Little attempt was made to reduce staff and track costs through rationalisation until it was far too late - once the political tides were against the railways. OK, they saved on the maintenance of steam locos, but they still had a driver, secondman, guards, TTIs, full complements of station staff, and boxes at every halt. If Fiennes and co had been given national powers to implement rationalised and basic railways, I reckon many more lines would have survived. There was just too much wasted time and money post-war, and this was partially down to the regions being allowed to run their own empires rather than as local management of a national organisation.I think BR had decided to eliminate many traditional steam-worked services without bothering to try an optimised diesel service to cut costs.
In the end I think the bottleneck for closures was in the regional HQs who couldn't formulate the closure proposals fast enough.
Ordering of new DMUs stopped, so the aim was to make the fleet work as many ex-steam services as possible, which put unsuitable suburban DMUs on long-distance services (eg Manchester-Holyhead).
Mind you, TfW still seems to do some of that today (eg 150s on Manchester-Cardiff).
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Beeching Cuts and the Big Four
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edwin_m
Veteran Member
Part of the intent of the Grouping was so the revenue from the stronger pre-Grouping companies would prop up the weaker ones. This may have induced a mindset that individual lines could be loss-making as long as the whole company made some kind of profit. It was only when the whole network became net loss-making in the 1950s that people started looking at major cuts (having first tried major investment in the form of the Modernisation Plan).
More lines are unlikely to survive because even with the basic railways, the railway continued to lose money. Basic railways required subsidy and at that point there wasn't the will to spend money on loss making services so there was little point in just reducing the level of loss.
edwin_m
Veteran Member
There might have been some railways where cutting cost tipped the balance between closure and staying open. However, to be near this threshold they would probably have been relatively major routes undergoing severe rationalisation. Rather in the way Salisbury to Exeter was singled and this has affected its performance right down to the present.
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ChiefPlanner
Established Member
The 1920's larger GWR did some considerable rationalisation of competing or duplication lines in South Wales , particularly involving the Barry Railway which was built pre WW1 when it was thought that the coal boom would go on for ever , and might even carry on growing. Many of these lines were expensive to build in the first instance with heavy engineering. They had set up a branch line committee which clawed through the economics of some of the weaker lines - and had not WW2 appeared , there would have been some more cutting back , including freight only branches which had lost their passenger services in the 1931 cuts. Plenty of scope in LMS / LNER areas and the rural farwest in the Southern had some candidates - a miracle that some of the lines round Halwill Junction survived at all beyond austerity Britain.
At least it's not the worst type of hindsight, where there was no way of knowing at the time! Notably, Fiennes was very into the basic railway, early cost and revenue attribution, and the demise of wagonload freight. He was by no means the only one - plenty of railwaymen saw what was coming. Ditto with fleet policy etc. - if a few of the top people had been different, sense would have prevailed.Ah yes ...'20/20 hindsight'- I remember it well
You'd very quickly end up in a different timeline; but, if the modernisation plan money hadn't been wasted and BR had started properly accounting for costs/revenue and cut costs appropriately, then the Stedeford Committee would not have been convened so early. By the time a Beeching equivalent had been brought in, it would likely be under a more sympathetic regime (Barbara Castle) where the social dimension would have been taken into consideration and, as you say, some marginal routes would have slipped from loss-making to profitable, or at least to only slightly loss-making. DMU working was already boosting passenger numbers over steam working, although it is difficult to envisage quite how dramatic the increase might have been.
norbitonflyer
Established Member
Not really: Halwill Junction was the point where the LSWR main lines from Bude and Padstow met on their way to Exeter and ultimately London.
The other line from Halwill Junction, to Torrington, only opened in 1925, to serve a number of ball clay pits in the area. (Built by Colonel Stephens but always operated by the Southern). It was always a bit of a backwater as a passenger line though. Hatherleigh station was actually so remote from the town that most people got the bus to the railhead at Okehampton instead. (I have my aunt's diaries from WW2, when she and her brother and sister (my mother) lived there with their aunt while thier father (my grandfather) remained working at the Wolwich Arsenal. My grandmother's frequent journeys between London and Devon were always Waterloo to Okehampton. (My uncle, however, spent a lot of his spare time helping the staff at Hatherleigh station)
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Freight was the difference. In the time of the Big Four most rural communities still needed their railway to get essentials in, particularly coal, and agricultural produce out.
Helvellyn
Established Member
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How much of argument could be made that flush with cash in the 1950s the focus was on the Modernisation Plan and all the new stuff, with less on where costs could be saved over and above dieselisation?
The excellent railcar.co.uk site has various articles on schemes to introduce DMU operations, including the West Cumberland one with early Derby Lightweights. It shows how journey times were sped up and passenger numbers increased. There would have been cost savings from moving away from steam locos and coaches but little mention of other areas for cost savings being looked at.
