Blackpool’s long wait for wires
As the Fylde Coast electrification scheme nears completion, Blackpool railway author BARRY MCLOUGHLIN takes a personal look back over a decades-long campaign
When I started work as political reporter at the West Lancashire
Evening Gazette in the early 1980s, one of the first stories I wrote began: “Electric trains could be gliding into Blackpool North station by 1990…”
I was wise to use the conditional ‘could’, as my forecast proved even more premature than some of Mystic Wolmar’s predictions (sorry, Christian). In fact, it was to be nearly another three decades before Britain’s biggest holiday resort was finally wired to the national electrified network.
I’ve written half a dozen books about the railways of the Fylde Coast, and they’ve all had a valedictory feel, as if a long-vanished epoch was crawling inexorably to an end.
But this winter, as I watched the old mechanical signal boxes and semaphore signals come down and the masts for the catenary finally go up across the flatlands of the Fylde, any lingering sense of nostalgia was dispelled by the fact that Blackpool could now stand on the brink of a new railway era.
Blackpool North and the old Blackpool Central used to be the busiest rail termini outside London during the holiday season, handling phenomenal numbers of passengers. On a single pre-war August Saturday, for example, the 29 platforms at the two stations handled an astonishing 190,000 passengers arriving and departing by 467 trains.
However, since Virgin Trains withdrew its London service in 2003, the route to Blackpool North has sometimes felt like an 18-mile branch line from Preston. VT’s restoration of a one-train-a-day London through service in 2014 did little to counter that impression.
Even when there were frequent through trains to the capital in BR days, working in London I had to catch a Class 47-hauled service from Blackpool North and then wait 15 minutes at Preston while the diesel was swapped for a Class 86 or ‘87’.
In fact, Blackpool’s campaign for electrification substantially predated the 1980s. It was first mooted as long ago as the 1930s, while after publication of the BR Modernisation Plan in 1955, the London Midland Region had proposed electrification between Blackpool, Fleetwood and Preston.
The campaign started again in the 1960s, but the shock closure in 1964 of Blackpool Central - the gateway to the Golden Mile - signalled an end to the coast’s railway ambitions.
Blackpool politicians and holiday trade leaders launched a fresh campaign in the early 1980s, but in 1985 they suffered a severe setback when BR announced it was shelving electrification and introducing Sprinter diesel multiple units instead.
The switchback saga continued five years later when BR Chairman Sir Bob Reid confirmed that the scheme was included in his board’s ten-year strategy, although it would depend on the government sanctioning the investment. The cost was put at about £40 million plus rolling stock. As well as boosting Blackpool’s tourist and conference trade, it would also speed up services to the then-new Manchester Airport station.
There was further excitement in summer 1990 when, amid a blaze of publicity and simultaneous news conferences in London and the regions, BR announced a bold £ 750m improvement programme for the West Coast Main Line ( WCML) with 155mph locomotives - the InterCity 250s.
The hope was that although Blackpool was not strictly part of the WCML regime, it would be anachronistic if the laborious swapping of locomotives at Preston were to continue.
Four months later, however, press speculation began to grow that all was not well with InterCity 250. BR had neither the money of its own nor sufficient borrowing powers to include the scheme in its five-year corporate plan.
And ominous signs of what lay ahead came when BR announced its May 1992 timetable. Instead of four trains daily from Blackpool to Euston and five in the opposite direction, there were to be just two and three respectively.
Then, on August 3, Ivor Warburton, Route Director of InterCity West Coast, announced what we had all feared: after its annual review of services, InterCity was pulling out of the resort completely from September 28.
At the Gazette, we launched a massive campaign against the decision, and I was among a group that presented our 11,000-strong ‘InterCity Saver’ petition to Sir Bob Reid at the ‘Black Tower’ at Euston. We had put together an influential cross-party alliance of MPs, councillors, businesses, trade unions and user groups, but BR remained unmoved.
And while Warburton denied the InterCity axe would jeopardise the electrification scheme, it was hard to see how a business case based solely on Regional Railways services would succeed.
Privatisation in the mid-1990s again rekindled hopes of a capital link, and in 1998 VT launched its Fylde Coast-London through services. With typical Branson bombast, a Class 43 was named Blackpool Rock and a mock-up of a mini Blackpool Tower went on
On a single pre-war August Saturday, for example, the 29 platforms at the two stations handled an astonishing 190,000 passengers arriving and departing by 467 trains.
show at Euston. However, delivery did not match the pledges. In 2003, after the failure of its much-hyped ‘Operation Princess’, VT scrapped its Voyager-operated CrossCountry services to Blackpool and the remaining through London train.
A decade later, the company once more dipped his toe into the waters of Blackpool-London direct services, relaunching them with just one train a day in each direction. Despite the somewhat inconvenient departure times, the company said there was growing demand which would be further boosted by electrification.
VT faces a rival (or possibly complementary) bid from Alliance Rail to run to the resort, although the open access operator would use Class 91-hauled trains rather than Pendolinos.
As I survey the smartly remodelled platforms at Blackpool North and the new third platform at Kirkham and Wesham, there’s just one big question now: will the electric trains which (to use my phrase of more than 35 years ago) will be “gliding into Blackpool North” get a chance to prove themselves financially from May?
Reeling from recession and changing holiday patterns, and high on the Government’s index of most deprived towns, Blackpool mustn’t be abandoned by the rail industry again.