Encyclopedia
British Railways , later rebranded as
British Rail, ran the
British railway system from the nationalisation of the 'Big Four' British
railway companies in 1948 until its privatisation in stages between 1994 and 1997.
This period saw massive changes in the railway network: steam traction was eliminated in favour of diesel and electric power, passengers replaced freight as the main source of business, and the network was severely rationalised.
History
The
rail transport system in Great Britain developed during the 19th century. After the grouping of 1923 under the Railways Act 1921 there were four large railway companies, each dominating its own geographic area: the
Great Western Railway , the
London, Midland and Scottish Railway , the
London and North Eastern Railway and the Southern Railway .
Railway profitability suffered during the great depression of the
1930s, capital spending was postponed and maintenance cut back. This meant that state of Britain's railways was already poor on the eve of
Second World War. During the war, the railways were taken into state control as a vital part of the wartime economy. They were heavily damaged by enemy action, and a further lack of capital investment and maintenance caused by wartime economic necessity compounded this. In parallel with the rest of Britain's economy, after the war the railways were in a very run-down state.
1948: Nationalisation
The Transport Act 1947 made provision for the nationalisation of the network, as part of a policy of nationalising public services by
Clement Attlee's Labour Government. British Railways came into existence on 1 January 1948 with the merger of the Big Four as the Railway Executive of the British Transport Commission .
The
London Underground and the
Glasgow Underground which were already public concerns, the Liverpool Overhead Railway, a small number of independent light railways and
industrial railways which did not contribute significant mileage to the system, were not included in British Railways, nor were non-railway-owned
tramways. The Northern Counties Committee lines owned by the LMS in
Northern Ireland were quickly sold to the Stormont Government, becoming part of the
Ulster Transport Authority in 1949.
The new system was split geographically into six regions along the lines of the Big Four:
These regions formed the basis of the BR business structure until the 1980s. The regional boundaries were re-drawn in 1958 to make them more geographically-based rather than being based on pre-nationalisation ownership. The North Eastern Region was merged with Eastern Region in the 1960s; a new Anglia Region was split off from the Eastern Region in the 1980s. They retained a level of independence, though there was also some centralisation.
1948-55: The early years
The priority in the immediate aftermath of nationalisation was to repair wartime damage and clear the backlog of maintenance work. Some pre-war capital investment schemes that had been cancelled upon the outbreak of hostilities were restarted . The new BR regions to a large extent inherited the organisations, structures and ethos of their predecessor Big Four companies and continued to work with a large degree of autonomy, building new steam locomotives and rolling stock to their respective companies' pre-war designs. There were also significant differences in fixed-stock engineering standards and operating standards between the former companies. The BR network was almost exclusively powered by steam locomotives, often of pre-grouping vintage, with rolling stock of a similar vintage and all in a poor state of repair. Only the Southern region with its large electrified suburban network around London operated a significant amount of non-steam-powered trains.
Rather than pursue other forms of motive power on a large scale, in 1951 a new range of BR standard steam locomotives was introduced, along with new standard passenger and freight rolling stock. Production of the various pre-nationalisation types ceased in favour of these. At the same time attempts were made to standardise other engineering standards and operating standards across the company wherever possible.
1955-63: The Modernisation Plan
Britain's railways arguably went into the Second World War having technologically fallen behind those of its peers. As the years passed after the War it became apparent that Britain was falling further behind. Countries like Japan, USA and France already had made significant investment in new diesels and electrics before the War, this continued after the war. Britain was not, and the run-down network deteriorated even more because of painfully slow rebuilding. Finally, and late, came the modernisation plan for Britain's railways. It cost the government much more than it should have due to bad timing.
The 1955 Modernisation Plan, detailed in the British Transport Commission's
Modernisation and Re-equipment of British Railways, argued for spending
£1,240 million over a period of 15 years. The aim was to increase speed, reliability, safety and line capacity, through a series of measures which would make services more attractive to passengers and freight operators, thus recovering traffic that was being lost to the roads. The important areas were:
A government White Paper was produced in 1956, stating that modernisation would help eliminate BR's financial deficit by 1962.
