policy in the last fifty years was not to modernise significant numbers of lightly used lines in order that they would lose less money.
To focus on the fact that Beeching failed to lead the railways to solvency is largely to miss the point of Reshaping, which was to travel rather than to arrive, in other words to reduce the deficit as much as was politically and socially acceptable. The fact that closures alone were not the solution to the railway problem does not mean they were wrong. Reshaping was only the first stage of a programme that would have left a railway so small that arguments over its viability are hypothetical – it was politically unachievable. The positive legacy of the Beeching era was this realisation and it resulted from a willingness boldly to attempt to tackle a problem that had festered for over a decade. The history of the railways since 1945 is littered with cries that what is needed is for the government and/or the nation to decide what sort of railway it wants and how much it is prepared to pay for it, or words to that effect.292 When Otto Clarke and Matthew Stevenson decided that they really ought to have a look at the implications of Proposals for the Railways in late 1956 those questions began to be asked seriously for the first time since 1945 (and probably since the creation of the big four in 1921) and they continued to be asked more thoroughly in the ensuing eight years than they have been since. There was no more difficult time for Whitehall to begin asking these questions than the late 1950s, just as car ownership took off. The modernisation of the machinery of government in the late 1950s may have resembled ‘a rather piecemeal set of running repairs to the post-war settlement’,293 but in transport it was more akin to installing a diesel engine in Mallard while it thundered down Stoke Bank.
It suited the government to present the Beeching Report as the outcome of sophisticated analysis but in reality it was a snapshot of a work in progress. That work suffered from a shortage of expertise and data in the face of a complex and developing picture. In 1960 ‘the future’ ended in about 1984. Had Britain been frozen in time in 1984 Beeching’s analysis might look rather better today. Instead, the railways have experienced a significant growth in demand since the early 1990s that was not foreseen even as it began and the number of private cars on the roads has almost doubled since 1980. Higher rail passenger numbers, increasing congestion, concern over the environmental consequences of the car and the realisation that we cannot simply build our way out of congestion have heightened the impact of those closures which probably should never have been made and increased the number which look wrong in hindsight. Nevertheless, rail policy in the late 1950s and early 1960s represented a significant advance on 1951–6, because genuine attempts to understand and tackle the problem were made. The most obvious omission in the development of transport policy during this period was the absence of an effective pricing mechanism for road use. One problem with the car is that its costs are not sufficiently related to its use and in particular to the kind of use one makes of it; but if this was a flaw in the Treasury’s response to the transport revolution, it was one determined by political realities.
In an ideal railway world the taxpayer would pay the rail operator a fee for the benefit provided by every rail service (not just those that lose money) to those who do not pay directly in fares and freight charges. Where the total of fares and non-user payments (or the rationally estimated future total) justified investment, investment would take place; where it did not justify maintenance and offered no prospect that it would, the service would close. In making this statement three points should be obvious from a reading of this book: that the closure of those services which could not survive under this system would be opposed; that the setting of non-user payments would involve complex calculations and debatable assumptions; and that the levels of these charges would be argued over by those seeking to prevent closures and by those seeking to lower taxes and fares. Modernisation failed to produce this ideal system, not because the wider value of rail services was simply lost on or ignored by officials, but because it proved unattainable in a political reality of competing demands for investment, a lack of expertise and resources and the pressure of electoral timetables. It is probably unattainable per se, but Whitehall was certainly closer to it by 1970 than it had been in 1957. Impossible it may be, but such ideals can be useful touchstones when dealing with the nitty gritty of getting things done. Critics of the Beeching/Marples era give too little credit to those involved for at least attempting to relate transport provision to estimates of future needs.
