Sabotage ahead of Beeching's cuts?

[TheSignalEngineer]

Returning to the points about Beeching and costings. 

In the late 1960s i was tasked with providing figures on signalling equipment required on still-open lines with/without certain already closed services which the embryonic PTE was considering for reopening. The same was done for permanent way and other infrastructure. One of these was Birmingham to Stafford via Walsall and Rugeley. The consultant compiling the report came to the conclusion that as the line was still used for coal traffic and IC diversions and all of the existing infrastructure was required for these the closure including the effects on the stations remining open between Walsall and Birmingham, actually lost more in revenue than it saved. 

[LNER4479]

I think a big part of the pre-Beeching rundown started due to the 1955 strike. This lost the railways a lot of business, never to return, particularly goods traffic - which went straight to the road hauliers who could offer a door-to-door service.

There's no disputing that the 1955 strike lost the railways a lot of freight business; but the gradual loss of freight traffic to road started a lot earlier than that, some 30 years previous in fact.

 

The railways never truly recovered to their position of dominance that they had enjoyed prior to the First World War. Upon de-mob, thousands of ex-army lorries and an equal number of men who knew how to drive them flooded the market and started to eat away at least at the short distance traffic. The economic slump of the 1920's, the general strike of 1926 and the world-wide depression following the 1929 Wall Street crash all contributed to freight revenues far worse than budgeted for, particularly for the LNER who were worst affected by the collapse of the North East coal trade.

 

World War 2 provided a brief, artificial upturn but the writing was well and truly on the wall long time before Dr Beeching rode into town.

 

Interesting, in his report he quotes the following revenue figures for British Railways (1961)

Gross receipts:

Passenger - £157.5m

Freight (inc parcels & mail) - £306.7m

 

So, as late as 1961, freight was still generating twice the income of passenger. Compare that to today!

 

I've no doubt some skulduggery was at hand but, looked in the longer term, what happened with Beeching had a horrible inevitability about it.

Edited December 8, 2017 by LNER4479

[wagonman]

I still remember the row when the Cheddar line trains lost their convenient connections to Bristol at Yatton. The (minor) retiming was clearly intended to stop Cheddar and Wells folk taking the train to Bristol, and it worked brilliantly.

 

Corrupt? Managers 'knew' what they had to do to keep their jobs, and went ahead and did it.

 

 

Quite so. There were several cases where local management came up with imaginative ways to boost traffic but were told that career advancement would only be achieved if they could close lines.

 

To be fair to Barbara Castle when she was Labour Transport Minister she did rescind a few closure notices, unlike the total nonentity who preceded her in the job. He just rubber stamped everything.

[Trog]

We told them to go away and asked where they were due to due next. "South West Sidings Shunt Frame, how do we get to it" was the reply. The Operations Supervisor said "Bet we can close it before you can paint it, were just off to sign it out now."

 

I think that was the box my colleagues demolished by attaching the hook of a 12t tele crane to its underside and lifting.

The box was then pushed out of the way with a bulldozer, and dismantled for its firewood content.

 

During the Midland electrification two P-Way cabins at Brent Sidings were painted one day and demolished the next.

Apparently the blokes doing the demolition were not impressed as the still tacky paint got everywhere.

[coachmann]

The whole rail closure thing wasn't much of a surprise at the time to anyone thinking in terms of politics, as I was.  My politics leaned towards the Conservatives long before i was able to vote due to what I read. The workers did themselves no favors when war ended, and while I could see why they did not want a return to pre-war conditions; (they had fought the war and expected greater respect), there was also a large element of downright stubbornness bordering on laziness in some areas. When they were asked to pull out all the stops to increase production for exports to bring in much needed money becasue the UK was broke, they argued and went on strike instead. 1955 was the turning point as far as I could judge, and I sense Government advisers said there was no point in providing men with jobs when they won't work. This freed politicians form old obligations and the future was pathed out towards eliminating costly wages.

 

Had my own path in life worked out as I planned and studied hard for, I would have been a teacher, but I was where I was and the parents flatly told me I could forget moving up to art college in Manchester as I had to bring in a wage like everyone else. So I entered the world of manual laboring and experienced first hand the behavior and thinking that was prevalent in the late 1950's to the early seventies (before I went self employed). Closed-shop, demarcation lines, long-held work practices, no wish to learn 'new tricks' and so-on was crippling the economy.  When Wilson got in in 1964, my wife said the men cheered in her factory, and this probably happened across the land. They hadn't worked out what Wilson's oft-chanted 'White technology' actually meant for them. It meant automation and job elimination. This was why the Beeching cuts continued unabated. When steam was eliminated earlier than initially planned in 1968, Labour turned their attention to nationalizing buses with the creation of PTE's and to eliminate conductors. They bolstered Leylands order books (by now nationalized) by insisting that grants for bus purchase were only available if buying new rear engine buses. Except for London, the traditional and relatively inexpensive half-cab bus with open platform virtually evaporated in front of our eyes to be replaced by costly to run buses with even more seating at a time when passengers were also evaporating. 

