When coal was king, and container trains ran empty

There was a time when coal traffic was responsible for almost two-thirds of the UK’s rail freight business, compared with just 2% now.

This quantum change has taken place during the lifetime of RAIL magazine, which began publication in 1981.

Official British Rail statistics for that year show that 61.7% of the total freight business was coal and coke (a total of 95.1 million tonnes), and that much of it went to power stations in merry-go-round services hauled by new Class 56s. By this time, the number of deep mines had shrunk to a few dozen from the near 1,400 recorded at the beginning of the 1950s. (For the record, Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson closed two and a half times as many mines as his controversial Conservative counterpart Margaret Thatcher.)

This was also the year that the Manchester-Sheffield line via Woodhead Tunnel closed, with its coal trains diverted to other routes. Also, a diversion of the East Coast Main Line was being constructed to avoid the then-lucrative but subsidenceprone Selby coalfield.

In 1981, iron and steel had an 11.8% rail freight market share (18.2 million tonnes carried). Construction, oil and petroleum, china clay, wagonload, mail, parcels and

Speedlink (wagonload traffic) accounted for 33.8 million tonnes (21.9%).

Speedlink, although glamorous and a headline-catcher, was a financial catastrophe that dragged BR into the red before it was shut down ten years later, having stifled investment in important areas such as infrastructure and better-quality passenger services.

BR disposed of more than 18,000 wagons it owned during 1981 (that’s the equivalent of 350 every week) as it moved away from unfitted van traffic, as well as 900 brake vans (a third of its fleet). There were still 123,000 vehicles on the books, with another 16,000 that were privately owned.

And what about containers? This sub-business was almost overlooked at the bottom of the 1981 statistics. State-owned Freightliner generated a mere seven million tonnes of cargo (4.5% of the national total).

There were few long journeys either in those days, The average distance covered by all freight trains was just 71 miles.