A different route for British Railways?

[tom73]

What do you think might have happened to British Railways if anyone other than Ernest Marples had been made Minister of Transport in October 1959?
(The "British Rail" trading name dates only from 1965.)

 

[Journeyman]

What do you think might have happened to British Railways if anyone other than Ernest Marples had been made Minister of Transport in October 1959?
(The "British Rail" trading name dates only from 1965.)

Pretty much exactly the same thing. By then, all the important decisions and mistakes that led the railways deep into the red had already been made, and someone would have had to face up to dealing with it all.

I'm not buying this Marples/Beeching anti-rail conspiracy at all. There's no evidence for it.

 

[Cambus731]

There is no way that there was any kind of conspiracy, and it must be admitted that the British Railways Board had shot themselves in the foot with ordering some dodgy rolling stock and the building of unnessary huge marshalling yards.
It is pretty obvious that the railway would have needed to have been pruned.
But i think we can all agree that Beeching went far too far

 

[Journeyman]

But i think we can all agree that Beeching went far too far

I don't agree. I think he conducted a much-needed analysis of where the money was going, and in general, I think almost all of his closures were justifiable, at least as things stood then. He didn't have the benefit of hindsight.

 

[coppercapped]

What do you think might have happened to British Railways if anyone other than Ernest Marples had been made Minister of Transport in October 1959?
(The "British Rail" trading name dates only from 1965.)

It wouldn't have mattered at all who was Minister of Transport at the time, Ernest Marples or Mr Squeeky Kleane MP, the result would have been the same. All the decisions - or lack of decisions - which led to BR's financial state had been made, or not made, by the British Transport Commission or the Railways Executive in the previous ten or twelve years.

(PS Why does this topic keep being raised ?)

 

[coppercapped]

There is no way that there was any kind of conspiracy, and it must be admitted that the British Railways Board had shot themselves in the foot with ordering some dodgy rolling stock and the building of unnessary huge marshalling yards.
It is pretty obvious that the railway would have needed to have been pruned.
But i think we can all agree that Beeching went far too far

These decisions pre-date the British Railways Board.

We do not all agree that Beeching went too far.

 

[AM9]

Actually, Beeching was just a consultant who did a job, - he didn't close anything, that was the business of the minister of transport. The problem was that the scope of the job was specified by a minister who had a vested interest in building roads, so it was inevitable that closures would be appropriate to his wishes rather than the needs of transport in the UK.

 

[tbtc]

I'm with @Journeyman here - the mistakes had been made a long time ago - a large amount of the network was either...

(a) freight lines built to accommodate volumes of freight that had died down (or was about to die down by the end of the '70s)
(b) lines built by Victorian entrepreneurs competing with each other - the kind of lines that largely duplicated each other (often without there being sufficient passengers to make *one* line economic)

What else was there to do?

Preserve lines in aspic just in case we wanted to reopen them in fifty years time?

Should we have preserved every mile of canal that was closed (when the railways usurped waterways as the premier means to move goods)?

Even today after huge increases in passenger numbers (over a generation) and big increases in both the UK population there are a lot of lines that see very few passengers. I think the Far North line (beyond Tain) gets marginally over a hundred passengers per day. The average service from Burley to Colne has twenty one passengers on board (IIRC). Plenty of lines survived the "cull" - whilst there are always going to be marginal cases on such a big network, you could argue that he didn't close enough.

And if it was a conspiracy then why did the closures keep on happening after the Tories were replaced by Labour in the mid '60s (and then continue when Labour were replaced by the Tories in the late '70s)?

Or, to put it another way, even in the 1980s/1990s, BR were only running a London - Leicester service every forty five minutes (the "Nottingham in ninety" was the frequency back then, rather than the ideal duration - a similar frequency to Sheffield). Split that demand between the MML and GC and you have two main lines from London to Leicester both with a train every hour and a half. It was a long time (from Beeching) until passenger numbers rose to the kind of levels where there was some slim justification for retaining some of the lines that he closed.

