Railways albeit with a slight blip during COVID seem to be at their busiest for nearly a century and that’s in spite of some pretty sky high ticket prices.
Things seem to have been steadily improving since around the late 1980s after being in decline for the previous 50 years.
I’m just wondering when people think the low point was - by that I mean a combination of poor quality trains, stations closures exceeding station openings, rationalisation exceeding increasing capacity etc.
Obviously there were the Beeching closures and the continuation of those into the late 60s and early 70s but similarly in the 70s/80s some new stations were starting to be opened and networks like Merseyrail and the Tyne & Wear Metro were being developed - but there were still notable closures and rationalisations like Woodhead, March to Spalding, (London) Broad Street, Tunbridge Wells West etc well in the 1980s.
The upturn seem to correspond with privatisation but likely inspite of rather than necessarily because of.
For me it feels like 1985 was probably the low point but I would be interested in others’ views.
As someone who lived through the changes in the railways from the late 1950s onwards my vote for the lowest ebb in the railways fortunes, both economically, visually and as a way to travel would be the decade from about 1955.
British Railway's financial results had been deteriorating since 1952 and by 1955 it was not even covering its direct operating costs; from breaking even at an operating level in 1952 the losses increased every year to reach £100 million by 1962. (Some £2,500 million today). The railways' slide into loss making had significant effects on its sponsoring department, the Ministry of Transport, and the Treasury. Suddenly, in space of a couple of years Whitehall had to find a way to fill the financial hole. When many industries were nationalised in 1947/8 [1] it was never expected that any of them would need operating support[2] although loans for large capital projects were foreseen so no management processes were in place to manage continual subsidies. As a result Whitehall was scrambling for some way to manage and staunch the flow of funds into what seemed to be at the time an ever increasing hole and for which the Treasury's forward planning had no precedent.
One of these initiatives was the 1955 Modernisation Plan which failed miserably in improving BR's financial results and which was followed four years later in 1959 by the
Re-appraisal of the Plan for the Modernisation and Re-equipment of British Railways and only eight years later by the Reshaping Plan in 1963.
Visually, this period was awful. Steam locomotives were run down and in very poor condition and the coal they burnt was often low grade and very smoky. Rolling stock was dirty both externally and internally and window slides frequently jammed with ash and grit. Money was tight and stations were grimy and unpleasant places although in many cases the platforms were swept - unfortunately often straight onto the tracks...
In the suburban areas around London the Southern at least did not put ash into one's eye, but the use of cast iron brake blocks on every electric train meant the south London trains, track, bridges and stations were covered with a thin layer of rust.
The new diesel locomotives did not improve matters much. In practice they were not much more reliable, if at all, than the steam engines they were replacing and they were also not looked after, chipped and peeling paintwork, oil stains and general grime were not uncommon.
The continuing loss of freight traffic resulted in many sidings and other facilities becoming unused and derelict, rusty rails covered by weeds and saplings. Long lines of sad looking freight and other rolling stock with COND(emned) or a cross in circle daubed on the sides were left in sidings all over the country.
There were some signs of change, some headline trains were being accelerated but frequencies were low with only a few signs of clockface timetables appearing away from the Southern and some other suburban services. But generally it was a very sad and depressing time, the last traces of the Big Four and their romance were being erased and it was not clear that any improvements were on their way.
[1] Coal; railways; canals; docks and harbours; road transport; the Bank of England; civil aviation; international telecommunications (Cable and Wireless); electricity; gas; and steel.
[2] The NHS was a special case, but it was also not an industry.
