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| The end of the line? After decades of neglect and funding cuts, by the late eighties much of Britain's once great national railway network was starting to look like this. Even worse, a large proportion of route mileage was already gone thanks to the infamous Beeching Cuts of the sixties, most of which were executed by a Labour government. |
In a regular series of posts ANDY
They say that travel broadens the
mind, and foreign travel especially. I was a late starter in getting “the bug”
for it. In fact it was on our honeymoon in August 1989 in Paris that I first
set foot on foreign soil. And as a graduate student of sociology with modules
in transport and planning what a shock it was.
We arrived in Paris via train, to
me the most civilised form of mass transport, at Gare du Nord. The journey had
been a real eye opener. We had travelled all of the way by train from
Darlington, enjoying an overnight stay in central London and then using the
ferry for the short crossing to Boulogne (this was before the Channel Tunnel of
course).
Nothing remarkable in this, but on
a personal level, visiting France for the first time was a big event in my
life. At the age of twenty nine I had previously developed the view that
everything about our country was best. Its education, health care, welfare, and
other state systems and infrastructure were at the apex of civilisation.
My first footsteps on to the
Société Nationale des Chemins de fer Français (SNCF) express train shattered
this UK-centric worldview. Clearly, before I had even tested a word of my
pigeon French out on an unsuspecting local person, this wasn’t just a journey
of discovery in terms of culture, society and country; it was a tale of two
completely different national railway systems, and it would be a comparison in
which Britain would inevitably come out a very poor loser. Bear in mind too our
journey was at the time TransManche Link (TML) were still excavating the
Channel Tunnel, Eurostar trains were still a couple of years in the future.
On time we left Boulogne and
travelled through the beautiful countryside of northern France at high speed on
our way to the nation’s capital. We were seated inside a second class
compartment, but it appeared to both my wife Gill and myself to be perfect
luxury. In fact, we had initially inadvertently mistaken our coach as being
first class and we might be reprimanded for sitting there. Our worries soon
abated on a walk down the train to enjoy the delights and service of a fully
stocked restaurant and buffet car. That’s because first class was even more
luxurious. This was first class travel with a second class ticket. Through
Amiens and on to Paris we were whisked to pull into Gare du Nord on time to the
second. This was how rail travel should be, I thought.
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| Ribblehead Viaduct on the Settle-Carlisle Railway with steam locomotive A1 Tornado crossing on a scenic railtour. This viaduct came to symbolise the struggle in the 1980s to keep what would become once again a strategic national freight artery open. Duplicity by politicians and British Rail massively inflated the cost of repair of this magnificent Victorian structure. This, and a closure by stealth policy of diverting trains away from this, the most scenic of railway lines was revealed by a national public campaign to be the massive deceit and fraud it was. |
My mind inevitably returned to the
previous day’s journey courtesy of British Rail (BR). Britain was enduring the
dying days of the premiership of Margaret Thatcher and her laissez-faire free
market economic policies in which anything owned by the state equalled bad and
anything in private hands was good. And she had a distinct dislike for
nationalised industries, and railways in particular.
Indeed Tom King, her Minister for
Transport in the early eighties had wanted to turn Marylebone Station in London
into a bus and coach terminus. The Serpell Report of 1982 that he commissioned
saw railways as an anachronism; a Victorian mode of socialised transport as far
away from their utopian vision of free market motoring as one can get. Viewed
by many transport analysts as “Beeching on steroids” its main outrageous
proposals were for a future where Britain would have virtually no railway
system at all. With the lowest passenger numbers of any year in the second half
of the twentieth century, 1982 in some represented the nadir for Britain’s
railway system.
Serpell was rejected; he went too
far even for the right wing Thatcher cabinet, but his philosophy was still
alive: BR was being run down and starved of investment. Our railway network’s
vital infrastructure was disintegrating after decades of neglect by governments
of all colours. BR under instruction from the Department of Transport was using
underhand tactics to close strategic main lines such as the Woodhead Route
between Manchester and Sheffield and was operating a closure by stealth policy
in order to justify closures. They undertook this by the use of carefully
manipulated passenger and transport surveys, diverting services away from lines
they wanted to close and finally by inflating repair figures for the
infrastructure of doomed lines.
BR under encouragement from the
Tory government could present an overwhelming case for line closure. The whole
fraudulent politically inspired policy was epitomised and finally exposed in
the successful fight by people power to save the main line between Settle and
Carlisle. It’s now a vital strategic freight artery and popular passenger
route.
From what I had seen so far as I
stood on the Parisian station platform, SNCF, unlike BR was a nationalised
industry of which the French were rightfully proud. Public transport especially
rail travel was in many respects a way of life to them, and their belief in the
strategic and economic importance of a well-funded railway network was there
for everybody to see. It was apparent straight away to even a casual visitor
that railways in France were clearly something that should be prioritised and
receive substantial public investment. They were, and still are relatively
cheap, reliable, punctual and safe. Regarding integration with other modes of
transport, well, the French must have invented that phrase “integrated
transport”.
This was in stark contrast to the
British view with which I had grown up: that railways were, and still are, a
drain on taxpayers’ funds. My first journey abroad including as it did rail,
Parisian Metro and bus travel illustrated well that it wasn’t railways or
public transport that were the anachronisms. No, the true anachronisms were the
British politicians who, being in the pockets of the road lobby, the motorway
construction and oil industries, had been systematically dismantling one of our
vital national assets.
Subsequent visits over the years to
Rome, Amsterdam, Brussels, Innsbruck and Barcelona confirmed that it was indeed
the UK that was out of synchronisation with other major western economies when
it came to transport policy. Successive governments have consistently placed
one of the chief purveyors of social inequality and environmental degradation
on a pedestal: the motor car.
In the years to come my views were
vindicated: the virtual sole reliance on road transport for freight in
particular and the inevitable congestion from mass car ownership and the loss
of a substantial portion of our railway infrastructure means that our small and
densely populated country’s economy is now in a poor position to distribute
what few goods it still makes to both domestic and international markets.
The Beeching Report of 1963 which
closed nearly half of the UK’s railway route miles is still regarded as one of
the most significant acts of political and corporate vandalism ever wreaked on
the British economy. Richard Beeching was head-hunted from ICI at the behest of
Tory Transport Minister Ernest Marples, to instil a private sector philosophy
in an organisation that should have been concentrating on public service. As a
director of Marples-Ridgeway Construction, Marples was simultaneously allowing
his henchman to decimate our railway network while trousering a fortune, as
Marples-Ridgeway benefitted from lucrative Government contracts to build
Britain’s burgeoning motorway network. Rumours of corruption and scandal
rightly engulfed his department during his tenure at the top, but nothing was
ever done.
And yet it was Wilson’s Labour Government
that enacted most of Beeching’s proposals, and his Transport Secretary Barbara
Castle was still closing now much-need railways to Keswick and Alston as late
as 1976.
The British have railways in their
blood. We were after all the nation of their very birth, the north east of
England where I live, was their cradle. The people of our country have always
loved railways. They have always hated the individuals and politicians who are
supposed to manage them on our behalf. That’s because most of them are, and
have been corrupt. We deserve much better.
Bibliography
Beeching R., The Reshaping of
British Railways, 1963, British Railways Board, HMSO.
Whitehouse, A., 1990, The Settle
and Carlisle Railway: The line that refused to die
Henshaw, D., 1994, The Great
Railway Conspiracy.
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