By the 1970s the wrecked British railway carriage had become a stock image for newspapers and television, channelling broader anxieties about the rise of sociopathic behaviour. Levels of destruction were sometimes staggering, both on football trains and on carriages in sidings. A bank holiday excursion returning to Liverpool in August 1975 was evacuated at Crewe after it was set on fire by the occupants, using as fuel the contents of mailbags they had stolen from Leicester station. In an earlier incident, fourteen stationary carriages were assaulted by four youths equipped with a hatchet from an emergency tool kit: 228 windows were destroyed, with 128 compartment mirrors and picture glasses, 86 blinds, 38 window straps, 180 light bulbs and 8 fire extinguishers. At the non-structural level of damage, the railways also had to contend with the new media of marker pen and aerosol paint. The latter was a costly niche product on its first appearance in the 1960s, but in the following decade became widely available as an accessory for car repairs. These new paints and inks allowed graffiti of a scale, ambition and speed altogether beyond the means of pocket knives, chalk, pencil, or water-based ink.
This was no time for building carriages that fostered easy misbehaviour. Many suburban carriages of the 1950s and 1960s were already organised as twin half-size saloons, even if they did not yet feature gangway connections. Suburban electrification was another agent of change. It encouraged the use of carriages equipped with air-operated sliding doors, like those already in use on the London Underground system. The first batch of electric trains introduced on the Liverpool Street lines in 1949 were of this new kind, although another twenty-nine years passed before British Rail built its last slam-door outer suburban trains. In the 1970s it also became standard practice to make a gangway through the whole train, a policy fostered in some areas by the decision to sell tickets on board rather than at lightly used stations. The main exception concerns multiple units (self-propelled, fixed-formation diesels and electrics), some of which lack a connection within the cab end to allow through passage when units run coupled together.
Behind the sliding doors of the new suburban carriage type were large vestibules which served as standing space when the train was full. Dangling from the roof of the 1949 trains were straps for other standing passengers to hold tight, a further instance of the movement away from the idea that a seat should be included in the price of a ticket. This shift has continued, accelerated partly by the need to provide for wheelchair users, but chiefly by the inexorable growth in passenger numbers. Official calculations now include a ‘standing allowance’, and a policy that short journeys (up to twenty minutes) may be made without the use of a seat – though most able-bodied people who travel regularly by train know that this limit may be exceeded many times over.
So the old, isolated, vandal-friendly passenger enclosures steadily disappeared. The last survivors of the archetypal British carriage belonged to Classes 405 and 415 on the Southern Region suburban electric services: ten compartments in a vehicle 62ft long, each six-foot cell offering six places a side, undifferentiated by armrests or seat divisions. To make an exit from the far side of a full compartment required a cake-walk past twenty-two knees, usually with some deft grabbing at the metal-framed luggage racks that did double duty as handrails. At quieter times this forced intimacy was replaced by solitude, an isolation surely more total than on any other form of public transport. The feeling was heightened when the train halted between stations – held at a red light outside Clapham Junction, perhaps, or pausing on the tight triangle of lines just west of London Bridge – and its thrumming motors fell quiet. The resulting silence soon filled with the tiny creaks and ticks of cooling equipment, and perhaps a muffled phrase or laughter from some conversation in another passenger cell, mysteriously conveyed through the structure of the carriage, before the signal came to move off again. It was better to travel thus in the off-peak daylight hours than at night, beneath the unkindly glow of the bare bulbs (easily unscrewed, for pleasure or for profit), when the entry of any dubious-looking stranger to the compartment might stir the sort of anxieties that Mr Briggs’s generation knew all too well.
The corridor compartment type held on rather longer. The electric trains built in 1988–9 for the Bournemouth and Weymouth route – officially Class 442, ‘Plastic Pigs’ to the railway enthusiast – still included these in first class, because the line’s long-distance commuters were known to prefer them. After these trains were withdrawn for modification, the last haunt of the compartment became the four-and-a-half-mile-long Lymington branch in Hampshire, a spur off the same route, on which a few 1960s electric units were retained until May 2010. It was worth paying a little extra to enjoy the comfortable isolation of one of these first-class enclaves; the well-read might indulge a reminiscence of Trollope’s The Claverings (1867), in which Lady Ongar finds herself paying for a first-class ticket for the sponging Mme Gordeloupe when they travel over the same line. By a nice coincidence, the same route also ended up as the last steam-worked branch in Britain, going electric in the centenary year of Trollope’s novel.
In terms of the passenger’s experience, the passing of the Lymington trains leaves the 1970s slam-door carriages of the Inter-City 125s as the most old-fashioned in the present fleet, the rest of which is equipped almost entirely with automatic doors. It is a curious distinction for these trains, which are perhaps the most admired of the hundreds of types put into service by the nationalised railway. Nor were they meant initially as much more than a ten-year stop-gap, until electrification and trains even faster than 125 mph came along. Their carriages were of the roomy and smooth-running Mark 3 type introduced on the West Coast main line shortly before. They were constructed on the principle of an extremely strong welded-steel shell, following the abandonment in the 1960s of the venerable tradition of building bodies and underframes separately. More noticeable innovations from the user’s point of view included automatic doors between the saloons and entrance vestibules, operated by means of tread mats – a blessing to passengers with heavy luggage, as well as an inducement to take food and drink away from the buffet car without the risk of spillage.
