Fire and Steam (47 page)

But the government was ever contemptuous of the railway managers; there was ‘a firm belief in Whitehall that railway managers were inbred, inward-looking and resistant to change'.
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In fact, when outsiders from other industries, like Batchelors Peas or Palmolive, joined the railways, they invariably discovered that running the railways was a far more difficult proposition than selling consumer goods to shoppers. British Rail was frequently at loggerheads with Edward Heath's Tory government, which was in power for the first four years of the 1970s. BR had learnt the lesson of Beeching and produced a strategy document in 1973 which stated there was absolutely no ‘financially viable' network size. Moreover, the oil crisis of that year reminded the politicians of the railways' existence and their ability to carry large numbers of people using far less fuel than road vehicles.

When the Labour government was re-elected by a tiny majority in the February 1974 election, it had to rescue the industry with another Transport Act passed that same year. Prime Minister Harold Wilson allocated £2.1bn to BR, including £1,500m for the next five years to
subsidize loss-making services through a newly created mechanism, the Public Service Obligation. However, there was still no solution to the conundrum that railway managers had faced ever since nationalization between their commercial and social remits. Moreover, passenger numbers declined as fares doubled between March 1974 and May 1975, an increase which was well above even the very high rates of inflation raging at the time. Nor was there any attempt to answer the fundamental question of what the railways were for.

Despite this, thanks to a forward-looking group of railway managers, there was a radical improvement on InterCity services with the introduction of the High Speed Train. This was a similar concept to the Blue Pullmans but with a more robust design, which is why these trains have survived into the twenty-first century. In fact, the High Speed Train was not supposed to spearhead the improved services; that was to have been the Advanced Passenger Train, a tilting train that was ahead of its time but became a sad casualty of the loss of nerve by both the industry and the government in the face of a barrage of negative media coverage. The idea was to reduce journey times by enabling the train to go around curves faster using a tilting mechanism; it would also reach speeds of 155 mph on straight sections. Development by British Railways engineers started in the mid-1960s and a prototype was put in public service in 1981. However, the train received a bad press, with claims that people were made sick by the tilt. The trains also proved unreliable, with frequent failure of the tilt mechanism, and the project was soon abandoned, even though engineers claimed that the problems could have been overcome. Indeed, tilting trains became commonplace in Europe and were eventually reintroduced with Italian technology by Virgin Trains in 2003 for their Pendolinos on the West Coast Main Line. The High Speed Train was, therefore, somewhat of a fallback option, but it was to prove a lasting success. Development of a diesel train with a 125 mph capability, which could run on existing lines without tilting, started in August 1970 but then was held up for a year because of a boycott by the unions because the trains were being designed to be controlled by a single driver.

Nationalization had not brought the hoped-for industrial relations peace. Quite the opposite. Railway workers were no longer prepared to
accept the trade-off between stable employment and relatively poor pay which the railways, especially outside the big cities, had offered. They were losing out compared with other industries where higher productivity benefited both workers and shareholders. The rail workforce felt they deserved better pay, even though the industry was declining, but British Railways was not allowed to put up fares without government permission, which meant they fell in real terms during the 1950s and 1960s. Not surprisingly, therefore, there were continual battles over productivity. The workforce was reduced dramatically, from over 600,000 in 1950 to 275,500 in 1979, which meant that the unions were rigidly opposed to more cuts, though the introduction of redundancy payments in 1959 had been an incentive for railway workers to leave the industry. Every aspect of railway work required fewer employees thanks to improved technology. Diesel and electric locomotives were easier to maintain and clean; signal boxes were being closed and centralized; the track was being replaced with longer stretches of continuous welded rail which was easier to look after, resulting in the replacement of the local gangs who maintained the track with fewer men in charge of longer sections. Strikes were not uncommon but rarer than myth would have it and they were all partial since there was no national rail stoppage until the 1980s. There had been a particularly damaging seventeen-day stoppage in 1955 by the drivers' union, ASLEF, but although it made a sharp dent in the finances of the British Transport Commission, the action did not entirely paralyse the network. While there was massive inconvenience to longdistance travellers and London commuters, life in the country went on as normal, which showed the railway workers that their industrial muscle had been greatly weakened by the advent of the motor car.

