BR Modernisation policies and subsequent investment

[Monkey Magic]

Apologies if this has been discussed before or this is the wrong place.

I was thinking about how difficult it is to get the government to invest in the railways and this has been something that has been a feature for as long as I can remember.

I can't help but wonder if some of the mistrust the Treasury and DFT have in the railways is a result of the mistakes of the modernisation programmes of the 1950s and 1960s where it seems like huge amounts of money were invested in schemes and new locos only for them to be scrapped within a few years.

It seems insane (given the pre-1945 history of the railways having stock dating from the victorian era) that things like the 9Fs should be scrapped after a working life of less than 10 years. To be replaced with diesels that were supposed to be cheaper but in some cases lasted less than 10 years.

That BTC/BR could have almost a blank cheque in terms of investment and could be seen to waste so much money and to do so twice, it seems little wonder that governments are so reluctant to invest in the railways.

What I can't get my head around is what the thinking of the BTC and BR was and how it was allowed to happen.

 

[yorksrob]

Apologies if this has been discussed before or this is the wrong place.

I was thinking about how difficult it is to get the government to invest in the railways and this has been something that has been a feature for as long as I can remember.

I can't help but wonder if some of the mistrust the Treasury and DFT have in the railways is a result of the mistakes of the modernisation programmes of the 1950s and 1960s where it seems like huge amounts of money were invested in schemes and new locos only for them to be scrapped within a few years.

It seems insane (given the pre-1945 history of the railways having stock dating from the victorian era) that things like the 9Fs should be scrapped after a working life of less than 10 years. To be replaced with diesels that were supposed to be cheaper but in some cases lasted less than 10 years.

That BTC/BR could have almost a blank cheque in terms of investment and could be seen to waste so much money and to do so twice, it seems little wonder that governments are so reluctant to invest in the railways.

What I can't get my head around is what the thinking of the BTC and BR was and how it was allowed to happen.

We shouldn't forget the saga of the Marshalling yards which were built for goods traffic that was unprofitable but which BR was forced to carry by law at the time.

There was also some good kit built - thinking of the Kent Electrification scheme, WCML electrification. Also thinking of those class 20's that are still in use sixty years later !!

 

[LNW-GW Joint]

What I can't get my head around is what the thinking of the BTC and BR was and how it was allowed to happen.

In The Train That Ran Away by BR Board member Stewart Joy (1972), he says the BTC/BR directors "tried to solve yesterday's problems with tomorrow's money".
It's a good analysis of how it all went wrong, with BR losing control of its destiny to the Treasury.
Basically, until the mid-60s BR had weak central management and powerful Regions who did their own thing (like ordering 41 different types of diesel locomotive between 1954-1962).

 

[Carlisle]

(like ordering 41 different types of diesel locomotive between 1954-1962).

That probably only happened because there weren't lots proven off the shelf designs available at the time so nobody wanted to be saddled with what might have ended up to be a large fleet of useless duds

 

[yorksrob]

Some regional variation was quite sensible. For example, the Southern Region's policy of using DEMU traction meant that these trains shared lots of components and technology with the third rail EMU fleet, even though these were technically different from the mechanical DMU's used elsewhere.

 

[HSTEd]

When you are being told to dieselise yesterday and there are no proven diesels to build you have to build random designs.

 

[coppercapped]

Apologies if this has been discussed before or this is the wrong place.

I was thinking about how difficult it is to get the government to invest in the railways and this has been something that has been a feature for as long as I can remember.

I can't help but wonder if some of the mistrust the Treasury and DFT have in the railways is a result of the mistakes of the modernisation programmes of the 1950s and 1960s where it seems like huge amounts of money were invested in schemes and new locos only for them to be scrapped within a few years.

It seems insane (given the pre-1945 history of the railways having stock dating from the victorian era) that things like the 9Fs should be scrapped after a working life of less than 10 years. To be replaced with diesels that were supposed to be cheaper but in some cases lasted less than 10 years.

That BTC/BR could have almost a blank cheque in terms of investment and could be seen to waste so much money and to do so twice, it seems little wonder that governments are so reluctant to invest in the railways.

What I can't get my head around is what the thinking of the BTC and BR was and how it was allowed to happen.

As this is my first post to UK Rail I hope I get it right!

You raise an interesting question about the railways’ management and the strategic direction it received from Government from the end of the Second World War until the 1960s. The apparent failure of the Modernisation Plan has interested, puzzled and frustrated me for many years; it was published when I was 11 years old and the idea of 100mph trains fascinated me - but they didn’t arrive on my line for another 20 years. Over the years I have tried to understand why that was and, as a result, why the railways’ finances continued to deteriorate in spite of the electrification and modernisation: the rest of this post is a summary of what I think happened.

I make no claim to original research. What I write is based on reading the text of the 1947 Transport Act, many articles in newspapers and the trade press and some very good books. These include Terry Gourvish’s various volumes covering the history of BR, Stewart Joy’s ‘The Train That Ran Away’, Gerry Fiennes’ ‘I Tried To Run A Railway’, Michael Bonavia’s ‘The Organisation of British Railways’ and similar. All these are now out of print but I am sure copies can be found if you are interested.

Firstly though, I have to take issue with your statement that it is difficult to get the government to invest in railways. This has certainly been true in some periods - specifically after the failure of the Modernisation Plan to reduce the deficit that BR was making every year - but the last 15 years has seen a large number of improvement schemes undertaken. Nothing like it has been seen since the early years of the Modernisation Plan - the Channel Tunnel Rail Link (now HS1), Crossrail and Thameslink, grade separation work at Nuneaton, Doncaster, Reading, Hitchin and now Stafford, station rebuilding at Reading, Nottingham and London Bridge, the new Kings Cross booking hall, electrification schemes in Scotland, the North West and now the Great Western, gauge enlargement on many routes and lots of new rolling stock.

Not all of these developments have been paid for by money routed through the Government - there has been much private direct investment especially in rolling stock since privatisation. In addition Network Rail has now borrowed a total of some £30 billion since it was set up much of which has been spend on infrastructure. If it seems that investment has been lacking or slow, then possibly the suggested scheme will not come anywhere near to washing its face financially. Throwing money into a pit is only done by fools - and for many years the railways appeared to be a bottomless pit.

