The Railways

  The vacuum-braking of wagons was one aspect of a broader problem. The Modernisation Plan of 1955 was essentially technocratic in nature. It looked for efficient ways to update the tasks the railways had been carrying out for generations. Building one new automated marshalling yard after another was entirely in the spirit of 1955. Meanwhile freight continued to transfer inexorably to the roads. Just as the Modernisation Plan was published, the figure for ton-miles carried by Britain’s roads overtook the total going by rail for the first time since the early-Victorian years.

  Historians locate the take-off point for British road haulage further back, in the years after the First World War. The early petrol- and steam-driven lorries in service before 1914 had an economic range of about forty miles, which tended to limit them to feeder traffic. Later models were more efficient, and carriers after 1918 could also have their pick of cheap ex-army lorries returning from the front. When the railways were largely immobilised by the General Strike of 1926, it was noted how much traffic managed to get through by road; nothing comparable had happened during the railway strike of 1911. By the 1930s, road hauliers were in contention for door-to-door traffic over distances of up to a hundred miles. Between 1923 and 1939 the number of lorries in use increased eightfold.

  Political developments were favourable too. Transport became a department of government in 1919, formalising the emergency arrangements of the war years. From 1920 the new Ministry of Transport could use state funds to maintain and build new roads. The dust clouds raised by Edwardian motorists began to disappear, as the highways acquired impermeable black surfacing (another military spin-off: the technique had been perfected by the Tarmac Co. Ltd when building service roads to the trenches in France). A strategic programme to overhaul the trunk roads began in 1929, with the additional benefit of creating employment during the Depression. Trees and hedges were cut back, curves widened and kinks straightened.

  Other advantages to the hauliers were legal rather than physical. Railway companies were required to publish their standard rates of carriage. Any road haulier could look up these charges, which had been subject to government control since 1840, and work out how to undercut them. In practice the railways were permitted to strike individual deals with customers too, and by the 1920s most of their regular traffic flows were covered by these ‘exceptional rates’; but any similar business had to be allowed the same rates, on the principle of no undue discrimination. This operational straitjacket was loosened in the 1930s, but altogether it was not hard for the lorry owners to steer fresh business from rail to road. Many larger companies simply bought road vehicles for their own use and waved the railways goodbye.

  Lorries also found a ready market among the railways themselves. They were especially useful for small consignments. Victorian working methods required these to be transferred from wagon to wagon as required, which entailed a great deal of sorting and repacking. Collection and delivery were made in short trips by horse-drawn vehicles, often the railways’ own. The greater operating range of motor lorries meant that consignments could be carried to the nearest large station, to be placed directly in a wagon destined for long-distance travel. No longer was it necessary to enlist a horse and cart to carry the goods to the local station, for a locomotive-hauled trip that might only cover a few miles before the goods were transhipped to a different wagon for onward despatch. In the 1930s the railways therefore began the systematic abandonment of small goods traffic at most of their lesser stations. The change was pioneered in the old North Eastern Railway’s territory, which by 1938 had cut the service back to 83 ‘railhead’ stations out of a total of 542. Most of the remainder continued to take wagonload freight, the term for consignments large enough to require at least one wagon.

  Great Western Railway delivery vehicles muster outside Theale station in Berkshire, c. 1930

  Many big customers chose to adapt their own distribution systems to this railhead model by setting up their own warehouses alongside. The railways’ own lorries could then distribute their biscuits, feedstuffs, fertilisers and other goods that tended to be delivered in quantities short of a full wagonload. At Leeds Hunslet East depot, to take one example from the mid 1950s, could be found the stockpiles of Kellogg’s, Horlicks, Boots and a new product, Fairy Snow washing powder. After 1928 the railways were also permitted to undertake direct road carriage from door to door, on the understanding that this could be more efficient than a three-stage journey with a railway wagon as the middle instalment. The Big Four companies even bought heavily into existing haulage firms, with the odd result that the railways had a stake in the success of their own competitors.

