History of rail transport in Great Britain 1948–1994
The history of rail transport in Great Britain 1948–1994 covers the period when the British railway system was nationalised under the name of 'British Railways', latterly known as British Rail until its eventual privatisation in 1994.
The railway system in this period underwent modernisation, reorganisation and rebranding, some of which proved controversial. The use of steam locomotives on the network also ended in this period. Due to falling passenger numbers, rail subsidies from the government were necessary to keep the railways financially viable. Concerns about the levels of these contributed to the Beeching cuts that closed down many less well used lines.
The 1940s: Nationalisation
The Transport Act 1947 nationalised nearly all forms of mass transport in Great Britain and came into effect on 1 January 1948. British Railways came into existence as the business name of the Railway Executive of the British Transport Commission on 1 January 1948 when it took over the assets of the Big Four railway companies.A few independent light railways and industrial railways, which did not contribute significant mileage to the system, were not included in British Railways; nor the Glasgow Underground and London Underground, already both public concerns, the Liverpool Overhead Railway, and non-railway-owned tramways. The Northern Counties Committee lines owned by the London, Midland & Scottish Railway were sold to the Northern Ireland government, becoming part of the Ulster Transport Authority as a result of the Ireland Act 1949.
Under the BTC's Railway Executive, the railways were organised into six regions:
- Eastern Region – LNER lines south of Shaftholme Junction, Doncaster '
- North Eastern Region – LNER lines in England north of Shaftholme Junction '
- London Midland Region – LMS lines in England and Wales.
- Scottish Region – LMS and LNER lines in Scotland
- Southern Region – Southern Railway lines
- Western Region – Great Western Railway lines
The 1950s: Modernisation
By the start of the 1950s, British Railways were making a working profit, albeit a small one. However, Britain had fallen well behind the rest of Europe in terms of dieselisation and electrification of its railways. There were political as well as practical reasons behind the resistance to dieselisation in particular: the Labour Government of Clement Attlee did not want to significantly reduce the demand for domestically produced coal in favour of imported oil, thus both affecting the balance of payments and potentially causing unemployment. Robin Riddles, who was effectively the British Railways' Chief Mechanical Engineer, disagreed with the dieselisation programme, arguing that it would be too expensive to import oil given the large amounts of domestically available coal. He continued to order steam locomotives on a large scale and from 1948 to 1953, 1,487 steam locomotives were built.Although the initial focus was on repairing and renewing, some pre-war capital investment schemes that had stopped upon the outbreak of hostilities were restarted, for example the Manchester–Sheffield–Wath electrification over the Woodhead route and the Great Eastern suburban electrification.
The new BR regions, formed largely around the management structures of the old "Big Four" companies, remained autonomous in terms both of organisation and production of locomotives and rolling stock, mostly continuing with pre-war designs – indeed, some designs were even older: the workhorse LNER Class J17 was designed in 1898. As a whole, the equipment of the new British Railways was outdated, often unreliable, and mostly in urgent need of a refurbishment. Only the Southern Region with its large electrified suburban network in South London inherited from the Southern Railway operated a significant number of non-steam-powered trains.
In 1951, the British Transport Commission approved a new series of standard locomotives and coaches incorporating design features primarily from the London, Midland & Scottish Railway but also the other pre-nationalisation companies. These standard designs were designed to be long-lasting but in the event few served to their full potential before being withdrawn during the 1960s.
By the middle of the decade, however, it was clear that British Railways were in trouble, particularly in the freight haulage business to which they were losing ground to road and air traffic. The government ordered a review.
The Modernisation Plan
The report formally known as Modernisation and Re-Equipment of the British Railways, more commonly the "Modernisation Plan", was published in December 1954. It was intended to bring the railway system up to date. A government white paper produced in 1956 stated that modernisation would help eliminate BR's financial deficit by 1962. The aim was to increase speed, reliability, safety and line capacity, through a series of measures that would make services more attractive to passengers and freight operators, thus recovering traffic that was being lost to the roads. The total cost of the plan was projected to be £1.24 billion. The important areas were:- Electrification of principal main lines, in the Eastern Region, Kent, Birmingham and Central Scotland;
- Large-scale dieselisation to replace steam locomotives;
- New passenger and freight rolling stock;
- Resignalling and track renewal;
- Closure of small number of lines that were seen as unnecessary in a nationalised network, as they duplicated other lines;
- Building of large freight marshalling yards, with automated shunting to streamline freight handling.
However, many railway historians including Christian Wolmar, Henshaw and others now regard it as a costly failure and a missed opportunity. An attempt was made to simply update the railways as they already stood rather than reacting to changes in the way goods and people were travelling in the post-war years. Massive investments were made in marshalling yards at a time when the small wagonload traffic which they dealt with was in steep decline and being lost rapidly to the roads. Others have taken a different view. In her book British Rail: The Nation's Railway, Tanya Jackson argues that the Modernisation Plan laid the foundations of the highly successful Inter-City operation as well as planting the seeds of modern industrial design in the railway organisation. This was to lead to British Rail producing its benchmark Corporate Identity Manual in the sixties. Above all, the Modernisation Plan endorsed the adoption and implementation of the 25 kV AC electrification system that has since been universally recognised as the modern standard.