BR was like one of those faltering FTSE companies that's lost it's way, fingers in too many pies, having taken on all kinds of contracts with no idea of what it's core was. It needed someone to come in and rescue the main bit of the business, focus on the kind of flows suited to heavy rail (InterCity, large freight volumes) and develop those areas.

But, for me, one of the best things in favour of Beeching are the quality of arguments against him (or, more specifically, the weakness of such arguments). There's really very little substantive to criticise him with. Some conspiracy guff about him only doing the thousands of miles of research during one wet midweek day in February (or the idea that Marples was in cahoots with Barbara Castle since the closures kept on coming). The idea that he should have known how rail would grow fifty years later? Often that criticism is from people who don't want us to build HS2 because we might all be working from home on computers by the 2040s and therefore not need long distance travel (yet Beeching should have known the future). Some additional capacity would be handy to have for a couple of weekends of diversions each year, but that's a pretty terrible reason to keep a line open. Beyond that... there's not a lot you can lay on him. Won't stop people though

 

[Journeyman]

Actually, Beeching was just a consultant who did a job, - he didn't close anything, that was the business of the minister of transport. The problem was that the scope of the job was specified by a minister who had a vested interest in building roads, so it was inevitable that closures would be appropriate to his wishes rather than the needs of transport in the UK.

But closures on a fairly large scale had been going on for years. The only significant difference was that Beeching's report properly analysed the situation, and tried to stabilise the situation by cutting out the dead wood in a systematic manner, rather than just on an ad-hoc, regional basis.

 

[Journeyman]

(PS Why does this topic keep being raised ?)

Because the Beeching/Marples conspiracy theory refuses to die, despite plenty of great minds studying it and failing to uncover any evidence. A lot of it is down to a refusal to accept that the [insert favourite here]* Line was built on dodgy grounds in the first place, and had no place in an integrated railway in a changing world.

* Great Central, Waverley Route, Woodhead, GWR route to Liverpool, S&D etc. etc.

 

[Dr Hoo]

Actually, Beeching was just a consultant who did a job, - he didn't close anything, that was the business of the minister of transport. The problem was that the scope of the job was specified by a minister who had a vested interest in building roads, so it was inevitable that closures would be appropriate to his wishes rather than the needs of transport in the UK.

Another popular myth is that Richard Beeching was a ‘consultant’. He was actually a very successful and clever industrialist. Whilst one might just describe his part time work on the Stedeford Committee as ‘consultancy’ he was most definitely seconded to be Chairman of the British Transport Commission on a five-year contract.
He actually did the ‘day job’ too. There was no real chief executive or general manager for the railways. He not only wound up the BTC, he ‘created’ the BRB and led it through the worst winter weather in decades, multiple major train accidents, continued to convert from steam to diesel and so much else.
And he still had time to do some of the best strategic thinking applied to railways up to that time and ushered in a new era of data exploitation, analysis, technological progress, business development initiatives, etc., etc.
Of course, he had some good people to help him. “Well done” all round.

 

[Taunton]

Beeching started :

Major Inter-City investment. Mk 2 stock. Freightliners. Merry-go-Round coal. The "British Rail" style and design. Modern advertising. Proper justification of investment. Sensible management restructuring.

Beeching stopped :

Passenger trains that hardly anyone had used since buses became practical in the 1920s, if at all. Buying diesel locos from every Tom-Dick-Harry attempted manufacturer. Gross overstaffing everywhere.

The only shame was he wasn't offered the job in 1948.

 

[Bevan Price]

Marples was definitely a bit "dodgy" and a poor choice for Transport Minister due to his business interests. However, closures of "basket case" railways would have continued, although not as fast as actually occurred. Beeching was undoubtedly bright, and had some good ideas, but in retrospect, he does not seem to have been a good judge of human behaviour. For example, when lines were closed, he thought that people would either drive to the nearest railhead, or use rail replacement buses. In practice, many of them deserted rail travel completely, using cars for the entire trip.

