This is all arguably true - but it's evidence against the idea that BR's financial troubles were its own fault rather than the result of external circumstances. I doubt the LNER would have been able to prevent further bleeding - the political environment at the time would not have looked kindly on subsidies and once the unprofitable parts had been taken out I doubt much would even be left.
Hindsight is a wonderful thing…
…but it is certainly true that the new British Railways was compromised by the financial and legal structures existing in 1948.
The points that I and others are trying to make are that:
- in its early days it made absolutely no attempt to adapt to the new social and economic landscape in which it found itself
- many of the problems it faced were self-inflicted.
Because of the changed economic circumstances this is not say that even with an adapted legislative framework the railway would have remained self-funded but that by denying for nearly ten years that the world had changed the shock of the ‘Beeching Plan’ would not have been so great - and it may have not even been needed. To address your point about subsidies it is conceivable that the British Transport Commission (BTC) and the government of the day could have earlier worked towards a framework for subsidising the ’social railway’ (as was the case by 1961/2) where the alternatives, due to an increasing number of cars, would have been more expensive.
The institutional framework in which the railways operated dated from 1938 and was set in aspic by nationalisation. Two examples:
- the ‘Common Carrier Obligation’ was introduced in 1854 to try to stop the many private railway and canal companies from acting in a monopolistic manner, but it completely escaped the notice of the Labour government that it itself had created a transport monopoly (rail, road and canal) and therefore the common carrier obligation was now completely irrelevant. It should have been abolished as part of the 1947 Act but it remained and made any type of management accounting allocating income and expenses pointless
- the BTC did not have the freedom to decide its fares and freight rates, any changes had to be approved by the Traffic Commissioners[1] but they remained aligned to the value of the goods and not the cost of movement.
Equally, the Railway Executive (RE) lived in a time warp and made no attempt to adapt its product to the circumstances existing after the War. At the end of the War there were serious labour shortages, some 350,000 men had been killed - they were all fit and most of them were young. Wages were increasing as was to be expected to get supply and demand into balance and it was becoming increasingly difficult to attract staff to the dirty jobs done during unsocial hours. Yet the RE continued to build motive power and operate train services using pre-war labour intensive technologies and methods.
Technology had advanced tremendously during the War. Many, if not all, of those being demobbed had experience of high speed internal combustion engines - all those lorries, jeeps, tanks and aircraft - and electronic communications. And yet the RE continued to build steam engines and strangled modern alternatives at birth.
At the time BR was created the LMS had built diesel shunters and the prototype Ivatt main line diesel locomotives and the Southern was also well on its way. The GWR had built a series of diesel railcars in the 1930s and ordered gas turbine main line locomotives using a form of prime mover which was only five years old. Forward looking or what? The Southern had electrified significant parts of its network by the time war broke out.
Then it all stopped. The RE added diesel shunters to its build programme and picked up railcar development again in 1952. Mainline diesel locomotive development restarted in 1955 with the publication of the Modernisation Plan. By this time the second or third iteration of the Ivatt designs could have been putting out 2,000 bhp or more with much operational experience behind them.
Road vehicle reliability and capability had increased enormously - yet the basic unit of freight production remained the 10 ton van ambling from siding to siding.
The RE did not look at all these changes and ask itself how the railway should be adapted to compete. Its biggest failing was that the traffic studies and analyses that Beeching had done in 1961 should have been done 14 or 15 years earlier. But they weren’t and so the BTC wasted hundreds of millions in building Type 2 diesels for a traffic which was vanishing.
And the rest is history.
[1] Not the correct name, but my memory fails me!