It's a huge 'what if' but moves to tackle other costs sooner might not just have given some lines a longer life but if it had reduced overall loses then a case to tackle harder costs (manned crossings as one example) might have been easier to justify with more investment in AHBs, etc., come the 1960s.
The excellent railcar.co.uk site has various articles on schemes to introduce DMU operations, including the West Cumberland one with early Derby Lightweights. It shows how journey times were sped up and passenger numbers increased. There would have been cost savings from moving away from steam locos and coaches but little mention of other areas for cost savings being looked at.
It's a huge 'what if' but moves to tackle other costs sooner might not just have given some lines a longer life but if it had reduced overall loses then a case to tackle harder costs (manned crossings as one example) might have been easier to justify with more investment in AHBs, etc., come the 1960s.
coppercapped
Established Member
Very little can be made of such an argument.
The railways were not 'flush with cash', by 1955 the total income did not even cover the operating costs.
People also seem to think that the Modernisation Plan expenditure was a grant - it wasn't. Of the £1200 million to be spent over its course some £400 million was to be internally generated by provision for depreciation and the remaining £800 million was to be borrowed.
Costs were excessive in areas other than train operation. In the 1950s there was considered criticism that all the various purchasing activities were inefficient, bordering on the negligent, leading to inflated prices being paid for a range of items such as steel and vacuum brakes.
The issue with this approach is that the railways' finances were deteriorating rapidly year on year so even if costs could have been reduced so a route became 'marginal' in one year general cost increases would mean that a couple of years later it would most likely have slipped into the 'loss-making' category. The issue here is that fares and charges were not under the railways direct control but had to be approved - after some delay - by the Transport Commissioners, an external body.
And what’s more, IIRC the railways had “common carrier” status, so couldn’t refuse traffic.
The privately-owned railways were highly regulated. They needed parliamentary approval to abandon even small sections of railway, close dockyards or canals etc., which must have been cumbersome and expensive. Any radical closures would probably have been difficult to get through Parliament.
Eyersey468
Established Member
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In some cases it may have bought enough time for the more sympathetic regime to have come in
But according to his autobiography (and we have to remember that it is an autobiography which will probably wish to show him in the best light) the rationalised and basic railway was only thought about in 1966 or thereabouts, when the proposed cuts (of the East Suffolk line) started to get really deep and threatening. So being given 'national powers' at that time would have been much too late. The East Suffolk line was at the more marginal end of the closures, and even that had to wait many years for investment money to be available in level crossing automation and single tracking However, any rationalisation would have required investment money, management time and labour time. Pretty much the only investment money that BR had at the time was from the sale of redundant land and assets [ from the very lines that 'rationalisation' would have sought to keep open ] and this investment money (and management time and labour) was being spent on upgrading the inter-city lines to be competitive with the emerging motorway network, rather than making heavily loss making lines a bit less loss making.
That seems to make sense to me. It takes time, and therefore money (time being money) to 'find' money, e.g from land sales, rationalisation of lines, services, new (cheaper to run?) rolling stock, ways of working (including their negotiation and gaining approval). In short, it's a reminder of how difficult it is to get anything done!
Do you have a source for this? I have not heard the claim "selling off assets from closed lines provided the money to upgrade intercity lines" before, and I'd have thought it would have been brought up a lot from defenders of Beeching.
Dr Hoo
Established Member
There was a ‘company’ called Railway Sites Limited, originally an LNER subsidiary that had been ‘preserved’ within the British Transport Commission. When Dr B was appointed as Chairman, with the job of winding the BTC up and ‘creating’ BR as we knew it, the company was re-organised.
Although it took a little while to get going fully it steadily ramped up and in 1966 raised £24 million from property sales, for example. (This was in addition to massive sales of scrap from closed lines, withdrawn wagons, small diesel locomotives sold to industry and so on.)
The book ‘The Railway Surveyors’ by Gordon Biddle is worth a read.
So, ‘yes’, sales did help to fund things like electrification of the WCML and to Bournemouth after the Modernisation Plan cash had run out/been largely wasted/etc. (according to taste).
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ChiefPlanner
Established Member
Being laid up at home with mobility issues (hopefully for not too long) , I have ample time for reading so I got out Michael Bonavia's excellent book on the birth of British Railways. An excellent read , concise and thorough read and he was very much in the right place to comment on "high politics" , and commercial reality having served as a senior LNER manager.