In addition, he seemed to think that closure was the only suitable solution everywhere, rather than attempt to reduce costs and take other measures to attract more users. So - he proposed to close lines like Liverpool - St. Helens - Wigan, and Liverpool - Southport, which serve a huge population.

 

[Dr Hoo]

To pick up just one point from the above post (it’s getting late) it has often stuck me as ironic that Marples is often criticised for ‘knowing nothing about transport’ but equally condemned for ‘being involved with road construction interests’.
It is also ironic that the greatest transport legacy of the Attlee Government was probably the Special Roads Act 1949 in the sense that motorways have developed relatively seamlessly since that time whereas the ideas of a nationalised, integrated British Transport Commission have been in a state of flux, reconstruction, privatisation, re-nationalisation, devolution, etc. ever since.
I have no time for Marples’ dodgy tax affairs but at least he had energy, imagination and a forward-looking vision for transport.
Perhaps some more another time...

 

[Indigo Soup]

The only shame was he wasn't offered the job in 1948.

Looking at the timescales, the BTC completely ignored modernisation until the Transport Act of 1953, botched it in the 1955 Modernisation Plan, Beeching was given his brief in 1960, and published his report in 1963. Based on that, you'd expect a leadership team with the right brief to come out with a credible scheme of modernisation in about 1951.

It would have said a lot of things that Beeching said in his report. Very little of it should have been a surprise. Actually, even Beeching didn't go far enough in some respects, he did very little to shake up levels of service that were basically from the Grouping era. The right questions were being asked by (for example) BTC commission member H. P. Barker, who was Managing Director of Parkinson Cowan as well as having a background in engineering, accountancy and law (!).

Comprehensive reforms in the early years of modernisation, when the railways were still the dominant form of transport, might have avoided some of the decline. Some of the better-used branch lines that were closed after Beeching might have been able to be saved, if the passengers could have been kept on the rails. Many probably couldn't, but once passengers started using buses and private cars the railway was never going to win them back - trying to modernise when the system was declining was always going to be a lost cause.

It is also ironic that the greatest transport legacy of the Attlee Government was probably the Special Roads Act 1949 in the sense that motorways have developed relatively seamlessly since that time whereas the ideas of a nationalised, integrated British Transport Commission have been in a state of flux, reconstruction, privatisation, re-nationalisation, devolution, etc. ever since.

I think the issue is that roads are something that the government does, and always has done. Motorways are an extension of the general government brief to provide highways, so it understands what it's supposed to do. There's no expectation that they'll turn a profit, or even generate enough revenue to pay for their own maintenance. Paying to keep the roads in working order is something that governments are accustomed to paying for out of general taxation. And it's useless trying to lay the blame for the growth in motorways at Marples' feet - they were well on their way by 1959, and he opened the M1 in his first year in office. Any Minister of Transport who opposed motorways would, in the climate of the time, not have been doing his job properly.

Railways, meanwhile, were (and sometimes still are) expected to run as commercial enterprises. They had been profitable in the 1930s (if you weren't too picky about returns on capital) and there was an expectation into the late 1960s that they could be made so again. The Railways Executive actually did make a profit for a few years in the early 1950s before the need for capital expenditure crippled them, which probably didn't help that impression. They weren't nationalised because of a vision that transport should be a public service - it was because there was an ideological belief that the profits from the railways (which weren't questioned) should be returned to the public. Something like the Beeching review needed to take place before it could be accepted that subsidies would be required on an ongoing basis. The longer that's avoided, the worse the finances of the railway become and the more likely it is that the network is cut back to something resembling Option A of the Serpell Report.