What created the image of these High Speed Trains, however, were the streamlined power cars, one at each end. Their lightweight shells of glass-reinforced plastic were styled with exceptional care, thanks to the input of the industrial designer Sir Kenneth Grange (born 1929). Engaged to create a new livery, Grange became so concerned to get the right look for the train that he redesigned the bodyshell of the power cars on his own initiative, testing the models of his prototype aerodynamically by securing nocturnal access to the wind tunnels at Imperial College London. Rather than sacking him, BR had the good sense to endorse the result. In a BBC4 documentary broadcast in 2012, Grange declared the power cars to have been his own favourite project, in a career that included work for Kodak, Kenwood (the restyled Kenwood Chef mixer of the 1960s was his), Wilkinson Sword and many other household names. The 1970s colour scheme has long since given way to others, but the High Speed Trains endure. With new engines in place, they are presently reckoned good for at least another ten years’ service.
Separate power cars represented a break from the usual practice, earlier generations of multiple-unit trains mostly having engines or motors below the carriage floors. This separation was another point in favour of the HSTs, keeping to a minimum the vibrations and noise within the carriage. The double-ended arrangement, as well as the streamlined styling, were in a line of descent from the Blue Pullman diesels of the 1960s, already mentioned. Though these lasted just thirteen years in service, they were the showpieces of the network in their day; Design magazine in 1963 called them ‘probably the best known trains on BR’. Responses to the rolling stock of the 1950s had often been scathing: critics derided clunky outlines, too many echoes of pre-war conventions, and a general failure to move on from the era of rationing and austerity. In terms of image, cars, coaches and airliners had distanced themselves from all of this as fast as possible; only on the rai
ls did things seem to lag behind. A Design Panel was therefore established in 1956, including consultants from outside the railway industry. Its brief was to ensure that railway equipment should look fit to take its place within ‘a great public service’, engendering pride and promoting business, and projecting ‘the idea of a keen and progressive management’.
These ideals came to fruition with the Blue Pullmans, a leap forward in smartness and technological confidence reminiscent of George Mortimer Pullman’s innovations of eighty years before. Their livery was blue and white, the paler colour making a broad horizontal band between the windows – the first version of what became the standard BR livery, suitably adapted, for most of the rest of the century. These windows were double-glazed, and equipped with retractable venetian blinds between the panes in place of curtains. Seats were adjustable, like those on aircraft (also, it was noted, like those on the popular new road coaches lately introduced on the M1), and had built-in ashtrays in the armrests. A visit to the toilet revealed a washbasin with mixer taps. The Blue Pullmans ranked also as the first British trains with full air conditioning, rather than the various earlier forms of pressure ventilation by which heated and filtered air was fed into the carriage. There was a public address system too, another airline-type refinement. Besides these technical advances, the trains were designed throughout with a heightened sense of clarity of outline and the value of ‘image’, in line with the international business aesthetic then on the ascendant in the West in everything from architecture to adding machines.
Another connection between the Blue Pullmans and the HST can be traced through Grange himself. His early career included a period as an assistant draughtsman to the architect-turned-design consultant Jack Howe (1911–2003), who was the Design Panel’s choice to work with the manufacturers of the Blue Pullmans. From here there is a direct line to the architect Walter Gropius, founder of the Bauhaus school of art, who had employed the young Howe during his brief pre-war practice as an exile in Britain, and thence to the fountainhead of socially conscious modernist design in early Weimar Germany. This chain of descent seems apt. The Blue Pullmans were a luxury product, but the Inter-City 125s were for everyone. Here was a genuine challenge to the image of the nationally owned network as a shabby, strike-prone embarrassment. Heavily promoted in poster and television advertising – this was the era of ‘The Age of the Train’, fronted by the unlamented Jimmy Savile – they were run without charging supplementary fares, unlike the Pullmans. Receipts rose markedly every time they were introduced to a new part of the network. It was quite an achievement to cater for the needs of ordinary second-class folk as well as business travellers, for whom these services represented an attractive alternative to costly domestic air routes. The trains even broke the world speed record for diesel traction on the rails, reaching 148 mph on a test run on the East Coast main line in 1987. By displacing slightly older Mark 2 carriages for use on other lines – ‘cascading’, in the industry’s term – the new trains also permitted a better quality of journey elsewhere on the network, triggering a minor holocaust of the increasingly juddery and corroded Mark 1s from the 1950s and early 1960s.
All in all, it is difficult to think of a more admirable product of 1970s Britain than the High Speed Trains. Here was everything that the mixed economy was supposed to represent, but failed all too often to deliver: innovative world-class design, successful both technically and aesthetically, developed by a state-owned body as part of a strategic national plan; private consultants and manufacturers working fruitfully together; a financial success in operation, without pricing out the ordinary Briton; excellence achieved in the spirit of public service, rather than the delivery of private profit.