Why was this so? I maintain that the roots of the problem lay in the way the railways were nationalised in 1947. The weakness of the 1947 Transport Act was that, for an Act which was nominally intended to create a co-ordinated transport system, it defined a structure which ensured that this could not be achieved. To be successful in its aim it would have been sensible to have set up the British Transport Commission with a ‘functional’ organisation, that is with departments individually responsible for operations, engineering, commercial, personnel, financial and so on but active across all the different transport modes - so the most effective mode, or modes, for a particular movement could have been identified. But the Act setting up the BTC set the existing structures in aspic by creating the BTC’s 'agents' by form of transport, e.g., the Railway Executive (RE), the Docks and Inland Waterways Executive, the Road Haulage Executive and the London Transport Executive. Even worse, the Government appointed the members of these Executives directly.

The result was inevitable, each Executive fought its own corner and the BTC had little control over them - it did not control the Executives' budgets except at the highest level, it could not move Members of an Executive to a different job or fire those who were thwarting its aims because these Members had been selected by the Government. The structure was condemned to failure before it started.

The BTC’s financial remit was vague, to say the least ‘To break even taking one year with another’. No requirements about return on capital or service levels or improvements or anything else. And the Common Carrier conditions were still in force.

The RE kept the Commission - which it saw more as a supervisory board - at arm's length by sending it only edited copies of its Minutes. It ran itself as if were a railway company operating in isolation.

The BTC was concerned about the need for new designs of steam locomotives being promoted by the RE and the lack of interest shown by it in the potential of diesel traction. With this in mind, the BTC's records show that it took action after noting the speed with which the Executive was tackling the standardisation of steam motive power - the RE had set up the Locomotive Standards Committee on 8 January 1948 within a week of nationalisation. In April 1948, the same month that the locomotive exchanges took place, the BTC’s Chairman (Hurcomb) wrote to Sir Eustace Missenden, the Chairman of the RE, to express his dissatisfaction with the progress made in assessing the merits of different forms of traction. The reaction was grudging - over 8 months later, on 20 December 1948, a committee was set up under J. L. Harrington, the Chief Officer (Administration) at RE Headquarters to study other forms of traction. It finally reported at the end of 1951.

Wow! A week to start work on new steam locomotives and 3 1/2 years to respond to a letter.

One of the extraordinary features of the Harrington report was the very crude nature of the financial figures presented. The cost comparisons were for built cost - no effort was made to relate operating costs to different manning levels or utilisation or identify cost/ton-mile or per passenger-mile. It would seem that the RE had little need for financial analysis in deciding its traction policy, nor did it need the BTC to shove its oar in. Until electrification was practical it considered that modern steam locomotives should haul the trains. The result was that 10 years had been wasted in the development of main line diesel locomotives and no effort had been put into the further development of the GWR’s early inter-city railcars. This hiatus explains some of the less-than-successful motive power bought as a result of the Modernisation Plan.

The point to remember is that others at the time were critical of the choices made by the RE - but the organisation of the railway business following nationalisation made it impossible for anyone to change the policy. For example, G. F. Fiennes wrote in 1967 of his time as Chief Operating Officer at the BRB in 1960: 'It is one of the disasters about British Railways that in the years between 1947 and 1955 no one had done the basic work on what we were there for at all; what traffic should be carried by what methods in what quantities, where from and to, at what rates. The upshot was that the Modernisation Plan produced in 1953-55 with the support of the Government to the extent of £1,500 million was little more than a change from steam traction plus host of mouldering schemes which the B.T.C. and the Regions had found after a hurried search of their pigeon holes. We had made the basic error of buying our tools before doing our homework on defining the job.’

I hope that I haven’t gone on too long!

 

[oldman]

I hope that I haven’t gone on too long!

Certainly not, very interesting post. I had felt that the fundamental problems were the decision to build the BR standard classes with no preparation for dieselisation and the failure to analyse what the railway should be doing in the modern world, but it is fascinating to read the details about how this happened.

 

[Monkey Magic]

Thank you. A very interesting post.

I think what I struggle to understand is how BR could make the decision to build standard classes and then decide to withdraw all steam so quickly. Which certainly gives them impression of BR as wasteful.

I've read some articles from the 1960s that seemed to talk about the late 1970s as when steam would finally go.

It would have made sense to replace life expired steam stock with diesels, and especially on branchlines. A more incremental approach would have allowed designs to be tested and technology to be proven first rather than experimenting only to find that a class you have ordered doesn't work.

I appreciate the labour shortage and this seems to have been a major factor. Where as pre-war it seemed that labour was cheap and plentiful, it was neither cheap nor plentiful afterwards.

At the same time you have designs being built for traffic that was then withdrawn from the railways.

I mean look at things like the Class 21/29s, Baby Deltics etc which had lives of less than 10 years.

And then you have other designs like the 20 that are pushing on for 60 years in service (although it should be noted they ran in pairs for most of their lives).

Other examples like the treatment of the Woodhead route - to invest in electrification and then to close the route.

With regard to subsequent investment - my feeling was that a lot of the current and recent investment has simply been to catch up on a lack of post-modernisation plan investment.

Although I accept that the 70s produced the HST, APT, 56, 87, and the 80s the replacement of first gen DMUs, Channel tunnel etc, but my feeling is that these investments were always done for the lowest amount possible.

For example the Voyageurs - always packed and really they needed to be 5 and 6 car units rather than 4 and 5 car units, likewise the 180s I use really ought to be 6 car units.

It is as if the framing is always 'what is the smallest order we can have?' and 'what is the cheapest way of getting there'.

 

[ainsworth74]

Well BR did have test program for diesels in the early 50s and my impression was they intended to build an operate small numbers of many different types of diesel locomotive with the intention being to select types that worked refine and then mass produce. However the BTC desperate to stem the losses grasped dieselisation as being a way of saving large sums of money. This panic is what caused BR to abandon common sense and just order anything and everything in order to meet their new targets.

The long term consequences of this decision were probably to lead to costs which were far higher than if they'd stayed the course.

Plus, as Gerry Fiennes basically said, a lot of the modernisation plan was done without due regard for future traffic flows and consideration for what the railway was for. So as well as some designs being withdrawn for being unsuitable others were perfectly suitable but withdrawn because there was no traffic for them!

Woodhead was closed because the traffic for which it was built (coal) no longer existed and to be fair it was probably not unreasonable to fail to realise that this would happen when authorisation was granted in the late 40s. It would have taken one heck of a crystal ball to be able to predict what would happen in the coal industry over the next thirtyish years!

What is more of a concern is the way they built the route using 1,500V DC when just a few years later BR decided 25kV AC should be the voltage of choice.

 

[tbtc]

I was thinking about how difficult it is to get the government to invest in the railways and this has been something that has been a feature for as long as I can remember.

