Howard Johnston
Fifty years ago, did no-nonsense Transport Minister Barbara Castle’s revolutionary plan rescue Britain’s railways from certain collapse? In the second of his two-part review of the 1968 Transport Act, HOWARD JOHNSTON contends that it was seriously flawed
“Regional services had haemorrhaged passengers, while the commuter and urban business was losing money heavily, as well as suffering badly from unreliability caused by haphazard underinvestment.”
British Rail was nobody’s friend 50 years ago. It was losing vast sums of money and was almost universally seen as second best to cars and lorries. It desperately needed a champion to try and turn it round.
Barbara Castle, Labour’s new Transport Minister, put her name to a far-reaching document that wrote off old debts and attempted to work out precisely what parts of the business were worth saving.
The 1968 Transport Act, which became law on January 1 the following year after 2,500 amendments under her more compromising successor Richard Marsh, sorted out some of the deep-seated flaws of former BR Chairman Dr Richard Beeching’s bloody networkslashing The Reshaping of British Railways report of five years previously, but made many serious mistakes of its own.
There was no provision whatsoever for growth, and the determination to deliver a profitable ‘basic railway’ led to spare track, runround loops and signalling being quickly ripped out for scrap.
With a little more vision, could more of the 30-plus branches that still closed after the Act was passed have survived? The communities which had isolation forced upon them for the sake of relatively small sums of money would certainly agree with this statement now.
However, this was not the time for sentiment. The Beeching review had been published in 1963, and Labour’s return to power the following year had done nothing to slow down the closure process. Within four years 4,500 route miles, a third of the total network, no longer had passenger services.
It was estimated that in 1968 only a sixth of BR passenger services were in profit. This came after a detailed nationwide survey that took into account the condition of track and signalling, when renewals were due, setting aside money to replace rolling stock, and whether freight traffic could share operating costs on some routes.
InterCity had created a bright image and was trying hard, but was still not making the hoped-for progress. Regional services had haemorrhaged passengers, while the commuter and urban business was losing money heavily, as well as suffering badly from unreliability caused by haphazard underinvestment.
Furthermore, BR’s relationship with the Royal Mail was not good - parcels and newspaper trains were mired in highly inefficient and often questionable working practices. The only rail freight that could be steadily relied upon was coal, metals and construction. Wagonload was still considered essential at the time, but had dwindled to just 20% of the total cargo business.
Through the early 1960s, major cities such as Manchester, Birmingham and Glasgow watched helplessly as Beeching’s BR took the decisions to cut their commuter services right under their noses. How could a centralised organisation that was struggling to stem repeated heavy annual losses possibly know what was best for them?
Change arrived from the end of 1968, with the creation of the first Passenger Transport Executives (PTEs).
Barbara Castle regarded urban motorways and clearways as disasters in the making, and successfully argued the case for allowing local political leaders to decide on integrated public transport.
Commuter railways would always be in trouble because fares could never finance what is a highly capitalised four hours a day business, with expensive trains standing empty and idle in sidings for the rest of the day.
Nationally, buses were also struggling in the face of falling demand, ageing vehicles and rocketing diesel prices. The Transport Act
offered the umbrella by launching the National Bus Company, with grants for keeping rural services and higher subsidies for fuel and vehicle replacement.
From now on, and for the first time, the new PTEs would run urban buses and liaise with BR on services and fares. For payment, BR awarded contracts to manage railway services to the PTEs, who in turn obtained a grant of up to 75% for running them.
By October 1969, the first PTAs were in business: in the West Midlands; South East Lancashire and North East Cheshire (SELNEC, later Greater Manchester); Merseyside; and Tyneside (the Tyne & Wear PTE). The Greater Glasgow PTE (later Strathclyde) was created in 1973, and the following year PTEs were set up for South Yorkshire (Sheffield, Rotherham, Doncaster and Barnsley) and West Yorkshire (Leeds, Bradford and Huddersfield).
Interestingly, no provision was ever made for Bristol, the Solent area (Southampton and Portsmouth), or Cardiff and the Valleys. The East Midlands triangle (Nottingham, Derby and Leicester) and Edinburgh were also not candidates, because they had relatively few commuter railways.
But despite inevitable government interference with bus deregulation and core investment, we have more electrified lines around Glasgow and some route reopenings thanks to the PTEs, plus the Tyne & Wear Metro, Manchester Metrolink, Midland Metro and Sheffield Supertram.
On the negative side, the underfunded three-line Merseytram scheme was strangled before birth in 2005, while Leeds Supertram and schemes for Bristol and Portsmouth/ Southampton were also dropped.