 

[Helvellyn]

I think it is forgotten as well that at the time the railways were being pruned there were plans to have a much more comprehensive road network than we do today. Just have a look at the "might have been" section of Pathetic Motorways to see some of the things that were planned. The London Ringways are probably the best known example but if you have a nose around Pathetic Motorways it becomes clear the the Department of Transport certainly had lots of internal planning documents, some of which have turned up in odd places (and thus on that site). For example, the M50 looks less of a white elephant when you see it could have been joined to the M42 (which in turn would have been built as motorway through to the M1/Nottingham).

We are looking at this with fifty years of hindsight, twenty years of rail passenger growth and a population much larger than was envisaged in the 1960s. It's not the only factor but part of rail's renaissance has been driven by the fact that major road schemes fell out of fashion in the 1990s with the likes of the A34 Newbury bypass and the M3 literally being blasted around Winchester.

 

[Altfish]

I'm not buying this Marples/Beeching anti-rail conspiracy at all. There's no evidence for it.

The fact that Marples was a major shareholder (IIRC) in a construction company that was building motorways and other roads did not influence his thinking? He was a poor appointment, he acted as Minster for Roads rather than Transport

 

[Dr Hoo]

Whilst I deplore Marples’ questionable business and tax affairs the firm of Marples Ridgeway had a fairly small role in highway construction whilst he was the Minister.
The Chiswick Flyover project dated from before he was responsible for transport. Only the Hammersmith Flyover and Bromford Viaduct (M6) went to the company during his tenure.
Marples’ go ahead for projects like completing the stalled WCML electrification, the Bournemouth electrification and the Victoria Line (the last justified by leading edge cost-benefit appraisal) demonstrated that he was far more than just a ‘roads’ minister.

 

[Journeyman]

The fact that Marples was a major shareholder (IIRC) in a construction company that was building motorways and other roads did not influence his thinking? He was a poor appointment, he acted as Minster for Roads rather than Transport

I think he saw that demand for road transport was increasing and demand for rail was decreasing, and acted accordingly. Doesn't make him evil.

 

[coppercapped]

The fact that Marples was a major shareholder (IIRC) in a construction company that was building motorways and other roads did not influence his thinking? He was a poor appointment, he acted as Minster for Roads rather than Transport

To add to Dr Hoo's reply in post no. 18, in 1960 Marples was also responsible for commissioning the 'Traffic In Towns' report from Colin Buchanan. This was a seminal work on the need to control the levels of traffic in the country's old and historic towns and not build motorways through towns and cities in the way that the USA was doing at the time.

Marples' tax affairs were nothing to write home about - but he was much more than a 'Minister for Road Building'.

 

[coppercapped]

I think he saw that demand for road transport was increasing and demand for rail was decreasing, and acted accordingly. Doesn't make him evil.

To flesh this out a bit, the table gives the number of cars registered at the end of each year:

• 1909 53,000
• 1920 187,000
• 1930 1,056,000
• 1939 2,034,000
• 1946 1,770,000
• 1950 1,979,000
• 1960 4,900,000
• 1970 9,971,000
• 1980 14,660,000
• 1990 19,742,000
• 2000 23,196,100
• 2010 27,017,900

Road improvements and the building of new roads had started in the 1920s. Motorway construction since the 1950s was simply the continuation of what had gone before. Specifically the number of cars had doubled every 10 years from 1930 until 1970 (apart from the hiatus from 1939 to 1949) when the growth slowed - it was not surprising that roads were being built.

 

[Doctor Fegg]

Should we have preserved every mile of canal that was closed (when the railways usurped waterways as the premier means to move goods)?

In retrospect, yes, we probably should have done. There are very few closed canals that would not prove worthwhile now for leisure boating, cycling, walking and as "green corridors".

Perhaps some of the northern Birmingham Canal Navigations weren't worth saving - I'm thinking of things like the Essington summit, rather than the Lichfield and Hatherton which certainly merit reopening. The isolated South Wales canals would be unlikely to generate any significant pleasure boating interest, so might have been better preserved as cycleways rather than retaining navigation. But lots of canals that were financial basket cases in their day would be roaring successes now - the Cotswolds, Wilts & Berks, Hereford & Gloucester, Wey & Arun, and so on.