I can't help but wonder if some of the mistrust the Treasury and DFT have in the railways is a result of the mistakes of the modernisation programmes of the 1950s and 1960s where it seems like huge amounts of money were invested in schemes and new locos only for them to be scrapped within a few years.

It seems insane (given the pre-1945 history of the railways having stock dating from the victorian era) that things like the 9Fs should be scrapped after a working life of less than 10 years. To be replaced with diesels that were supposed to be cheaper but in some cases lasted less than 10 years.

That BTC/BR could have almost a blank cheque in terms of investment and could be seen to waste so much money and to do so twice, it seems little wonder that governments are so reluctant to invest in the railways

That's a really interesting idea for a thread (instead of yet another about XC at Brighton etc).

Looking back, the railway had a lot of goodwill in the 1940s and 1950s which it had managed to squander by the 1960s/ 1970s, allowing politicians to justify the cuts that they made.

Whilst nobody has perfect foresight, there seems to have been a lot of waste. Easy for modern enthusiasts to moan about things like "wouldn't it be more useful if First had ordered some 170s instead of that awkward small class of 175s/ wouldn't it be more useful if First had ordered some 22xs instead of that awkward small class of 180s" but today's "inefficiencies" are nothing compared to how things were fifty years ago!

Whilst some kind of "Beeching" was probably inevitable (given the duplication of lines in some areas, the routes built for speculative/spoiler reasons etc), I'm convinced that BR could have handled things significantly better in the 1940s/1950s to avoid the need for such deep cuts later on.

They had a pretty decent hand of cards in 1948 but regional squabbling/ lack of national planning/ terrible decisions over what to build and scrap... it kind of invited the later cuts to take place.

Hate to say it, but I kind of can't blame subsequent Governments for not trusting the railway (and it's bottomless pit approach to money), after it had made so many bad decisions in the early days of BR.

In The Train That Ran Away by BR Board member Stewart Joy (1972), he says the BTC/BR directors "tried to solve yesterday's problems with tomorrow's money"

Interesting (and depressing) quote!

There does seem to have been a lot of money invested in trying to solve "yesterday's problems" - rather than focussing on things like railways for the plethora of "new towns" cropping up around that time - which now are very reliant upon the car.

until the mid-60s BR had weak central management and powerful Regions who did their own thing (like ordering 41 different types of diesel locomotive between 1954-1962)

That's shocking!

I mean, I knew it was a larger number than it should have been, but... forty one?!

Same kind of waste (on a smaller scale) with 100mph electric locos:

• 81s (25 built)
• 82s (10 built)
• 83s (15 built)
• 84s (10 built)
• 85s (40 built)
• 86s (100 built) - could do up to 110mph
• 87s (36 built) - could do up to 110mph

...with sub-classes within those (and some trains split between more than one builder). Prototypes are one thing, but... was there any need for so many versions?

Fun for a schoolboy in the 1980s at places like Carstairs, trying to spot the difference between an 81 and an 85 as they approached at speed (), but such a waste of money/ resources.

That probably only happened because there weren't lots proven off the shelf designs available at the time so nobody wanted to be saddled with what might have ended up to be a large fleet of useless duds

When you are being told to dieselise yesterday and there are no proven diesels to build you have to build random designs.

Genuine question - since other countries moved from steam to diesel (if not all countries) - did they have the same splurge and purchase dozens of different types of locomotive? Or were they more organised? They didn't all wait for the UK to settle on a proven design before they built any, surely.

As this is my first post to UK Rail I hope I get it right!

...

I hope that I haven’t gone on too long!

Very interesting first post - welcome

Woodhead was closed because the traffic for which it was built (coal) no longer existed and to be fair it was probably not unreasonable to fail to realise that this would happen when authorisation was granted in the late 40s. It would have taken one heck of a crystal ball to be able to predict what would happen in the coal industry over the next thirtyish years!

What is more of a concern is the way they built the route using 1,500V DC when just a few years later BR decided 25kV AC should be the voltage of choice.

Agreed re Woodhead.

The non-standard electrification is the bit that annoys me more than the actual closure. If it had been electrified to 25kvAC then we could have seen easy extensions of 25kvAC at Sheffield/ Wath (e.g. Sheffield Victoria - Retford!), which would have made the case for retaining bits of Woodhead (e.g. Sheffield Victoria - Deepcar - Penistone) better.

Once the coal trade was decimated, there was little to recommend the line east of Hadfield - it doesn't serve any major towns (or Sheffield Midland) - it's not a route that I'd prioritise for re-opening - but if it had been electrified to the (now) normal AC voltage then we certainly wouldn't have had to write off 65 "non standard" electric locomotives so early!

Still, we may finally see 25kvAC in Sheffield some time in the 2020s (?) - may take a while longer until Wath sees proper electrification though...

 

[Sir Felix Pole]

To be fair, the Woodhead electrification was a continuation of the pre-war LNER scheme for which a fair amount of work had been undertaken before the commencement of hostilities and included the slightly later building of 'Tommy' the prototype electric locomotive. 1500V DC was the standard for main-line electrification at the time (Weir Committee (1931)), with 25kV AC only at an early experimental stage. The first large scale application (Valenciennes to Thionville in Northern France) did not commence until 1955 and SNCF continued with 1500V DC installations for many schemes already underway. BR did make the 'brave and courageous' decision to adopt 25kV AC for the WCML, and the inexperience and lack of expertise contributed to cost-overruns and delays, which sadly has echoes today. It was spectacularly the right call, however, with the system now being the international standard. You could argue that Woodhead should have been converted to 25kV AC, as with Shenfield (and Hadfield after the closure of Woodhead itself), but there was sadly no business-case to answer with the decline in traffic. Woodhead's time might come again, however, as a possible 'HS3' route.

 

[Monkey Magic]

Add into it Western Region going for Diesel Hydraulics while everyone else was going for DE.

Class 14 - 56 - withdrawn in less than 5 years
Class 22 - 57 - withdrawn in less than 10 years
Hymeks - 101 - withdrawn 10-15 years
D600 - 5 - withdrawn in less than 10 years
D800 (Swindon) - 42 - withdrawn in 15 years
D800 (NBL) - 33 - Withdrawn 9-11 years
Westerns - 74 - withdrawn 12-15 years

Basically 360+ locos very few of which had a life longer than 15 years.

 

[coppercapped]

Thank you. A very interesting post.

I think what I struggle to understand is how BR could make the decision to build standard classes and then decide to withdraw all steam so quickly. Which certainly gives them impression of BR as wasteful.