 

Today, we are where we are thanks to what happened in the latter half of the 20th Century. Trade Unions have a place in civilized society, but they are only effective when their leaders and shop stewards think like politicians so that they are equal to the game. They failed to realise that their members were working poeple, not Socialist activists.  Many were of course, but the unions stranglehold was eventually broken by their own members who voted overwhelmingly for the Conservatives (Maragaret Thatcher) in 1979.  They voted for change, but as things turned out, they inadvertently threw in the towel as well and handed back all the power to the employers. And employers being what they are, they reverted to pre-war practices, the very thing the men that fought and died for this country did not want!

Edited December 8, 2017 by coachmann

[LNER4479]

Feeling better after that, Coach? Great post!

[Bernard Lamb]

 

To be fair to Barbara Castle when she was Labour Transport Minister she did rescind a few closure notices, unlike the total nonentity who preceded her in the job. He just rubber stamped everything.

Oh dear, come on now, in general 'twas the other way around.

It was Barbara Castle who sealed the fate of the Waverley Route after Richard Marsh had prevaricated.

It is so easy to bash people using the blunt weapon of hindsight.

It is totally unacceptable to use rude and offensive language as in your post.

Bernard

[cb900f]

Was is not Barbara Castle who said that there would be no more closures and then promptly closed the S&D ?

 

Pete

[LMS2968]

It is totally unacceptable to use rude and offensive language as in your post.

Bernard

I missed those, despite reading it again - twice. Perhaps your and my idea of 'rude and offensive' are wildly at variance.

[The Stationmaster]

I seriously wonder about the 'corruption' allegation and various other things,  there were very definitely cases of the left hand and right hand being well disconnected from each other - such as the people who ran the painting programmes not knowing what was on the closure list because nobody bothered to tell them and so on.

 

And I don't know how it was done elsewhere but I do know how the Beeching passenger traffic survey was done on two lines (including our local branch) because it involved the station staff physically counting the passengers - the passenger numbers which went into the Report for many stations no doubt came from exactly that sort of source and nothing else (and if anything could well have been inflated by local staff rather than deflated by some 'corrupt' senior manager).  The story of 'deliberately broken connections' is an old chestnut which is still around today (it even figures in a letter to our local 'paper this week) and I suspect that in many cases it simply resulted not so much from any sort of intention to break connections but very firm intentions to save money by tightening diagrams rather than anything else (I've certainly seen things like that happen during my railway career - long after Beeching had left the scene).  Don't forget too that the early 1960s saw a shortening of the working week for railway staff which in turn increased the cost of covering an unchanged volume of work

 

The sad fact was that many lines simply failed to cover their operating costs and couple that with not recognising their bringing traffic to the rest of the network and you get closures (plenty of which were going on long before Beeching arrived - mass closures of rural lines pre-dated his appearance by several years).  As for renewals shortly before closure being added to costs that is incorrect - but what they did do (although I'm not at all sure if it applied in the Beeching era?) was that newer material released by rationalisation and closures offered a higher reusable value than older, life expired, material and that would beneficially affect the nett value of the actual process of doing the job, e.g it could make a track singling scheme viable.

 

Were some closures 'fiddled'?  The answer to that is probably yes and in some cases it was done to get rid of passenger services in order to reduce the costs of operating the freight services which outlasted them by decades on some routes.  Were lines deliberately rationalised and reduced to a 'basic railway' in order to make saving - yes; and the only question I would ask is why shouldn't they have been if it kept them open or at least prolonged their life and reduced the losses?

 

So corruption? - no doubt about it on Marples part but within BR I would wonder especially if there is no firm evidence to support such allegations.  But overall never overlook the fact that if people are tasked to do a particular job they are usually best advised to do it if they wish to continue to have a roof over their head and food on the table.

[TheSignalEngineer]

Regarding 'Just Missed' connections, when I was on holiday in Cornwall around the time the new St Ives station opened in 1971 I decided to do a trip round some of the branches. I went in and asked for the local bus/train timetable book which was available in those days then asked for a Priv ticket to Looe. When the Booking Clerk found I was Railway he gave me a duplicated sheet and said "these are connections which happen but aren't possible in the book. If there are any more you see that are within 5 minutes phone ahead because it is often possible to fix a slight delay somewhere."