  Under the post-war Attlee government it looked briefly as though the tide might be reversed. By 1947 the railways had recovered an estimated 49 per cent of freight traffic by revenue, as against 41 per cent in 1938, and there were aspirations to integrate rail transport and long-distance road haulage (buses, inland water transport and docks too) in a single cost-effective system under the benevolent eye of the British Transport Commission. But these plans were never enforced with any vigour, and were discarded under the Transport Act of 1953. Nor was there any serious intention to reverse the flow of small consignments away from minor stations; as the railways’ own policies showed, the only efficient way to handle these by train was through railhead distribution.

  It did not help the railways’ case that their own goods depots were often chronically outmoded. A single city might have a plethora of separate depots, the legacy of individual companies that mostly lost their identities and competitive raison d’être in the Grouping of 1923. Carlisle, an extreme case, ended up with seven general goods depots around the city, served originally by as many different companies. Bristol was no exception: Fully Fitted Freight hurries over the embarrassing fact that goods forwarded from the huge depot at Temple Meads (ex-Great Western) have had to come by railway lorry through the streets to the city’s other main depot at St Philip’s, alias Midland Road (ex-Midland), where they are put back on the rails again. Here they are loaded into box vans, of standard dimensions established decades before: a wooden body somewhat bigger than a large garden shed, mounted on a ten-foot wheelbase and carrying a payload of up to twelve tons. The vans stand at a platform under the open sky as loads are carried in manually through the sliding doors, or brought up on hand barrows, as if this were a house removal. There is a great deal of standing around and conferring over notebooks. Railwaymen in cloth caps, brass-buttoned waistcoats and shapeless jackets amble about. Police guards stand by as vulnerable cargoes – tobacco, alcohol, chocolate – are loaded into several of the wagons, which are then laboriously sealed. It hardly looks like the future of British land transport.

  The more interruptions or transhipments required for any railway journey, the higher the chance that a lorry could do the same job more quickly and with lower risks of delay, loss or damage in transit. Already the first instalments of the motorway network were taking shape, a project ‘in keeping with the bold, exciting and scientific age in which we live’ – to quote the speech made by Ernest Marples (1907–78), Minister of Transport, at the opening ceremony of the M1 in 1959. Marples was quite a character, an able and slippery self-publicist whose reputation never quite escaped the taint of shady dealing (most of his personal fortune came from road building, and it was his own firm that constructed much of the M1). Marples also set about knocking the finances of British Railways into a more businesslike shape, setting up an advisory group to re-examine the progress and priorities of the 1955 Modernisation Plan. Wary of the risks of allowing the railways to mark their own homework, Marples made sure that the group was composed mostly of successful private businessmen with some experience of the nationalised industries. Among its members was a jowly, balding man, a former research scientist and fibres specialist whose achievements included a share in the development of Terylene, who had since become technical director of the giant chemicals conglomerate ICI. His name was Dr Richard Beeching (1913
–85).

  As the Special Advisory Group discovered, the railways’ finances were in a horrible state. Integration having been abandoned, the management had pressed on with the project of modernising the network. That the assumptions of 1955 concerning future traffic turned out to be hopelessly optimistic had made no difference. Decisions had been taken on technical merits, without proper regard to capital costs or commercial plausibility. A typical example was the replacement of little-used steam-hauled local trains with diesel multiple units: a high return on outlay might result, but that was not the same as showing a profit. For two North Wales branch lines that were examined the annual return was impressive (23 per cent), but the services still went on losing money. All these losses across the network added up to a deficit that kept growing: £23 million in 1954, £177 million in 1962. It was time to ask hard questions about the future size and shape of the network, and what could feasibly be achieved both for passenger traffic and for freight. That railways had a social value, so that closing stations and withdrawing services would impose hardship or inconvenience, was never in doubt; but the ruling assumption was that no line should run at a loss, unless a reprieve was granted at a ministerial level.