At this time the some of BR's legal liabilities as a common carrier were removed, in particular the requirement that general goods handling facilities must be offered at every station. This ended the tradition of having a general goods handling facility with associated rail infrastructure at practically every station, many of which were becoming under-utilised in the face of competition from road transport. This had associated cost savings in staff, infrastructure and caused a significant reduction in the numbers of slow stopping freight trains, significantly increasing network capacity.
Unfortunately the modernisation plan failed to take into account this and the other effects that mass road transport would have upon the traditional role of the railways, and as a result much money was wasted by heavy investment in things like
marshalling yards that were soon under-utilised and quickly became obsolete. Much money was also wasted by the rapid introduction of new classes of diesel locomotives into fleet service without an adequate period of prototype testing, which resulted in several classes being scrapped within a very few years of their being built. The failure of the Modernisation Plan led to a distrust of British Rail's financial planning abilities by the Treasury which was to dog BR for the rest of its existence.
Some routes were closed during the 1950s to take account of changing transport patterns and to remove obvious route duplication. For instance in
East Anglia most of the former lines of the
Midland and Great Northern Joint Railway were shut in 1959; long-distance passenger trains on the former Great Central Railway main line ended in 1960 as a prelude to its later closure. However the route closures were just a small taste of what was to come.
1963-68: The Beeching Axe and the end of steam
In 1963, BR chairman Dr
Richard Beeching published the
Re-Shaping of British Railways calling for major rationalisation of the system. Many rural routes were unprofitable in the face of increasing competition from road hauliers and the private car. The
Beeching Axe fell on many branch lines and some main lines - some of these lines have since become
heritage railways.
The late 1950s to the end of the 1960s saw first a reduction, then the final withdrawal of Britain's fleet of steam locomotives. Mass withdrawals of older classes started towards the end of the 1950s, with many of the pre-grouping companies' engines being scrapped. BR built its last steam engine at Swindon in 1960. Withdrawals of newer steam engines started in the early 1960s, some of which had been built to modern post-war designs and were less than 10 years old. During this period many new designs of diesel locomotives and multiple units were introduced to replace steam-powered trains. The greater availability and reliability of these new trains, coupled with the need for fewer locomotives and less rolling stock caused by the Beeching line closures, meant that the BR fleet reduced significantly. Main-line diesel locomotives began arriving in large numbers from 1963, in early 1966 the Western Region was the first region to declare that it had no further Steam locomotives; other regions quickly followed suit with the last pocket of steam traction being withdrawn from the North-West of England in August 1968. The short narrow-gauge
Vale of Rheidol Railway at
Aberystwyth in
Wales was the only exception: it remained steam-operated until its sale by BR in 1989. Pre-nationalisation rolling stock was withdrawn as BR standard stock became available, the majority had gone by the end of the 1960s.
From 1958 to 1974 the
West Coast Main Line was electrified in stages on the French system of
25 kV 50Hz
AC overhead line electrification, this having been chosen as the standard system for new electrification north of London, despite BR having invested significant amounts in two 1,500V DC overhead systems a decade earlier. Many commuter lines around
London and
Glasgow were also electrified, and the Southern Region extended its already extensive pre-war 750 V
DC third rail system to the
Kent and
Dorset coasts. However electrification never reached system-wide level, as on many other
European railways.
1969-79: British Rail
As the last steam locomotives were being withdrawn, the corporations's public name was re-branded as
British Rail . This re-branding introduced the double-arrow logo, still used by
National Rail under licence to represent the industry as a whole ; the standardised
typeface used for all communications and signs; and the "rail blue" livery, which was applied to nearly all locomotives and rolling stock.
In 1973 the TOPS system for classifying locomotives and multiple units was introduced. Hauled rolling stock continued to carry numbers in a separate series. Also during this time, yellow warning panels, now characteristic of British railways, were added to the fronts of diesel and electric locomotives and multiple units in order to increase the safety of track workers.
The major engineering works were split off into a separate company,
British Rail Engineering Limited , in 1970.
1980-94: Sectorisation
In the 1980s the regions of BR were abolished and the system sectorised into five sectors. The passenger sectors were InterCity ,
Network SouthEast and
Regional Railways . Trainload Freight took trainload freight,
Railfreight Distribution took non-trainload freight, Freightliner took
intermodal traffic and
Rail Express Systems took parcels traffic. The maintenance and remaining engineering works were split off into a new company, British Rail Maintenance Limited . The new sectors were further subdivided into divisions. This ended the "
BR blue" period, as new liveries were adopted gradually. Infrastructure remained the responsibility of the Regions until the "Organisation for Quality" initiative in 1991, when this too was transferred to the sectors.