The allegation that this was a policy that failed, was dishonest, callous and too narrowly focused on financial outcomes is too simplistic and to a large extent wrong. How, then, do we account for the passionate conviction with which Beeching is attacked – not simply criticised but ‘reviled’ and resented – fifty years on?294 It is important to draw a distinction between the way Beeching is remembered and the nature of contemporary reaction. While there are elements of a romantic Luddism in the opposition to rail closures, Beeching’s status as a symbol of the modern approach and the association of rail closures with modernisation were assets in the presentation of a policy which was generally only unpopular with those who stood to lose a tangible service. Even when opposition was based on an arguably outdated attachment to the railway as a symbol of an area’s continued significance, this itself reflected a fear of being left behind while the rest of Britain modernised. Even the preservation movement, which might be seen as manifesting a purely romantic attachment to railways, in many cases grew out of a desire to restore a ‘real’ service. The withdrawal of a local facility, whether rail, hospital or post office, is almost always opposed. It is usually only possible to remove some of that opposition by arguments about the national interest, however well founded they may be. This is partly because once a public service exists people tend to feel they have a right to it; but also because those who suffer hardship will rarely accept that this is justified by some wider averaging of losses and gains, even though it is impossible for governments not to take such an approach. The battle over rail closures was first and foremost a political struggle between those who saw the threatened lines as worthwhile social services and those who felt the nation could not afford them. In order to win that battle the government adopted tactics which were effective in the short term but which fuelled suspicion and resentment over time – limiting debate, withholding inform
ation, erring on the side of closure. This conflict took place at a time when romantic nostalgia for the disappearing rural railway co-existed with enthusiasm for modernisation, but on balance the latter was stronger in contemporary reaction to the closure programme. To present opposition to rail closures in the Beeching era as indicating a national rejection of modernisation would be too simplistic; nevertheless it illustrates the contrast between a seductive dream and its problematic reality.
The hardship some suffered as a result of rail closures provides the foundation for the subsequent development of Beeching’s reputation, but the popular memory of Beeching today reflects both the ‘declinism’ Jim Tomlinson sees in economic history and a sense of social decline founded firmly in nostalgia for an England recreated by heritage railways and on screen. The level of infamy attached to Beeching’s reputation today reflects the place of the branch line in English culture. The version of the rural railway conjured up in modern popular culture is a myth – part based in fact, but with key elements missing and others imaginatively enhanced – just as the wider vision of England’s rural past we entertain ourselves with is rather more attractive than, say, Thomas Hardy’s version. In the years after Beeching, regret at the loss of rural railways and an imagined way of life they came to symbolise became entwined with a growing recognition that road traffic and road building do not make the countryside a more agreeable place. In the last twenty years, this effect has been enhanced by the gradual realisation that, like smokers fearing the onset of cancer, we really are going to have to give up emitting carbon one of these days, even if we don’t think today is the right day.
Rail closures were part of a transformation of rural England in the second half of the twentieth century. The rural England we imagine as ‘traditional’ is dead, whether or not it ever existed. That transformation is regretted – at least some of the time – by those who brought it about through their desire to live in the country while enjoying the benefits of a job in a town or city; to drive on dual carriageways and use out-of-town supermarkets; to pay less for goods delivered more cheaply by road; or to drive to the coast. As Marples understood, ‘our own car is precious, the rest are a traffic problem’.295 There is a Squire Chesterford ranting against the lorries and cars and houses with numbers instead of names in most of us. That part of us also regrets rail closures because they symbolise this change and because the branch-line railway is an integral part of the ‘real’ England depicted in so much of our culture, which the new England appears to have destroyed. Yet this change was caused not by the Beeching Report, or by the closing of the railways, but by the motor car and the lorry. It was a consequence of popular choice. As Kenneth Glover put it, to predict and provide a response to road traffic growth ‘has become politically incorrect, but at the time it seemed democratic’, because it gave people what they showed they wanted. 296 That downland car park, that train puffing slowly and peacefully through green meadows no more, the lane that is now a road, the houses that have numbers instead of names, that cloud of diesel dirt that hangs over every city, those melting ice caps – that was not Beeching and Marples, it was us; we did it. We liked trains, but we used buses and then we bought cars. Why? For the same reason we built railway lines across the hitherto unsullied estates of the aristocracy. We do not want to spend our lives within five miles of the village we were born in. We want to move, we want convenience, we want speed. We want new things. We want to get where we’re going. It is almost as if we can’t help it.