I've read some articles from the 1960s that seemed to talk about the late 1970s as when steam would finally go.

It would have made sense to replace life expired steam stock with diesels, and especially on branchlines. A more incremental approach would have allowed designs to be tested and technology to be proven first rather than experimenting only to find that a class you have ordered doesn't work.

I appreciate the labour shortage and this seems to have been a major factor. Where as pre-war it seemed that labour was cheap and plentiful, it was neither cheap nor plentiful afterwards.

At the same time you have designs being built for traffic that was then withdrawn from the railways.

I mean look at things like the Class 21/29s, Baby Deltics etc which had lives of less than 10 years.

And then you have other designs like the 20 that are pushing on for 60 years in service (although it should be noted they ran in pairs for most of their lives).

Other examples like the treatment of the Woodhead route - to invest in electrification and then to close the route.

With regard to subsequent investment - my feeling was that a lot of the current and recent investment has simply been to catch up on a lack of post-modernisation plan investment.

Although I accept that the 70s produced the HST, APT, 56, 87, and the 80s the replacement of first gen DMUs, Channel tunnel etc, but my feeling is that these investments were always done for the lowest amount possible.

For example the Voyageurs - always packed and really they needed to be 5 and 6 car units rather than 4 and 5 car units, likewise the 180s I use really ought to be 6 car units.

It is as if the framing is always 'what is the smallest order we can have?' and 'what is the cheapest way of getting there'.

To answer your last point first. Money has a cost - it’s called ‘interest’. Few people, whether individuals or organisations, (oil sheiks excepted!) have sufficient money in their pockets to buy anything and everything they want. For any large expenditure they will have to borrow the money - and this money has a cost.

So it makes good sense to spend as little of it as possible in buying your new dishwasher, motor car or train - as long as it does what you find important. A dishwasher you might be able to buy outright, but you will probably have to borrow money to buy a car or a house. The monthly interest payments will automatically limit the amount you borrow - unless you are prepared to go bankrupt.

The same is true for businesses. Organisations will spend as little money as possible on developing and selling a product or service so that the product or service can be offered at the lowest price possible. Obviously what is meant by ’the lowest price’ depends on the sector of the market one is intending to address. Sometimes companies get it wrong and if the product is of poor quality then the sales will be low. Alternatively the product can be too expensive - but the result will be the same, sales will be slow or non-existent. Hitting the happy compromise between price and performance is very, very difficult.

Being too expensive rather than too cheap is the worse case - because you will have wasted more money on the unsuccessful expensive product than you would have done for the unsuccessful cheap one.

If the Government spends more money on the railways than it needs to then, as the railways as a whole are still not profitable, this money can only come from the taxpayers. And who wants to pay more taxes…?

Back to why all the events you have noticed occurred.

At the start BR was profitable, that is its income was greater than its expenditure. However as life started to return to normal after the end of the War and rationing, including petrol rationing, became history BR started to lose traffic and its wages bill increased. This was a time of full employment but the old ways of working the railways were labour intensive - as a result BR had to pay more to retain its staff. The result was that by 1955 BR’s income was no longer covering its operating costs, let alone generating sufficient money to buy new equipment.

By 1960 BR was losing about £100m a year (say about £4 billion in today's money) and this at a time when only about 10% of families owned a car; imagine what the finances would have looked like by 1970 without radical action.

It was essential to reduce the costs of operation as quickly as possible - and if that meant scrapping 10 year old steam or diesel locomotives - then so be it. What is important in this context is not what you have spent in the past - that money’s already gone and can’t be recovered - but what you are spending now and will be spending in the years to come. So for any given task, those designs with the lowest operating costs survived[1]. The others were scrapped.

The same thing is true for the Woodhead route. The electrification was planned by the LNER before the war to haul coal trains over the Pennines. Then the main market (the coal trains) went away - what do you do now? Keep spending money in maintaining all the electrical kit and the route itself although there is little or no use for it? Or close the lot and reduce the call on the taxpayer. It’s not as if Sheffield is isolated by rail from Manchester - there is a suitable alternative.

The reason why 10 year old steam locomotives were scrapped was simple - they should never have been built in the first place. That they were was largely due to personalities in the Railway Executive. Three men trained by Stanier took over the motive power organisation in 1948: ‘Robin’ Riddles, Stewart Cox and Roland Bond. Riddles was Executive Member for mechanical and electrical engineering, Cox was Executive Officer, Design and Bond was in charge of locomotive construction and maintenance. They had all grown up with steam and, it has been suggested, they wanted to be remembered in the same category as Churchyard, Gresley and Stanier. During the War, Riddles was responsible for getting Bailey bridges and Mulberry harbours built and there is no denying he was a forceful personality who tended to get his own way. We have a lot to be thankful for - that ability when fighting a war is essential. But peacetime brings other imperatives - one of which is that costs are important - and he was not flexible enough to realise that the times, they were a'changing. And, as I wrote in my earlier post, the structure of the BTC was such that nobody could compel them to change their course.

It is, I think, no coincidence that the Modernisation Plan was written as these three players had retired or were approaching retirement.

[1] This is not quite true! Some designs survived, not because they were particularly reliable or suitable, but because BR had built them in large numbers. Class 47 - I’m looking at you!

 

[yorksrob]

I'm not convinced that 20 types of diesel locomotive would have made vastly much more difference to the economic wellbeing of the railway than 41. The duds must have been dwarfed by the vast numbers of loco's, carriages and multiple units which ended up in use for decades.

Falling foul of the motor car, lorry and fashion probably took more of a toll. To that end, developing a basic railway concept should have been the priority.

That said management intransigence probably wasn't confined to the modernisation era. I remember reading about a local Southern Region manager who developed a plan to make economies on the Swanage branch during the sixties, only to be told by his seniors that it was not his job and he should get on with closing it.

 

[30907]

since other countries moved from steam to diesel (if not all countries) - did they have the same splurge and purchase dozens of different types of locomotive? Or were they more organised? They didn't all wait for the UK to settle on a proven design before they built any, surely.

Many countries aimed ultimately for electrification and so didn't build vast numbers of main line diesels anyway, and there certainly wasn't the hasty batch ordering without prototypes.
Significant numbers used well tried off the peg US designs - eg Norway, Denmark and Hungary with double cab designs (including the distinctive Danish MZ) and Yugoslavia (etc) with hood types. And then there were mass produced Soviet designs. Portugal also went for proven designs but from various countries including UK.