Even the royal family were drawn into the story. When testing was complete, the prototype High Speed Train was left spare. For the Silver Jubilee year of 1977, two of its carriages were refitted as combined sleepers and saloons for the monarch and her consort (a bedroom each, with single beds, according to the traditions of the royal trains). The discreetly modern blue-and-gold furnishings were chosen by the royal family under the guidance of another modernist architect, Sir Hugh Casson (1910–99), a particular favourite of the Queen and Prince Philip (Casson is reported once to have said ‘I know what Queenie likes’). This was not his first essay in railway design, for Casson had long been among the circle of consultants favoured by BR’s Design Panel. These carriages too remain in service, the products of a cultural and economic consensus now utterly lost; the settlement between public and private, capital and labour, that found its level in the early 1950s but which in the end proved briefer than a single reign.
To varying degrees, most of the trains now in service are superior in speed and comfort to those inherited from the great post-war modernisation. They are also stronger and safer: there will never be another accident like the Clapham Junction collision of 1988, when thirty-five people died in crowded slam-door carriages that disintegrated on impact. But the national picture is a mixed one, with some less alluring designs of passenger train around too. Like the HSTs, these are instructive for what they reveal about the constraints and assumptions behind the late-twentieth-century railway. And so we come to the strange story of the Pacers – the latter-day revenge of the four-wheeled carriage.
The Pacers originated in the need to replace the fleet of diesel multiple units (DMUs), built between the mid 1950s and early 1960s. These had displaced steam haulage on passenger routes that were not electrified and were not thought to justify the use of locomotive-hauled carriages. By 1963 some 4,000 DMU carriages had been built, from six-car units for Trans-Pennine services to single cars with a cab at each end for less busy lines. The immediate effects were often very positive, as passenger numbers rose sharply. In the first fifteen weeks of the new service between Leeds and Bradford, for example, an extra 80,000 journeys were made. People liked the airy, well-lit carriages, especially the novelty of a clear view along the tracks ahead or behind, through the glazed partition of the driver’s cab. A trip made in a good seat in a DMU was like riding at the front of a road coach, with the extra thrill of strangeness as the shining parallel rails were endlessly eaten up by the train, and the voyeuristic closeness to the driver’s back, separated incommunicably behind his glass screen (it was always disappointing when a privacy-loving driver lowered the cab’s internal blinds).
A new Trans-Pennine diesel multiple unit on display at Manchester Piccadilly station (formerly Manchester London Road), December 1960. Forward-facing passengers enjoyed fine views through the ‘wraparound’ cab windows
So far, so good; but by the mid 1970s these trains were showing their age, and the money to replace all of them with stock of comparable quality was not to be had. Instead, BR cast about for something that came pre-designed, and seized upon the single-decker Leyland National bus. This was a simple and straightforward design, developed jointly by two other nationalised industries, British Leyland and the National Bus Company (then operating as National Express) and built in great numbers from 1972. A railway prototype appeared in 1978, made up of components from the standard bus body mounted on a four-wheel chassis. Even the automatic doors were of the foldaway bus type. Four wheels were considered sufficient because the vehicle weighed under twenty tons, less than two-thirds the average figure for powered DMU vehicles of the first generation. A wheel arrangement that was regarded as old-fashioned a century before was thus resurrected, to bounce and squeal its way along the rails of the modernised network.
This was not the first time that BR had fallen for the four-wheeled railbus concept. Twenty-two of the type had been introduced in 1958, in the hope that they might be the salvation of lightly used lines. Each was designed to operate singly, and each had an engine of only modest power beneath the carriage floor. Those on the Scottish Region earned the nickname ‘four-wheel bicycles’ on account of their struggles to stick to the timetable. All were gone within ten years, along with most of the lines they served. Not one had manag
ed to produce a surplus of revenue over movement costs, the most basic yardstick of cost assessment.
Second time around, the concept was different, in terms of both manufacturing and operation. The production series consisted of two- or three-car units, for use on more intensively worked lines. The interiors were filled with rows of low-backed, bus-type bench seats. Design and production costs were modest, exploiting the modular system of design and interchangeability of parts that were central to the Leyland National concept. The wheelbase was not a new design either, but an adaptation of a type developed for fast freight wagons by BR’s Research and Technical Centre at Derby. Fuel costs were low; initial trials achieved ten miles to the gallon.
In the hope of generating foreign custom, the prototype was sent across the Atlantic for trials by the United States Federal Railroad Administration, together with a second prototype unit. The Americans bought one of these, but decided to stop there. Another prototype was sold to Northern Ireland Railways, with the same result.
Disappointed in its export drive but undeterred from its domestic mission, BR set about developing a two-car prototype, then a first series of twenty two-car units, the Class 141. These had railway-type cabs instead of the broad, low-set windscreens of the bus bodies, so they did at least look like someone’s idea of a train when viewed head-on. The 141s entered service on lines around Leeds in 1984, where the first generation of DMUs had enjoyed such success three decades previously. No comparable surge in usage resulted, which was hardly surprising: the new units proved unreliable as well as uncomfortable and had to be expensively modified within a few years.
The Railways Page 29