When the 'traditional' railway became the 'modern' railway

[andyman7]

35 minutes ago, cctransuk said:

 

........ except that, in many people's opinion, the end of steam was premature.

 

Furthermore, the technology used in the APT-E project had been under development for some considerable time.

 

So, as with all things, progress was incremental, and there can be no point at which things became 'modern'.

 

Only wars seem to bring about exceptionally speedy developments in technology!

 

CJI.

Or an alternative viewpoint is that the construction of new steam locomotives in the 50s was a wasteful exercise when it was already clear the diesel/electric traction had transformed the economics of motive power, It's all subjective.

[Steamport Southport]

2 minutes ago, Will Crompton said:

I ain't sure about these 'ere new fangled class 87's.

 

Sling some proper names on them like Royal Scot and they'll be fine!

 

 

 

[Rugd1022]

1 hour ago, cctransuk said:

 

........ except that, in many people's opinion, the end of steam was premature.

 

Furthermore, the technology used in the APT-E project had been under development for some considerable time.

 

So, as with all things, progress was incremental, and there can be no point at which things became 'modern'.

 

Only wars seem to bring about exceptionally speedy developments in technology!

 

CJI.

 

It's easy to forget that the BR Standard 9Fs were supposed to have a life expectancy lasting to 1980!

 

I started spotting in 1971 as a nipper and joined the railway in 1982 and so much has changed since then, yet I still have pockets of semaphore signalling on my route card, namely Droitwich Spa, Worcester, parts of the Syston to Manton line and the Dudding Hill to Acton Wells line. How long these will last is anyone's guess, but I'm glad they still exist for now.

 

I can remember vividly sitting on top of the curved blue brick wall at the bottom of Railway Terrace in Rugby seeing my first brand new Class 87 in 1973 and thinking how modern it looked. I can remember seeing dozens and dozens of locos scrapped at Swindon Works and several Class 56s and 58s taking shape at Doncaster Works, yet the work they were mostly built for has vanished. I can remember seeing my first Class 50 - D404 gliding through Rugby one night on a southbound 'liner, ten years later I found myself driving them, and now around half of them are in private hands working on preserved lines. They all seemed modern in their time.

 

I've said this before on here but I'll say it again : it's a funny old thing, time...

[The Stationmaster]

1 hour ago, Michael Hodgson said:

 

The railways always were a business.  That's why they were built and we had the the railway mania in the 1840s.  And George Hudson was never a beggar - the bosses always were rich, and many of them just got richer.

 

The traditional railway became the modern railway

• when the GWR broad gauge was to converted to standard
• when the Regulation of Railways Act forced the companies to fit continuous brakes and block signalling
• when they merged into the Big Four after WW1
• when they agreed (in the 1920s!!) to use colour light signals rather than semaphore
• when the railways were nationalised
• when the Modernisation Plan was published in 1954
• when the Beeching Report was published in 1963
• on sectorisation of BR
• on privatisation
• .....

And many more things besides.  For example the change from steam to diesel traction didn't make much difference to train working methods except for footplatemen, particularly for freight; the change from wagonload to trainload was long drawn out process.  The changes to the role of the Guard on both passenger and freight trains spanned a decade or more.   In BR days management structures changed almost with the wind as did Regional boundary changes.

 

There seem to have been a lot of changes in this century - partly down to privatisation but far more down to increasing interference in the running of the railway by (un)Civil Servants and, in some respects, politicians (but that was nothing new for the latter, they've been meddling in some way or another since railways were first invented).

 

So change is really continuous.   I remember a Shunter in Reading West Jcn yard saying to newly arrived me back in the late 1960s 'Why do you want to come on here, this job's had it son'.  Similarly one of our Train Meeters at Radyr in 1973 would always say 'The best company was the GWR, my old dad always said that and he'd worked for the Taff Vale so he should know'.

 

So in reality it is a rolling process with different thing changine at a different and many of the changes which make a real and deep impact taking a long time to a lot of people.

[Steamport Southport]

Just now, andyman7 said:

Or an alternative viewpoint is that the construction of new steam locomotives in the 50s was a wasteful exercise when it was already clear the diesel/electric traction had transformed the economics of motive power, It's all subjective.

 

Not really when you consider that many of those diesels and electrics were in the scrapyard next to the locomotives they were supposed to be replacing. Some of which actually outlasted them. Most of the rest soon joined them.

 

Also we live on an island of coal and coal was cheap. Importing oil from halfway around the world was hardly economic.