 

[coppercapped]

Very interesting first post - welcome

Thank you! I'm looking forward to my stay!

You also raised the question

Genuine question - since other countries moved from steam to diesel (if not all countries) - did they have the same splurge and purchase dozens of different types of locomotive? Or were they more organised? They didn't all wait for the UK to settle on a proven design before they built any, surely.

30907 has already provided an answer for the European experience, and how many railways around the world used US based equipment. It's useful also to look at the US experience as they were the pioneers in this field.

One of the big differences between the US and the UK was that few of the Class 1 railroads designed and built their own motive power - most of them bought locomotives from Alco, Lima or Baldwin. The Norfolk and Western was one of the few railroads to design and build its own locomotives.

As the diesel engine became sufficiently reliable and powerful enough for railroad use new manufacturers, such as the Electro-Motive Division of General Motors and General Electric, entered the market. EMD produced their first locomotive in 1936; by 1952 diesels outnumbered steam locos. Steam was extinct on Class 1 railroads by 1961. Even Norfolk and Western, operating one of the most modern steam fleets in the US and situated over a coalfield, decided in June 1958 to change to diesels. This was complete by May 1960, in the process several hundred steam locomotives were scrapped some - shades of BR - being only 5 years old.

The American railroads did not have to experiment with differing designs - they purchased what was on offer. In the early days there were several manufacturers but this number was whittled down very quickly to EMD and GE. It is significant that, like the North British Loco Co. in this country, none of the big US steam engine manufacturers made the change.

When technology changes, the effects can be brutal. It was the steam age equivalent of Apple wiping the floor with Nokia.

 

[Pigeon]

The reason why 10 year old steam locomotives were scrapped was simple - they should never have been built in the first place.

Oh, I can't agree with that. The railways had a motley collection of largely clapped-out traction. New and standardised locomotives were needed, diesel traction was not well established at the time, diesel locomotives cost about three times as much as steam if not more, and there was considerable uncertainty over how long it would take to be brought in and also to what extent vice electrification. To meet the immediate and urgent need it made sense to use the established and cheap technology for which all the infrastructure and skills were already there.

What should never have been built in the first place was the motley collection of largely clapped-out-from-the-word-go diesels that resulted from the rush into dieselisation after those in charge had somehow got the idea that it was a magical solution to everything when it was still an experimental technology. They should have stuck with the original, sensible idea of buying 10 of each of a variety of designs and then waiting to see if they were any good or not before deciding which ones to go for. Instead they rushed hundreds of untested experiments into full service and hoped they wouldn't blow up, which was just dumb.

Add into it Western Region going for Diesel Hydraulics while everyone else was going for DE.

Class 14 - 56 - withdrawn in less than 5 years
Class 22 - 57 - withdrawn in less than 10 years
Hymeks - 101 - withdrawn 10-15 years
D600 - 5 - withdrawn in less than 10 years
D800 (Swindon) - 42 - withdrawn in 15 years
D800 (NBL) - 33 - Withdrawn 9-11 years
Westerns - 74 - withdrawn 12-15 years

Basically 360+ locos very few of which had a life longer than 15 years.

Well, there were good reasons to choose hydraulics. The WR already had experience of the electrical side of "DE", from their gas turbine experiments, and didn't want it. They wanted a proven design with a high power-to-weight ratio. An adaptation of the German V200 design to the British loading gauge was just the ticket.

Then the silly politics got in the way: the government not wanting to buy stuff off those nasty Germans who we'd just fought a war with, and insisting that people do something before they can be given money regardless of whether what they are doing is any use or not. So instead of using the well-made, reliable engines and transmissions straight from the German designers, they had to use the cruddy licensed versions built from inaccurately-converted measurements using substandard materials by a bunch of blacksmiths and men with big hammers, with NBL failing to realise that while you might be fine making a steam locomotive like this a diesel engine was a different matter.

They even had to accept a tranche of overweight, lumbering behemoths which NBL made by carving bodyshells out of battleship armour with a hammer and chisel and then panicking because they couldn't figure out how to make a bogie to take the weight, and sold to the WR at a loss hoping to make it up by selling more in future even though they sucked and the WR had never even wanted them in the first place.

The railways responded to NBL by insisting that NBL repair their own crap at their own expense and guarantee it for three months, in the vain hope that this would give them sufficient incentive to make the things properly in the first place. NBL responded to the railways by going bust. This then put the kybosh on the survival of all the hydraulic classes that depended on NBL being able to supply spare parts, which was about a third of them.

Also in the category of silly politics locomotives are the Class 14s, whose intended traffic was disappearing even as they were being built, but despite this they kept on building them, because of course instead of paying people at Swindon to not build locomotives it is better to pay several times as much to have them building locomotives you'll never use.

So that disposes of about half the hydraulics episode as silliness that could have been avoided by shooting all the politicians, which is a good idea in any case, and leaves us with the Westerns, Warships (excluding those with NBL parts), and also the Hymeks.

The "Ws" were actually good locomotives for the most part, certainly no worse than diesels in general, and a lot better than the Peaks - a rather less advanced design - were managing at the time. A lot of the reason why they were underappreciated is not inherent in the designs themselves.

They were handicapped in their use for freight by lack of brake force due to their light weight. At the time they were ordered this wasn't supposed to matter because all the unfitted freight vehicles were about to be scrapped anyway. In the event it took us forever to get shot of the things and the hydraulics were just one unfortunate casualty of the authorities getting their priorities upside down.

Part of the trick of the high availability obtained by the Germans with the original design was unit replacement. Engines and transmissions could be removed in their entirety and overhauled as a background process while the loco was fitted with a spare unit standing ready and put back into traffic without delay. To further facilitate this process, the two types of engines and two types of transmissions were all interchangeable. The WR intended to do this but never got it together and nearly always just patched things up in situ, which was particularly difficult given the lack of space for access. Not to mention that NBL buggered it up by not putting the mounting points in the standard places and killing the interchangeability aspect.

And then there was the steam heat fiasco which did for a whole lot of diesel classes both hydraulic and electric. In theory steam heat was a great idea as it allowed the continued use of existing carriage stock, it didn't reduce the available power for traction, it could (in theory, though they never did it) be produced for free using the waste heat in the engine exhaust, and it was lovely and cosy - when it was working. The problem was that it so often wasn't, because not one of the different manufacturers of steam heat boilers knew a bolt from a rivet and every design that any of them supplied was a useless heap of junk that broke down more often than all the other bits of the loco put together. And the hydraulics' lack of interior space made it hard to engineer an ETH conversion because there was nowhere to put the generator.

