Nostalgic for British Rail? Dry your eyes on a sandwich
★★★ ☆☆
Christian Wolmar is described by his publishers as Britain’s foremost transport journalist, and no doubt he is. Journalism about transport is always of some interest, whether it is the news that the people we hope will be driving our trains will be on strike, or that a much-touted new service is behind schedule, or that a new road is about to concrete over a vast part of our countryside, but such things rarely improve one’s spirits. Nor, one might expect, would a history of British Rail such as Wolmar has written; and one would be right.
To be fair to Wolmar, he knows his Deltics from his DMUs, and his book has a thesis, which is that British Rail (as it was when it was privatised; until 1965 it was British Railways) wasn’t remotely so bad as we thought or, for those too young to recall it – it was privatised almost 30 years ago – as some have been told.
In fact, what Wolmar says is that, at the end of its life, the nationalised railway wasn’t as bad as it had been, and wasn’t as bad as the privatised services that replaced it. That, indeed, is a matter for debate. However, by the end of his mildly obsessive tour through 46 years of BR history, the reader is left regarding his book as the sort of thing one might give as a Christmas present to someone one doesn’t much like.
Wolmar tells a depressing story of a depressing institution at a depressing time; of a nationalised industry in an era of “cheap and nasty”; of generations of management stupidity and workers’ pig-headedness; of wanton destruction, both moral and aesthetic; and above all of crushing banality. By the time when, according to Wolmar, things started to go well in the 1980s, the game was up. For 40 years BR had lost money – taxpayers’ money – in return for a service often redolent of the Third World. Something else had to be tried; the botched privatisation for which we are still paying the price nearly 30 years later.
Wolmar never really questions whether nationalisation, on January 1 1948, was the ideal solution. Perhaps there is no point: the Attlee government believed in nationalising almost everything it could, causing the suffocation of our enterprise culture and the interference in massively subsidised industries of two classes of people who usually knew nothing about business (railways or otherwise): socialist politicians and civil servants.
The 20th-century railway suffered from two grave problems: the rise of road transport thanks to the internal combustion engine, and the running into the ground of rail services during two world wars, when relentless use was coupled with little or no investment. After the Great War, over 120 (mostly small) railway companies were grouped into four to give them the economies of scale to help make them viable; and after the Big Four (the London and North Eastern; London, Midland and Scottish; Great Western; and Southern Railway) had themselves been run into the ground by 1945, nationalisation seemed the only answer.
BR was hamstrung not merely by the under-investment that went with nationalised industries, but also by a shocking absence of foresight. It was still building steam trains as late as 1960, even though electrification had been discussed since the 1920s; and in 1963 came the Beeching report, which wanted to close 55 per cent of the network’s stations and 30 per cent of its route miles. The assumptions that underlay Beeching were ludicrous; not least that either the population would not increase, or, if it did, none of the extra millions would want to travel by train. As a result, major population centres now have no railway station.
But the vandalism of Beeching was matched by bloody-mindedness all around the railway. In the 1970s and 1980s, endless industrial disputes turned the commuting public violently against BR, and the unreliability of its freight operation meant that major customers – such as the newspaper industry – stopped using rail, and moved to the roads. Now the roads are so overcrowded, an efficient rail system with marshalling yards and sidings to service commercial customers would seem highly desirable, but most of those yards and sidings went long before BR did.
BR also had an enormous aesthetic heritage: some of the finest Victorian buildings were railway stations. Many were demolished, either because the lines they had served were closed or because they clashed with BR’s mindless modernisation programme in the 1960s. The demolition of the old Euston and its replacement by a concrete horror became emblematic of this destruction: the removal of its Doric Arch was the ultimate outrage, though BR threatened to surpass that by demolishing St Pancras, until John Betjeman stopped them. Luckily, by the end of its life, BR had learned some manners; the 1990 redevelopment of Liverpool Street left all of the fine Victorian features intact.
Wolmar somewhat romanticises BR, perhaps because he finds it so easy – and it is – to rip to shreds what came next. As a BR commuter in its closing decade, my own memories are less rosy – dirty, shabby trains, overhead wires that always seemed to be down. These days the trains are much better and the service more reliable, at least on my line: but perhaps I am lucky. Wolmar symbolises his accusations of exaggeration about how awful BR was by saying that its notorious sandwiches were in fact edible. Of course they were; they just weren’t good.
As a commuter in the 1980s, my memories are less rosy: dirty, shabby trains, always disrupted
Mediocrity in cuisine matched mediocrity in everything else; Prue Leith may have advised them on food, but it never appeared as though they took her advice.
This is a serviceable history of an unloved, and unlovable, institution. It offers little in the way of advice about how to provide a marvellous railway for the future without bankrupting the taxpayer or insulting the passenger. It is also a book that would have been improved by the attention of an editor, as Wolmar has a habit of telling us the same thing twice, and often things that weren’t that interesting the first time.
One is left with the sense that, for all the sizeable part BR played in the lives of many of us, it wasn’t actually that important. And in 20 years’ time, if we all have driverless cars, looking back to the age of the train will seem very quaint indeed.