Why Was The UK Late To Run Diesels Compaired to Europe

[Drumtochty]

Getting a bit confuesd here, not a railway geek at all, more of an engineer with a common intrest in mechanical things.

There were around 2,500 steam trains built from 1948 to 1960 or so in the UK. Now Germany other European railways were using Diesel trains from the late forties or so.


Some TV programmes say that BR etc should have started using diesels on mass from say 1948. The little I know from the fifties and sixties of the reliability of UK sourced diesel units was very poor but DMU's like the type 101 and 102 seem to have been exceptions to that rules. Also, the 37's and 47's are still running.

Main line locos of all sorts in the UK from the late fifties and sixties had at best 10 or so years life even after major refits.

Therefore, my question is how did say the German and the French Railways manage to run reliable Diesels during 1948 to say 1970 or did they have the same problems with their locos and did they change designs every 10 years and do many change outs in the fifties and sixties.

 

[Iskra]

I believe it was to do with the low price and ready availability of coal in the UK, so less incentives to dieselise.

Interesting question about early diesels in the EU.

 

[MarlowDonkey]

Some TV programmes say that BR etc should have started using diesels on mass from say 1948.

It was an unwillingness to spend dollars on imported oil that was at least part of the perceived problem. There wasn't any particular reliability problem with the handful of diesels already built by 1950. Of the 1923 Companies, the GWR first had diesel railcars in the 1930s, the LMS had shunters then as well and a pair of prototype main line engines as did the Southern.

 

[LUYMun]

Probably at that time the British government, unlike other European countries, didn't think about sustaining post-war passenger growth at the peak of public transport, instead letting it wither. I also think the ill-fated Modernisation Plan may have also brought a wide range of factors to this problem, not helped by letting a large number of manufacturers produce models that varied in reliability. Ultimately this destroyed the image of the railways for years to come. It would've been better off had BR electrified main line routes, which of those that did get electrified received much success, instead of relying on compromises that failed to understand changing trends in passenger and freight traffic.

 

[birchesgreen]

Britain, compared to many places on the continent, did not suffer the massive destruction during the war than happened in Germany for example. On the continent in many cases industry and infrastructure had to be started again from scratch.

 

[Class 170101]

As noted above we had plenty of coal and oil like North Sea oil had yet to be explored.

 

[36270k]

I the UK steam finished in 1968
In Western Europe steam ran in France and West Germany until the 1970's
In Eastern Europe steam continued until later.

 

[Drumtochty]

It was an unwillingness to spend dollars on imported oil that was at least part of the perceived problem. There wasn't any particular reliability problem with the handful of diesels already built by 1950. Of the 1923 Companies, the GWR first had diesel railcars in the 1930s, the LMS had shunters then as well and a pair of prototype main line engines as did the Southern.

Agreed there were shunters etc that worked for many years and DMU's but many mainline locos were scrapped by the early seventies. Is there anyone here who knows if the Europeans had the same issues with mainline Diesel that had to be scraped after 10 years from being built in the 50's or early 60's.

 

[Mollman]

The great irony was that there was quite a bit of enthusiasm for electrification amongst some of the pre-grouping companies (including L&Y, MR and NE), if the LNER and LMS had continued that in the way the Southern did then we would have had less of a need for diesels to replace steam.

 

[UrieS15]

You have put your finger on the major part of the reason for UK steam, but it was not an unwillingness to buy oil, we were in a double bind. The US had pulled the plug on lease-lend so suddenly that not even its own embassy staff in the UK had been told. From around Christmas 1945 everything we bought from America had to be paid cash on the nail, whereas the Marshall Plan poured money into the ruined economies of Europe and probably US products as well. UK coal was our only option. As a child I grew up with the phrase 'the dollar gap' which was of course a major part of our balance of payments, and contributed to the prolonged rationing. It was not until the mid50s that we were in a position financially to contemplate the kind of investment needed for the changeover.

