FOURTEEN: An Undeserved Reputation
1 This chapter and the next one are covered in greater detail in my book on rail privatization, On the Wrong Line, published by Aurum Press, 2005.
2 Horses were still commonplace in the 1950s; our milkman in Kensington, West London, used one until the end of that decade.
3 Terry Gourvish, British Railways 1948–1973, Cambridge University Press, 1986, p. 5.
4 Michael Bonavia, British Rail, the first 25 years, David & Charles, 1981, p. 61.
5 Conversation with author.
6 Email to author.
7 The normal sequence of signals is double yellow, yellow and red. The yellows in effect warn of an impending red signal.
8 As mentioned in Chapter 12, AWS was not made mandatory until after the 1997 Southall disaster, when a train with a failed AWS crashed into a freight service, killing seven people.
9 The exchange rate in the 1940s was $4 to the pound but was then fixed at $2.80 in September 1949, representing a 30 per cent devaluation and consequent increase in the cost of oil, which was priced in dollars.
10 David Henshaw, The Great Railway Conspiracy, Leading Edge, 1991, p. 54.
11 Henshaw quotes a figure for steam haulage of just under a shilling per mile compared with 3¼d for diesel.
12 Henshaw, The Great Railway Conspiracy, p. 51.
13 Gerard Fiennes, Fiennes on Rails, fifty years of railways, David & Charles, 1986, p. 49.
14 Bonavia, British Rail, the first 25 years, p. 52.
15 Quoted in Gourvish, British Railways 1948–1973, p. 270.
16 Calculated by the Central Statistical Office and quoted in Gourvish, British Railways 1948–1973, p. 68.
17 If the railways’contribution to the British Transport Commission’s central charges are included, the loss for 1959 is doubled to £84m.
18 See also Chapter 13. Nearly all, about 1,000 miles, were kept open for freight.
19 Of course Marples divested his shares when he was Minister of Transport – to his wife.
20 Anthony Sampson, Anatomy of Britain Today, Hodder & Stoughton, 1965, p. 582.
21 Henshaw, The Great Railway Conspiracy, p. 117.
22 Ibid.
23 The Buchanan report on traffic, published in 1963, specifically warned that new roads would inevitably clog up. Ministry of Transport, Traffic in Towns (The Buchanan Report), HMSO, 1963.
24 I have happy memories of travelling as a child to Louth from London by train on this line.
25 Henshaw, The Great Railway Conspiracy, p. 232.
26 Gerard Fiennes, I tried to run a railway, Ian Allan, 1967.
27 Jack Simmons and Gordon Biddle (eds), The Oxford Companion to British Railway History, Oxford University Press, 1997, p. 29.
28 Hunter Davies, A walk along the tracks, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1982, p. 11.
29 British Railways Board, The Development of the Major Trunk Routes, British Railways Board, 1965.
30 The shorter name began to be used widely from 1965 and was virtually universally applied by 1970.
31 Interestingly, Birmingham was reached from Paddington and Manchester from St Pancras, completely different routes to the main ones used today.
32 It was originally known as Inter-City.
33 Terry Gourvish, British Railways 1974–1997, Oxford University Press, 2002, p. 2.
34 If the trains could not have braked so efficiently, then the intervals between signals would have had to be increased, reducing the capacity of the rail network.
35 She is reckoned to have used them once during her premiership, a trip on the Gatwick Express to take a plane.
36 The eventual cost for the total refurbishment of the line would eventually be £1bn (at 1990 prices) but this represented remarkably good value in relation to the cost, post-privatization, of the West Coast modernization whose bill came in at £10bn.
37 There is some debate about whether it was the cheapness of the work or the use of Eurostar trains on the line that exerted greater pressure on the wires that caused the difficulties.
38 The first chairman of that name as, confusingly, the next one was also Sir Bob Reid.
39 For example, the Southern Region extensively modernized the Exeter–Salisbury line, which provided a good secondary route between London and the West Country, with colour light signals during the early 1960s improving the line speed. As soon as it was transferred to the Western, the service started being run down and tragically large sections were turned into a single track, greatly reducing its capacity and usefulness.
40 Since there were far fewer railway workers, the percentage of those killed per 1,000 staff went down only by a half in that period, from 0.32 to 0.15.