 

Modernisation of the railways was probably one of the biggest wastes of money in the history of Britain. Numerous failed designs of diesels that cost an awful lot of money. In modern terms it would be in the tens of billions of pounds just thrown down the drain. Closing down lines on a whim just to save a few pennies whilst spending money on daft road schemes.

 

You could have probably got another forty or fifty years out of steam whilst concentrating on electric railways and some minor dieselisation using proven technology. Many of the higher up railwaymen were in favour of that, unfortunately it was down to politicians wanting the "new" things and elimination of the old immediately.

 

As the song goes "The King is in the all together...."

 

 

Jason

[Wheatley]

5 hours ago, Ben B said:

in hindsight I wish I'd taken the interesting, old-fashioned bits of it that were still around less for granted, and recorded more of it because it seemed to change very quickly after years of existing. Does anyone else find themselves thinking of this stuff?

All the time. I started work on the railways in 1987 in a Victorian signalbox which, although track circuit block, was still effectively operating as a traditional crossing loop box with two colour light each way worked by levers. By then it was a shadow of it's former self (Hudddersfield Junction on the MSW) but there was loads of the 'old' regime still lying about. Most ballast trains were still unfitted, many engineers' trains still had Big Four wagons in the consist, and shunting them in a possession was done the old way with a pole and a lot of shouting and whistling.

 

From there I went into a coal-heated semaphore box, from there into a Victorian booking office (Barnsley) with an APTIS machine plonked on top of the deep drawers used previously for Edmonson tickets, from there to Boston for 3 months on secondment, from there to the Settle & Carlisle, and from there to RRNE HQ at York where I had the run of the entire top half of the former Eastern Region. 

 

Huddersfield Junction has gone, Barnsley was knocked down while I was there and replaced by a characteristically characterless 80s box, I didn't take a single photo of Boston and every time I visit the S&C a bit more has gone, or been improved, or just been left derelict.  

 

I wish I'd taken a lot more photos. Despite having the run of the place I didn't once wander down to Boston Docks, I took lots of photos of steam trains at Appleby but not a lot else, as a modeller I'm ashamed that I didn't even survey the signalboxes I was cooped up in for up to 12 hours a day, or even take any decent 'square on' shots to scale up later.    

 

I particularly wish I'd taken a lot more photos of the people I worked with. 

 

[Wickham Green too]

2 hours ago, andyman7 said:

Modernisation has been continuous since Rocket, ...

C-mon - Rocket was a vast improvement on its predecessors etc. etc. etc. 😁

[andyman7]

1 hour ago, Steamport Southport said:

 

Not really when you consider that many of those diesels and electrics were in the scrapyard next to the locomotives they were supposed to be replacing. Some of which actually outlasted them. Most of the rest soon joined them.

 

Also we live on an island of coal and coal was cheap. Importing oil from halfway around the world was hardly economic.

 

Modernisation of the railways was probably one of the biggest wastes of money in the history of Britain. Numerous failed designs of diesels that cost an awful lot of money. In modern terms it would be in the tens of billions of pounds just thrown down the drain. Closing down lines on a whim just to save a few pennies whilst spending money on daft road schemes.

 

You could have probably got another forty or fifty years out of steam whilst concentrating on electric railways and some minor dieselisation using proven technology. Many of the higher up railwaymen were in favour of that, unfortunately it was down to politicians wanting the "new" things and elimination of the old immediately.

 

As the song goes "The King is in the all together...."

 

 

Jason

The problem was that the rush to diesels excluded General Motors who were leaders in the technology, and included for political reasons a whole host of UK builders hopelessly inadequate to the task (as well as a few who were). The other reason these locos ended up in the scrapyard was that there was no work for many of them, because as they were built, their work dried up. As for cheap coal, that could not offset the grossly disproportionate cost of operating steam.

 

I love the railways and I love their history but to evaluate things on the basis that as they were built they should have been used for 40 years doesn't address the two key issues - their construction could not be economically justified even at the time, and even if they could last 40 years, there is no way they could have in practice survived even a fraction of that time when their operating cost day in and day out is multiples of the cost of diesel/electric traction.

 

 

Edited June 19 by andyman7

[34theletterbetweenB&D]

53 minutes ago, The Stationmaster said:

...freight; the change from wagonload to trainload was long drawn out process...

Couple of years past I was gifted a copy of David Holmes' 'Station Masters Reflections', and it was truly an experience when I got around to reading his initial induction into BR's mystic sundry and wagon load freight handling process, right down to the milk ration for the station cat; and what came thereafter, as his career eventually took him into Trainload freight.

