Ive never been on a train, said Robert. How could that be? I thought. He lives next to Trowell Junction, and trains are the most wonderful thing in the world.
It was 1968. I was nine, and my family, unlike Roberts, did not own a car. We went everywhere by train. I loved the views from the wide windows of the carriages. I loved the steam locomotives, the elegant stations and the wonderful Victorian solidity of everything connected to the railway.
But there was more to it than that. The tracks were a way to somewhere else, they opened up a vista of possibilities, of places to go, in a way that roads did not. The rails curving away into the distance were directly connected to the rails at Wick and Thurso, romantic-sounding places whose names I knew only from the map, but which I hoped to visit one day.
I would watch as long trains of iron ore, coal, or steel rolled by, and I admired the skill of the engine-drivers as they reversed their long trains of empty wagons up the gradient to Wollaton Colliery. Best of all was the Waverley, the express from St. Pancras to Edinburgh. The shiny green locomotive, with its Waverley head-board, and its maroon carriages, held out the tempting promise of a journey to Scotland, where I had never been.
Boards above the carriage windows showed the name of the train and its route Waverley: St. Pancras Carlisle Hawick Edinburgh. I knew nothing of Sir Walter Scott beyond the title of his books, but I longed to travel on such an exclusive, smart, express train.
How it was
Waiting by the lineside, there was a feeling of excitement as the signal-arm rose with a clunk to show that a train was coming. The levers controlling this signal, and thousands like it, were pulled by an army of signalmen who made sure that the railway ran safely.
One such signalman was Adrian Vaughan. In the 1960s he worked on the line between Didcot and Swindon, built by the Great Western Railway in 1840. His book Signalmans Morning is a wonderful portrait of men at work, and of the pre-Beeching railway, which now seems as remote as the Middle Ages.
When Adrian Vaughan began work at Uffington in 1961 the railway had changed little since 1890. Steam locomotives were larger, faster, and more powerful, but a Victorian railwayman would have been quite at home at Uffington. Drivers still addressed signalmen as Bobby or Officer, a reminder of the 1840s, when policemen signalled trains by making hand signals like a cricket umpire.
Although the Great Western had ceased to exist in 1947, many railwaymen felt they still worked for the company, rather than for British Railways. The Great Western was a very distinguished railway. Its locomotives had copper-capped chimneys, there was a special blend of whisky in its dining cars, and the guards on the Cornish Riviera Express wore tail-coats and wing collars, and carried flowers in their buttonholes.
The GWR liked to hire footmen or butlers as guards because of their bearing and their skill in dealing with aristocratic passengers. The railway had a semi-military spirit, which encouraged safety and punctuality, and ensured high morale.
Driver was a title of respect and honour. Managers were Officers who ate in the Mess. Staff were loyal, because although the Great Western looked on them as its servants, it felt it had an obligation to them, and treated them well.
Unlike other railways, the GWR went to extraordinary lengths to keep men employed when times were hard, and treated pensioners, widows and orphans generously. Officers stayed in their posts for years, which made for better personal relationships, and better management.
At Uffington, Adrian Vaughan signalled around sixty-five trains during an eight-hour shift. The entire railway was divided into block sections, each controlled by a signalman. A block section might be a hundred yards long at a busy station, or several miles long in open country, and no train could travel along a block without a signalmans knowledge or permission. Signalmen communicated by bell-codes, passing trains from one block to another under a system which made the railway as safe as was humanly possible.
A signalman would watch each train as it passed, to check that all was well, and a train was checked roughly every three-and-a-half minutes. If a signalman saw a problem, he could stop the train. The driver of a goods train would often be unaware that an axle-box had overheated in the middle of his train, or that a wagon was shedding its load. (Most signalmen now work in large central signal boxes, using electronic systems which mean that trains can run for miles without passing a signalman.) Semaphore signalling was not perfect, and accidents happened then just as they do now, but the system seemed safer.
Signalmen had no formal training, and learnt on the job by assisting an experienced man. Drivers learnt their craft on the job, and in Mutual Improvement Classes, run by volunteers, skilled drivers teaching in their own time. Signalmen and drivers were trusted to do their jobs without undue management interference. They knew what was safe and what was not, and drivers willingly supervised Adrian Vaughan as he drove their locomotives on his days off, a practice which would make present-day managers apoplectic.
The Uffington Ganger, Bob Thatcher, and his men checked and repaired the track every day, often in filthy weather. They did not wait for an accident to tell them something was wrong, they sought out minor flaws before they became major ones. If a rail was defective, it would be replaced using the stock of rails which Bob kept in the station yard.
The whole railway was looked after like this, and although it was labour-intensive, it was a safer and more reliable system than the one which allowed the Hatfield crash. There was a team spirit among the drivers, signalmen, and station staff, as well as a determination to provide a service on a railway which carried passengers and goods to every part of Britain.
In 1953 the railways carried more freight than the roads. The railway could serve everybody and do everything. No job was beyond it. It could, and did, move Bertram Mills Circus, small parcels, and entire farms with livestock and machinery. This was both part of its strength, and the root of its problems.