 

[LNW-GW Joint]

I don't think Europe made that much headway with diesels before we did.
I think it was the independent manufacturers who led the way, unlike here where the railway, especially after nationalisation, was wedded to internal manufacture.
Germany experimented with diesels pre-war, but they also had abundant coal and little or no domestic oil like us.
Much of the early development of diesel engines came from maritime interests, Sulzer being one major line (and EE's Deltic another).
Post-war investment in Europe took them quickly from steam direct to electric, while we messed about with another steam generation and then a raft of unsatisfactory diesels.
There was a BR faction which wanted to "send for the General Motors catalogue" in the early 1950s, but that was politically untenable when we were short of dollars.

 

[EssexGonzo]

As far as I have read - and probably not the definitive reasons - there are a combination of reasons, some mentioned above:

- Loads of coal.
- The desire to retain the jobs of coal miners - especially as (mentioned in a previous post) the switch away from coal would have been to diesel and not electricity. Had we gone straight to electric locos, we may not have been as worried about the coal-miners’ jobs as said coal would have gone to the power stations.
- A *relatively* under developed national grid system that was still evolving, which punished electric trains further from the agenda.
- BR management being somewhat stuck in the past and backward looking. We were epically good at making steam locos, so why not carry on making them?

Plus the things mentioned but others. Although not sure about the need to rebuild post-war not applying to UK. Our railways were in a shocking state after the war.

Just things I’ve picked up over the years from TV and books.

 

[Snow1964]

It was coal (available in UK) and need to import (and refine) oil (Priced in dollars)

Remember that UK was virtually bankrupt after WW2 and importing was very expensive (and buying foreign currency was controlled for years). Before WW2 one pound got you $4.86, from 1940 was $4.03 to a £1, then in 1949 got devalued to $2.80 to a pound. Today it’s nearer $1.38 to £1 (floating now of course) which shows how far pound has been hammered

 

[Taunton]

It was an unwillingness to spend dollars on imported oil.

I regularly have to correct this one.

Dollars were not required for oil, because all the UK supply came from points in the "Sterling Area", paid for in pounds. Here's a list of all such countries, where you will find major oil producers of the era like Kuwait or Bahrain, which is why BP (in particular) focused their oil exploration there - all paid for in pounds.

Sterling area - Wikipedia

Bear in mind the UK government from 1945 to the end of 1951, through all the principal post-war reconstruction, was dominated by MPs from the many coal mining areas of the era, who were dead against any reduction in coal production if it could be managed. Of course, there was meantime a great expansion of oil use. Shipping changed over wholesale from coal to oil firing in this time. Aviation, both RAF and airlines, really got going. Car production boomed, and petrol rationing (which had been refinery capacity-driven) ended. All bought with Sterling. The railway, nationalised, was one area to control to continue with coal use.

 

[WAO]

Nationalisation was an issue. While public ownership seemed (and is) a great idea, what it really meant was civil service bureaucracy and treasury control. It also meant fixed capital repayments rather than variable (or no) dividends. The ideal in 1948 was the wartime Southern Railway under Sir E J Missenden, the hidden hero of Dunkirk and D Day; under state ownership he became a chairman not a general manager, with Sir Cyril Hurcombe as head of BTC (ex Permanent Secretary), to obstruct any real progress. Missenden did go to the USA and come back with ideas on diesel and electric traction. Faced with the difficulties, he took his pension.

The same happened with the NHS, a Tory idea by Sir Henry Willink, for a state funded service but independently operated (which it now approaches, with NHS Trusts). Instead it was Nationalised to keep the quality down.

WAO

 

[simonw]

You have put your finger on the major part of the reason for UK steam, but it was not an unwillingness to buy oil, we were in a double bind. The US had pulled the plug on lease-lend so suddenly that not even its own embassy staff in the UK had been told. From around Christmas 1945 everything we bought from America had to be paid cash on the nail, whereas the Marshall Plan poured money into the ruined economies of Europe and probably US products as well. UK coal was our only option. As a child I grew up with the phrase 'the dollar gap' which was of course a major part of our balance of payments, and contributed to the prolonged rationing. It was not until the mid50s that we were in a position financially to contemplate the kind of investment needed for the changeover.

