Fire and Steam (46 page)

It was not all Beeching's fault. His terms of reference had been too narrow: he was only supposed to find a way of returning the industry to profitability as soon as possible rather than consider the overall social and wider economic value of the railway or examine the economics of other methods of transport. There was no attempt, for example, to produce a cost-benefit analysis taking into account the extra deaths from traffic accidents as a result of pushing people on to the roads. Such techniques had not yet been developed but in any case logic was not part of the Beeching process. These caveats were quickly forgotten in the orgy of closures that ensued. The Beeching report had been commissioned in order to demonstrate that minor railway lines were fundamentally uneconomic and it was hardly surprising that this was its conclusion. He was searching for that Holy Grail, the myth of the profitable railway.

Of course many of these branches and lines were not viable and were ripe to be axed, but the closure programme went too far, with little regard for the future needs of the railway once the roads filled up.
²³
Most of the mistakes were made after Harold Wilson became Prime Minister following Labour's narrow victory in the October 1964 election. Whereas in opposition, the Labour party, backed by the unions, had strongly opposed the shutting of lines, in government it performed a complete U-turn, and increased the rate of closures. After much prevarication, Wilson finally announced in March 1965 that he did not have the power to stop any of the thirty-eight line closures put forward by Beeching, twenty-five of which had already been made. Far from being reviewed, the closure programme was speeded up by the
new Transport Minister, Tom Fraser, with the closure of 1,071 miles in 1965, eighty more than in the previous year under Marples. Moreover, Wilson announced extra closures such as the Oxford–Cambridge line, which even Beeching had not suggested. The biggest casualty was the Great Central, which provided an alternative route from London to the Midlands and the north-west, and while it duplicated other lines, it would have been very useful for freight and as a diversionary route. Other mistakes included shutting the alternative route between Exeter and Plymouth, which avoided Dawlish where flooding over the sea wall causes perennial problems; the Somerset & Dorset, which provided an important connection in an area with a rapidly increasing population; and, as mentioned above, Oxford–Cambridge which not only provided an east–west route avoiding the capital but served the new town of Milton Keynes which was scheduled for rapid expansion. One particularly damaging cut was to deprive the sizeable Lincolnshire port town of Boston, once a main line station, of its direct London link – which means it can now only be reached circuitously via Sleaford and Grantham – just to save sixteen miles of track.
²⁴
Another nonsense was to cut the direct link from London to Stratford-upon-Avon, one of Britain's biggest tourist attractions, and turn it into an outpost of the West Midlands suburban system. Henshaw recognizes that the completely uneconomic branch lines had to go but reckons that a third of the lines closed by Beeching, around 1,200 miles of passenger railways, ‘should never even have been
contemplated
for closure'.
²⁵

As if to reinforce the inconsistency of Labour's policy, some Beeching targets were reprieved for reasons of political expediency, such as Glasgow–Stranraer and the central Wales line which serves very isolated communities with marginal constituencies. The East Suffolk branch was saved by Gerard Fiennes, a lifelong railwayman who would later make his name by writing a book called
I tried to run a railway
,
²⁶
which earned him the sack from British Railways. He sketched out the concept of a basic railway, using diesel multiple units and minimal repairs to maintain passenger numbers while slashing costs, that made the line viable and it was retained. Had similar calculations been made on many other lines by equally enterprising managers, today's railway mileage would be considerably longer. The anomalies left by the ill-thought
scheme were legion. While relatively busy lines, with the kind of effort demonstrated by Fiennes, could have been made viable, isolated communities in rural areas like mid-Wales, the Scottish Highlands, Cumbria and Norfolk were left with stations that are seldom used by more than a handful of passengers per day.