41 This is explained in Andrew Dow, Dow’s Dictionary of Railway Quotations, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006, p. 278.
42 Philip S. Bagwell, The Railwaymen: the history of the National Union of Railwaymen, Vol. 2, The Beeching Era and After, George Allen & Unwin, 1982, p. 3.
43 Terry Gourvish, British Railways 1974–1997, Oxford University Press, 2002, p. 450.
FIFTEEN: The Future is Rail
1 For a full explanation of the structure of today’s railway and the privatization which brought it about, see Christian Wolmar, On the Wrong Line, how ideology and incompetence wrecked Britain’s railways, Aurum Press, 2005.
2 Apart from a residuary body which looked after some historical property rights and responsibilities.
3 Independent, 6 July 1995.
4 Independent, 13 October 2002.
5 Another, Grand Central, started operations in 2007 with just six daily services.
6 Including all the electric and diesel multiple units and a few locomotives used to haul passenger trains.
7 The distinction between renewal and maintenance was arbitrary, and depended on whether the length of track needing repair was more or less than 500 feet long, and this split was to cause endless bureaucratic hassles and much extra expense.
8 This was changed by the Labour government to 1 per cent above the rate of inflation in January 2004.
9 This is examined in detail in Wolmar, On the Wrong Line.
10 Between the Potters Bar accident in May 2002 and the derailment of a Virgin Pendolino train in Cumbria in February 2007, resulting in the death of one woman, there were no passenger fatalities in train accidents caused by industry error, the longest such period in the train’s history. The only other deaths of passengers in an accident during this period were at Ufton Nervet near Newbury (in 2004), caused by a driver committing suicide by deliberately leaving his car on the line. The other fatal accident in the privatization period (not mentioned in the main text), at Great Heck in 2001, was also caused by a car on the line.
11 The old Southern zone, effectively the lines of the Southern Region, was the only exception to this. It was run by a knowledgeable railwayman, Michael Holden, who, unlike his colleagues, did not panic and therefore did not impose many speed restrictions.
12 See Wolmar, On the Wrong Line, p. 182.
13 This includes the extra money being borrowed annually by Network Rail which had debts of £18bn by the end of September 2006 and no prospect of ever paying them off. The burden will therefore be borne eventually by the taxpayer when it is written off. See Roger Ford, Informed Sources’, in Modern Railways, November 2006.
14 For a full analysis, see Wolmar, On the Wrong Line, chapters 13–15.
15 For example, only some lines are electrified and there are two systems, third rail and overhead catenary, while different types of trains are required for long distance, regional, commuter and branch line services.
16 However, this seemed a case of trying to bolt the stable door too late. The contracts mostly had come up for renewal in 2004 and yet the Strategic Rail Authority sanctioned the new deals at the same high prices. See Wolmar, On the Wrong Line, pp. 275ff.
17 Interview with author, quoted in Wolmar, On the Wrong Line, p. 339.
18 David Willetts, a
long-time senior Tory MP, admitted in a Daily Telegraph interview, 13 December 2003, that the privatization had been ‘ideologically-driven’ and a mistake. In 2006, the Shadow Transport Secretary, Chris Grayling, suggested that vertical integration – bringing back together operations and infrastructure – was the most desirable solution.
19 Though this is an area where the railways need to improve further as the technology has not kept pace with parallel developments in road transport. See, for example, Christian Wolmar, ‘Rail needs to improve its efficiency’, Transport Times, 10 November 2006.
20 Tyndall Centre for Climate Change, Living within a Carbon Budget, September 2006, executive summary, p. 9.
21 There is a debate about whether aviation is safer than trains, which rests on what assumptions are made and what factors are taken into account. Planes, for example, are most at risk on take-off and landing, and therefore air travel becomes statistically safer if long-haul journeys are considered. Moreover, on the railways, accidents to passengers falling down stairs at stations are included in statistics while the equivalent deaths at airports are not.
FURTHER READING
As mentioned in the introduction, there are over 25,000 titles listed in George Ottley’s A Bibliography of British Railway History and therefore this bibliography can only skim the surface of what is available. Even to list all the sources I have used to research the material in this book would take up rather too much space and therefore this list only includes those which were particularly useful or relevant.
