Fire and Steam (44 page)

One curiosity was the introduction in 1949 of two double-deck trains for Southern Region services to Dartford. The idea has recently attracted the attention of transport ministers keen to find ways to relieve overcrowding but it was not a satisfactory solution. The clearance in tunnels and under bridges is smaller on British tracks than on the Continent and the trains proved too cramped for comfort, despite an ingenious attempt to make more space by putting the upper-level seats below floor level to create a bit of extra headroom. Moreover, the double-decked carriages caused extra delays at crowded stations as passengers – used to trains with doors for every compartment – struggled to get on and off them. Needless to say, the experiment was not extended and the trains were withdrawn in 1971.

British Railways recognized early on that there was a need for a massive modernization programme. Rail managers looked enviously to Europe where renewal was taking place on a large scale with the help of American Marshall Plan money in countries like Holland and France, whose railways had been bombed into oblivion during the final days of
the war. In Britain there were no signs of a similar programme being introduced by the government. It was not only the shortage of materials and skilled labour, but also the want of ambition in those early days of a nationalized industry. BR was struggling so hard to regain pre-war standards of performance and service that there was little attempt to think about the future role of the railways.

Safety continued to be a major concern: in 1952 and 1957 there were two very serious accidents which killed over 200 people between them, both caused by drivers going through signals set at danger. The disaster at Harrow and Wealdstone station, at 8.15 a.m. on 8 October 1952, was the second worst accident ever on Britain's railways after Quintinshill, with a death toll of 112, and Lewisham, five years later, was the third worst, with 90 dead. At Harrow, the driver of an overnight sleeping car train from Perth struck a local train heading south at 60 mph and then a minute later, a northbound express ploughed at full speed into the wreckage, greatly increasing the scale of the disaster. It was never discovered why the Perth train driver, a regular on the route, missed the signal on a clear autumn morning (although he was running late and normally that service would have had an unencumbered run into Euston rather than being slowed by the rush-hour traffic).

At Lewisham in December 1957, fog, that perennial danger on the railways, contributed to the failure of the driver of a streamlined Pacific locomotive hauling a Cannon Street to Ramsgate express to see two successive yellow signals.
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By the time he saw the red, it was too late and his train crashed into the rear of an electric one. The heavy locomotive wrought tremendous damage, bringing down a girder bridge carrying the Nunhead–Lewisham loop line, which collapsed on to the wrecked train. It was fortunate that the driver of a train approaching the bridge spotted its absence just in time to stop his train on the edge of the abyss.

The inspectors in both accidents pointed out that the disasters could have been prevented by the installation of the Automatic Warning System (mentioned in
Chapter 12
). After Harrow, British Railways began a programme to install it throughout the network, although oddly the disaster did not seem to increase the urgency of its
implementation, and it was not made mandatory until very recently.
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There were policy mistakes, too, which damaged BR in those early days. The Railway Executive made a fundamental error in failing to recognize that the steam era was drawing to a close, partly because its members felt that the continuous availability of coal was assured, whereas the steady supply of oil was, at the time, doubtful and had to be paid for in expensive dollars.
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Instead of examining alternative power sources – diesel and electric – BR ran a series of tests called the Locomotive Exchanges, during which the regions were told to accept ‘foreign' locomotives on to their tracks and to pit them against their own to see if any could be used as the models for the rest of the network. The trials, which attracted considerable interest and publicity, were asking the wrong question and inevitably found that no existing design was suitable. Politically, of course, it would have been difficult for BR to have adopted an LMS or Great Western design for universal use on the whole railway since that would have infuriated the other regions. Instead a series of twelve different types of BR locomotives was commissioned, which might have helped create a corporate image but was a waste of scarce resources. David Henshaw, the author of a study on the Beeching cuts, put it wittily: ‘The British Transport Commission had inherited 400 odd [in fact it was 448] classes of steam locomotives and dealt with the problem by producing another 12 standard classes,'
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all of which would be scrapped within a couple of decades.