Beeching's fundamental mistake was to underestimate the contribution of branches to the economics of the railways and he was wrong to assume that people who travelled by rail would happily shift to buses.
The Oxford Companion to British Railway History
sums up the Beeching era thus: ‘Unfortunately, he was expected to produce quick solutions to problems that were deep-seated and not susceptible to purely intellectual analysis.'
²⁷
Beeching himself viewed it differently: ‘I suppose I'll always be looked upon as the axe man, but it was surgery, not mad chopping.'
²⁸

Overall, the closure programme was a haphazard process based on flawed logic and the assumptions by Beeching about the lack of profitability of many lines were proved wrong. Even in cool economic terms, Beeching's closures were never going to turn around the finances of the railways. He calculated they would save around £30m annually, at a time when the railways were losing nearly three times that much. In February 1965 Beeching produced a second report
²⁹
which suggested even further cuts, reducing the railway to 3,000 miles of main line which would be intensively developed and 4,500 miles of other routes that would be maintained to a minimal level. He had overstepped the mark and Wilson sent him back to ICI a year before the end of his contract.

Viewed in the context of the long-term history of the railways, Beeching merely accelerated a process of closures that had already started. Nevertheless, the figures for the 1960s are startling. By the end of the decade there were just 3,002 stations, compared with over 7,000 in 1961, and nearly 6,000 miles had been closed, leaving just 12,098. As with the conversion of steam to diesel, the process had been too slow for many years, but then proceeded too fast to retain any coherence and to fulfil strategic aims. Contrary to Beeching's protestations, it
was
slash and burn, with marginal closures justified by dubious figures drawn up by British Railways staff intent on fulfilling narrow short-term financial
targets. His figures for revenue were skewed because the data was collected in April – outside the holiday season when many marginal lines made huge profits.

With hindsight, much of the responsibility for the contradictory policies of the 1950s and 1960s can be laid at the door of successive governments, which set the railways an impossible task. On the one hand they were expected to act commercially and be profitable, but on the other they were not allowed to raise fares in line with inflation, as this was politically sensitive, and they were required to remain as a common carrier and to transport at a fixed price whatever was dumped on them, whether it was a small parcel or a whole farm (farm removals by rail still occurred in the 1950s). There was, too, the feeling within government that cheap fuel for motoring was a permanent fixture and therefore the demand for travel by railway would inevitably fall over time.

It was not until the late 1960s that the social obligations of the railway were finally acknowledged in Barbara Castle's 1968 Transport Act, which relieved the railways of the impossible target set by Marples of breaking even or making a profit. She recognized, for the first time, that the railways needed financial support from the government, creating a distinction between commercial services which should pay for themselves and ‘social' ones which needed subsidy. She wiped out the accumulated debt of £153m and encouraged BR's managerial and business flair to blossom in the ‘commercial railway' – the trunk intercity routes mostly radiating from London. She created the Passenger Transport Executives in six conurbations which received large grants from the Ministry of Transport to pay for both new railway infrastructure and to run the services. They have subsequently been very successful in reviving the suburban networks of provincial cities and boosting usage. The pace of closures slowed dramatically with only 900 miles being shut in the four years following the passage of the 1968 Act, and thereafter there was only a trickle, which stopped completely in 1977.

British Rail
³⁰
did, however, try one last major closure in the 1980s, the spectacular Carlisle to Settle railway built at such a high cost, both financial and human, by the Midland (see
Chapter 8
). BR claimed, with
little justification, that the Ribblehead viaduct was crumbling and would cost too much to repair. The opponents of closures, emboldened by the aftermath of Beeching and now far better armed with statistics and legal experience, were able to ensure the line's survival – which is fortunate since it is now not only a very useful diversionary route when either the West or East Coast line is closed but has also become an important freight artery as well as carrying considerable tourist traffic. Indeed, it is so important to the network of the twenty-first century that in 2004 Network Rail embarked on a five-year improvement programme costing £60m.

The Carlisle to Settle controversy was, however, an exception. A new atmosphere was developing inside British Rail, now that the threat of closures and redundancies had receded. Growth and development were no longer dirty words. Over 300 stations were reopened between 1970 and the end of the century, a tacit admission that Beeching had gone too far. In 1963, work resumed on the West Coast Main Line electrification which was to be the flagship of British Rail and the concept of InterCity was developed.