Briefly , he makes the point that the political background of the Attlee era made nationalisation possible or desirable - the railways came out of WW2 very tired and in need of a vast renewal catch up etc but by no means financially broken , but would have been better off than they were if they had been commercially paid for actual work done , rather than insulted by no real thanks for their efforts and referred to as a very poor bunch of assets. (not to mention staff depletion , 5 or so years of not much asset renewal and the extreme austerity that was imposed post 1946 say)
The railways could have expanded their road services - both freight and passenger taking advantage of the great post war rise in road traffic by doing much of it in railway owned vehicles (oil rationing permitting) , developed railway / air services with a comprehensive domestic network , and done a great deal to improve freight rail container movements and bigger , faster bulk wagons. (instead the PO wagons commandeered in 1939 were bought off their grateful owners and scrapped........thousands of them), decent freight depots , and plenty of time to study the poorer earning / duplicate and "penetrating" lines and come up with a strategic plan , not the later Beeching plan which he thought was rushed and politically driven as a reaction of the financial and operational problems seen after 1954/5 when the conditions of the railway were exposed.
The playing around with locomotive exchanges . maintenace of steam developed further by the standard classes - often replacing Victorian examples with brand new engines on hopeless lines was the wrong solution (hindsight is a wonderful gift..) , when the real job was developing a proper diesel replacement , prudent electrification and somehow managing resources (like steel for rolling stock and rails) - and employee resources.
Line closures would have been expanded , but probably more focused in the early to mid 1950's with objective , strategic management - no easy task + the later and maybe earlier "Inter City" / block train and domestic Freightliner services would have seen a more robust railway , admittedly in a nation that some tremendous social , economic , industrial changes ........
norbitonflyer
Established Member
Much money was wasted in the Modernisation Plan by failing to properly assess the pilot scheme designs before deciding on which features to standardise, resulting in a veritable zoo of diverse types in the sixties and seventies (no less than eleven in the Type 2 range) and repeat orders for types which later turned out to be basket cases - Classes 21 and 30 come to mind, which only worked properly after replacing their engines (MAN and Mirrlees respectively) with completely different makes (Paxman and English Electric), to become Classes 29 and 31 - although too late to save class 29. Some other pilot scheme designs, eg classes 15 and 22, had large repeat orders but were all withdrawn within ten years or so.
Mercifully, the very worst pilot scheme designs (Classes 16,23,28,41) revealed their true colours before any repeat orders were made
Other designs were ordered for which there was little or no work, largely thanks to the Beeching cuts - class 14, for example, was supposed to replace the GW pannier tanks on trip and shunting work, both about to be largely eliminated by Beeching, whilst local passenger services were already being operated by DMUs, although I have often wondered whether their ordering was a crafty way of replacing the other nationalised industries' motley fleet of steam locomotives - certainly most of them had long post-BR careers with the NCB and British Steel.
Another example - Class 17 was an answer to the question - "how do we solve the visibility problems of the pilot scheme Type 1 designs?". The result was not only the wrong answer (the Class 17s were over-complicated and unreliable) but it was the wrong question anyway, as the aforementioned elimination of trip working and shunting meant Type 1s were redundant - although two Class 20s coupled together nose to nose solved the visbility problem and made a very useful 2000hp loco, with better adhesion than a Class 40 of the same nominal power because all eight axles were powered.
Mercifully, the very worst pilot scheme designs (Classes 16,23,28,41) revealed their true colours before any repeat orders were made
Other designs were ordered for which there was little or no work, largely thanks to the Beeching cuts - class 14, for example, was supposed to replace the GW pannier tanks on trip and shunting work, both about to be largely eliminated by Beeching, whilst local passenger services were already being operated by DMUs, although I have often wondered whether their ordering was a crafty way of replacing the other nationalised industries' motley fleet of steam locomotives - certainly most of them had long post-BR careers with the NCB and British Steel.
Another example - Class 17 was an answer to the question - "how do we solve the visibility problems of the pilot scheme Type 1 designs?". The result was not only the wrong answer (the Class 17s were over-complicated and unreliable) but it was the wrong question anyway, as the aforementioned elimination of trip working and shunting meant Type 1s were redundant - although two Class 20s coupled together nose to nose solved the visbility problem and made a very useful 2000hp loco, with better adhesion than a Class 40 of the same nominal power because all eight axles were powered.
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Dr Hoo
Established Member
I'm pretty sure that the obligation only related to facilities insofar as they existed. The various Handbooks of Stations and so on made clear that many stations didn't handle livestock, end-loading, cranage, etc..
Whilst canals and dock facilities were generally regulated under their own legislation, I wasn't aware that most railways required specific legislation for closure. So, for example (to pick a complicated itinerary), in 1930 a consignor could demand a 'mileage' rate for a wagon load from the LMS' Hulme End (on the Leek & Manifold narrow gauge line, which nevertheless had 'transporters' for standard gauge wagons), to Cliddesden on the Basingstoke & Alton line, part of the Southern. By 1935 both of these lines had gone, apparently by administrative decision.
