What if theory on the railway network

[uglymonkey]

Lots of people travel to Newquay by train. I've seen packed to standing HST's ( complete with unwieldy surfboards) in the past.

 

[Starmill]

Lots of people travel to Newquay by train. I've seen packed to standing HST's ( complete with unwieldy surfboards) in the past.

They did in the past. Now rather less so. Truro and Falmouth are much more of a draw for railway passengers.

 

[RT4038]

It would be unrealistic to suggest that 1960's Britain was entirely America focused.

Whichever way you look at it, a "ten times the number" scenario wouldn't have happened as there weren't ten times the number of secondary railways to begin with.

Never said Britain was entirely America focused. But it did have great influence at that time - aspirational and predictive.


How many stations have been closed since 1955? 3000+ ?
How many stations would have been closed but were not and were rationalised instead? 300 ? (not including those that have been rationalised since, but were not proposed for closure)

I know its only broad brush, but I don't think 'ten times' is far wrong.

 

[yorksrob]

Never said Britain was entirely America focused. But it did have great influence at that time - aspirational and predictive.


How many stations have been closed since 1955? 3000+ ?
How many stations would have been closed but were not and were rationalised instead? 300 ? (not including those that have been rationalised since, but were not proposed for closure)

I know its only broad brush, but I don't think 'ten times' is far wrong.

I think that if you're looking at our current portfolio of secondary routes, I think you'd be looking at less than half again potentially surviving, but providing an incredibly useful service - along the lines of the Marshlink (which is absolutely thriving btw).

 

[Gareth]

We're certainly clearly a classic anglophone country when it comes to public transport, in that we went for the car in a big way and public transport was seen as old hat. That said, there was always going to be some rationalisation of the rail network. It happened in most European countries countries to some extent.

 

[RT4038]

We're certainly clearly a classic anglophone country when it comes to public transport, in that we went for the car in a big way and public transport was seen as old hat. That said, there was always going to be some rationalisation of the rail network. It happened in most European countries countries to some extent.

However, these categories are only a guide though - every country is different historically and geographically. (western) European countries went for the car in a big way too - Eastern Europe didn't but when the wall came down the railways closed (in some of the countries anyway)and car ownership ballooned. Some anglophone countries regulated buses to be subservient to trains (New Zealand, South Africa for instance) but geographical and population density features eventually conspired against rail passenger. Density wise we are closer to some European countries (Netherlands, Belgium) but didn't regulate railway building or bus services in the same way as they did, so by 1955 our branch/local trains were empty, and main line trains inconvenient and losing traffic. In contrast, European urban road networks are often better laid out and modernised than here, but this is by no means the general case for everywhere!

 

[Gareth]

Indeed, European countries are quite heterogeneous when it comes to demographics. The UK's much more similar to the Netherlands than it is to Finland, say. Likewise, the US East Coast is quite a bit more dense than the rest of the country and it has more comprehensive Amtrak services as a result.

 

[Irascible]

I seem to have misplaed this thread at some ponit...

To me the stupid mistake was separating buses and railways within the BTC at nationalisation. The railways were big players in the bus industry between the wars. They held shared in Tilling and BET concrns as well as forming joint operating committees with municipals in Yorkshire.
For they saw buses as a cheap way to penetrate areas with insifficient traffic to justify a railway.
But no. We ended with the National Bus Company and BR going their own sweet ways, and privatisation on quite different models.

The problem seems to have been the BTC itself - which I guess is a problem of the government who set it up. It was, apparently, just a sign of the times though, but going too far that way ends up with a huge discussion about our society in general & that is a bit too far.

I suspect that the problem with the modernisation plan was 'where do you start?' , as the railway was so horribly outdated and worn out. It is easy to criticise with our 20/20 hindsight, but no doubt the thought would have gone to dealing with the problems of the there and now, plus having to deal with both the external and internal politics - buying proven diesels would have meant the USA, whom we were hugely in debt to and couldn't afford to increase that debt, plus the fate of British (steam) locomotive manufacturers and their workforces. The internal politics of organisations mean that taking decisions of closing/ streamlining large portions are particularly difficult to take, without some outside impetus. If we look back at the modernisation plan now (assuming no more money was available) we would probably go for electrification of the main lines then and still close the rest, but steam traction still had to be replaced on every line no matter what. Would spending more or all the money on electrification merely caused even greater shrinkage of the network, to contain the losses?

Modernising loss making branch lines and secondary routes would never have have been a good investment decision. The savings that could be made would likely never have paid for the capital costs involved, and the lines still closed, even if a few years later.