Running through the whole saga is the thread of the WR not realising that they weren't the GWR any more and all the bitching back and forth between them and the overall management, which didn't help anyone or anything, and the use of the "standardisation" excuse to provide a stick to slap the WR down. Given the largely self-contained nature of the hydraulics' duties on the WR and the existence of the WR's own shops at Swindon to deal with heavy repairs, it's not really such a big deal. Any attention they might require at other regions' depots would more than likely be to parts which were common to many classes, and not to the unique transmissions.

The hydraulic transmission was a good choice. Only a very small proportion of breakdowns were due to transmission failures, and most of those were in the nature of teething troubles. This was not the case with electric transmission. The hydraulic system also gave better traction for starting heavy loads than was achievable with electric transmission before the development of good electronic wheelslip control systems. Also, the redundancy in the duplicated engines and transmissions gave better failure resilience.

If the WR had been allowed to crack straight on with the "stunted V200" design, using German-made components, from the word go, instead of messing about with the NBL junk, and had had the time wasted messing about available to sort out the teething troubles and get the unit replacement system up and running, then I think the story could have been very different: the WR would have had a very noticeably lower proportion of dross in its loco fleet throughout the sixties compared to the other regions, and with the principle thus shown to be successful it would have been natural for hydraulics to become favoured over electrics more generally.

 

[Monkey Magic]

The thing that strikes me about modernisation is how despite nationalisation, regional fiefdoms still existed, this seems to have meant that modernisation was less than coherent in terms of its vision.

we can add into this all the various different DMU designs and that the Southern had different designs. It does make sense in some areas - ie the Hastings Line, but for the rest I am not so sure.

It is almost as if there was no overall vision for modernisation when they started but just a slogan 'we must modernise no matter what' and then it was left up to the regions to decide what they wanted to do.

On the subject of politics - I wonder if some of it was also the belief in full employment and that it was better keep people in work (hence why most of the loco building site remained open for so long)

 

[coppercapped]

Deleted

 

[edwin_m]

And the hydraulics' lack of interior space made it hard to engineer an ETH conversion because there was nowhere to put the generator.

Presumably the ETH on a diesel-electric just takes a feed off the generator (or alternator) that's there already, so rather easier than on a hydraulic where room has to be found for a largeish component. This may mean that the writing was on the wall for the hydraulics as soon as BR adopted air-conditioning in around 1970. Which I would have thought a long-sighted management would have anticipated happening a few years earlier, or were they thinking of steam-powered aircon?

 

[yorksrob]

The thing that strikes me about modernisation is how despite nationalisation, regional fiefdoms still existed, this seems to have meant that modernisation was less than coherent in terms of its vision.

we can add into this all the various different DMU designs and that the Southern had different designs. It does make sense in some areas - ie the Hastings Line, but for the rest I am not so sure.

It is almost as if there was no overall vision for modernisation when they started but just a slogan 'we must modernise no matter what' and then it was left up to the regions to decide what they wanted to do.

On the subject of politics - I wonder if some of it was also the belief in full employment and that it was better keep people in work (hence why most of the loco building site remained open for so long)

In terms of the Southern, there's currently a question over whether they should replace third rail with OLE. This is far from proven, even with the network at capacity, so you can imagine that in the 40's and 50's there would have been absolutely no justification whatsoever to go to the expense of moving away from the third rail system established by the Southern Railway.

Traction aside, after the first batches of EPB' s which were built with Bullied design bodywork, the Southern Region built it's MU's with standard BR designs of bodywork, so it's hard to see how they could have done anything strategically more sensible at the time.

 

[coppercapped]

Oh, I can't agree with that. The railways had a motley collection of largely clapped-out traction. New and standardised locomotives were needed, diesel traction was not well established at the time, diesel locomotives cost about three times as much as steam if not more, and there was considerable uncertainty over how long it would take to be brought in and also to what extent vice electrification. To meet the immediate and urgent need it made sense to use the established and cheap technology for which all the infrastructure and skills were already there.

What should never have been built in the first place was the motley collection of largely clapped-out-from-the-word-go diesels that resulted from the rush into dieselisation after those in charge had somehow got the idea that it was a magical solution to everything when it was still an experimental technology. They should have stuck with the original, sensible idea of buying 10 of each of a variety of designs and then waiting to see if they were any good or not before deciding which ones to go for. Instead they rushed hundreds of untested experiments into full service and hoped they wouldn't blow up, which was just dumb.

Thank you for reading my post and your reply. To some extent we seem to be talking at cross purposes so I’ll try rewording it and adding some extra information!

You claim that BR had to build standardised steam locomotives after the war. I agree with you that some locos had to be built for a few years after the end of the war to replace the worst of the stock in poor condition, but after that the numbers should have been minimal; there was no justification for the ‘Standard’ designs. Locos that were scrapped after a life of only ten years or less should never have been built in the first place.

The main point I was making was that between January 1948 and 1955 the BTC and the Railway Executive did not work out was it was there for and all the later problems flow from that omission. I quoted G. F. Fiennes in my first post. It bears repeating because he identified the core of the problem:

'It is one of the disasters about British Railways that in the years between 1947 and 1955 no one had done the basic work on what we were there for at all; what traffic should be carried by what methods in what quantities, where from and to, at what rates. The upshot was that the Modernisation Plan produced in 1953-55 with the support of the Government to the extent of £1,500 million was little more than a change from steam traction plus host of mouldering schemes which the B.T.C. and the Regions had found after a hurried search of their pigeon holes. We had made the basic error of buying our tools before doing our homework on defining the job.’

The RE built 2537 steam locomotives between 1948 and 1960, 1518 to designs of ‘The Big Four’ and 999 ‘BR Standard’ designs. (Source: Johnson and Long, ‘British Railways Engineering 1948-80’, published by Mechanical Engineering Publications Ltd., 1981. ISBN 0 85298 446 4). If the BTC and the RE had done their homework properly and worked out what it was there for before building the locomotives, the numbers built would have been smaller. As it was 2 ‘Standards’ were built for every 3 ‘Big 4’ designs. The ‘Standards’ were a complete waste of money - in most cases they were simply prior designs but with new tooling and details. The Class 5 was basically a rework of Stanier’s ‘Black 5’; the Class 4 2-6-4T was essentially a tweak of Stanier’s 2-6-4T of 1934. And why on earth were there both tender and tank versions of the little Class 2, 3 and 4s? The ‘Britannias’ once they had the problems with the axles sorted out (after 120 years of locomotive development - how did that happen?) were seen to be no more efficient than a rebuilt ‘Royal Scot’.