 

The author persuades us that this was the core transition of the UK railway from 'Traditional to Modern' as moving freight was the sole reason that rail systems developed, before ever there was anything as sophosticated as  mechanical traction, signalling and like systems. This evolved system for what had been accepted for transport, moved from X to Y, and collected by the consignee, and the charges therefore due, thus was as anciently traditional as it got; until TOPS brought modernity.

[DenysW]

And it's still changing, and I'm still failing to adapt. It's still a mild surprise to get on a service that's open-plan end-to-end: 12 coaches on Thameslink, 5 coaches on the Mildmay.

[John Isherwood]

2 hours ago, andyman7 said:

Or an alternative viewpoint is that the construction of new steam locomotives in the 50s was a wasteful exercise when it was already clear the diesel/electric traction had transformed the economics of motive power, It's all subjective.

 

As has been mentioned upthread, the 1960s generation of diesels raced steam to the scrapyard - there simply wasn't a sufficiently developed understanding of diesel technology at the time.

 

How much better would it have been for the BR Standards to work out their design life alongside a far smaller, less diverse fleet of first generation diesels.

 

Lessons would have been learned so that, when steam was eventually eliminated, there would have been a reliable second generation of diesels in place.

 

CJI.

[jpendle]

For me it's the slow but very steady demise of wagonload freight.

 

OR, the advent of trams and then buses, meaning that the railways became less useful for the general populace, outside London.

 

I grew up near Bolton in the late 60's and early 70's, and despite there being 2 railway stations in my town, they were a good 20 minute walk away from home, so we always took the bus.

 

I only started using trains when I was told that while the last bus from Bolton left at 10:00pm on a Saturday, the last train left at 11:30. Leaving more time to enjoy the many and varied hostelries

that were still going back then.

 

Regards,

 

John P

 

 

[andyman7]

2 hours ago, cctransuk said:

 

As has been mentioned upthread, the 1960s generation of diesels raced steam to the scrapyard - there simply wasn't a sufficiently developed understanding of diesel technology at the time.

 

How much better would it have been for the BR Standards to work out their design life alongside a far smaller, less diverse fleet of first generation diesels.

 

Lessons would have been learned so that, when steam was eventually eliminated, there would have been a reliable second generation of diesels in place.

 

CJI.

It's all of course starker with hindsight, but my challenge is that the BR standard designs were not needed at all. The pre-nationalisations designs which carried on in production in some cases until the mid-50s would perfectly adequately have seen out the steam transition to (as you say) a far smaller less diverse fleet of first generation diesels. The pick of the bunch could have themselves been the 'standard' designs for a period. We can all say that the 'Big 4' mentality wouldn't have tolerated it - but that's what can happen when the decisions are all handled by 'railway' people. There is an argument that the 'old' railway habit of CMEs wanting their own designs was perpetuated by Riddles. He was enabled by a management structure in the BTC and Government that failed to recognise that the overbuilt, unplanned, duplicated railway network inherited from Victorian prospectors prior to the development of the road network was going to need substantial pruning, with a focus on a smaller customer base it could serve well - rather than carrying everything for everyone everywhere. Without Riddles we'd have been deprived of a number of wonderful sights and sounds but cold hard economic logic suggests that should have been so.

A number of contributions decry the 'interference' of Government and civil servants but that only became acute because the railway 'experts' were asked what was needed to make the railways pay in the 1950s and after being given hundreds of millions of pounds (over £1 biliion in today's money) the deficit was as big as ever. It took a long time for the industry to be trusted financially and it was only after the Serpell report and Bob Reid's sectorised British Rail that the industry was in a position to replace and renew assets at scale again - and this time they met their financial targets. The subsequent tragedy was not necessarily of privatisation itself but that the model chosen was ideologically-driven and in the process destroyed the hard-won financial discipline and management controls that it took BR 40 years to get right.

Edited June 19 by andyman7
Spelling

[DLT]

42 minutes ago, andyman7 said:

The subsequent tragedy was not necessarily of privatisation itself but that the model chosen was ideologically-driven and in the process destroyed the hard-won financial discipline and management controls that it took BR 40 years to get right.

And privatisation cost billions to enact, money that was effectively wasted, as none of it was actually spent on the railways.

(sorry, starting to sound political....)

Edited June 19 by DLT

[stewartingram]

I can remember a quote from a Modern Railways/ Trains Illustrated (around the time the title changed). The article was about the Felixstowe branch (pre the days of container shipping). The comment was about traffic on the branch - "it was good to see the amount of goods traffic, no line could/(should) survive without that, as passenger traffic is never enough to survive on" (or words to that effect).

Nowadays we have basically a passenger railway, with a small amount of freight traffic imposed on it.....