Fire and Steam (38 page)

The LNER, the second largest of the Big Four, was another mishmash, incorporating the three railways that made up the East Coast Main Line (Great Northern, North Eastern and North British), and also bringing together the disparate three lines that went into London and which, ironically, had been refused permission to amalgamate five years before the war: the Great Northern, the southern end of that East Coast line, was principally a main line railway that did not serve its London suburbs well; the Great Eastern, with its monopoly of East Anglia and covering that swathe of suburbs in north-east London which it had helped create; and the relatively new Great Central, a railway without a clear purpose. The LNER's inaugural chairman was William Whitelaw, who had gained prominence in Scotland as chairman of the North British railway and was the grandfather of the politician of the same name under Mrs Thatcher. Whitelaw's policy was far more liberal than that of the LMS, encouraging the various railways to retain their own identity in a loose federation. The overall ethos was to retain existing policies rather than go for standardization, providing they were
not detrimental to the overall interests of the company (in sharp contrast to the autocratic rule from the centre of the LMS). The LNER, with its strong network in the northern heartlands, was essentially a freight railway. In 1924, 61 per cent of its receipts came from freight, compared with 58 per cent and 56 per cent respectively on the LMS and Great Western; the Southern, with its strong commuter base, earned barely a quarter of its revenue from carrying goods.

Given the decline in freight, particularly from the heavy industries of the north, the LNER always struggled financially, and was much the weakest of the four. Out of necessity, then, the LNER was more entrepreneurial than the LMS, making much play of its fast trains such as the
Flying Scotsman
and creating popular specials such as the ‘Garden Cities and Cambridge Buffet Expresses', known rather more prosaically by Cambridge students as ‘Beer Trains'. They linked King's Cross with the two garden cities, Letchworth and Welwyn, as well as Cambridge, affording plenty of drinking opportunities for the undergraduates at a time when pub opening hours were short and fixed. Even the hotels on these two big railways differed in character and style. According to Michael Bonavia, with a few exceptions, the LNER hotel ‘tended to be less pretentious but to offer more solid bourgeois comfort and perhaps a friendlier atmosphere'.
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Given that the Great Western consisted of the eponymous pre-war company with a few, largely Welsh, additions, it had little difficulty in maintaining its image and its traditions. The Great Western also had the advantage of having by far the best engines, designed by George Churchward, the engineer who had built the 100 mph
City of Truro.
His ‘Star' and ‘Saint' classes, introduced before the war, were years ahead of any of their rivals and the ‘Star' derivatives, the ‘Kings' and ‘Castles' built by his successors in the mid-1920s, were made to far higher standards of workmanship than their equivalents on other railways and survived until the end of the steam era. Consequently, the Great Western recovered its pre-war timetable much more rapidly than the others and by 1925 was running faster and more frequent expresses than in 1914. The company not only had a highly stable workforce and a paternally minded management – which had both advantages (good welfare funds) and disadvantages (relatively low wages) for the workforce – but
between amalgamation and nationalization there were only two general managers, Sir Felix Pole for the first six years and then Sir James Milne. All of this was good for profits too, and the company paid healthy dividends of 7–8 per cent throughout most of the 1920s and not all the profits were disbursed to shareholders. The Great Western invested heavily in station refurbishment and was the pioneer in terms of safety, having developed an automatic warning system that alerted drivers to a red signal ahead. The initial version, Automatic Train Control, first introduced on some important signals in 1906, used a system of magnets to alert the footplate crew with a siren and, from 1912, to apply the brakes automatically as well, unless the driver cancelled it. The Great Western was the only one of the four railways to fit this safety device, which, although not installed throughout its network, must have saved countless lives. Yet amazingly, its successor, the Automatic Warning System and its more sophisticated offshoot, the Train Protection and Warning System (TPWS), were not made mandatory on the British rail network until after the Southall accident of 1997.