Had the BTC run the railways by burning five pound notes in the grate of pre-war locomotives they could hardly have wasted more money.

For the essential replacement locomotives to be built just after the war only the regional Grouping designs should have been built. There would have then been no need to complicate holdings of spare parts by adding another set to the stores - there were only 999 ‘Standards’ but there were over 20,000 locomotives on the stock list. There was much less inter-regional traffic then as now so having ‘Standard’ locomotives brought no great advantages - the ‘Big 4’ had worked out ways to handle the issues and for the next few years the solutions they used would have been satisfactory.

There had been huge developments in internal combustion engines and control systems during the war; the drawing office staffs would have been much better employed in improving Ivatt’s 10000 and 10001 and building small series of Mk2 and Mk3 versions and continuing the development of the seminal intercity railcars built by the GWR and used on the Cardiff-Birmingham route just before the war. Instead they worked on steam locomotives with the result that main line diesel and electric traction development effectively stopped. BR’s Modernisation Plan foresaw the building of the ‘Pilot Scheme’ diesels - the point one I am trying to make is that this ‘Pilot Scheme’ should have happened 10 years earlier. Diesels were not untested technology, by 1949 in the USA nearly half the passenger and shunting work and one third of the freight traffic were covered by diesel-electric traction (Johnson and Bond, ibid).

The cost arguments made by Riddles et al for steam were simplistic, but as you refer to them it seems that they are still accepted. My point that they were incomplete and not fit for purpose. I reiterate:

The cost comparisons (made by the Harrington Committee) were for built cost only - no effort was made to relate operating costs to different manning levels or higher levels of utilisation of diesel traction or identify operating costs per ton-mile or per passenger-mile.

The calculations made would have been rejected out of hand if BR were a private company - the design team knew to a penny how much it cost to build and overhaul its locomotives in the workshops but it did not have a clue how much the locomotive earned in service or how much it cost to operate or to maintain in the running sheds and - what is even more damning - it never tried to find out.

I’ll repeat - the big missed opportunity in the late 1940s and early 1950s was not to have addressed the issues of the methods of operation of the railway and to introduce more economic, productive and labour efficient methods whilst at the same time improving the service to the customer. Gerry Fiennes made significant advances with the Shenfield electrics and the 1952 'Britannia' timetable between London and Norwich - but at the time he was too junior to have a wider ranging influence. Nobody looked at the timetables as a whole to see whether trains ran when people needed them, or to the places they needed to get to - the train service was patchwork which had grown up over the last century and really needed a dusting. The only railway which had really embraced the future was the Southern with its clock face timetable, intensive services and high stock utilisation starting with the electrification of the Brighton line in the mid-1930s.

If the Railway Executive had grasped the future, instead of hanging on to the past, then the whole history of BR would have been considerably different. In all probability there would have been no need for a ‘Modernisation Plan’, or its immediate consequence the ‘Re-shaping of British Railways’ report, as change would have happened in a controlled manner over a longer period. This means that the examples you quote of North British Loco’s suicide and the Western’s diesel hydraulics would, in all likelihood, not have happened[1]. However the fact that these stories exist was a direct result of the Modernisation Plan rushing to catch up in five years what should have happened over fifteen.


[1] At the time there were strong arguments in favour of what were then called ‘quick running’ engines coupled with light weight body construction and transmissions so properly developed hydraulics could have had a longer life.

 

[Pigeon]

I think I am clearer as to what you're getting at, but I still don't see the Pilot Scheme having happened 10 years earlier. One thing I left out was fuel availability. Light oil was expensive (cf. petrol rationing until 1955). One reason the GWR were interested in gas turbines was to burn heavy oil, which was much cheaper. This was also what they used for their oil-fired steam experiment - which was sort of semi-forced on them by the immediate post-war coal shortage and the government earmarking Welsh coal for export only. But once the NCB started to get into gear sorting out the clapped-out collieries the coal shortage was sorted, whereas the oil shortage went on for much longer. The government lost interest in oil and went back to backing coal, and the oil-fired steam locos were converted back to coal after only a year or so burning oil, both because oil was now more expensive than coal and because the maintenance costs of the oil-burners were greater (the higher temperature of the oil flame, and the speed with which it can be turned up and down, gave the firebox and boiler a much harder time from thermal stresses than coal).

Presumably the ETH on a diesel-electric just takes a feed off the generator (or alternator) that's there already, so rather easier than on a hydraulic where room has to be found for a largeish component. This may mean that the writing was on the wall for the hydraulics as soon as BR adopted air-conditioning in around 1970. Which I would have thought a long-sighted management would have anticipated happening a few years earlier, or were they thinking of steam-powered aircon?

ETH can be tapped off the main generator, but on most ETH-fitted classes it isn't, because of difficulties with regulation and the like (AIUI the ETH 31s do tap it off the main generator, and more or less let regulation go hang, but most installations are a bit better than that). The ETH conversion on the 45s for instance involved removing the original auxiliary generator and replacing it with a much larger one capable of providing both ETH and locomotive auxiliary supply, together with the associated regulating equipment in place of the original steam heat boiler equipment. Other locos have separate main, auxiliary and ETH generators.

The mechanical layout problem is much simpler on a DE because the generators are (semi)rigidly coupled directly to the engine's output flange, and the system is basically a compact cylindrical lump sticking out of one end of the engine; fitting a bigger/extra generator for ETH simply means finding room for a slightly longer lump. The typical arrangement on a hydraulic was to have a short cardan shaft connecting the engine output flange to the input flange on the transmission, and a further cardan shaft taking drive from an auxiliary output flange on the transmission to an electrical machine which did double duty as auxiliary generator and starter motor. With the auxiliary output being on the cab end of the transmission, the dynastarter ended up crammed in with the equipment cupboards behind the cab, or, even worse, under the cab floor. A replacement machine capable of supplying ETH would have needed to be much larger to handle the power, and siting it would have required an extensive rebuild.

I don't really know to what extent the introduction of aircon was foreseen and planned. I have a vague idea that its development was forced by safety concerns about opening windows when the HST was on the drawing board, and this being about the same time as the Mk2ds were being made it was introduced into them at least partly for proving purposes. I certainly think that without the HST we'd not have seen it until much later, since in the British climate there's not much call for it most of the time.

Steam powered aircon isn't actually a completely daft idea You could have an absorption-cycle cooler unit, and an ejector to circulate the air. No moving parts, either, so it should be highly reliable. I haven't done the sums on how bad the steam consumption would be, but I would hazard a guess that it wouldn't be as bad as all that.

