To quote a previous post of yours:
You seem to be having difficulty making up your mind whether technical competence and development had a bearing on the success of the railway at during the period in question.
I'll help you out. It is absolutely about technical successes. Technical successes are important in their own right, but you don't get multiple technical successes without managerial competence.
Between 1947 and 1962, the Southern Region achieved:
- The complete replacement of life expired wooden bodied suburban stock with modern steel bodied units, including the 10 car train schemein the South East
- The electrification of the whole of Kent, including new rolling stock, re-signalling, remodelling of stations and layouts
- Successful long term cliff stabilisation in the Warren Halt area
- An innovative diesel electric traction solution which enabled the modernisation of the main line London - Hastings line
- Using diesel electric traction to modernise and rejuvenate secondary routes throughout the region including routes around Oxted and those in Hampshire
The point you are unable to grasp, is that the above list of achievements could not have been achieved without competent management that knew its railway and knew how to develop its market. This occurred because the professionals of the Southern Railway remained in place. Whether some unified transport strategy, dreamt up by the BTC succeeded or not is peripheral to this.
As to your somewhat deterministic view of history, yes, if the common carrier obligation had been got rid of at the time of Nationalisation, maybe we wouldn't have had the Stedeford committee. Maybe we would have. Perhaps Marples would still have decided that the network was costing too much and would have convened the committee anyway. Similarly, perhaps if the CCO had been removed at the time of the big four's square deal campaign, we might not have had nationalisation. Perhaps if an earlier (than Marples) conservative Government had removed it at the time of the modernisation plan British Railways might have been able to focus its resources more wisely. You cannot lay the entire responsibility for the CCO at the door of the Attlee Government.
The Stedeford Committee and Beeching were arguably as much a reaction against the perceived profligacy of the modernisation plan as they were to Attlee, yet as I've illustrated above, the lions share of the modernisation monies went on perfectly sensible and necessary investments that stood the railway in good stead and as for the Marshalling yards and unnecessary freight locos, if the CCO had been removed at the time of the modernisation plan, its funds wouldn't have been spent on those things anyway.
With regard to the Marshall aid money, yes, some should have been made available to the railway earlier on but since you don't believe the railways were properly managed in the first place, its hard to see how that would have made a difference according to your theory anyway. And lets face it, the Attlee Government wasn't the only one in the late twentieth century to be parsimonious with railway investment. Let us not forget that the Major Government launched its privatisation bill with the express aim of replacing public subsidy and investment.
--- old post above --- --- new post below ---
You might have a point with this, you might not. The railways might still have fallen out of favour in comparison with the car. It seems that these particular skills were lacking long before Attlee or nationalisation, so one can hardly lay the blame entirely at either.
By a similar token, secondary lines continued to close long after such developments as you've outlined above had become established, so maybe it wouldn't have made that much of a difference afterall.
There is a big difference between the Direction of an organisation and the Management of it. The things you have described are tasks of management; I have been writing about direction. This is why I have been concentrating on the legal and economic framework within which the railways had to function in the years after the Second World War. Management and Direction are very different but they are complementary - competent management, such as you describe, cannot counteract the malign effects of incompetent direction and the best direction needs competent managers to implement the decisions effectively.
BRs early Directors, the Railway Executive, did not understand that the world had changed dramatically from that of 1939. In this they were not alone, the 1947 Transport Act essentially simply changed the ownership of the railways but left everything else unchanged.
At the end of the War there were serious labour shortages, some 350,000 men had been killed - they were all fit and most of them were young. The
Empire Windrush arrived in 1948 to try to help fill the labour shortage. Wages were increasing, it was becoming increasingly difficult to attract staff to the dirty jobs done during unsocial hours. Yet the RE continued to build motive power and operate train services using labour intensive technologies and methods.
Technology had advanced tremendously during the War. Many, if not all, of those being demobbed had experience of high speed internal combustion engines - all those lorries, jeeps, tanks and aircraft - and electronic communications. And yet the RE continued to build steam engines.
The development and construction of the Standard steam locomotives stands as an example of where the RE got it completely wrong - it was a total waste of engineering and development resources. This is the lost decade in technology to which I referred. At the time BR was created the LMS had built diesel shunters and prototype main line diesels and the Southern had designed some. The GWR had built a series of railcars in the 1930s and ordered some gas turbine main line locomotives. The Southern had electrified significant parts of its network by the time war broke out.
Then it all stopped. BR added diesel shunters to its build programme and picked up railcar development again in 1952. Diesel mainline locomotive development restarted in 1955 with the publication of the Modernisation Plan. By this time the second or third iteration of, for example, the Ivatt designs could have been putting out 2,000 bhp or more with much operational experience behind them.
Road vehicle reliability and capability had increased enormously - yet the basic unit of freight production remained the 10 ton van ambling from siding to siding.
The RE did not look at all these changes and ask itself how the railway should be adapted to compete. The biggest failing of direction was that the traffic studies and analyses that Beeching had done in 1961 should have been done 14 or 15 years earlier. But they werent.
Passenger train service patterns should have be thoroughly examined. One route I knew a bit about, as relatives used to live near Islip, was the Oxford to Cambridge line. Until it was closed the train service was very similar to that operated towards the end of the 19th century - it being operated essentially as two branches which both coincidentally started from Bletchley. The service pattern, the train times and the speeds were no longer suitable - if they ever were. It is not surprising that once the family car offered an alternative the passengers stayed away.
Making the timetable suit the passenger wasnt unknown on the railways, Herbert Walker had introduced with great success clockface timetables on the Southern Electric between the wars and the GWR was moving towards a standard pattern for departures from Paddington. It didnt have to wait for diesel or electric traction, it could have been done with steam as the 1951 London - Norwich timetable showed. This latter was a 'management' initiative, not a result of 'direction'.
The same rigour should have been applied to freight services.
Only when all this had been done could the most suitable equipment have been bought. BR wasted millions in buying hundreds of underpowered Type 1 and Type 2 diesels and building marshalling yards because it still thought the pick-up freight train had a future. The AECs, Atkinsons, Bedfords, Commers, Dennises, Dodges, ERFs, Fodens, Guys, Leylands, Scammells, Seddons and Thornycrofts of 1946 showed that this was never going to be the case any more.
It doesnt require perfect hindsight to see the effects that these lorries would have.
I am not in any way suggesting that the railways would not have suffered loss of traffic in some areas and routes - with the increase in the number and capabilities of cars and lorries on the road this was inevitable. However adopting, for example, the Brighton line model for inter-city services on the great routes from London to the North in 1948 would have had a positive effect on the way the railways were considered by the public and politicians. The service didnt necessarily have to be fast, just increasing the frequency has a similar effect, but it would have set a sign. As the traction and track improved over the next years then the journey times could have been reduced.
But the lamentable failure in direction meant that action wasnt taken. If it had been, and the money that was available more wisely spent, more might have been saved and the changes would have happened over a longer period. The system would have had longer to adapt to the new order - and might have helped shape the new order rather than always reacting to it. And the poisonous long-term effect on relationships with Governments, of all colours, and the Treasury that the waste of much of the Modernisation Plan monies caused would not have occurred.
One point about the Marshall Aid money. In Germany at least, being the country I know most about, the Marshall Aid money was used to set up the
Kreditanstalt für Wiederaufbau, or Reconstruction Credit Agency. Organisations could borrow funds, but the funds had to be paid back. This concentrated the mind wonderfully. It was never the case that Marshall Aid money was simply given away as it was here, it was invested for long term benefit. The
Kreditanstalt für Wiederaufbau still exists doing what it has always done.