Can you enlighten us as to any Parliamentary sanction or approval that I may be missing?
Gloster
Established Member
As I have said before, long ago I was told by someone who had at the time been in a position to know that the BTC/BR was put under considerable pressure to abandon its plans to take small batches of each design and, after testing, come back with large orders for the best one(s) in each type. The loco builders used the line, ‘How can we sell to the world and gain money from exports if our own railway does not show confidence in our products by ordering lots of them.’
Biddle does not discuss to what proportion property sales formed a source of capital. Reading chapter 12 of Gourvish's British Railways, property sales are not mentioned as a major source of income - asset sales are indeed only briefly mentioned as one source of income alongside direct borrowing and "depreciation provisions paid for by government support of the deficit". Biddle states that BR earned £58 million for sales of land, less than the £65 million of capital investment raised by direct borrowing and much less than the £575 million invested overall in the 1963-8 period. Indeed it seems unlikely that asset sales from closed lines were a major part of the funding of the second half of the WCML electrification, as it was not approved until 1970, long after most of the sellable assets had been sold.
In addition, absolute figures from property sales are not very helpful. Closed lines were not the only source of property to sell off and rationalisation would probably have involved selling off station houses, goods yards, etc. anyway. It's hard to say what the figures from property sales would have been if line closures had been fewer. Biddle notes that most of that £24 million figure came from property sales in London.
Gourvish also states that during the 60s focus on easy targets like line closures meant that productivity in other areas was not improved as much as it could have.
Of course the management of the private rail companies were hardly predisposed to look kindly on their successors. The Attlee government - indeed I doubt any government - was never going to hand out cash to the railways with no strings attached. And without that cash, I can hardly see them doing better than BR.
Bevan Price
Established Member
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A big worsening in BR finances was due to the ASLEF strike in 1955, which lasted for over 2 weeks. Many passengers - and, more importantly, freight users found they could "get by" without rail transport. Many deserted rail, never to return. Road freight transport boomed. The subsequent decline opened the way for Marples and Beeching.
The Acts of Parliament for the various railway companies have many instances of abandonments being authorised. I assume they didn't go through this rigmarole for fun. As luck would have it, the LMS 1933 Act refers to the Leek and Manifold Railway at para. 25. Perhaps you missed it.
I agree about the significance of the 1955 strike, though it can be argued that, economically, it only accelerated a trend that was happening already. In particular rural communities learned that they did not have to rely on the railway for moving freight. The 1955 strike had a political impact too because it led to a change in government policy in the 1956 White Paper "Proposals for the Railways". It was the BTC's response to this that led, amongst other things, to the abandonment of the diesel traction pilot scheme.
Another significant event was the strike that didn't happen in 1958. The 1958 pay dispute was settled without a strike by setting up the Guillebaud Commission on Railway Pay. This reported early in 1960, and it was the financial implications of meeting the Guillebaud recommendations that "opened the way for Marples and Beeching".
Dr Hoo
Established Member
I'm not clear that 'withdrawal of services' or 'closure' is the same as 'abandonment'. In many cases in the 1930s formal abandonment would be the point at which Reversion Clauses might kick in, enabling land owners whose property had been taken for the original construction to 'reclaim' 'their' property.
I had chosen my hypothetical example with some care because the definitive history of the Basingstoke & Alton Light Railway describes the administrative process of 'closure' quite well. The line had initially closed during the First World War, in December 1916 and been lifted immediately afterwards. The Southern Railway (as inheritors under the Grouping) only sought to 'abandon' it in an Omnibus Bill (like the LMS one cited) in 1923. In fact the line was reinstated and re-opened in 1924 with a 'promise' to the House of Lords that it would be reviewed (only) "after ten years". In fact the line continued to be an utter basket case and was closed to passengers again in 1932 and (as a through route) for goods in 1936. Lifting began in 1937 but was paused to allow the filming of the famous "Oh, Mr Porter!" in that year, being completed late in 1937. This was before statutory abandonment as I understand it. Land sales continued until after the Second World War.
Falcon1200
Established Member
I would agree, and add that increasing affluence enabled more people to own a car with the freedom and flexibility it provided. My family went on holiday by train until 1969 when we got our first car; After that, we never went by train again.
davyp
Member
Are we due another round of closures?
(Runs for cover ....)
(Runs for cover ....)
Or are we due a major round of reopenings?
The number of freight lines seems to be dwindling, with some receiving a new passenger service and others, seeing no traffic at all, looking unlikely to be maintained for much longer, e.g. Stocksbridge, Cwmbargoed. Call those closures if you will.