[Trog]

The thing to remember when discussing the past is that everybody has 20:20 hindsight and what seems totally obvious to us looking back. Probably looked very different looking forward from the sixties and not just because it was all in black and white back then. 

 

What looks like a conspiracy is also more likely cock up, lets face it our governments have been totally incompetent at almost everything else they have done, so what is the likelihood that they could pull off a conspiracy without it ending up as front page news in a week.  That said Marples is definitely suspect and should never have gone near a government job involving any sort of infrastructure given the potential conflict of interest with his business activities.

[Trog]

Regarding 'Just Missed' connections, when I was on holiday in Cornwall around the time the new St Ives station opened in 1971 I decided to do a trip round some of the branches. I went in and asked for the local bus/train timetable book which was available in those days then asked for a Priv ticket to Looe. When the Booking Clerk found I was Railway he gave me a duplicated sheet and said "these are connections which happen but aren't possible in the book. If there are any more you see that are within 5 minutes phone ahead because it is often possible to fix a slight delay somewhere."

 

I used to attend the ballast train meetings at which we would agree with a senior Operating Department Supervisor how the trains for that coming week-ends engineering work were to be run. One of these ODS's lived up the Bletchley - Bedford branch, if the train we all caught home after the meeting was running late, he would ring Bletchley PSB and ask them to hold the branch train. There must have been quite a few people living up there who either thought that they were really lucky, or that BR was being very helpful when they kept making a connection they thought they had missed.

[caradoc]

Was is not Barbara Castle who said that there would be no more closures and then promptly closed the S&D ?

 

Pete

 

Was she ex-GWR as well ?

[SED Freightman]

 

And I don't know how it was done elsewhere but I do know how the Beeching passenger traffic survey was done on two lines (including our local branch) because it involved the station staff physically counting the passengers - the passenger numbers which went into the Report for many stations no doubt came from exactly that sort of source and nothing else (and if anything could well have been inflated by local staff rather than deflated by some 'corrupt' senior manager).

 

A former colleague and friend, now deceased, was employed on overtime to undertake a passenger count on late evening services between Alton and Winchester, he apparently spent a couple of hours enjoying a pint (or perhaps two) in a pub at Ropley whilst the guard noted details of passenger numbers.  The information was then handed over on the last train of the day, and whilst the guard probably added a few additional passengers to the tally my friend also added a few more as it was obvious what the usage figures would be used to support a closure proposal.  Unfortunately, if enough ghost passengers had been added to the figures to save the service the fiddle would have become obvious so closure of the line occured in due course.  As suggested by the Stationmaster I suspect a lot of well meaning staff tried to boost traffic figures as they suspected senior management would try and reduce them, however this probably had little if any effect on the eventual outcome.

[LMS2968]

Was she ex-GWR as well ?

I well remember a cartoon in one of the national papers in this period. It was a pretty good drawing of a Castle class loco with BC's face on the smokebox door, Thomas style, and the nameplates displaying "Barbara Castle". There was a headboard, "The Flying Redhead"! Edited December 9, 2017 by LMS2968

[wagonman]

Oh dear, come on now, in general 'twas the other way around.

It was Barbara Castle who sealed the fate of the Waverley Route after Richard Marsh had prevaricated.

It is so easy to bash people using the blunt weapon of hindsight.

It is totally unacceptable to use rude and offensive language as in your post.

Bernard

 

 

Castle's predecessor was Tom Fraser. I referred to him as a nonentity as that was what he was. Have you heard of him? He closed the Oxford-Cambridge line which wasn't even on Beechings' list and we're now facing the prospect of paying £millions to re-open it. Yes I know some call it a vanity project, just like HS2...

[Mad McCann]

I think that if you look at every major strategic transport decision since 1914, it's possible to theorise that each decision made was intended to increase consumption, therefore demand for and price of petrochemicals. Viewed through that prism, virtually everything in modern Western society right down to out of town retail and the singular madness of the school run makes a kind of perverse sense. It's only a personal musing of course, but it has a certain logic to it. Precious little about our current transport model does.

 

D4

Edited December 8, 2017 by Mad McCann

[coachmann]

There was a huge gap between the perception of a line's worth to the local communities it served and the incredible indifference of the rest of the world.  Reservations raised at closure meetings about proposed replacement bus services often had some validity when, within a few months of a line's closure, the bus operators were pressing for service reductions. They had simply over-egged their case to ensure victory. 