Lost in transit
Goods, whether coal or china, bicycles or dog food, were carried in wagons of Victorian design which had no brakes. The damage which these wagons caused to goods was appalling. Wagons were marshalled in long, loose-coupled trains, and although the locomotive and the guards van at the end of the train had brakes, the wagons did not. These trains travelled very slowly, and could not provide the service that customers wanted.
Some vacuum-braked wagons did exist, but the decision, made in the 1950s, not to build them in quantity was disastrous. Train service patterns became ossified, and management seemed incapable of responding to business opportunities. No-one knew where a wagon was once it began its journey, and wagons got lost in the system for days on end.
Bill Bradshaw (now Lord Bradshaw of Wallingford), who became General Manager of British Railways Western Region in 1983, remembers what it was like. He saw a huge pile of TV Times magazines on a platform, just before ITV began transmissions in 1955. He said to the Goods Agent, Thats some good traffic. The Goods Agent sighed and said, Next year Ill be explaining why Ive lost it. Bill summarised the situation: The hopelessness of it.
Most goods traffic was sundries boxes of this, boxes of that, for here, there, and everywhere, which were barrowed into wagons by an army of workers led by stubborn Trade Union officials, whose attitudes devastated the industry, and made closure inevitable.
At the Oxford goods depot, thirty or forty wagons arrived every day, mostly sundries traffic. Forty-eight lorries made deliveries around Oxford, still operating to a pattern based on the distance a horse could travel. Two or three trailer-loads of goods from different suppliers were delivered to Woolworths each day.
Working conditions were horrible, pay was half of that at Morris Motors, there were continual staff shortages, and unloading was forever in arrears because of this. Each autumn, the railway froze up with sundries as shops stocked up for Christmas. Unsorted goods were piled high in the depot, and deliveries were days in arrears. The customers became very angry with the railway, and bought lorries.
The Beeching Kremlin
The modernisation plan, when it came, was a mess. Most industries would have made changes gradually, but the 1959 Conservative Government had promised to make the railways pay, and appointed Dr. Richard Beeching from ICI to do the job.
There were good railway managers, usually men who had begun their careers as Traffic Apprentices, but there was a lack of strategic thinking at Board level. Beeching was a strategist, but he had no system for translating his ideas into sensible policies, and relied on bullying managers recruited from outside the railway.
Bill Bradshaw said that one of these men had a positively evil approach to work. Staff at stations like Uffington had no concept of management above the level of the station itself. Their loyalty was still to the Great Western Railway, and they referred to BR headquarters as The Kremlin. Organisations now spend large amounts of money communicating with their staff; but this was unknown in Beechings day.
Lines and stations had closed, even before Beeching. Managers had little real idea of operating costs, and used dubious practices to justify closures. No attempts were made to economise, or make services more attractive. People really believed that cars and motorways would supplant railways as railways had supplanted canals.
Bill Bradshaw feels that Beeching should not have let the railway headquarters staff expand, and sees his own time at the Kremlin as a missed opportunity. Totally useless frustrating highly political, point-scoring, nothing to do with running railways. I should have had a Chairman Mao approach, and made them get on the trains. They were out of date, and they had lost touch.
The public felt helpless when Beechings proposals were published, and opposition to closures was badly organised. The figures which were produced were selective, and were not subject to cross-examination. If the Beeching report appeared today, there would be more opposition.
What future for the remains?
Nearly thirty years later, we must work out how to improve the railways that are left. The worst aspect of Beeching was the central planning, the Government diktats on who had a railway, and who did not.
Two lines competed for traffic between London and Birmingham, but they served different parts of the country, and both prospered. The London Midland and Scottish Railway ran from Euston via Rugby, and the Great Western ran from Paddington via Banbury and Warwick.
British Railways electrified the line from Euston, but reduced much of the line from Paddington to single track, and ran a skeleton service. Since privatisation, Chiltern Railways have re-introduced expresses along this route from London Marylebone to Birmingham. They have succeeded because of their competitive fares, new, faster trains, and their excellent service. Their initial success was so great that they persuaded Railtrack to re-lay double track between Princes Risborough and Bicester, which permitted an even better service.
Re-opening would never have happened under British Rail, who never admitted that a closure was wrong, and never allowed two lines to compete. Despite Railtracks difficulties, Chiltern are pressing ahead with their ambitious long-term plans, which include re-opening the old Great Central route north of Aylesbury, opened in 1899 in the expectation of Channel Tunnel traffic. Its builders made its bridges and tunnels large enough to take outsized European wagons, but it was closed in 1966, almost thirty years before the tunnel opened.
Privatisation caused difficulties by separating ownership of track and trains. But investment increased dramatically, passenger and freight traffic grew, and an entrepreneurial climate flourished.
If train operators can be persuaded that their lives will not be ruled by bureaucrats, I suggest they are given tax incentives to rebuild lines which were closed or downgraded by Beeching, but which could be made profitable in an age of overcrowded roads. The lines from Derby to Manchester via Matlock and Bakewell, and from Carlisle to Edinburgh via Hawick could be rebuilt relatively easily, as the trackbed and most bridges are still there.
All that is needed is minimal bureaucratic interference, entrepreneurial management with sensible business plans, and enormous amounts of money.