  This was the basis on which Beeching was appointed to take charge of the railways in 1961. The ponderous old British Transport Commission was killed off shortly afterwards, and the railways began the year 1963 with a generous write-off of debt and a new controlling body, the British Railways Board, with Beeching as chairman. His report, The Reshaping of British Railways, was launched in March 1963 (five days after the Beatles’ first LP), priced at one shilling.

  The report covered every aspect of the railways, but is remembered above all for its policy of closing lightly used passenger lines and stations. The effects on railway travel were certainly both rapid and drastic. One-third of the 4,300 stations open at the end of 1962 had closed eight years later (by which time Beeching had collected a peerage and gone back to ICI). A great many of these closures hit lesser stations on main lines, served by local trains that tended to get in the way of the more financially rewarding through traffic. Others were on branch or cross-country lines that shut completely, as the network was chopped down from 18,214 miles to 12,098 during the same eight years.

  Some of these lines closed with barely a mumble of protest, especially when they duplicated or ran parallel to other routes. Other services on the hit list were keenly contested, and won a reprieve. Some should never have been threatened in the first place, such as the electrified commuter route between Liverpool and Southport with its weekly traffic of 120,000 passengers. It also helped if a line happened to run through plenty of marginal constituencies, because the ultimate decision on closure rested not with the railways’ management but with the Minister of Transport. The arrangement was good news for the people of mid Wales, whose railway traversed no fewer than seven marginals on its course between Shrop-shire and Carmarthenshire. Other remote and beautiful lines that were menaced but have survived include the Far North of Scotland route, the northerly route to the ferry port of Stranraer, the Cumbrian Coast route and the Settle and Carlisle line. Then there were the railways that really should never have closed, and in some cases have since reopened to passengers. Mansfield, Corby, Aberdare, Heysham – all lost their trains, all have now got them back. A final category covers lines that the report meant to retain, but which were killed off after all. So there were no more holiday trains to Swanage or Hunstanton, no more rambles through the Peak District from the old Midland Railway’s stations in Dovedale and Wyedale, no more donnish cross-country journeys between the high tables of Oxford and Cambridge (one to weigh in the scales against any accusations of Establishment bias towards Oxbridge).

  An under-used, loss-making service is a service nonetheless, and Beeching’s vigorous axe-work has left deep scars in the collective memory. That hundreds of stations had already been abolished by his predecessors, that others were closing all over the place even as the doctor went about compiling his report, that dozens more closures were forced through by his successors – none of this can dislodge the association between Beeching’s name and the loss of so many lines and stations. As the official historian of British Railways puts it, ‘History remembers the Black Death, not the other plagues.’ Yet Dr Beeching’s prescription for the railways was based on some clear-eyed diagnoses, whatever its detailed failings. Even after the closure of over 3,000 miles of route in the years up to 1961, Beeching could show that half of the network that remained was carrying only marginal levels of traffic: no more than 4 per cent of passenger-miles and 5 per cent of freight ton-miles. One-third of the passenger stations together handled under 1 per cent of total passenger revenue. Goods depots (most of which shared space with passenger stations) numbered 5,000, half of which contributed no more than 3 per cent of revenue for the sector. Critics objected that the traffic surveys were too crude and partial, having been taken over just one week in April 1961, but there was no convincing challenge to the outlines of Beeching’s deductions.

  Dr Beeching’s attitude to freight was rather more complicated. Closing down little-used depots and the lines that served them was the easy part. By the end of 1968 only 912 of the 5,000 total were left, and even these had dwindled to 542 five years later. Sundries depots, of the kind capable of handling the fiddly little consignments celebrated in Fully Fitted Freight – garden gates and all – were cut still further, from 950 depots to a target of a mere 100 railheads, from which collections and deliveries were managed by road. The aim was to improve the woeful returns on the sundries trade, for which the average payload was less than one ton per wagon. Seasonal flows of traffic on a larger scale were no longer welcome, because they required keeping too many wagons waiting unproductively in reserve. When the apple-growers of the Cambridgeshire fenland tried in 1964 to arrange transport of their crop from Wisbech, BR could not spare sufficient box vans for the job. Two years earlier, this would have been accounted a serious oversight; now it was a matter of policy. On the other hand, it was clear that bulk flows of year-round traffic – coal for power stations, coke for steelworks, petrochemicals, aggregates – could run at a sound profit, using large wagons with continuous brakes (as with passenger carriages, the vacuum brake was gradually abandoned in favour of air braking, another costly transition).