Traction policy
The Modernisation Plan called for the large-scale introduction of diesel locomotives: a total of 2,500 locomotives for mainline service to be procured in 10 years at a cost of £125 million, plus the replacement of much of the existing pre-war passenger rolling stock with over 5,000 diesel or electric multiple units or new carriages at a further estimated cost of £285 million. The longer-term plan was to electrify all the major trunk routes, the important secondary lines and the remaining suburban systems, but the Plan initially called for the acquisition of 1,100 electric locomotives for £60 million plus £125 million for electric infrastructure. Diesel traction would therefore serve mainly as a stop-gap between steam and electric traction, remaining only for more minor routes, shunting and certain freight movements.This was a major change from BR's existing traction policy, drawn up immediately after nationalisation, which had been based on perpetuating steam locomotives: existing locomotive designs from the Big Four continued to be built post-nationalisation, and then BR designed a new series of standard locomotive classes. Entering service in 1951, the Standards were intended to have a service life of 30 years and would be superseded by a rolling programme of electrification. In its early years BR largely halted the work done by the Big Four experimenting with diesel traction – completing pilot orders for prototypes such as those from the Southern Railway that became BR's Class D16/2 – but not perpetuating them. The exception was the continuation of the introduction of a series of diesel-powered shunting locomotives such as what would be the British Rail Class 08 and its variants, which entered service from 1951. The Modernisation Plan overturned this arrangement, even though many of the orders for the Standard steam locomotives were years from being fulfilled. Steam traction would now be replaced by diesels within a decade while the long-term electrification programme, while retained, would be slowed and scaled down. It was hoped that the rapid switch to diesel traction would deliver similar operational advantages and cost savings as electrification but at a faster pace and with much lower upfront capital costs. This committed many of the later-built Standard steam locomotives to be withdrawn having served only a third of their intended service life.
Although not laid out in the published Modernisation Plan, BR's initial approach to this huge acquisition task was to implement a pilot scheme, commissioning orders for 171 diesel locomotives from six independent manufacturers plus BR's own design offices and workshops. These designs were spread across the three power categories BR had decided would fulfil its mainline motive power needs. The designs commissioned deliberately represented a diverse range of engineering approaches with numerous constructors and suppliers of engines and electrical equipment. The intention was that the most successful designs and elements proven by the pilot scheme would form the basis of the large-scale orders called for by the Modernisation Plan over the next decade.
This policy was overtaken by political and economic events. BR's financial position was worsening as costs rose and traffic and revenue declined. BR's accounts had shown an overall negative balance since 1954 and in 1956 the organisation's net revenue fell into the negative for the first time: a loss of £16.5 million. Costs were still climbing, market share and volumes of both passenger and freight traffic were falling rapidly, and BR was facing a perpetual manpower shortage as the high employment and rising working and living standards and wages throughout the economy in the 1950s made working on the railways – especially the dirty, labour-intensive steam locomotives – unattractive. The railways were still suffering from a general public image of being outdated, inefficient and run down.
The British Transport Commission and BR management therefore decided to expand the pilot scheme to hasten the introduction of modern traction. In May 1957 – a month before the first locomotive ordered under the original pilot scheme entered service – the total orders were increased to 230 and the power categories were expanded from three to five, introducing new mid- and high-power types that BR had not originally considered necessary. In late 1958, as BR's financial balance approached an annual loss of £100 million and still well before many of the locomotives ordered in 1955 under the original pilot scheme had been built, the BTC agreed to further accelerate the adoption of diesel traction by placing sufficient orders to introduce 2300 diesel locomotives by the end of 1963. Although some designs were not perpetuated in these bulk orders on the basis of the early experience with the pilot scheme, many of the types included in these orders had not yet entered full service and in some cases the prototype had yet to be built. Designs for the new Type 3 power rating – not present in the pilot scheme – were ordered in quantity 'off the drawing board' and only one Type 5 design was in existence.
With numerous manufacturers being required to produce their own designs to meet the deadline, the standardisation intended in the Modernisation Plan could not be achieved. The three standard classes originally planned – and even the five proposed in the revised plan – were replaced by a total of 14 distinct locomotive designs from numerous manufacturers, incorporating many of the diverse features intended to be tested and evaluated against each other. This limited the theoretical operational benefits and cost savings from the widespread adoption of diesel traction, and many – but not all – of the designs ordered under the accelerated Modernisation Plan were plagued by reliability and service issues, leading to poor availability from the brand new locomotives and leaving some areas of the BR network with a shortage of serviceable traction in the early 1960s. Ironically, in 1967 British Railways drew up a National Traction Plan that rationalised its stock of locomotives and multiple units. Designs that had proved to be the most reliable and operationally efficient were selected for retention and modernisation while the others were designated 'non-standard' and earmarked for quick withdrawal and replacement – a belated implementation of the original pilot scheme that saw many of the locomotives ordered in the late 1950s withdrawn after only a decade in service and in some cases even before the steam locomotives they were intended to supersede.
There were some fundamental incorrect assumptions with the classes of new locomotives ordered under the Modernisation Plan. Steam locomotives were replaced by diesel types on a 'like-for-like' basis with BR ordering, for example, large numbers of light-duty diesels intended for local mixed-goods services, which failed to take into account the decline in local and branch line goods services that was largely switching to the roads. In conjunction with the new marshalling yards, large numbers of diesel shunters were ordered that soon became rendered virtually obsolete by the rise of container freight and, like the yards they worked in, often only served a few years before being scrapped.