Not so we the Marshall plan. We just spent it on 'the wrong stuff'.

BBC - History - British History in depth: The Wasting of Britain's Marshall Aid

A lost opportunity, by Correlli Barnett

www.bbc.co.uk

 

[Gloster]

The same happened with the NHS, a Tory idea by Sir Henry Willink, for a state funded service but independently operated (which it now approaches, with NHS Trusts). Instead it was Nationalised to keep the quality down.

WAO

There really is no way that the NHS can be described as a Tory idea: it is based on the 1942 Beveridge Report, which Willink’s 1943 proposal can only be described as watering down. The post-war Labour government did not pursue his plan for a number of reasons, most importantly because his proposal would not have been comprehensive.

On what evidence do you base your last sentence?

 

[randyrippley]

One of the key issues though easily overlooked is that prior to WWII the UK hardly had a diesel engine industry. During the 1920-30s the UK shipping lines steadfastly stuck with coal power, partly due to vested interests in shareholdings. Meanwhile the German and Scandinavians were building as many diesel ships as they could, mainly using German or Sulzer engine designs. Net result was German diesel technology forged ahead, while ours didn't. The few diesel merchant ships we did buy tended to have licence-built European designed engines. As coal fell out of favour in the UK it was replaced by oil-burning steam. Don't forget that during WWII we started off with tanks that needed petrol, not diesel because of a lack of engines.
The only exceptions of any significance were the small portable Lister/Petter type of units - and English Electric, who saw the future in the mid 1930s and introduced the K- series, which became the only reliable UK engine suitable for mainline traction. Mirrlees was probably the only UK diesel builder that had decent maritime technology and tried to move into rail traction in 1947 but took ten years to get a significant order for low powered units - the class 30, and that probably only happened because they and Brush were by then part of Hawker-Siddeley. That leaves Paxman, with a series of unreliable engines only suitable for shunters and type 1 locos. And the Napier Deltic with all its problems. Only the EE design was suitable for mainline work.
BR looked around, tried and didn't like UK licence built German designs so instead standardised on a licence built Swiss design (conveniently forgetting that Sulzer has German origins). That must have taken a year or two to get past government.
But when you look at it, its hard to see how UK dieselisation could have happened earlier. EE had the engine design, but postwar there was nowhere to build the locos - until they took over Vulcan, Stephensons, and Hawthorn Leslie in the mid 1950s and revamped the sites. Same with Brush, it took companies ten years to escape from the post war financial straightjacket and start investing.
If we'd tried to dieselise earlier it would have been a disaster - the lessons from NBL writ large, with businesses failing due to
undeveloped product
victorian clapped out tooling
outmoded work practices
If we'd tried it earlier, it would have failed

 

[MarlowDonkey]

EE had the engine design, but postwar there was nowhere to build the locos -

They had been able to partner with the LMS and Southern to build prototypes. In a different world could the order for Britannia Pacifics have been type 40s instead ?

 

[UrieS15]

Not so we the Marshall plan. We just spent it on 'the wrong stuff'.

BBC - History - British History in depth: The Wasting of Britain's Marshall Aid

A lost opportunity, by Correlli Barnett

www.bbc.co.uk

Thank you for that link I found it fascinating.

 

[randyrippley]

They had been able to partner with the LMS and Southern to build prototypes. In a different world could the order for Britannia Pacifics have been type 40s instead ?