  The power-station traffic was mostly taken over by merry-go-round (MGR) trains composed of air-braked hopper wagons, each carrying twice as much coal as the standard 1950s type. These could be loaded and unloaded automatically while the train crept its way round big looped track layouts at both pithead and power station, eliminating the need for shunting, marshalling or reversing. The MGR system was characteristic of the huge power stations built on rural land by the Central Electricity Generating Board in the 1960s and early 1970s, such as Ratcliffe-on-Soar in the Trent Valley, a few miles south of D. H. Lawrence’s truck-haunted native landscape. In place of cheaply built wooden trucks used perhaps once a fortnight, the new hopper wagons could run productively and without a pause for as long as the driver’s shift lasted.

  Another promising type of traffic was the standard intermodal container, for which BR coined the name Freightliner. Container traffic began to show a profit in 1968, which was also the year in which BR was finally relieved of responsibility for the doomed sundries trade. Containers have since become one of the busiest sectors of the modern rail haulage business, although on a very different basis from the 1960s conception of an alternative to the lorry for inland traffic. Now that the British industrial economy is a shadow of its old self, container trains mostly distribute imported goods from Southampton, Felixstowe, Tilbury and the new Thamesport terminal to inland sites for onward distribution by road. The Felixstowe branch alone now sees twenty-nine container trains in each direction every day. Especially in the Midlands and points north, any imported goods bought from Marks & Spencer, B&Q, or one of the big supermarkets are likely to have come part of the way as rail freight. />
  But in between the garden gates and the full trainloads were the medium-sized cargoes, and here Beeching could wave neither an axe nor a magic wand. The sector was declining, but remained much too big to write off altogether: as late as 1967, wagonload traffic still accounted for two-thirds of the revenue from freight. It was consignments of this kind – a few wagons a few times a week, coal or oil for the factory boiler-house, batches of breeze blocks or rolled-steel joists for the building industry – that kept the trains rolling in and out of the great marshalling yards. The dilemma for the railways was that the wagonload service could never be made to show a surplus, regardless of how many trains ran, but neither could the existing network be kept up without the income it generated. It was feared that giving up on wagonload traffic completely might tip the system into a downward spiral.

  This situation was essentially transitional. As the road network grew, so did its challenge to railway freight in terms of convenience, capacity and speed. The permitted size of the lorries passing endlessly up and down the burgeoning motorway system increased too. Before 1964 they were limited to 24 tons gross weight. The new maximum was 32 tons, a figure subsequently increased to 44 metric tonnes (43.3 imperial tons). Permitted speeds rose too, to 40 mph in 1967, and then to 60 mph on motor-ways. In the face of such competition, the service offered by the railways had to change drastically.

  A determined response finally came when the service was effectively relaunched in 1972, later adopting the brand name Speedlink. The new generation of mixed freight trains ran to fast and reliable timetables, making intensive use of air-braked wagons to guarantee delivery within one working day. Their movements could be tracked by computer technology known as TOPS (Total Operations Processing System), bought in from the Southern Pacific Railroad in the USA to replace the old, ad hoc methods of telegraph codes and telephone calls. Customers were connected directly by means of several hundred private sidings at works and depots, or they could use one of the remaining handful of railhead distribution centres to collect and deliver by road. Each long-distance Speedlink train still had to be made up from small groups of wagons picked up from these sites and broken down again for delivery at the other end – coupled and uncoupled, as ever, by hand. Little groups of these wagons could be seen amid the vast acreage of empty sidings at the few remaining marshalling yards, waiting to be sent on their way, until the service was finally abandoned in 1991. Air brakes, computerisation, accelerated speeds, rationalised distribution – none of these improvements had in the end been enough to make the wagonload service run at a profit.