Precisely 999 of these new BR locomotives were built in the next decade and a half, culminating in
Evening Star
, the last British-built steam engine (apart from a few for export), completed at Swindon in 1960. Astonishingly, that did not stop the various regions from continuing to produce their own established types of steam locomotives simultaneously during the next decade, with a total of 1,500 being completed by 1957. The Western Region, for example, added nearly 300 shunters to its stock in the first five years of nationalization when diesels, which were more expensive to build but cheaper to run, could do the job much better. Nor did such profligacy prevent the Western from boasting, in 1966, that it was the first of the regions to stop using steam traction.

Continuing with such an extensive steam-engine building programme for so long after the war was clearly an expensive mistake, since an earlier move towards diesel and electricity would have saved millions. Yet the lessons suggested by the massive increase of traffic on the Southern after electrification did not percolate through to the rest of the industry, despite the opening of another successful electrification scheme in 1949: the completion of the project to electrify the busy lines between Liverpool Street and Shenfield that had been started by the LNER before the war led to an immediate 50 per cent increase in traffic.

There was a marked reluctance among senior BR managers to embark on further electrification schemes. The only other scheme was the Manchester to Sheffield route under the southern part of the Pennines through the three-mile-long Woodhead tunnel, one of the longest on the network. The idea was to use electricity to run both freight and passenger trains; indeed, the line's principal purpose was to haul coal from the south Yorkshire mines to the huge Fiddlers Ferry power station near Warrington. Like the Shenfield electrification, this project had been started and then shelved at the outbreak of the war, but was revived even though it required the huge expense of building a new double-track Woodhead tunnel because the two old single bores were a century old and in a poor state of repair. The scheme was finally completed in 1954 but proved to be something of a white elephant as the trains ran on a different electrification system from that subsequently used for the West Coast Main Line. When Fiddlers Ferry changed over from coal to oil in the 1970s, the line became redundant and closed in 1981.

These electrification schemes were definitely the exception, and BR was similarly slow to make use of diesel technology. The failure to convert many local and branch services to diesel was a missed opportunity given that the resulting cost economies could have made these lines far more resistant to the Beeching axe wielded in the 1960s. This was not for lack of available technology. As far back as 1921, one of Colonel Stephens's railways, the Weston Clevedon and Portishead, had introduced a petrol-engined railcar on its fourteen-mile length and in Ireland the first diesel railcars in the British Isles started running on the small County Donegal Railways in 1926. Despite the unfortunate
tendency of early models to lose their front wheels – luckily without causing injury to any passengers – they proved a great success. They seated forty people each and cost only a third to run compared with conventional steam-hauled trains.
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They were fast, reliable and flexible as they saved on the laborious business of shunting the engine round at each terminus. In the 1930s the Great Western had begun to introduce carriages with underfloor diesel engines on a few branch lines and the Southern had experimented with diesel shunters, but there had been no appetite in any of the Big Four companies for a wholesale introduction of diesel railcars (or ‘multiple units' as they were now called), despite the huge savings that could be made. Even in the 1950s, when similar trains were being introduced all around the world, British Railways remained reluctant to follow suit and ‘there was really little excuse for the excruciatingly slow progress made in Britain where modern rail traction was concerned'.
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British Railways did make better progress in improving its fleet of freight wagons, but the cost was high. Of the 550,000 wagons it had bought from private owners at nationalization, the British Transport Commission soon realized there were 85,000 coal wagons which were surplus to requirements and needed to be scrapped immediately, an expensive mistake.

While BR dithered over alternative power sources, it was quick to sort out the vital question of a livery for the organization and a series of high-profile ‘beauty contests' were held. The first, in January 1948, was at Kensington Olympia, where various locomotives bearing the contrasting greens of the Great Western, the LNER and the Southern, as well as the black of LNWR and a blue Southern Region colour for electric units, were paraded to hordes of rail enthusiasts. Various colours ranging from blue for the largest express passenger locomotives to unlined black for goods and shunting locomotives were chosen. The Southern Region kept malachite green for its trains while the few electric multiple units in other regions were painted in a lighter green. British Railways' heraldic insignia featuring a lion and a wheel was also selected after much discussion – Gerard Fiennes fittingly called it an ‘emasculated lion [riding] rather uncomfortably on a wheel'
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– but, as Michael Bonavia points out, ‘the shortage of staff for cleaning
locomotives and of washing machines for coaching stock made the whole exercise pretty unrealistic',
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and in any case the blue for expresses was phased out within a couple of years because it showed the dirt too easily!