I also made heavy use of the internet but I think it is futile to suggest any particular sites as most of the material can be found quickly via Google or Wikipedia. While the normal disclaimers concerning the internet apply, it is noticeable that these apply to books too, as on numerous occasions I found references that were contradictory or inaccurate – O. S. Nock in particular is a serial offender but he also provides much that is helpful. Like this book, my list focuses on the wider history of the railways which is likely to be of interest to the general reader rather than on technological developments or historical details that are mainly of interest to rail enthusiasts. This list also tries to avoid the coffee-table-type books which have more pictures than text and the histories of individual lines that often have a tendency to focus on technical detail rather than on the wider effect of their construction. In sum, therefore, this is very much a personal offering intended to stimulate interest in further reading rather than an attempt to be comprehensive.
In terms of a general history, there is no recent work, which is one of the reasons why this book has been written. There are a few older volumes that provide excellent outlines, notably several books by Jack Simmons. His The Railways of Britain (Macmillan, 1986) is an update of his 1961 book of the same title (published by Routledge & Paul) and his The Victorian Railway (Thames & Hudson, 1991) is a comprehensive account of how the railways influenced the Victorian era. Simmons also wrote The Railway in England & Wales 1830–1914 (Leicester University Press, 1978), which curiously is listed as Volume one when no second volume ever appeared. He did, though, later produce The Railway in Town & Country 1830–1914 (David & Charles, 1986), which again provides great detail on the effect of the railway throughout Britain. Simmons also co-edited, with Gordon Biddle, The Oxford Companion to British Railway History (Oxford University Press, 1997), which is a rather soulless but useful volume that has a relatively small number of longish entries that inevitably fail to be comprehensive but do provide very useful potted histories. Frank Ferneyhough, The History of Railways in Britain (Osprey Publishing, 1975) has many useful lists. The two volumes of C. Hamilton Ellis, British Railway History (George Allen & Unwin, 1954–9), are the most entertaining of these early histories and cover 1830–76 and 1877–1947 respectively. Among the numerous writings of O. S. Nock, there is The Railways of Britain (revised edition, B. T. Batsford, 1962) and The Railway Enthusiast’s Handbook (Arrow Books, 1970), which contain a lot of basic information. Adrian Vaughan’s Railwaymen, Politics and Money (John Murray, 1997) is a bold attempt at covering the great age of railways.
There are two books with similar titles which provide much of the wider context for the early railways: The Railway Age (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962; Penguin, 1965) by Michael Robbins, and Harold Perkin’s The Age of the Railway (Panther, 1970). Nicholas Faith’s The World the Railways Made (The Bodley Head, 1990) also looks at the effect of the railways on wider society as does Michael Freeman’s particularly well-referenced Railways and the Victorian Imagination (Yale University, 1999).
The history of the Liverpool & Manchester Railway is well documented in Liverpool & Manchester Railway 1830–1980 by Frank Ferneyhough (Robert Hale, 1980) and in Simon Garfield’s elegant The Last Journey of William Huskisson (Faber & Faber, 2002). There are numerous accounts of the big companies that emerged in the later Victorian period, such as The Midland Railway by C. Hamilton Ellis (Ian Allan, 1953) and Terry Gourvish’s Mark Huish and the London & North Western Railway: a study of management (Leicester University Press, 1972). A series of books on 150 years of various lines was published by David & Charles, among them LMS 150: The London Midland & Scottish Railway written by Patrick Whitehouse and David St John Thomas (1987). Hunter Davies’s entertaining George Stephenson (Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1975) is one of the best railway biographies. Potted histories of many of the railway pioneers can be found in 50 Famous Railwaymen by Chris de Winter Hebron (Silver Link, 2005). The development of Scottish railways is covered in Battle for the North by Charles McKean (Granta, 2006).
There is an entertaining series that shows what travelling on the railways was like in the pre-motor car age: Travelling by Train in the Edwardian Age (George Allen & Unwin, 1979) and Travelling by Train in the ’Twenties and ’Thirties(George Allen & Unwin, 1981), both by Philip Unwin. In this vein there is also Victorian and Edwardian Railway Travel by Jeoffry Spence (Fitzhouse, 1977).