 

[coppercapped]

I think I am clearer as to what you're getting at, but I still don't see the Pilot Scheme having happened 10 years earlier. One thing I left out was fuel availability. Light oil was expensive (cf. petrol rationing until 1955). One reason the GWR were interested in gas turbines was to burn heavy oil, which was much cheaper. This was also what they used for their oil-fired steam experiment - which was sort of semi-forced on them by the immediate post-war coal shortage and the government earmarking Welsh coal for export only. But once the NCB started to get into gear sorting out the clapped-out collieries the coal shortage was sorted, whereas the oil shortage went on for much longer. The government lost interest in oil and went back to backing coal, and the oil-fired steam locos were converted back to coal after only a year or so burning oil, both because oil was now more expensive than coal and because the maintenance costs of the oil-burners were greater (the higher temperature of the oil flame, and the speed with which it can be turned up and down, gave the firebox and boiler a much harder time from thermal stresses than coal).

There does seem to be a confusion as the availability of the different fuels after the war. I think several events have been conflated which give the impression of extended rationing.

From July 1942 onwards no petrol was available to the general public for personal use, only ‘official’ uses being permitted. Rationed quantities became available again in June 1945 immediately after the end of the war in Europe. The winter of 1946-47 was long and cold - coal stocks froze and became unusable, there were resultant power cuts and blackouts; potato stocks rotted and potato rationing started which had not happened during the war. In 1947 there was a strike of transport and dock workers which meant that petrol was again no longer available to civilian users.

Petrol became available again in 1948 on ration; rationing finally ended in 1950, not 1955. This last date may have been confused with later rationing which was briefly re-introduced as a result of the Suez crisis in 1956 but lifted by mid-1957.

Into this mix of bad weather and the troubles in re-jigging an economy that had been set almost completely on a war footing were the issues of coal and oil supplies to the railways. The railways used large quantities of coal because of the low thermal efficiency of the steam locomotive - a 1952 report by the Federation of British Industries put this as low as 4% overall - with the result that the British railways burnt 14 million tons of coal each year. Because of problems with the quality, quantity and price of coal at the end of the war, in 1946 the GWR converted ten 28XXs, one Hall and one Castle to burn the very viscous Bunker C oil and planned the conversion of some more. At this point the Ministry of Fuel and Power got to hear of the proposal and planned on extending the programme to cover 1,229 locos over the whole country with the intention of saving 1 million tons of coal a year and diverting this to industry. However the Ministry also hadn’t done its homework and hadn’t asked the Treasury if dollars were available to import the oil in the quantities required. They weren’t and all the GWR’s locos were converted back to coal by April 1950.

Of the two gas turbines, only the Brown Boveri machine was intended to use Bunker C oil, the Metropolitan Vickers machine was designed from the outset to use paraffin or gas oil, i.e., diesel.

There never was a significant shortage of oil fuel in the country after the war, especially not for the small quantities which would have been needed for the early series of main line diesel locomotives which I maintain should have been developed. These would have first been available in small numbers from 1949 onwards so the timescales with fuel supplies are compatible.

In any event it was much more efficient, by a factor of nearly 10, to burn oil in a diesel engine rather than in the firebox of a converted steam locomotive.

 

[edwin_m]

I don't really know to what extent the introduction of aircon was foreseen and planned. I have a vague idea that its development was forced by safety concerns about opening windows when the HST was on the drawing board, and this being about the same time as the Mk2ds were being made it was introduced into them at least partly for proving purposes. I certainly think that without the HST we'd not have seen it until much later, since in the British climate there's not much call for it most of the time.

Steam powered aircon isn't actually a completely daft idea You could have an absorption-cycle cooler unit, and an ejector to circulate the air. No moving parts, either, so it should be highly reliable. I haven't done the sums on how bad the steam consumption would be, but I would hazard a guess that it wouldn't be as bad as all that.

The Pullmans both MU and loco-hauled were air-conditioned in the mid-60s and the Mk2c series was built soon after with provision for retrofitting but never actually fitted. The main reason to go to aircon from Mk2d onwards was probably noise - pretty obvious to anyone using one of the new 100mph services in summer.

This was, of course, a few years too late for the Westerns. However I think it would be evident that if you're building a fleet for steam replacement there soon won't be any steam locos on your prime services, and it was already known that steam boilers on diesels were unreliable. Also a sizeable part of the network was worked by electric locos with no steam heat capability, with more electrification expected (which didn't happen of course). So I think it was pretty short-sighted not to consider ETH as a likely requirement for all passenger locos including the Westerns - didn't some class 47s have it from new?

 

[Pigeon]

Thanks to both for the additional information, in the light of which I do now pretty much agree.

Class 47s: yes, and on checking I am surprised to find that it was not the later ones as I had thought, but the first 20. The rest were built without ETH and in some cases converted later. Which is rather odd.

 

[341o2]

Certainly not, very interesting post. I had felt that the fundamental problems were the decision to build the BR standard classes with no preparation for dieselisation and the failure to analyse what the railway should be doing in the modern world, but it is fascinating to read the details about how this happened.

I'm also in full agreement, especially the last 2 paragraphs and cite the class 14 "teddy bears" built for freight soon to be withdrawn. With no work they were soon withdrawn as well and readily found new homes with the likes of the NCB

 

[edwin_m]

Class 47s: yes, and on checking I am surprised to find that it was not the later ones as I had thought, but the first 20. The rest were built without ETH and in some cases converted later. Which is rather odd.

Yes that rings a bell now you mention it. Some kind of pilot scheme? These became 47401-420 which along with the Deltics couldn't work the ETH on certain coaching fleets, which suggests an early and non-standard installation.

 

[ChiefPlanner]

Without going into tedious detail about the rights and wrongs of steam versus diesel or kinds of classes introduced.

There must have been something seriously wrong when new BR standards flooded into say Mid Wales to run existing services , in the same timetable , with existing pre- war stock when the real exam question was "what does the railway need to do , to meet the new British economy post 1945. Fiennes was a genius - did a very good job on the Anglia area with the Shenfield and main line TT, good effort on local trains - abnd a fair crack at knocking out marshalling yards which were desired , but met no real purpose in a rapidly changing world with liberalised motor transport.

But then - look who ran the early BR ? - a load of superannuated military bods - whereas the pre war companies had good commercial managers who strove hard on limited funds for a better railway. Post war - the cash was largely wasted.