Probably not as a class 40 is only about equivalent to a class 5. You might have seen the 5MT and smaller built as diesels but you would still have to wait for the Sulzer type 4 designs to come on stream for anything more powerful. Or maybe the class 50 engine would have come earlier.
But the diesels couldn't have been easily built in volume in the BR workshops anyway - neither Derby or Crewe were able to keep up production rates on the Peaks, while Swindon was said to be expensive with no effective production management. And that was AFTER the BR workshops had been updated. Ten years earlier they wouldn't have coped

 

[Fireless]

Germany was a quite early adopter of diesel traction on the railways and produced both impressive high-speed railcars and practical shunting locos (some locos built in the 1930s even lasted into the 1990s) before the second world war but high-powerd mainline locomotives were still very much in the experimental stage with mass production only slowly starting in 1950.
The western german DB (German Federal Railway) started a mixture of mass electrification, dieslisation and line closures putting a hard end (including a steam ban) to steam traction in late October 1977.

Things were very different in eastern Germany with a very different political and economical situation giving the railway both a far more important role making mass electrification and dieselisation a lot more difficult.
The official end scheduled of eastern german state railway standard gauge state railway steam was in 1988 but the Reichsbahn kept, both a decently sized heritage fleet and couple of locomotives as spares and steam donors until its end to be inherited by the DB AG at its formation in 1994 which quickly put an end to regular state railway standard gauge steam in Germany on the 6th of November that year.

Yet, the eastern german narrow gauge railways never ceased to use steam locomotives (mostly relatively modern 2-10-2Ts built in the 1950s) in regular service with the the sale of the final two lines (the flood damaged and temporarily closed Weißeritztalbahn and the Lößnitzgrundbahn) owned by the DB AG closing the chapter of regular state railway steam in Germany on the 21st of June 2004.

 

[RT4038]

I regularly have to correct this one.

Dollars were not required for oil, because all the UK supply came from points in the "Sterling Area", paid for in pounds. Here's a list of all such countries, where you will find major oil producers of the era like Kuwait or Bahrain, which is why BP (in particular) focused their oil exploration there - all paid for in pounds.

Sterling area - Wikipedia

Bear in mind the UK government from 1945 to the end of 1951, through all the principal post-war reconstruction, was dominated by MPs from the many coal mining areas of the era, who were dead against any reduction in coal production if it could be managed. Of course, there was meantime a great expansion of oil use. Shipping changed over wholesale from coal to oil firing in this time. Aviation, both RAF and airlines, really got going. Car production boomed, and petrol rationing (which had been refinery capacity-driven) ended. All bought with Sterling. The railway, nationalised, was one area to control to continue with coal use.

I think also that oil coming from points in the 'Sterling area' could be sold for dollars, whereas coal was not so valuable on the open market. Therefore with the balance of payments as they were, it made more sense to sell the oil elsewhere and use the coal domestically.

 

[Taunton]

Germany was a quite early adopter of diesel traction on the railways and produced both impressive high-speed railcars

Germany didn't build many 1930s high-speed railcars - in fact they built less of their FDT high speed trains like the "Flying Hamburger" (two cars only by the way) than the GWR here built streamlined diesel railcars.

 

[Bevan Price]

Germany was a quite early adopter of diesel traction on the railways and produced both impressive high-speed railcars and practical shunting locos (some locos built in the 1930s even lasted into the 1990s) before the second world war but high-powerd mainline locomotives were still very much in the experimental stage with mass production only slowly starting in 1950.
The western german DB (German Federal Railway) started a mixture of mass electrification, dieslisation and line closures putting a hard end (including a steam ban) to steam traction in late October 1977.

Things were very different in eastern Germany with a very different political and economical situation giving the railway both a far more important role making mass electrification and dieselisation a lot more difficult.
The official end scheduled of eastern german state railway standard gauge state railway steam was in 1988 but the Reichsbahn kept, both a decently sized heritage fleet and couple of locomotives as spares and steam donors until its end to be inherited by the DB AG at its formation in 1994 which quickly put an end to regular state railway standard gauge steam in Germany on the 6th of November that year.