The Southern was a completely different animal from the other three because of its dependence on the suburban commuter traffic – its lifeblood. It was blessed, too, by having the most illustrious and competent railwayman of the age at its head, Sir Herbert Walker, who set about melding its three main constituents into one railway and, crucially, speeding up the electrification programme which proved to be by far the cheapest and most efficient form of traction for a railway that ran high-frequency services on short routes. Walker was a tall imposing figure, with the type of powerful presence that ensured colleagues would leap to their feet as soon as he entered the room, but he lacked the common touch of some of his peers who were able to talk to managers and footplatemen alike. Nevertheless, he was the outstanding figure of the railways during the inter-war period.

The task of blending the three sections of the Southern into a coherent railway was made easier by the fact that they had blunted their competitive instincts and had moved more towards cooperation during the run-up to the war. The Southern rejoiced in having a shiny new station, too, the vast Waterloo, which had taken twenty-two years to build, replacing the ramshackle mess that had built up over the years. It
was opened finally by the King and Queen in March 1922, boasting twenty-one platforms, its own telephone exchange and no fewer than 240 synchronized clocks.

While the three Southern railways knew each other well, their operating methods and styles were different, and old jealousies and rivalries persisted; for example, it took a year to open up passageways between the Brighton and South Eastern sides of Victoria station, and half a decade for similar improvements to be made at London Bridge. At first, the three general managers were supposed to run the new unified outfit jointly, but that was clearly unworkable. Walker, by far the most gifted as well as the youngest, assumed control as general manager in 1924, and over the next thirteen years was responsible for steering through the electrification programme.

Like today, the railways of the Southern were always in the spotlight, rarely in the limelight. The suburban services were used by the great and good, the bowler-hatted commuters from the leafy villages of Surrey and Kent, and the prosperous suburbs of outer London, and they knew how to make a fuss when things went wrong. While there had been carping coverage of the Southern's predecessors in the press, a particularly vehement campaign was launched in the latter part of 1924 as a result of a series of obscure timetable changes designed to reduce wasteful competition between London and Portsmouth. Places that suffered a reduced frequency in service, such as Chichester and Arundel, might have had few inhabitants, but they included a duke and a bishop, both of whom protested loudly. The outcry increased in intensity during the winter, and every little breakdown – a hot axle box here, a signal failure there – seemed to find itself highlighted in the newspapers. As Hamilton Ellis put it eloquently, ‘hitherto patient season-ticket holders began to bay at the winter moon of their discontent'.
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There were indeed grounds for genuine complaint. Many of the old Brighton & South Coast and South Eastern carriages were shabby and decrepit, and the little tank engines used on these services were constantly breaking down as any available money was channelled away from routine maintenance of near-redundant stock towards the electrification programme. There was, too, the equivalent of the famous ‘wrong kind of snow' incident that was to plague the railways for much
of the 1990s: a train full of returning Orpington commuters was mistakenly routed on a different line and the furious passengers could only be brought back home after a long detour through Tonbridge. The subsequent cartoon in
Punch
, the
Private Eye
of its day, captioned ‘the train that took the wrong turning', brought universal derision on the railway.

Walker responded in a novel way by employing a public relations officer to combat the newspaper campaign. The fellow who was appointed to this groundbreaking role, John Blumenfeld Elliott, the son of the illustrious Edwardian journalist, R. D. Blumenfeld, later claimed to have invented the very name of the job, PRO, and set about countering the newspaper stories by writing articles in space bought in the newspapers. The very fact that the Southern's reputation was so bad at the outset meant things could not get much worse and Elliott exploited this. An advertisement headed ‘The truth about the Southern' was the first counterblast and reminded readers of the important role of the railway in transporting troops to and from the recent war, and how this overuse had contributed to the wear and tear of the fabric of the railways. That article was followed by a series of factual, well-written accounts of what the Southern was doing in terms of improving the track, electrifying lines and increasing services. Amazingly, Elliott's counter-attack, backed strongly by Walker, had the desired effect and the Southern's reputation was turned around, helped by the rapid progress of the electrification scheme.