 

The nationalized railway system (like the National Health Service) was financed by the treasury to which we all contributed one way and another, so logically we were all paying for a public service. That said, arguments will always gain nothing against the stark reality big unsustainable losses. The problem with the Beeching era was the way losses were presented in order to achieve but one end. 

[nigel newling]

I believe a realistic view of the Beeching cuts is that the "ruling classes", of both political persuasions believed the age of the train had passed and the true value of the British railway network lay in the property portfolio that it represented. The political objective was to capitalise what were regarded as "obsolete" infrastructure assets. The same approach was taken to traditional city centre Victorian hospitals, replacing them with-of-town jerry-built shanties that are now PPE millstones around our necks. The real estate values released were phenomenal.

 

When you next visit the GWR at Winchcombe, have a look at the bridge carrying the Greet road over the railway. A 50 year old steel and brick bridge (of a type still found in position and carrying traffic elsewhere on the GW network) was replaced with new construction employing concrete lintels. This was done in the year that it was declared that the  North Warwickshire line from Stratford to Cheltenham was no longer financially viable.

[Andy Hayter]

I think you miss something there.  Even though a line is closed, normally the railway remains responsible for the upkeep and maintenance of all bridges.

 

A former work colleague was a senior scout where they had purchased the old station at Loch earn Head (I hope I spelled that correctly).   They were offered the road bridge and surrounding land in around and under it at the end of their plot for £1 but wisely declined since that would have made them responsible for all repairs.

 

I'll bet there are still bridges near long closed stations in and around Cornwall where NR are still picking up the bills for maintenance.

[Arun Sharma]

I think that if you look at every major strategic transport decision since 1914, it's possible to theorise that each decision made was intended to increase consumption, therefore demand for and price of petrochemicals. Viewed through that prism, virtually everything in modern Western society right down to out of town retail and the singular madness of the school run makes a kind of perverse sense. It's only a personal musing of course, but it has a certain logic to it. Precious little about our current transport model does.

 

D4

Given that previous threads have highlighted how the Treasury factors in the cost of lost fuel duty and car tax into their BCR/balance sheets of Public Transport vs. Private Road Transport, your point seems entirely logical.

[Leander]

 

To be fair to Barbara Castle when she was Labour Transport Minister she did rescind a few closure notices, unlike the total nonentity who preceded her in the job. He just rubber stamped everything.

 

That would be Tom Fraser.

[Mad McCann]

Photographs of the Silloth line west of Kirkbride in 1961 show recent relaying in FB rail on concrete sleepers. In my previous job which involved driving around the hinterland of that former railway, I also noticed a couple of locations where cattle creeps and culverts had been renewed in concrete with steel guardrails in the style seen in the vicinity of the contemporary new yard at Kingmoor, suggesting the same time frame for renewal.

I do strongly suspect that many of these works were done in the full knowledge that the lines in question were likely to be under review in the near future. I also consider it significant that the traffic survey that generated much of the data for Beeching's report was conducted in the week or two prior to Easter which as I'm led to believe was at the time one of the very quietest times of the year, traffic wise, particularly for rural lines.

 

I'm not sure this kind of not-entirely-subtle skewing would be tolerated today, given that in my chosen example, the summer months could generate a great deal of traffic and even during weekdays in the light summer months, the line was popular with Carlisle folk having a little evening jaunt to the coast.

In fact, had the Wilson government remained true to its word to reactivate the line if Labour won the '64 election, it's possible the line would still be with us and would certainly be thriving today, given the dormitory nature of the Solway Coast area to Carlisle. Additionally, by 1974, Freight Facilities Grants might well have seen the return of wagonload traffic between Carr's mill in Silloth and the United Biscuits plant in Carlisle.

Whilst FFGs themselves have since 2010 been withdrawn in an ideologically inspired act of environmental self harm, having observed the extensive HGV traffic between the two points daily, there would have been a significant impact on local road traffic and also the town environment of Silloth.

 

I sense modelling potential in this hypothetical scenario, incidentally!

 

D4 

[Dunsignalling]

I think you miss something there.  Even though a line is closed, normally the railway remains responsible for the upkeep and maintenance of all bridges.

 

A former work colleague was a senior scout where they had purchased the old station at Loch earn Head (I hope I spelled that correctly).   They were offered the road bridge and surrounding land in around and under it at the end of their plot for £1 but wisely declined since that would have made them responsible for all repairs.

 

I'll bet there are still bridges near long closed stations in and around Cornwall where NR are still picking up the bills for maintenance.

And tunnels