With the proposed motorway building programme stalled due to lack of funds, BR's senior managers had the opportunity to consider seriously the role of the railway in the age of the motor car. Instead, this period was wasted in building steam engines, trying to sort out the administrative complexities of a massive new organization, continual feuds between the British Transport Commission and the Railway Executive, and in trivial tasks such as selecting liveries and insignia. All of this meant the railways were not in a fit state to compete against the car by the late 1950s when the motorway building programme was in full swing.

The changeable political climate and unstable structure of the railways did not help. Attlee's Labour government was thrown out when he lost the second election held in the early 1950s, and its Tory successor, led by the ageing Winston Churchill, was quick to reorganize the British Transport Commission which they saw as a socialist construct. Privatization of the railways was not on the agenda but the 1953 Transport Act denationalized road haulage, resulting in the sale of 24,000 lorries to small, mostly one-man, companies which were far more adept at handling loads for short and medium distances efficiently. The Railway Executive was abolished and instead area railway boards were placed directly under the aegis of the BTC. This was the first of ‘several defective solutions'
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to change the organizational structure of the industry during its fifty-year history of state ownership – all devised by outsiders with little understanding of the industry. Crucially, British Railways was still not allowed to stand on its own but remained subsumed within the monolithic British Transport Commission until the latter's abolition a decade later.

Surprisingly, though, the Tories were to give the railways one last chance to prove their worth with an ambitious and comprehensive modernization programme set out in a document published in January 1955. By then the railways were deeply in the red, as rising costs, road competition and perennial strikes resulted in losses of £22m (about
£400m in today's money) that year. The Modernization Plan was prompted by the belated realization that there had been no adequate investment in the railways for fifteen years. Indeed, there had been a net disinvestment of £440m since before the war (£8bn in 2007 prices)
¹⁶
– in other words, the assets of the railways had deteriorated far faster than they were being renewed. The modernization programme was aimed at addressing that backlog but also at creating a railway that could cope with the competition from the roads. The plan was breathtaking in its scale and involved the complete reorganization and refurbishment of the industry. It envisaged spending £1.24bn (£22bn today) by 1970 to replace steam with diesel, to create 1,500 miles of newly electrified line and replace old wooden and brick stations with concrete and glass palaces. The plan, drawn up by the British Transport Commission, was accepted by both ministers and Parliament with little debate, despite the cost.

While the investment was desperately needed, the plan was ill conceived and unrealistic, evidenced in its opening words: ‘The Modernisation Plan will win traffic back from the roads. Freight traffic will also return and grow.' The Plan used a scattergun approach, attempting to improve all aspects of the railway without sufficient thought about where investment would have the greatest effect. The focus was on hardware – shiny new locomotives and vast new marshalling yards. And because British Railways was now run by powerful regional managers, who were all vying for the largest slice of the cake for their patch, there was never any coherent programme to focus the investment where it was most needed. Local managers came up with crazy schemes such as electrifying vast swathes of line in the Eastern Region that served remote communities in the Lincolnshire fens (which soon fell to the Beeching axe). The London Midland Region tried to bid for the ridiculous number of 660 electric locomotives for the West Coast Main Line when 100 later sufficed. Such proposals were rejected but other daft schemes went ahead, notably the £1.6m (£30m today) Bletchley flyover on the West Coast line which was never used and survives today as a monument to incompetent planning. The flyover was part of a very sensible scheme to use the Oxford–Cambridge line as an east–west route avoiding London, but not only
was that plan never implemented, sadly much of the route was closed in the 1960s.