'What if' the government had supervised the building of the railways - less railways? 'What if' the railways had got out of the rural local and secondary passenger rail business to buses in the 1930s, and these bus services had been integrated with the main lines? We may have ended up with a few more 'borderline' secondary routes with trains on? We wouldn't have ended up with lines hamstrung by poor interchange at multiple stations in the same town/city. However by 1960 we were where we were!

We still have a pretty dense railway network. There are not many countries with any denser. Most countries have gone through closure programmes in one way or another. We are not some outlier.

If your system is that antiquated then I guess you have to start by deciding what you want it to do, in broad terms - not look at what you have & see if you can tweak it. It's unfortunate international freight containerisation didn't really kick off a little earlier, but that is life - internal containerisation was already a thing which I've never really been sure why wasn't taken up more. Concentrating on continuously braked block freight, recognising there was a shift to road and running their *own* road freight instead of local rail workings would still have kept money flowing in, as an example - and perhaps there might have been more local freight concentration terminals around now. Road freight could even have taken all the wierd loads that needed specialist wagons sitting around doing nothing most of the time - so fiulfilling common carrier - and still brought money in. Again, feels like BTC segregation hurt here - you'd think nationalising evreything would integrated it better! of course nearly all that did actually happen but far more brutally & less well integrated, because by that point the time for judicious surgery had passed & it was amputate quickly or die off.

That's an interesting point about inter-war co-operation - perhaps the RCH should have been charged with getting the big four to integrate better overall & look forwards more. I'm never quite sure how much government control there was over the network at the time, I have seen hints that it was more than most people generally think though. The railways shedding jobs in the 1930s seems like something governments would have done a lot to avoid, though. ( Also true of the 1950s, I guess! ).

All other countries prune their networks too, but has anyone else ( who hasn't had a revolutionary war or something that drastic ) had a Beeching axe moment?

 

[RT4038]

I seem to have misplaed this thread at some ponit...



The problem seems to have been the BTC itself - which I guess is a problem of the government who set it up. It was, apparently, just a sign of the times though, but going too far that way ends up with a huge discussion about our society in general & that is a bit too far.



If your system is that antiquated then I guess you have to start by deciding what you want it to do, in broad terms - not look at what you have & see if you can tweak it. It's unfortunate international freight containerisation didn't really kick off a little earlier, but that is life - internal containerisation was already a thing which I've never really been sure why wasn't taken up more. Concentrating on continuously braked block freight, recognising there was a shift to road and running their *own* road freight instead of local rail workings would still have kept money flowing in, as an example - and perhaps there might have been more local freight concentration terminals around now. Road freight could even have taken all the wierd loads that needed specialist wagons sitting around doing nothing most of the time - so fiulfilling common carrier - and still brought money in. Again, feels like BTC segregation hurt here - you'd think nationalising evreything would integrated it better! of course nearly all that did actually happen but far more brutally & less well integrated, because by that point the time for judicious surgery had passed & it was amputate quickly or die off.

That's an interesting point about inter-war co-operation - perhaps the RCH should have been charged with getting the big four to integrate better overall & look forwards more. I'm never quite sure how much government control there was over the network at the time, I have seen hints that it was more than most people generally think though. The railways shedding jobs in the 1930s seems like something governments would have done a lot to avoid, though. ( Also true of the 1950s, I guess! ).

All other countries prune their networks too, but has anyone else ( who hasn't had a revolutionary war or something that drastic ) had a Beeching axe moment?

Of course it isn't actually quite true that the Big Four companies were 'big' players in the bus industry before nationalisation. Some of the Big 4 developed a small amount of connecting bus operations but these were 'sold' to the territorial bus companies (in the main) around the time of regulation of bus services (1930) in exchange for shareholding. By and large the rail companies were sleeping partners, not active on any kind of co-ordination. One has to realise that the 'grouping' [consolidation] of railway companies into the Big 4 was accompanied by fears of local transport monopolies, and there was certainly suspicion that the railways would try to nobble the road competition - hence the railway companies keeping a low profile and merely reaping their share of the profits.

The BTC was too large and came with too much organisational baggage to be able to grapple with co-ordination between different modes. It was a political inspiration and had lots of opponents - none more than private road transport interests. Grappling with the railway and its financial issues it did not want to cause loads more controversy. It published one (I think) Area Road Passenger Transport scheme for consultation, got lots of hostile response, and was kicked into the long grass.

Nationalising the railways was not some kind of political consensus - there was plenty of opposition and the Govt and BTC had to tread very carefully - upheaval and re-organisation, particularly anything which would threaten livelihoods and result in monopoly. It is easy to look back and criticise, when we know the end results!