Yet, the eastern german narrow gauge railways never ceased to use steam locomotives (mostly relatively modern 2-10-2Ts built in the 1950s) in regular service with the the sale of the final two lines (the flood damaged and temporarily closed Weißeritztalbahn and the Lößnitzgrundbahn) owned by the DB AG closing the chapter of regular state railway steam in Germany on the 21st of June 2004.

Despite that early adoption of diesels, both West (DB) and East (DR) German railways continued to build steam locos well into the 1950s, and DR continued to do major conversions of older steam locos into the 1960s.

(Standard gauge)
DB Class 23 2-6-2 Introduced 1950; DR equivalent introduced 1955.
DB Class 65 2-8-4T (passenger tank) introduced 1951; DR equivalent introduced 1954.
DB Class 82 0-10-0T (heavy shunter) introduced 1950
DR Class 83 2-8-4T (freight tank) introduced 1955
(A total of over 350 locos.)

 

[30907]

Despite that early adoption of diesels, both West (DB) and East (DR) German railways continued to build steam locos well into the 1950s, and DR continued to do major conversions of older steam locos into the 1960s.

The differences being:
1. steam was phased out more gradually (only by 10 years on DB)
2. electrification was more clearly the goal and
3. (because of 2?) DB built very few express passenger or high powered diesels.

 

[O L Leigh]

Germany was a quite early adopter of diesel traction on the railways and produced both impressive high-speed railcars and practical shunting locos (some locos built in the 1930s even lasted into the 1990s) before the second world war but high-powerd mainline locomotives were still very much in the experimental stage with mass production only slowly starting in 1950.

I'd say that puts us pretty much on a par in terms of our own diesel development, as various British companies were also experimenting with diesel shunting engines and railcars even as early as the inter-war era. We may not have had a headline-grabbing diesel train like the "Flying Hamburger", but we certainly weren't sat on the sidelines.

And it wasn't just the GWR railcars. As early as 1931, Armstrong Whitworth were turning out three diesel electric railcars in the shape of "Tyneside Venturer", "Lady Hamilton" and "Northumbrian", all of which saw service with the pre-Grouping NER. They were also turning out various shunting engine designs and, in 1933, the UK's first mainline diesel loco, the 1-Co-1 D9 "Universal" locomotive, trumping the LMS Twins by 14 years. All of these used Sulzer units of varying size and power.

 

[Richard Scott]

3. (because of 2?) DB built very few express passenger or high powered diesels.

They had around 127 V200s (2200hp or around 2500hp in later build - can't remember precise value) which were certainly express passenger locos (I know they were really mixed traffic but so we're many of ours) and 419 218s (2500-2800hp) along with 150 215s (1900 - 2500hp) all of which were 140km/h machines and widely used on passenger work. Would say that's a similar number of locos in that power range to what we had.

 

[Helvellyn]

There really is no way that the NHS can be described as a Tory idea: it is based on the 1942 Beveridge Report, which Willink’s 1943 proposal can only be described as watering down. The post-war Labour government did not pursue his plan for a number of reasons, most importantly because his proposal would not have been comprehensive.

Willink served as part of the Beveridge Commission and his White Paper was the Tory proposal to implement it.

https://navigator.health.org.uk/theme/national-health-service-white-paper

 

[Diplodicus]

...and the totally-counterproductive Big 4 rivalry that stifled any hope of a coherent national infrastructure plan. "Silo thinking" writ large. These rivalries persisted well into the sixties amongst "the old guard".

From John Nelson's "Losing Track" opening chapter (in 1968): "Neither had this nationalised railway forgotten its private sector company roots and traditions. The area manage'rs organisation at Exeter to which I was attached cover the most splendid part of South Devon and had recently been remapped to combine the GW mainline and part of the old SR routes from Waterloo to Devon and Cornwall. Although this epitomised the geographical functional approach to BR's operations in those days there remained intense rivalry amongst those who had worked for the two private companies. When the Southern part was "acquired" by the Western, many files and records at Exeter Central were burnt to prevent them "falling into the wrong hands".