Running concurrently with the Sectorisation process came the last of BR's major infrastrucuture projects; the East Coast Main Line was electrified in stages between 1987 and 1990, whilst the Chiltern Main Line was extensively modernised so as to open up an additional link between London and Birmingham. A follow on from the Chiltern project was to be the nationwide roll-out of the Automatic Train Protection system which was proven to prevent accidents caused by SPADs. However, privatisation intervened and this plan was largely abandoned.
1994-97: Privatisation
On the advice of the Adam Smith Institute, under
John Major's Conservative government's Railways Act 1993 British Rail was split up and privatised. This was a continuation of the policy of
Margaret Thatcher's Conservative government's privatisation of publicly-owned services. The unpopular Conservative government was facing a Labour victory at the May 1997 General Election, and so privatisation was rushed through and was finished in November 1997.
Several models of privatisation were mooted, in the end the one that was chosen resembled that chosen previously for the privatisation of the electricity and gas industries. The ownership of track, trains and infrastructure was separated into different companies based upon the existing BR business structure, with government economic regulation of certain parts of the industry remaining after privatisation where sufficient competition was deemed not to exist. Passenger services in each sector were franchised out to private companies, often bus operators. The
Association of Train Operating Companies was created to organise ticketing and market the rail services using the
National Rail brand. Freight operations were mostly bought by one company,
EWS.
Railtrack plc was created as a regulated monopoly controlling the infrastructure and its shares floated on the
London Stock Exchange. The Shadow Strategic Rail Authority was created to oversee and advise the government. The British Railways Board remained with some residual functions.
Privatisation has had mixed results. Passenger growth has been stimulated, but this has been at extra cost to passengers, who have seen steady fare increases since 1997, and to the public purse which, by 2006, was paying a subsidy more than three times as large as British Rail had received. Freight has also increased; however, there is debate as to whether these increases in passengers and freight have been due to privatisation, or simply to increasing congestion on the roads and an improved economy, which usually results in more travel. Some analysts have pointed out that a similar rise in passenger numbers occurred in the late 1980s when the economy was buoyant, only to fall in the recession of the early 1990s; however, recent passenger-journey numbers have climbed back to the level last seen in the 1950s.
Railtrack's management proved to be incompetent and the Labour government refused to continue to subsidise the losses of shareholders. It went insolvent, was put into administration and was replaced by a not-for-profit publicly owned
Network Rail. Some saw this as the first step towards renationalisation. Given the costs, this is unlikely at present although some studies have recommended this as a cheaper choice than the current subsidies to commercial companies. The Shadow Strategic Rail Authority's power became real when it became the
Strategic Rail Authority . It was itself abolished after a few years and its functions transferred to the Department for Transport .
There has been some controversy over the decision to withhold subsidies from Railtrack, which forced it to become insolvent. Press reports indicated that the then transport minister Stephen Byers deliberately forced the company to become insolvent, as this would remove any obligation on the government to provide compensation to its shareholders, who would lose their investment. However, the High Court ruled that the Department for Transport had not actively sought Railtrack's collapse .
Network
The BR network, with the trunk routes of the
West Coast Main Line,
East Coast Main Line,
Great Western Main Line and
Midland Main Line, remains unchanged. The
Beeching Axe fell on many branch lines and some other main lines.
Locomotives and rolling stock
Locomotives
Steam locomotives
BR inherited more than 20,000 locomotives from the constituent Big Four companies, the vast majority of which were steam locomotives. BR built 2537 steam locomotives in the period 1948-1960: 1538 were to pre-nationalisation designs, and 999 to its own standard designs. These locomotives were destined to lead short lives, some as little as five years against a design life of over 30 years, because of the end of steam traction on 11 August 1968. The exceptions were
locomotives No. 98007-98009 which continued to work the
Vale of Rheidol line until 1989, in spite of one of them having been built in 1902.
Diesel locomotives
When BR was created, diesel traction was in its infancy in the
United Kingdom . Only two main-line diesel locomotives was inherited in 1948 and a handful of diesel shunters of various types.