The PTE principle has survived the setting up (in 1974) and subsequent dismantling (in 1986) of the Metropolitan county system (which was partly designed for better planning of road and public transport investment), a couple of national and world recessions, and the later disbanding of the bus network.
Change came just in time for transport in the capital, which was handed over to the now-defunct Greater London Council just as Beeching’s eyes were focused on closure of a large part of what is now London Overground’s ‘main line’.
BR saw no future for the Broad StreetRichmond service, and it seemed likely to go in 1969. Grant Aid was secured for another two years, but the (Conservative) government of 1971 was again on the warpath when it proposed to reduce the subsidy. Powerful campaigning and a supportive BR found a way through, and the threat was lifted.
Antique slam-door London Midland and Southern suburban electric multiple units were soon replaced by ex-Great Northern high-density Class 313s to meet the increasing demand, and Bombardier’s five-car Class 378s are their natural successors.
It was a big challenge for all the PTEs to try and bring together the ragbag of local bus services and rundown commuter railways that had previously been run by BR.
They would become integrated by the formation of the National Bus Company, which from January 1 1969 took over the interests of those within the National Holding Company that also embraced bus builders, British Road Services, Pickfords, shipping lines, and travel agents such as Thomas Cook. Independent bus operators serving rural areas were not affected.
North of the Border, the Scottish Transport Group merged the interests of the Scottish Bus Group and the Caledonian Steam Packet Company.
For those areas that lost their rail services, the offer of replacement buses proved
The only rail freight that could be steadily relied upon was coal, metals and construction. Wagonload was still considered essential at the time, but had dwindled to just 20% of the total cargo business.
It was a big challenge for all the PTEs to try and bring together the ragbag of local bus services and rundown commuter railways that had previously been run by BR.
something of a con. The road substitutes failed to hold on to the business and many were quickly withdrawn, leaving communities with no public transport at all.
While London always went it own way, the Thatcher government’s 1985 Transport Act dismantled the integrated structure in favour of a free-for-all, to create competition among anyone prepared to issue 56 days notice to the Traffic Commissioner that they wanted a slice of the business.
The National Bus Company was broken into 70 pieces and sold off, many of them to private individuals. In 2018, successful buyouts have left us with Stagecoach, First UK, National Express, Go-Ahead, Arriva, RATP Dev, Abellio, Veolia, and Transdev.
As for freight (the reason our railways were constructed in the first place), BR had lost virtually all its traditional wagonload business by the mid-1960s, although its modern merrygo-round trains with rapid discharge hoppers had a monopoly on coal-to-power stations traffic.
Freightliner was the rising star, and was just establishing handling terminals for longdistance container services across the UK and to the continent via the principal ports.
The 1968 Transport Act created the National Freight Corporation (NFC) to integrate Freightliner and BR’s own road business, but there is little evidence that it was effective. It failed in its mission to regulate haulage firms competing with rail for long-distance business, charge them more for use of the road network, and introduce unpopular safety rules such as restricting driver hours and tachographs. Unions forced the abandonment of lorry licensing.
Meanwhile coal traffic, almost two-thirds of all rail freight, was showing signs of serious decline ( 5% in a single year), although the establishment of 125 concentration depots instead of deliveries to tiny yards was a positive move. At the peak of rationalisation, an almost unbelievable 1,000 four-wheel vacuum-braked wagons and vans a week were despatched to scrapyards.
While minerals and raw and processed steel receipts were falling sharply, the booming oil industry was rapidly developing its own company trains, as were cement and building materials manufacturers and suppliers.
Freightliner was the great new hope. Beeching had envisaged a network of up to 55 container depots across the UK, stretching from Plymouth and Brighton to Glasgow and Aberdeen, with an average train journey of 150 miles. Annual carryings were confidently predicted to reach 57 million tons by 1984. Sadly, the true figure was seven million.
The first revenue-earning Freightliner trains had run from York Way in north London to Glasgow (Gushetfaulds) on November 15 1965, and by mid-1968 there were 17 handling centres (rising to 29 by the end of 1969) and a through working from Stratford (London) to Paris via the Dover-Dunkerque ferry.
Scene-setting container handling centres included Dudley - on the site of the former passenger station and today a derelict, treecovered eyesore. Others were Birmingham Lawley Street, Willesden, Edinburgh, Hull, Leeds, Newcastle, Sheffield, Stockton-on-Tees, Nottingham, Swansea, Hull, Glasgow, Coatbridge, Liverpool and Southampton, although most of these have also gone to the wall.
To give Freightliner space to breathe and expand, the 1968 Transport Act made it independent from BR, with a 51% shareholding vested in the NFC. Terminals, wagons and motive power were leased from BR, but the unions were unhappy about demanning and the initial liner trains had to run with an elderly 1940s-design brake van on the rear.
