This was something I said in "What Alistair Darling should have said".
State interference in Britain's railways got off to a slow start. They introduced the Parliamentary Train which doesn't seem to have had much of an impact. They introduced a whole raft of safety regulation in the 1880s - mainly relating to things that were being done anyway. At some point they started accident investigations. When the London, Chatham and Dover Railway and the South Eastern Railway merged, the state managed to pile on them so many restrictions that the merger was rendered virtually pointless.
It wasn't until after the First World War that the state really got stuck in. Grouping created vast, inefficient conglomerates that took years to match pre-war performance. Financial restrictions undermined the profit motive and commercial restrictions prevented the companies from integrating road and rail.
In the Second World War, the government managed (and I am not quite sure how) to leave the railways on a financial knife-edge and their infrastructure in a parlous state.
And then they were nationalised.
British Railways came under the umbrella of the British Transport Commission whose aim was to promote integrated transport. It didn't. But BR had it's own share of failures. First of all, it invested heavily in steam when it was clear to most of the rest of the world that the future lay in diesel and electric traction. In the mid-1950s they realised the mistake and embarked on a crash Modernisation Plan. The haste led to the adoption of many poor designs. The misreading of the way of the world led to the construction of several almost completely useless marshalling yards. The losses started to mount. Service went to pot with the British Rail sandwich becoming a national joke.
By the early 1960s the losses could not be ignored. The Beeching cuts saw half the network disappear. It was probably the most sensible thing the Government has ever done on the railways.
In the late 1960s, subsidy to BR was put on an institutionalised basis with the introduction of the Public Service Obligation grant.
In the 1970s, BR invested heavily in the Advanced Passenger Train which turned into an expensive flop. Mind you it also managed to build the High Speed Train and the Mark III carriage - so, it wasn't all bad.
In the 1980s, BR was pretty much ignored by the Thatcher government. And did quite well. InterCity and London's commuter routes even underwent something of a revival.
And, to be fair to the state, it did pass the Acts which, by permitting the compulsory puchase of land and the formation of joint-stock companies, probably made the railways possible.
Footnotes
Parliamentary Train. An Act of Parliament forced all train operators to provide at least train every day calling at all stations and charging no more than 1d a mile.
Grouping. In the early 1920s the tens of independent British railways were forced to merge into four groups: Southern Railway, Great Western Railway (GWR), London, Midland and Scottish (LMS) and London and North Eastern Railway (LNER).
Update 30/08/04
Tim Hall details the Modernisation Plan's low points.
Update 03/09/04
Beeching did not see the closure of half the network. As these official figures show, in the period 1963-1968 only about a quarter of the network was closed. Having said that they do show that the current network is only about half the size it was at its peak.
Comments
The history of British Railways is shot through with political interference - for example one of the reasons that the Modernisation Plan resulted in an influx of unsuitable and untried motive power was the political requirement to spread the work around as many (UK) manufacturers as possible. Instead of getting the best supplier, small runs of untried designs were procured from hopelessly incapable suppliers. The worst example was North British, who built many fine steam engines, but had no experience of diesels, delivered some of the most unreliable products ever to grace the UK rail system and then went bust under the weight of the warranty claims. There were too many builders and all this policy did was stave off the inevitable merger, liquidation and consolidation of the industry, and as usual the stool pigeon in all this was BR.
Posted by andy wakeford on August 17, 2004Patrick's summary makes constructive comment difficult. Once the car and lorry started to affect every aspect of daily living, the role of the railways in a competitive environment meant change. The railways were 'common carriers' until about 1970, and this brought many restrictions. Despite the coal shortage in 1948, modern steam engines were required to replace the older steam engines which had served valiantly in the war. The diesel engine at this time was in its infancy for rail development. Until the 1970's, the railways played an essential role in the life of this country. Hindsight will suggest many alternatives to poor decisions, but the whole subject is very complex.
Posted by Brian Hayes on August 18, 2004Brian,
If constructive comment is difficult try some of the destructive kind! If I'm talking nonsense I want to know about it.
What is a "common carrier"?
Also, can we really say that diesels were in their infancy when the the Burlingon Zephyr (or whatever it was called) had been going for 15 years?
I take your point about poor decisions. Of course, the free market could have made just as many mistakes but looking back at the forty or so years prior to 1948 I just can't find that many examples of them getting things completely wrong. Or, at least, not big examples.
Posted by Patrick Crozier on August 19, 2004Common Carrier legislation was repealed I believe as part of the 1962 transport act which abolished the BTC and created the British Railways Board.
It had been introduced in the 19th century as a requirement for railways to carry all goods at defined charges, and restricted the striking of special deals with particular customers.
It was designed for a monopoly profitable industry; quite apart from the ideological arguments for and against this which I know are dear to this site, the biggest problem is that the regulation continued to persist long after the monopoly had expired with the advent of road transport with the result that individual profitable flows could be creamed off by new entrants to the freight market whilst rail was required to maintain an infrastructure for everyone regardless of commercial viability.
The LMS, LNER, GER and SR lobbied for the removal of the Common Carrier legislation in the 'Square Deal' campaign of 1938; WW2 intervened....
Patrick's right about diesels not being in their infancy. Not only was the diesel already starting to conquer America, but British manufacturers such as English Electric were turning out perfectly good export models.
The LMS ordered two 1700hp diesels from EE in 1947. By all accounts these machines, forerunners of the very successful class 37 of 15 years later, were a success. There is no reason why they could not have put this design into series production, except Robert Riddles thought kettles were cheaper.
Posted by Tim Hall on August 20, 2004I have got a copy of Edwin A Pratt's "Railways and Nationalisation" (1911) in front of me - well worth a read, by the way. He was writing about the railway of the day and while he gives plenty of examples of railways being able to vary their rates he gives no mention of "common carrier" legislation or caps on rates. I wonder if it came later.
Posted by Patrick Crozier on August 23, 2004Re your quote:
"The Beeching cuts saw half the network disappear. It was probably the most sensible thing the Government has ever done on the railways."
As far as the developed world goes, it is largely only the english-speaking nations which opted for wholesale dismemberment of their rail systems. These countries are now faced with the developed world's poorest public transport systems and most heavily congested roads.
Britain is replete with former rail-routes which today would be valuable (and viable) had they not been axed. In the frenzy to rip them out, the option of 'mothballing' was not entertained. Now, the cost of re-instatment is many times what it might have been, for very little actually saved.
As the problems in sustaining today's road- and air-based transport continue to mount, I predict an increasing realisation that the Beeching cuts were a colossal mistake.
Posted by David Bond on December 2, 2004Permalink
It must be remembered that the APT that 'flopped' was the second to be built. The first was a gas turbine engined train which ran perfectly, and but for the oil crisis of 1973, which made it far too expensive to run, would have gone into production. The High Speed Train was a success in the end, but only after much tinkering with its initially substandard engine. The post '73 electric APT was so much of a test bed for new technology, some of it 20 years ahead of its time, that one wonders just how serious BR were by then about actually building it in bulk. Even so, they had it working reliably after a year of so of running, but in a way that prefigured the fate of the Millenium Dome, by then the press had sealed its fate.
Posted by James Hamilton on August 16, 2004