I just know that you are all waiting avidly for Part 3 of my thoughts on the development of the railways in the early post-war period! Having now arrived in northern Germany and thanks to the miracle of the World Wide Web I can post it from here…
In this section I argue that in 1948 the Railway Executive completely missed the opportunity of:
- deciding what is was there to do
- commencing work on building an accounting system to support decision making
- start to match timetables with demand and flows based on the very successful ‘clock face’ timetables introduced by Herbert Walker on the Southern in the 1920s and 1930s
- build on the work already started by the Big Four on diesel traction.
Nothing listed here was new or revolutionary for the time - it had all been done before. Companies and organisations have always needed to know and understand the reason for their existence, what they were good at (and what they were not so good at…), where their income came from and how they could increase it in order to grow and where their costs arose. Only once all these were known could they decide on the tools they needed. In 1967, G. F. Fiennes (then General Manager of the Eastern Region of BR) wrote 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.
This has been quoted before, but it can’t be repeated often enough in threads of this kind as there are always some people who don’t know it!
One can argue that the continued existence of the Common Carrier obligations made the first two points in my list superfluous - but if the RE really had been forward looking it should have been able to have at least some view of the way the world would develop over the next few years and campaigned to have the obligation removed. As it was it assumed that everything would continue as before.
Apart from basic traffic studies of the type carried out by Beeching in 1961, I am arguing that the RE should have started to build ‘Pilot Scheme’ diesels in 1948. If it had done so the frenzied rush to convert to diesel, which started around 1956 as the railways’ finances slid into free-fall and which resulted in the building of large numbers of generally unsatisfactory diesels, could have been avoided. The RE was correct in identifying electrification as being a better source of traction power than steam locomotives and continued the electrifications that the LNER had planned before the war but it should not have ignored diesel traction in the hope of jumping straight from steam to electricity. As it was it lost seven or eight years in the development of diesel traction.
There have been many voices over the years which have argued that such an approach was not possible, for reasons of production capacity; shortages of materials; lack of money; the cost of diesels; that diesel had to be imported; that steam offered fuller employment; that the RE was directed to build steam locomotives and so on and so forth.
All these arguments are bogus and I shall try to demonstrate why.
It is clear that at the end of the Second World War Britain's gold and dollar reserves were almost completely run down thus making it difficult for the Government to pay for the imports it wanted. However, the economy as a whole was in better shape than those of France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, Italy and all of central Europe. There was a flourishing export market to replace goods lost in the war, British industry was not run down but faced the difficult process of shifting from a war economy - almost every single branch of manufacturing industry was involved to a greater or lesser extent in making war goods - to a peacetime one. During the war British industry built 20,000 Spitfires;14,000 Hurricanes over 7,000 Avro Lancasters and 150,000 Rolls Royce Merlins as well as thousands of other aircraft and their engines; battleships; aircraft carriers; submarines; destroyers; frigates; tanks; guns; landing craft; electrical equipment; radar and other electronics and early computers under much more hostile conditions. Between June 1941 and the end of the war Britain shipped 3,000 of those Hurricanes to the USSR together with 4,000 other aircraft, 5,000 tanks, 5,000 anti-tank guns and 15 million pairs of boots.
There was
lots of production capacity available, a part of it suitable for locomotive-sized diesel engines and electrical equipment.
Clearly, in the short term immediately after the War, probably until 1951 or 1952, there was no alternative to building new steam locomotives. Replacements for clapped out and older locomotives were badly needed - so continuation of the Big Four designs was the obvious solution - but probably in smaller numbers than one might think for two reasons. Firstly newer replacements were more capable than the Victorian engines that would have been scrapped earlier if it was not for the war and, secondly, the extra haulage and route capacity required for supporting the invasion of Europe with men and equipment could now be used for other things.
In the event the RE and BTC 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). The ‘Standards’ were a complete waste of money as the engineering, management and drawing office time could have been used to better effect - in most cases they were simply existing designs but with new tooling and details. For the essential replacement locomotives only the Big Four’s designs should have been built. The locomotive exchange trials in April 1948 had shown there was no great difference in performance between the locos of the individual companies so there is no reason why the most modern of each of them could not have continued to have been built for the next five or six years for use in their area. There would then have 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 Four’ had worked out ways to handle the issues and for the next few years the solutions they used would have been satisfactory.
But there was no reason whatsoever for
not building some prototype diesels. As I wrote in my previous post, even the British Transport Commission could see this - and wrote to the Railway Executive to that effect in 1948. 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 developing and improving Ivatt’s 10000 and 10001 and building small series of Mark 2 and Mark 3 versions. The other path that should have been followed at the same time was the continuation of the development of the seminal intercity railcars built by the GWR and successfully used on the Cardiff-Birmingham route just before the war.
I am not suggesting that there should have been wholesale dieselisation in this period, only the manufacture and use of up to a couple of hundred units of 1,600 to 2,000 hp and probably another couple of hundred DMUs. Of these DMUs some would obviously have been used for the more lightly trafficked routes but the GWR’s experience showed there could be good results on the longer distance inter-urban or intercity services. If this path had been followed then by about 1951 or 1952 there would have been enough experience to make considered judgements on the operational cost savings which could be made by the new traction, an idea of the way the markets could have been developed by faster and cleaner traction combined with timetables matched to a world increasingly attuned to the flexibility offered by the motor car.
(The argument has been made that steam traction was necessary as ‘we’ (meaning the Government) could not afford the oil which anyway was in short supply. There was plenty of oil: in 1950 when petrol rationing was abolished there were 1,979,000 cars registered for use on the road, 439,000 goods vehicles and 123,000 buses. Including other vehicles there was a grand total of 3,970,000. There was enough fuel to power all these vehicles - in comparison the quantity needed to power a couple of hundred diesel trains was a drop in the ocean).
There was a short window of opportunity to convince motorists of the benefits of rail travel in the years leading up to the opening of the first motorways by offering more regular interval train services in faster and cleaner trains. The RE and BTC missed it. The result of this was that instead of the railway adapting in a period of full employment in the 1950s when it would have been possible to dramatically reduce staff numbers, and so its cost base, without excessive social upheaval and distress it was caught by surprise. The Modernisation Plan and all the subsequent Re-appraisals and Reshapings were direct consequences of its short-sightedness in 1948 and 1949. If the railway had bitten the bullet in 1948 either these documents would not have been necessary or they would have come in a very different form. Dr. Beeching would have stayed an ICI man all his working life.
This is not to say that all the network would have survived as many of the changes in travel patterns, for example the increase in foreign holidays, would have happened anyway. Almost certainly short, dead-end branch lines in the countryside with no traffic generators at either or both ends would have gone as would some of the duplicate routes. But the key to retaining the more marginal routes and to improve the profitability of the main trunk routes so raising cash for investment would have been to reduce costs as far and as quickly as possible. For this to have been possible and successful the RE would have had to been a very different animal in 1948.