The flagship Harwich-Zeebrugge international service was launched on March 18 1968. It employed two purpose-built Sea Freightliner ships, each capable of carrying
up to 150 30ft containers stacked three high, with a total payload of 3,000 tons. The first company Freightliner container train also ran (on August 20, from the Ford factory at Halewood to Harwich), carrying components for Ford Escort cars.
The NFC concept was not to last, however, and a later 1978 Transport Act brought control of Freightliner back to BR - a move that many saw as seriously retrograde. What resulted was a stagnation of the business, and widespread depot closures. In Scotland, only the Coatbridge terminal survived because it proved easier to move consignments by road and shut down Aberdeen, Dundee, Edinburgh and Gushetfaulds.
In 2018, the business has shrunk massively, but is at least profitable. Freightliner’s current website lists just eight main terminals at Birmingham, Bristol, Cardiff, Coatbridge, Doncaster, Leeds, Liverpool, and Manchester, with shared activities at Daventry, Widnes (Ditton), Hams Hall, Scunthorpe and Teesport, and management centres at Crewe, Eastleigh, Ipswich and Mossend. Principal ports served are Felixstowe, London Gateway and Southampton Maritime and Millbrook.
Neither Dr Richard Beeching nor Barbara
Castle would recognise the Freightliner business today, which serves the world market from the UK, Poland and the Middle East. Since 2015, it has been owned by Genesee & Wyoming, whose corporate headquarters is in Connecticut, USA, and which owns 122 freight railways worldwide, with 7,300 employees and 3,000 customers.
Elsewhere, the architects of the new Transport Act could not have anticipated the near-total collapse of the parcels, mail, newspapers and sundries businesses to road and air competition.
What has happened to the bustling despatch office and weighing-in scales at every manned station, the sidings filled with bogied vans awaiting their next duty, the four-wheeled BRUTE (British Railways Utility Trolley Equipment) caged trolleys close to the platform edge, and the yellow delivery vehicles outside the entrance? Until the 1960s, it was common practice to carry small parcels in the guard’s
The architects of the new Transport Act could not have anticipated the near-total collapse of the parcels, mail, newspapers and sundries businesses to road and air competition.
compartment of a passenger train or diesel multiple unit.
It’s all gone, swept away by successive reorganisations, business sell-offs and ultimately stronger competition. The lorries operated by UPS (United Parcel Service) are the direct successor to BR’s Red Star service, and are geared to reach the entire world market.
From January 1 1969, National Freight Carriers assumed ownership of almost 10,000 road lorries and 23,000 trailers for collection and delivery, with centralisation of parcel offices at railheads, where there was often a dedicated depot. It was unwieldy and ineffective, and the business declined so rapidly that what sundry traffic remained by 1981 became the Red Star parcels service, with the emphasis placed on the customer collecting the parcel.
This unwanted millstone to the railways was practically given away for just £ 300,000 in a 1995 management buyout, and in turn swallowed up a decade later by international company UPS. Its competitor is Parcelforce, which is owned by the Royal Mail, currently no real friend of the railways.
Newspaper traffic is another lost cause. It was so taken for granted in 1968 that it is scarcely mentioned in Barbara Castle’s document, and it could not have been imagined that it would be completely lost to road and air competition 20 years later, accelerated by Fleet Street’s decision to print editions of national papers on regional presses.
At the business’s zenith, London termini were hives of frantic activity just before midnight. Tens of thousands of labelled bundles of newspapers would arrive from the presses, and be loaded via conveyor belts or by hand into rail vans.
As many as 75 trains would be rostered to shift those newspapers to distribution centres, where they would then be re-sorted and split for deliveries to local wholesalers.
Sometimes these trains slowed but didn’t even stop, throwing out the parcels as they nudged along
The acres of derelict land close to Manchester Victoria that used to be Red Bank Sidings is present-day evidence of the collapse of the postal and newspaper business. Once, there were overnight services to Liverpool, Blackpool, Stoke, Crewe, Leeds, Hull, York, Newcastle and Cleethorpes, leaving lines of vans to be worked back to their origination point.
A lesser-known aspect of the 1968 Transport Act was to create the Channel Tunnel Planning Council, which recognised the need for serious discussions over a fixed railway link with the continent.
It gave the Transport Minister power to acquire by compulsory purchase land for a terminal on the English side of the Channel and associated works.
While it was the role of senior government to negotiate with the French Republic, the CTPC would manage the tunnel’s finances (including borrowing money), conduct travel studies, and manage its operation.
The Act also had the power to close it all down if not enough progress was made, and it is not clear now if and when the CTPC ever met. It would also be another 13 years before the tunnel project was put on a proper footing, and 26 in total before it would be completed.