The French did a huge organised program of passenger line withdrawals at the beginning of the 1930s, replacing them with buses. The Canadians, South Africans and most of the Australian states did reports into their passenger services which resulted in many/most of them being closed. The US did the same with the start up of Amtrak. In many of these cases these reports sped up what was already happening. The Irish did a similar thing.

 

[mike57]

Taking the OPs question literally, if nothing had closed we would be left with a network of decrepit and underused routes, which would suck investment away from the important routes. Some routes should never have closed, and there is feeling amongst a lot of people that the government of the day when the 'Beeching cuts' were implimented were very anti railway, with lots of vested interests in the roads lobby. I also think that significant routes should have been protected from development, but at the time road transport was seen as the way forwards. Fast forward 60 years and the logic was obviously flawed, you cannot just keep building more roads, and if you want to move large volumes of goods or people around railways are the best way.

If you look back at the period 1955 to 1965 a number of fundemental errors were made. The rush to replace steam was one example, yes its days were numbered, but replacing an old but basically working resource with a huge range of diesel locomotives of different designs, some of which were pretty much junk from the day they were delivered was a bad move and a huge waste of resources. Better to iron out the quirks and reliability issues with a small initial purchase and then order in bulk the best designs. Steam might have lasted another 5 years or so, but the resulting outcome would have been better. I dont think this is the benefit of hindsight either, when carrying out a development into uncharted waters you refine your designs before going all out to impliment the solution. We also pretty much had a proven way forwards for main lines which was electrification, which had been developed since the start of the 1900s, but instead we chose to swap to a large number of unproven diesel designs.

The same with the closures, I think even at the time everyone knew which routes were the real basket cases, as opposed to those routes which would benefit from rationalisation and modernisation to reduce manning and costs and could have survived and made a useful contribution to the current network. However as has been discussed before there would probably have been significant union resistance to that kind of streamlining, so instead we lost the lot useful routes together with the basket cases. Its a lot easier to upgrade a route if conditions change than it is to reopen a closed route.

Ironically I think it would have been easier to close routes or stations today if they have outlived their purpose if the cuts back in the 60s had been less severe, and some of the more obviously unwise closeures had been avoided.

 

[RT4038]

Taking the OPs question literally, if nothing had closed we would be left with a network of decrepit and underused routes, which would suck investment away from the important routes. Some routes should never have closed, and there is feeling amongst a lot of people that the government of the day when the 'Beeching cuts' were implimented were very anti railway, with lots of vested interests in the roads lobby.

And quite rightly too. The Germans had started with their autobahn network in the 30s, and the Americans with their Interstate Highways in the 50s. These politicians did not want Britain to fall behind in the world, nor (which is frequently ignored / glossed over by rail employees and enthusiasts) did they want the country to be held to ransom by rail strikes / the threat of strikes as had dogged the 50s. There was not enough money to build the motorway network and fully modernise our decrepit railways, and road seemed to be the way of the future. So they chose to modernise a slimmed down rail network and build the motorway network. Is anyone seriously suggesting that the UK public should have been condemned to relying on the railway? They must be joking. I doubt there is anywhere in the world like that.

If you look back at the period 1955 to 1965 a number of fundemental errors were made. The rush to replace steam was one example, yes its days were numbered, but replacing an old but basically working resource with a huge range of diesel locomotives of different designs, some of which were pretty much junk from the day they were delivered was a bad move and a huge waste of resources. Better to iron out the quirks and reliability issues with a small initial purchase and then order in bulk the best designs. Steam might have lasted another 5 years or so, but the resulting outcome would have been better. I dont think this is the benefit of hindsight either, when carrying out a development into uncharted waters you refine your designs before going all out to impliment the solution. We also pretty much had a proven way forwards for main lines which was electrification, which had been developed since the start of the 1900s, but instead we chose to swap to a large number of unproven diesel designs.

I think you are ignoring what sort of enormous cost running a steam railway is, and, by 1968, how difficult it was getting to recruit labour to service and man them. Electrification was just too expensive and too slow to implement. There may well have been errors in diesel locomotive building, but the railway does not operate in a political vacuum and there were all sorts of pressures on Govt. to order locomotives from British locomotive manufacturers whose order books had dried up (due to foreign conversion from steam to diesel) and precious little experience with diesels. With hindsight this was largely throwing good money after bad, but that lobby could not be ignored either.

 

[Eyersey468]

If the OP means no closures at all I doubt that would have happened, some lines such as Freshwater to Newport on the Isle of Wight were complete no hopers and never even covered their costs from day 1 let alone showed a profit. Its amazing that line hung on until 1955.