Glossary
ASLEF The Associated Society of Locomotive
Engineers and Firemen
BR British Rail
BRB British Railways Board
BRF British Road Federation
BTC British Transport Commission
CTCC Central Transport Consultative Committee
DSIR Department of Scientific and Industrial Research
GCR Great Central Railway
GER Great Eastern Railway
GWR Great Western Railway
K&ESR Kent and East Sussex Railway
LBSCR London Brighton and South Coast Railway
LMS London Midland and Scottish Railway
LNER London and North Eastern Railway
M&GN Midland and Great Northern Joint Railway
MGM Ministerial Group on Modernisation
MHLG Ministry of Housing and Local Government
MoT Ministry of Transport
MTCA Ministry of Transport and Civil Aviation
NAPRO National Archives, Public Record Office
NCB National Coal Board
NFU National Farmers Union
NUR National Union of Railwaymen
Pick-up goods freight train serving all the stations on a line
REPC Regional Economic Planning Council
RHA Road Haulage Association
RHE Road Haulage Executive (part of the BTC)
RRL Road Research Laboratory
SAG Special Advisory Group
(AKA Stedeford Committee)
SER South Eastern Railway
SMMT Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders
Stopping train local passenger train serving every station
TGWU Transport and General Workers Union
TUCC Transport Users’ Consultative Committee
TSSA Transport Salaried Staffs’ Association
WBRPA Westerham Branch Railway
Passengers Association
WVRA Westerham Valley Railway Association
Acknowledgements
This book draws heavily on my earlier academic monograph, Government, the Railways and the Modernisation of Britain – Beeching’s Last Trains (Routledge, 2006). I am grateful to Routledge for permission to use this material.
I am also grateful to the trustees of the Harold Macmillan Book Trust, Copyright and Archives Fund for permission to quote from the diaries of Lord Macmillan, and to the British Railways Board (Residuary) Ltd for permission to quote BRB copyright material (AN and RAIL class records from the National Archive). I am grateful to Ashridge Management College for access to the private papers of Lord Watkinson. I have benefited from, and enjoyed, the willingness of several participants in the events discussed here, most of whom are unfortunately no longer alive, to cast their minds back over them: Lord Boyd-Carpenter; Sir James Dunnett; Sir Christopher Foster; Kenneth Glover; Richard Hardy; Lady Marples; Dame Alison Munro; Lord Peyton; Sir Leo Pliatzky; Sir David Serpell; William Sharp; Sir Geoffrey Wardale; Ivor Warburton; and Lord Whitelaw. I have also benefited from the existence of three excellent online resources: the Railways Archive (http://www.railwaysarchive.co.uk); the Disused Stations website (http://www.disused-stations.org.uk); and the website provided by the Colonel Stephens Railway Museum at Tenterden (http://www.hfstephens-museum.org.uk).
I am exremely grateful to Ben Brooksbank, Nick Catford, Nigel Tout and Moon at m24instudio for their very kind assistance in providing illustrations. I am also grateful to the National Archives Image Library for permission to reproduce the image of Northiam station and to the Library and the Isle of Wight Council for permission to reproduce the images of Newport station.
Many colleagues have kept me entertained and encouraged over the years and put up with my ranting about railways, both in academia and at the LGA, but Peter Hennessy’s encouragement and guidance in completing the PhD which began my research on Beeching – and his subsequent interest in my work – have been invaluable. My father read an early draft of the book and provided helpful comments and Hollie Teague at Biteback Publishing has helped improve it tremendously. Needless to say, any mistakes and failings herein are entirely mine.
Most importantly I am extremely grateful to my wife and eldest son. Preparation of this book coincided with the arrival of my second child and would have been completely impossible without their forbearance.
Select bibliography
Adley, Robert, Out of Steam: The Beeching Years in Hindsight (Wellingborough: Patrick Stephens, 1990)
Anderson, P. Howard, Forgotten Railways: Volume Two, The East Midlands (Newton Abbott: David and Charles, 1973; 1985 edition)
Bagwell, Philip and Peter Lyth, Transport in Britain: From Canal Lock to Gridlock 1750–2000 (London: Hambledon and London, 2002)
Booker, Christopher, The Neophiliacs: A Study of the Revolution in English Life in the Fifties and Sixties (London: Collins, 1969)
Burroughs, Robert, The Great Isle of Wight Train Robbery (London: Railway Invigoration Society, 1968)
Butler, David and Anthony King, The British General Election of 1964 (London: Macmillan, 1965)
Butterfield, Peter, ‘Branch lines, wayside stations and road competition’, Journal of Transport History, 16 (2), September 1995, pp. 179–95.
Catt, Andrew, The East Kent Railway (Tarrant Hinton: Oakwood, 1975)
Catterall, Peter (ed.) Macmillan Diaries – Prime Minister and After, 1957–66 (London: Macmillan, 2011)
Carter, Ian, Railways and Culture in Britain – The Epitome of Modernity (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001)