The inter-war period is well covered by Michael Bonavia’s The Four Great Railways (David & Charles, 1980) and there are various books on the individual companies such as Sir Herbert Walker’s Southern Railway by C. F. Klapper (Ian Allan, 1973). The speeding up of the railway in this period is depicted well in Mallard (Aurum Press, 2005) by Don Hale. Go Great Western by Roger Burdett Wilson (David & Charles, 1970) is a rare account of a railway company’s publicity machine.
Terry Gourvish has covered the business history of British Railways in two large thoroughly researched and official volumes, British Railways, 1948–73: a business history (1986) and British Rail, 1974–97: from integration to privatization (2002), which are published respectively by Cambridge and Oxford University Press. Gerard Fiennes wrote the classic I tried to run a railway about his career (Ian Allan, 1967) at British Railways (for which he was sacked) as well as the lesser-known but equally entertaining Fiennes on Rails: fifty years of railways (David & Charles, 1986). Michael Bonavia covers the early history of BR in British Rail: the first 25 years (David & Charles, 1981). The Beeching scandal is brilliantly exposed in The Great Railway Conspiracy by David Henshaw (Leading Edge, 1991).
My book, On the Wrong Line: how ideology and incompetence wrecked Britain’s Railways (Aurum Press, 2005) details the story of privatization and its aftermath, and Nigel G. Harris and Ernest Godward’s The Privatisation of British Rail (Railway Consultancy Press, 1997) has many useful figures. The rather more official version is provided in All Change: British Railway Privatisation, edited by Jon Shaw and Roger Freeman (McGraw Hill, 2000). The InterCity Story (Oxford Publishing, 1994), edited by Mike Vincent and Chris Green, outlines one of BR’s great success stories. E. A. Gibbins has written several books on the unfairness of government policy towards the railways and BR in particular, including Britain’s Railways – The Reality (Leisure Products, 2003), and while they are rather impenetrable, their wealth of information is invaluable. David Wragg’s Signal Failure: politics & Britain’s railways is another rare book on railway politics (Sutton Publishing, 2004
) and he has also written a useful account, Wartime on the Railways (Sutton Publishing, 2006).
There is a huge literature on accidents of which the most famous is L. T. C. Rolt’s Red for Danger: a history of railway accidents and railway safety (4th edn, David & Charles, 1982). There are eight volumes of a pictorial series on railway accidents entitled Trains in Trouble by various authors, published in the 1980s by Atlantic Books (not the current publisher), which is very comprehensive. Stanley Hall’s Danger Signals (Ian Allan, 1987) and Hidden Dangers (Ian Allan, 1999) cover more recent disasters.
On the navvies, the lively The Railway Navvies: a history of the men who made the railways (Hutchinson, 1965, reprinted by Pimlico, 2000) by Terry Coleman remains the best account, but The Railway Builders by R. S. Joby (David & Charles, 1983) is also worth reading. Joby’s The Railwaymen (David & Charles, 1984) provides background on the early workers in the industry and another good account is The Railway Workers, 1840–1970 by Frank McKenna (Faber & Faber, 1980). The best biography of a contractor is the Life and Labours of Mr. Brassey by Sir Arthur Helps, originally published in 1872 and reprinted by Tempus Books in 2006.
The history of the unions can be found in the two volumes of The Railwaymen: the history of the National Union of Railwaymen by Philip Bagwell (George Allen & Unwin, 1963 and 1982) and ASLEF 1880–1980 by Brian Murphy, which was published by the union itself.
There are countless accounts of their life on the railway by staff of all grades. Those I enjoyed include Tales of the Old Railwaymen by Tom Quinn (David & Charles, 1998), which is a collection of over a dozen such lifetime stories, and Small Coal and Smoke Rings (John Murray, 1983), which is written by a Great Western fireman, Derek Brock, as is Firing Days by Harold Gasson (Oxford Publishing Company, 1973). The Memories and Writings of a London Railwayman is based partly on an oral history stretching back to the early twentieth century (edited by Alan Jackson, Railway & Canal Historical Society, 1993). John Farrington’s Life on the Lines (Moorland Publishing, 1984) was compiled from a wide variety of conversations with railway workers, and Graham Zeitlin’s Staying on Track (Scotforth Books, 2002) is a manager’s account of life at BR. The previously neglected story of women in the railway industry has been covered comprehensively in the excellent Railwaywomen: exploitation, betrayal and triumph in the workplace by Helena Wojtczak (Hastings Press, 2005).
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