The Wey & Arun closed in 1871. No-one then can have been expected to foresee the emergence of pleasure boating 90 years later (...though the first ever travelogue of a leisure canal trip was about the Wey & Arun, so maybe!). But the Shrewsbury & Newport Canal, say, was mostly navigable into the 1960s, and its demolition - literally, including bulldozing embankments and removing a cast iron Telford aqueduct - was criminal.

So... railways? Same applies: no-one can expect Beeching to have seen the future with perfect clarity, but I find his certainty and self-assurance troubling. (Gerry Fiennes' comment about how much Beeching liked maps springs to mind.) In the States they have railbanking - a halfway house to abandonment that allows use of the trackbed as a rail-trail, with the proviso that it may be reclaimed for rail use in the future. It's an admission that you can't always see the future, that perhaps you're not quite as smart as you think you are, and that maybe your predictions won't come to pass. Beeching could have done with a little of that humility; and if we had railbanked some of the trackbeds abandoned in the 1960s, we would be in less of a pickle today.

 

[Bevan Price]

Looking at the timescales, the BTC completely ignored modernisation until the Transport Act of 1953, botched it in the 1955 Modernisation Plan, Beeching was given his brief in 1960, and published his report in 1963. Based on that, you'd expect a leadership team with the right brief to come out with a credible scheme of modernisation in about 1951.

Part of the problem was the "jobs for the boys" appointment of chairmen of the BTC. First a retired general, followed by a retired senior civil servant, neither having much (if any) experience of operating a commercial railway network. Would either have had the knowledge or ability to push some senior rail managers out of their "leave it as it is" attitudes ? Beeching did achieve that, but probably went quite a bit too far in my opinion.

 

[Fearless]

The silver lining to all those closures is the thriving preservation scene we have today, where thousands of people can enjoy the 'heritage experience' on lines such as the West Somerset, Severn Valley, Avon Valley, etc. Canals, too, as witness the huge amount of work done on the Kennet & Avon.

 

[coppercapped]

Part of the problem was the "jobs for the boys" appointment of chairmen of the BTC. First a retired general, followed by a retired senior civil servant, neither having much (if any) experience of operating a commercial railway network. Would either have had the knowledge or ability to push some senior rail managers out of their "leave it as it is" attitudes ? Beeching did achieve that, but probably went quite a bit too far in my opinion.

This is the heart of the reasons why BR was so hard hit. The people selected to run the British Transport Commission were expected to 'administer' it and not 'manage' it. The reason why this happened was that there was no concept of what the railways - or indeed what any of the other organisations brought into the fold - ought to be doing when nationalised in 1947 apart from 'steady as she goes'. There was a vague commitment to create an integrated transport system but nowhere was it defined what was meant by this phrase and as the various Executives were not really controlled by the BTC this never happened.

The only Executive which had a plan for the future was the London Transport Executive - and that largely because it was untouched by nationalisation apart from a change in name from the London Passenger Transport Board and it remained run by the same people.

The first Chairman of the BTC was Sir Cyril Hurcomb who was Permanent Under-Secretary of the Ministry of Transport in the 1920s and 30s, then of the Ministry of Shipping from 1939 and finally of its successor the Ministry of War Transport from 1941 until 1947. He knew about administration - but had no experience of business. He was replaced by Sir Brian Robertson, an ex-soldier - again an able administrator, but not a businessman. (The sequence was the other way round to that you mentioned, but it doesn't really matter!)

By the mid-1950s the railways had been under direct Government control for some 15 years by which time most of the senior staff with commercial experience from the days of 'The Big Four' had retired and most of the rest of the management simply did as they always had done. (Please note that I am referring only to the commercial and financial management - changes did slowly start to happen on the technical side after Robin Riddles and his cohort retired). As a result - and completely lacking in clear direction from the Board of Directors (aka the BTC) - local management had little or no idea how to adapt the system to the new world of higher wages, less incentive to work unsocial hours, the slow but sure shift away from heavy industry and coal mining and the growth in car ownership.