However, the first major innovation for passengers on long-distance routes was the 90 mph Blue Pullmans, decked out in a soothing sea-blue colour and powered by huge diesel engines at each end, a novel idea, introduced in 1960, that allowed for rapid turnaround times. The trains ran on both London Midland and Western Region lines, providing limited stop services to places such as Manchester and Birmingham.
³¹
The five train sets were luxurious and the service was an example of railway customer care at its best: for the first time on a British train, full air conditioning and armchair seats with padded foam were offered, but unfortunately the bogies were poorly designed which meant that sometimes the ride was too bumpy for comfort. The service, which was initially only for first-class passengers but was later extended to second class, proved popular, but the trains themselves were prone to breakdown and only lasted until 1973. However, the Blue Pullmans demonstrated that the concept of fast journeys in modern coaches was the way forward for the railways and the technology of having a power car – a locomotive – at each end was adopted in the High Speed Train, the InterCity 125. British Railways managers were beginning to realize
that the role of the railway in the age of the motor car was no longer to act as a common carrier, trying to cater for every possible journey, but instead to focus on passenger flows where the railways had a real advantage, for example as an alternative to motorway travel for business people.

It was on the East Coast that, in the short term, speeds increased the most. With electrification shelved (and eventually carried out at the end of the 1980s), the BR manager in charge of the line, the innovative Gerard Fiennes, persuaded BR to build twenty-two high-powered diesels capable of cruising at 100 mph, the huge Deltics. Timings between London and Edinburgh were cut from seven to six hours, and Leeds was just three hours away, the best journey times since before the war – and that was on every train, whereas in the 1930s these speeds were achieved only on the daily prestige service.

Similarly, diesels were introduced on services from Paddington to Bristol, St Pancras to Nottingham and Liverpool Street to Norwich. Carriages, too, were improved. Coaches had been standardized since 1951 with the introduction of the Mark 1, which was better than its predecessors, but it was not until the arrival of the Mark 2 that there was a major improvement. It could provide a comfortable ride at 100 mph thanks to more sophisticated bogies and the interior was far superior to anything that had been offered before.

However, the standards of passenger comfort varied enormously from line to line and creating the InterCity concept was an attempt to provide a consistent level of service across the network. Modern marketing and branding techniques began to be used by the increasingly adventurous and commercially minded British Railways. The iconic twin track logo, which survived privatization, was introduced in 1965 to demonstrate the modern face of the railway, and the InterCity brand for fast services between major cities was launched in April of the following year when the West Coast electrified services began running. Instead of naming individual expresses, the whole service was branded as InterCity.
³²
The new timetable on the West Coast was a vast improvement on any service previously offered on the line. Trains departed at the same time every hour and many journeys were timed at an average of 80 mph, which required sustained running at 100 mph for long stretches. Stations such
as Euston, Stafford and Macclesfield were completely rebuilt to give the railways a new modern image that unfortunately has not aged well (Euston's baroque great hall was demolished and replaced with a glass and concrete monstrosity that had no seats for waiting passengers). A massive publicity campaign, including TV advertising, was launched, the first of several over the next twenty years that would establish InterCity as one of the top five brands recognized by the British public. Passenger numbers soared, with a two-thirds increase from the previous year, a phenomenon that became known as the ‘sparks effect', and the frequency of services had to be increased to meet demand.

In the early 1970s, therefore, British Rail turned the corner. The success of the West Coast electrification and the development of InterCity marked a renewed confidence in British Rail. Under the leadership of the forward-looking former Transport Minister, Richard Marsh, growing and improving the railway, rather than continuing to run it down, was now seen as the objective. British Rail managers started to fight back, reckoning that the financial discipline to which they had been asked to conform was becoming an end in itself, rather than part of a policy to improve a vital service.