British Rail by Christian Wolmar sets out an alternative view of the state-owned rail network in Britain - away from the jokes about sandwiches and the wrong kind of snow. His argument is that this portrayal of costly ineptitude is underserved and was deliberately created to justify the privatisation of the railways, which has in fact ended up costing the taxpayer more while charging more for tickets on a worse service.
I was half expecting this to be a nostalgic look back to the good old days on the railways, but actually there is little nostalgia for the steam age or the pre-Beeching era. Beeching was the civil servant whose name is synonymous with railway closures, especially many rural branchlines. But Christian gives him a fair assessment - many of those lines were in disrepair and no longer served any industries or centres of population. Many of them hadn't turned a profit before being nationalised and actually 'British Rail' extended their lives longer than they would have lasted if run commercially.
There are some fascinating insights in this book. In the 1950s British Railways had an ambitious plan to build helipads at major stations because helicopters were the transport of the future. But it's not just flights of fancy like that - there are plenty of actual railway practices that seem hilariously wrong-headed now.
One of those was the use of slip coaches. Basically, this was a system that meant fast trains didn't have to slow down at stations. At a given point, the last coach on the train would be uncoupled and roll to a halt in the station while the train thundered on. This meant that lots more staff were needed, one for each coach to apply the brakes and make sure it stopped in the right place. And the coaches needed to be collected up and shunted somewhere else until they were used again. It was crazily inefficient just to shave a few minutes off the time it took for a train to get to its eventual destination.
The other thing I found interesting is that although Beeching's plans were made under a Tory government, the cuts were almost all carried out under a Labour administration. That's despite the opposition of unions to the cuts and lay-offs.
Most of the Beeching cuts in the 1960s were in the name of modernisation, but actually real modernisation didn't happen until a new generation of managers came through the system in the 1970s and 80s. Power shifted in favour of managers and away from engineers meaning that priority was given to joining up timetables and improving the experience of train travel. There were even marketing campaigns - many of which triggered memories of seeing the TV ads in the 80s. (Like "Let the Train Take the Strain.")
The real big shift was away from regionalised thinking - the country was basically split into four competing regions that mirrored the original four companies that were merged into British Railways. Instead of region-based organisation, the bosses at British Rail decided to focus on 'sectors' - passenger, freight, post and so on. The InterCity brand that I really remember from my childhood came in around then - along with Regional Railways which I remember seeing a lot more on trains operating out of my home town.
I was very interested in the way focusing on the service being delivered, rather than the region services were being delivered in, transformed the railways. Some sectors started turning a profit, which was invested back into new trains, creating a virtuous circle of profit generation. A lot of this happened under Margaret Thatcher's Tory government, which is surprisingly depicted as broadly supportive of British Rail and less inclined to meddle with the railways than previous governments.
But, sadly, then came privatisation. Christian presents this as a gross act of political vandalism, implemented entirely, and incompetently, for ideological reasons. It was a loose statement in John Major's manifesto in 1992, enacted without any real plan or sense of purpose by his unpopular government. The epilogue about the quarter century post-privatisation is a panoply of failures.
I think the highest credit I can give this book is that it's a book about railways that's ideal for people who don't get excited about railways as much as for people who do. There are lots of interesting tidbits of information - like the sheer number of steam engines built by British Rail that all ended up on the scrapheap by 1970 - and the overall story of a state owned industry achieving success is a compelling narrative.
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