Beeching - or somebody very like him - was from then on inevitable.

As to the question of whether he went too far - by which I assume that you are referring to the station and line closures - that was an issue for Government, not for the Railways Board. Proposals for closures had to be approved by the Minister - it was in the Minister's gift to deny closure if he/she saw fit. The 'railbanking' concept mentioned by Dr. Fegg in post 22 as an alternative to closure would have to have been managed and funded by the Ministry of Transport directly or, if the BRB were to manage the scheme, the Ministry would have had to reimburse it as a separate budget item. And anyway, how long should land be 'banked' before it became clear it would never be reused as a railway. 10 years? 20 years? 50 years?

 

[Helvellyn]

I wonder how Beeching or someone like him would have managed the modernisation plan and the funds available? For example, much is made of the huge number of locomotive types but that could equally apply to the huge variety in Mark 1 coaches. I don't think it is coincidence that when the Mark 2 came in under the more commercial BR of the mid-1960s there was simplification in the number of vehicle types.

 

[Bevan Price]

I wonder how Beeching or someone like him would have managed the modernisation plan and the funds available? For example, much is made of the huge number of locomotive types but that could equally apply to the huge variety in Mark 1 coaches. I don't think it is coincidence that when the Mark 2 came in under the more commercial BR of the mid-1960s there was simplification in the number of vehicle types.

The main changes when Mark 2s stock was introduced were that compartment stock (in corridor coaches) was abolished for standard class, and there was no need to build Mark 2 non-corridor suburban stock because "suburban" services were now operated by dmus or emus. Surely in some of the Mark 1 stock, the only variety was in the internal layout whilst using a basically similar body shell ??.

 

[Dr Hoo]

The main changes when Mark 2s stock was introduced were that compartment stock (in corridor coaches) was abolished for standard class, and there was no need to build Mark 2 non-corridor suburban stock because "suburban" services were now operated by dmus or emus. Surely in some of the Mark 1 stock, the only variety was in the internal layout whilst using a basically similar body shell ??.

There was a considerable variety of Mark 1 refreshment vehicles. So many that no more were needed for a long time.

 

[tbtc]

The 'railbanking' concept mentioned by Dr. Fegg in post 22 as an alternative to closure would have to have been managed and funded by the Ministry of Transport directly or, if the BRB were to manage the scheme, the Ministry would have had to reimburse it as a separate budget item. And anyway, how long should land be 'banked' before it became clear it would never be reused as a railway. 10 years? 20 years? 50 years?

This is a problem for me too - this kind of idea that (ex) railway land is somehow sacred and should be preserved forever just in case it'll ever be "useful".

As an example, I used to enjoy trips to Tinsley Yard as a lad - all this action, always something being shunted, marshalled, fascinating.

But the freight dried up, the need to shunt all of these long trains seems quaint nowadays.

All these branches to collieries and steelworks kind of became redundant when the industry closed.

Were we meant to keep the land just in case, maintaining the Victorian infrastructure to modern standards (since the railway would be liable for any damage caused by poorly maintained bridges etc)? Where was the money going to come from? Would that impact upon the budget for lines worth keeping open? "Sorry, we've had to cut half the services on your line because we need to fund a replacement viaduct on a line that we closed twenty years ago"? British Rail would end up having more in common with the National Trust (spending never-ending sums of money repairing outdated infrastructure) than a modern transport company.

It just feels like a cop out from taking the hard decisions that did need to be taken in the 1960s (in light of the huge rise in car ownership, the changes to freight demand etc) - saying "they should have kept all of the land just in case" is a way of avoiding the fact that many lines deserved closure - it's deferring the decision, a useful way of staying in denial.

 

[muddythefish]

We do not all agree that Beeching went too far.

Major towns and communities cut off from the rail network. Swathes of the country left dependent on the car and poor quality bus services. Of course he went too far.