There is no doubt that the electrification programme was the most notable achievement of the railways during this period, resulting in the creation of the biggest electrified suburban railway in the world, stretching far beyond the suburbs of London. First, however, the debate over what system was to be adopted had to be resolved. The London, Brighton & South Coast had begun to electrify its suburban lines using an overhead system
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while the London & South Western had been persuaded by Walker to adopt a third-rail system for its early electrification projects covering its Shepperton and Hampton Court lines. There were pros and cons for both methods: the overhead system offered extra power, useful for a long route such as the line to Brighton, and its electrical sub-stations could be spaced more widely apart.
Crucially, too, there was no risk of electrocuting unfortunate maintenance workers who stumbled on the track or of the conductor rail icing up, breaking the contact, a frequent occurrence on the third-rail system in icy wet weather. On the other hand, installing gantries for the catenary (the overhead wire) was expensive and necessitated moving some signals as their visibility was obscured.
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Moreover, parts of the South Eastern had been built so economically that the tunnels and road bridges did not have sufficient headroom to accommodate overhead wiring. The third-rail system therefore had the advantage that it could be applied throughout the Southern Railway and, since it was also cheaper and simpler to fit, Walker adopted it. Despite its problems, the system survives today to the bemusement of many commuters who have travelled on the Continent where overhead electrification is the norm.

Cleverly, as a further way of reducing the overall cost, Walker devised a rolling programme so that there was a continuous flow of work for the team installing the system. Thus, for example, Waterloo to Guildford and Dorking, and Victoria to Orpington and Crystal Palace were electrified in 1925 and the following year several lines of the South Eastern such as North Kent, Bexleyheath and Dartford ensued. By 1930 Gravesend and Windsor were reached and three years later, the first major main line, London to Brighton, got its third rail, replacing the old overhead system that had been installed on the suburban section of the route.

Walker was now extending electrification far beyond the London commuter lines, reckoning that the increase in traffic and the savings in costs justified the policy. Before Walker retired, routes from London to Eastbourne and Hastings and both lines to Portsmouth were electrified. The policy proved to be an undoubted success, contributing greatly to the profitability of the Southern railway and, indeed, stimulating the development of many suburbs and outlying villages where a fast and frequent train service ensured that commuting into the capital was bearable. Moreover, electrification allowed for much faster acceleration and braking, which meant that capacity on the railway could be greatly increased and trains could call at more stops within the same timetable. Walker exploited the advantages of electrification by providing more frequent services and it paid off. There was a ‘sparks effect' on every route that was electrified, with passenger numbers increasing, ensuring
that the company's board was happy to see the programme continue. Walker ‘made suburbs of Chatham, Brighton, Portsmouth and Alton, with two or three trains up to London every hour of the day'.
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In another far-sighted measure, Walker's policy was to standardize running times outside peak hours on the clockface principle, with longdistance trains leaving London on the hour, and others departing at regular intervals at the same minutes past the hour during the day. In 1934, according to Walker, the electric services ran two and a half times more frequently than the steam trains they had displaced and annual takings on these lines were £6.2m compared with £4.4m with little increase in overall operating costs.
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In fact, Walker probably made a mistake by choosing the third-rail technology for the longer-distance routes, but had he not done so the railway would have faced the extra costs and inflexibility of having two (or possibly more) different systems. As it is, virtually all later electrification schemes on Britain's railways used overhead catenary but that was partly because technological developments reduced the cost.

Walker's judgement was not always right, but his mistakes were generally forced on him by the constant need for penny-pinching due to the lack of resources. The condition of the coaches in which passengers travelled was a case in point. As an economy measure, many of the electrified carriages were simply old pre-war stock converted by fixing them on to bogies with electric motors, which was far from ideal. Walker favoured the old compartment stock without corridors for the suburban journeys because this speeded up boarding, even though the carriages were uncomfortable for standing passengers forced to squeeze between the two sets of knees of those lucky enough to have grabbed the seats. Special compartments were provided for women who could not face such close contact with the opposite sex and, later, trains which were open-plan but still had doors at every bay for quick entry and exit were introduced.