14 saturday review Saturday June 11 2022 | the timesChristian Wolmar points out in his pas-
sionate defence of the much maligned BR
that neither cliché was true. In the early
days sandwiches could indeed be found
wilting under a glass dome in a station café,
but BR had brought in chefs such as Clem-
ent Freud and Prue Leith, and pioneered
fresh shrink-wrapped sandwiches. And no
executive uttered the laughable phrase
about the snow: it was a BBC interviewer
who put the idea to a hapless BR executive
explaining why powdery snow had caused
delays during a cold snap in 1991. The dam-
age was done. BR was privatised under
John Major’s government, the state-owned
company finally being dissolved in 1997.
Even now, when the costs and fragmen-
tation of the privatised network have
become obvious even to the Department
of Transport, the government is reluctant
to admit that Great British Railways, as its
proposed state-owned network will be
called, may have echoes of BR.
Perhaps no industry has had to undergo
such radical change as Britain’s Victorian-
era railways. In 1948, when Labour nation-
alised the worn-out and bankrupt “big
four” rail companies (LNER, LMS, Great
Western and Southern), the system com-
prised almost 20,000 miles of track. In the
following decades, it was ruthlessly pared
back to 10,000 miles and the workforce of
640,000 cut to 109,000 (shedding 10,000
staff every year of BR’s history). This pain-
ful change, Wolmar argues, ensured that
by the 1990s BR was one of the most effi-
cient systems in Europe, with lower subsi-
dies than France, Germany or Italy.
It began badly. The government had dif-
ficulties in binding together fiercely inde-
pendent regions; there was a huge variety
of clapped-out steam engines; there were
stations that hadn’t been painted for years;
and stroppy unions were always ready to
go on strike. The 1955 modernisation plan,
which cost a staggering £1.24 million
(about £35 billion in today’s money), was a
wrong turn: it stuck to steam instead of
opting for electrification. The argument
was that Britain had plenty of coal, oil for
diesels was expensive and electrifying a
huge network would be impossible.
However, steam was dirty, slow and
costly. In 1950 engine sheds needed clean-
ers, coalmen, fire-droppers, steamraisers,locomotive shunters, cranemen, shedmen,
storekeepers, timekeepers, pumping staff
and water-softening plant attendants —
an army of 18,000 men and boys, all made
redundant less than two decades later.
Bureaucracy and energy wasted on
crackpot ideas, including £40 million to be
spent on helicopter terminals at stations,
ensured that little progress was made. The
modernisation programme didn’t address
the size of a network: a third of it carried
just 1 per cent of passengers and 1 per cent
of freight. With 96 per cent of passengers
using just half the lines, the antiquated
tank engines trundling along branch lines
were mostly carrying fresh air.
No one had any idea how to compete
with the new motorways and booming
car ownership. No one stood up to Ernest
Marples, the fiercely anti-rail transport
minister and pin-up of the Macmillan gov-
ernment. No one knew about marketing:
one manager told Wolmar it had beenseen as “fluff around an elephant’s arse”.
BR did eventually sharpen its marketing in
1977 with a successful TV advertising cam-
paign — “This is the age of the train” —
fronted by Jimmy Savile. In retrospect, not
the best choice.
In despair at the rising deficits, Macmil-
lan drafted in an outsider, the notorious Dr
Richard Beeching. This formidable execu-
tive from the chemical industry, hired at a
huge salary, knew what had to be done and
did it. In a flawed but startling survey over
one week, he identified dozens of lines that
lost millions. After his devastating report
in 1963, almost all were eventually axed.
He pronounced the death of steam — the
last train ran in 1968, only eight years after
the last steam engine, Evening Star, came
out of the Swindon workshop.
Wolmar doesn’t see Beeching as the hate
figure he has become to nostalgics and
steam buffs. Although more than 500
miles have since been reopened and heri-
tage railways have boomed, Wolmar ar-gues cuts were inevitable given the deficits.
Beeching also had the right idea about
faster journeys and luxury coaches to
attract business travellers. He also saw the
importance of creating a modern image:
British Railways became British Rail and
the new double arrow logo knitted the
network together. After him, governments
accepted that loss-making rural lines
would always need a subsidy.
With the fluency of a long-time rail
expert, Wolmar is writing neither for nerds
nor for anoraks, but to show that BR, in the
end, made a good fist of running a railway
on commercial lines. He has his heroes —
Robert Reid, an astute BR chairman from
1983-90, and Chris Green, one of the new
graduate railway trainees and head, suc-
cessively, of ScotRail, Network SouthEast
and InterCity.
He has his villains, especially those who
broke up the system for political reasons.
He understands the romance of the Rail-
way Children image — the quaint country
stations and triumphant Victorian via-
ducts — but shows it could not last. Under
BR railways got faster, leaner and safer. In
1949, 209 railway workers were killed on
duty; by privatisation there were only a
handful and crashes were rare.
Wolmar hates privatisation and says
nothing about the influx of money, the
doubling of passenger numbers and the
innovations of smart operators. All these
were benefits. Yet his criticism of fragmen-
tation is correct and echoed by most rail-
waymen. Safety was neglected — as the
investigations into several big rail crashes
made clear. An army of lawyers, at huge
cost, was needed to apportion blame
between the operators and the state-
owned Railtrack for delays or cancella-
tions. Engineering skills have been lost
and instead of decreasing, the subsidies
needed on several routes rose enormously.
The failures of the privatised system
have become ever more apparent as com-
panies that overbid to secure franchises
later went bust. And the collapse of rail op-
erators’ incomes during the pandemic has
hastened along the plans for Great British
Railways, a near reversal of privatisation.
As commuters endure a new wave of rail
strikes, perhaps we’ll even feel nostalgic
for those curling BR sandwiches.The author doesn’t
see Dr Beeching as
the hate figure he has
become to steam buffs
T
wo things dominated the public
image of British Rail: curly-
ended stale sandwiches and the
“wrong kind of snow”. Despite
the introduction of high-speed
trains, intercity services and the refurbish-
ing of stations, British Rail (BR) never
recovered from the clichés. They were
trotted out every time Tory politicians
banged the drum for privatisation, ammu-
nition in a long ideological campaign
against one of Britain’s last nationalised
industries.books
Why we should bring back British Rail
Forget the curly
sandwiches — BR was
one of Europe’s most
efficient rail systems,
says Michael Binyon
British Rail
A New History
by Christian WolmarMichael Joseph,
416pp; £30