Initially, BR persisted with the small scale experimentation with diesel traction while continuing to build hundreds of steam locomotives to old and new designs. Even some steam shunters were being built through to the mid-1950s, when standard diesel shunters were already in large-scale production. It was not until the 1955 Modernisation Plan that more substantial developments in main-line diesel locomotive technology were planned.
The Plan envisaged small numbers of prototype locomotives of varying power types being ordered from a variety of manufacturers. These could be tested and compared against each other before large-scale orders were placed. Unfortunately, even before many of the prototypes had been delivered, a combination of the political need to maintain employment in the British locomotive-building industry and over-optimistic assessments of the possibilities offered by new diesel locomotives meant that large-scale orders were placed for a wide variety of untested and incompatible designs, many of which proved to be very poor.
By the end of 1968 all steam locomotives had been withdrawn - but during 1967-71 so were a large number of virtually new diesel locomotives and shunters as many designs had proved unsuccessful, non-standard, and unnecessary with changed requirements on the railways, e.g. widespread line closures and the decline of wagonload freight traffic. However, some of the diesel shunters withdrawn during this period found further use on industrial railway systems.
After the production of some 5000 diesel locomotives in the 1956-1968, the British locomotive-building industry virtually collapsed. BR needed very few new diesel locomotives from then on; only 285 heavy-duty freight locomotives and 199
High Speed Train power cars were purchased from then until privatisation began in 1994. No diesel locomotives have been built in Britain for the mainline system since 1991; the most recent new types have been imported from
Canada and
Spain.
Electric locomotives
Electric traction was more advanced than diesel traction at nationalisation, with a number of isolated electrified networks across the country using a variety of power supplies, though 1500 V dc overhead supply had been accepted as the national standard in the 1930s. Most of these networks used electric multiple units to provide the passenger service, with steam locomotives operating freight trains. Thus, BR inherited only 13 ex-North Eastern and three ex-Southern Railway electric locomotives, plus two departmental electric shunters, also ex-Southern Railway.
In the early years of BR, a number of locomotives were built to operate on the newly-refurbished and electrified
Woodhead Route using the 1500 V dc overhead system. However, by the time that the next major electrification project, the West Coast Main Line , was underway, the decision had been taken to adopt 25 kV ac overhead as the standard supply system.
BR decided to test a variety of new 25 kV ac types for the WCML electrification; 100 locomotives of five classes were built by different manufacturers. Having learned the lessons from these types, a further 100 examples, of standard class 86, were ordered. This class was introduced in 1966, and some are still in service today. The earlier prototypes, mostly pretty successful, succumbed in the 1980s and early 1990s as non-standard following the arrival of new electric locomotives.
Although the purchase of new electric types was carried out in a more successful way than the comparable process for diesel locomotives, the 200-odd electric locomotive fleet used to operate the WCML from the mid-1960s was still far smaller than that originally envisaged; more than 500 were thought necessary when the initial plans were developed. It was fortunate that changes in the railway's operation had already occurred before mass orders were placed for electric traction.
However, BR had intended to move away from loco-hauled electric trains on the main line as early as the 1970's. The
Advanced Passenger Train was a
multiple unit design intended to reduce journey times on the WCML by running at speeds of up to 150mph. The APT used a sophisticated tilting mechanism to allow the coaches to lean into curves, and featured a hydrokinetic braking system to allow the train to stop within the existing fixed block signalling system. The project was plagued with technical problems and a lack of political will to overcome them resulted in the project being cancelled in the mid 1980s. In the end, the APT enjoyed something of an "afterlife" in the 2000s when its tilting technology re-appeared on the Italian designed
Class 390 "Pendolino" trains introduced for the WCML modernisation, finally replacing most of the electric loco fleet.
Coaches
BR inherited the rolling stock of the Big Four railway companies and also continued to build coaches to their designs. In 1951 BR began its own programme of coach construction using standard designs, and included significant improvements in comfort and safety over previous designs. The first BR design was the Mark 1, with the final design being the Mark 4.
Freight wagons and industrial tankers.- Coal trucks.
- Parcels vans and mail wagons.
- Industrial and oil tankers.
- Flat-cars and car-transporters.
- Gravel hoppers.
Multiple units
See also
External links
Sorted alphabetically