The boycott was the other weapon in the unions' armoury and was successfully deployed to ban work on the High Speed Train until BR agreed that double manning should be retained for 125 mph running, though the practice was eventually phased out with the agreement of the unions in the 1980s. The prototype of the High Speed Train, developed by BR engineers at Derby, outperformed its specifications with a record-beating speed of 143 mph on a test run in June 1973. The HST represented a significant technological breakthrough as it gave a stable
ride at 125 mph thanks to the precision of the engineering and the use of disc brakes, which were much more efficient, therefore allowing the train to run at full speed without the need for a new signalling system.
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(Older readers may remember the strong smell of brake lining which permeated through the air conditioning of trains as they slowed down, until the problem was finally dealt with in the 1990s.)

The trains were introduced on the Western Region in October 1976 and on the East Coast line two years later, reducing journey times at a stroke since previously the top speed on the network had been 100 mph. Improvements to the track were also made to allow the new trains to run at high speeds for longer, further reducing journey times. Bristol could be reached from London in just seventy minutes and, on the East Coast, Newcastle was now under three hours from the capital, a saving of forty minutes. The ‘journey experience', as the marketing people call it, was much improved too with comfortable seats with tables for most travellers, full air conditioning, and restaurant cars on every train, serving the famous Great English Breakfast in the mornings. InterCity was blessed too with a series of brilliant advertising campaigns devised by the Tories' agency, Saatchi & Saatchi, notably the famous Jimmy Saville series ‘We're getting there'.

The HST saved the concept of express train travel and enabled the railways to remain competitive with the car on the now completed motorway network. InterCity was a people's train service, with no supplement for its use, and it was so successful that yield management techniques to maximize revenue (through charging higher fares at times of peak demand), now familiar in the aviation industry, had to be developed by British Railways to choke off-peak-time demand (through cheap fares aimed at leisure customers travelling off-peak and high fares at times of the day when business people wanted to travel). A new breed of long-distance commuter emerged as it was now possible to travel daily from places as far from London as Bristol, Doncaster and even York.

For a while, the InterCity High Speed Train service was a world leader. By 1979, when the timetable had been adjusted to take account of the new trains, BR's fastest time between two stations – Reading and Swindon – was 106 mph, beaten only by the Japanese bullet trains running on their own dedicated tracks, which managed a mere 4 mph
more. Sadly that position would soon be eroded as countries across Europe, and later Asia, introduced similar high-speed services on dedicated tracks. Nevertheless, the InterCity name and concept spawned a number of imitators around the world, from Cameroon and New Zealand to Spain and Austria. Indeed, in 1989 the Deutsche Bundesbahn in West Germany christened their new 300 km/h highspeed trains, InterCityExpress or ICE.

Peter Parker, another outsider, who took over as head of the British Railways Board from Richard Marsh in 1976, was quick to exploit the improved image of the railway resulting from the introduction of HST. He managed to get several electrification schemes under way, including the Bedford–St Pancras (BedPan, as it was known) line, where the work was completed in 1982 (though causing major ructions with the unions, again over single manning). This was also the year of the ASLEF dispute over ‘flexible rostering', a term that briefly attracted national attention and which essentially meant the right of BR to roster workers for shifts other than the standard eight hours.

Overall, however, the 1980s were a far better time for the railways than the previous decade, despite the government's continued stop-start policy which prevented the industry planning its long-term future. On the one hand, Mrs Thatcher's Tory government set up a commission in 1982 to investigate the future of the railways, headed by a former civil servant, Sir David Serpell, whose recommendations made the Beeching cuts look remarkably modest; on the other, the government gave the go-ahead for the modernization and electrification of the East Coast line, the biggest project on the railways since the West Coast scheme in the 1960s.

The trigger for the establishment of the Serpell Commission was the financial crisis suffered by the railways soon after Mrs Thatcher's election in 1979. Part of the report was sensible, suggesting, for example, that BR should divest itself of its workshops, which still accounted for half of spending (no other railway, other than that in India, still built its own trains). However, the second part of the report lacked any political nous and caused an almighty furore that ensured it was quickly consigned to the dustbin. Serpell produced six options for a pruned-down British railway for the twenty-first century, ranging from the
culling of just a couple of hundred miles to the infamous option A which proposed reducing the 10,370 route miles to just 1,630, comprising only the West Coast Main Line, the East Coast as far as Newcastle, and the routes from the capital to Norwich and Bristol, and a few key commuter lines. Implementing this scheme would have left whole swathes of Britain such as north and mid-Wales, the West Country and much of Scotland without a railway. By highlighting the worst option and mounting an aggressive counter-attack, the British Railways Board soon ensured that Serpell's ideas were never further considered.

Despite Mrs Thatcher's antipathy for the railways – which she rarely used herself
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– the government changed tack and, rather than imposing these cuts, it supported a series of development programmes including modest investment in rural lines and, crucially, the much-delayed electrification of nearly 400 miles of the East Coast Main Line at a cost of £300m.
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The work began in 1985 and was completed in late 1990. New trains were introduced – the InterCity 225 stock which, as its name implies, was supposed to run at 225 kph (140 mph) but in fact has always been limited to 125 mph by the condition of the track and signalling. Again, there was a massive increase in passenger numbers, even though the electrification had been done on the cheap
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and on the windy East Coast the catenary (overhead wires) were brought down all too frequently, causing major delays.

Very gradually, things were getting better: in spite of the 1982 strikes, the industrial relations situation improved during most of the second half of BR's existence as the number of employees continued to shrink and Mrs Thatcher's anti-union legislation weakened the industrial muscle of the workforce. Whereas strikes and disputes had been a constant subject of discussion by the British Railways Board in the 1960s and 1970s, now the absence of strife meant they were rarely considered. Relations with government also improved markedly. Sir Bob Reid,
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who replaced Peter Parker, had a fruitful relationship with the Transport Secretary, Nicholas Ridley, one of Mrs Thatcher's pet ideologues, and at last there was a dialogue about what the government wanted from the railway. Investment was seen as a way of reducing costs in the longer term, for example, replacing conventional signalling on remote lines in the Highlands with electronic radio signalling that
was far cheaper to maintain and replacing worn-out diesel multiple units and locomotive-hauled trains on regional routes with modern air-conditioned stock.

In 1983, Reid broke up the old regional baronies of the railway that had still held considerable sway,
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and instead created three passenger business sectors: InterCity, London & South East (renamed Network SouthEast in 1986) and Provincial (later Regional) railways. Freight was separated into two companies, one dealing with train loads, the other with smaller consignments. Under pressure from the government, the various subsidiary businesses such as hotels and ferries were sold off. InterCity was given the task of breaking even, which was achieved with a bit of fiddling over allocation of costs and by ensuring that certain profitable routes, such as London–Norwich and, oddly, the Gatwick Express, the only InterCity route completely south of the Thames, were included. From making a loss of £100m in 1984, InterCity became Europe's only profitable railway, making substantial profits in the boom years of the late 1980s, even after paying its allotted share of the infrastructure costs.

Network SouthEast, the London suburban network melded together by a forward-looking career railwayman Chris Green, also managed to break even at the height of the boom, thanks to a coherent marketing strategy and the development of a series of travelcards that allowed people to make multiple journeys for a one-off payment. It was a remarkable achievement for a commuter railway and Green also pioneered the concept of total route modernization, using scarce investment resources to improve all aspects of a particular line, from the signalling and the track to the rolling stock and the station paint. The first line to receive this treatment, Chiltern, which had been threatened with closure, was a great success, attracting massive numbers of new passengers but the demise of BR stopped this programme.