The genie in the railway lamp

Sorry to disagree Pete, but that's an old chestnut that is still in the harking nostalgically back to days of yore mindset. Technology advances quickly. 30 years ago neither of us would have dreamed it possible that we could be having this kind of debate while (I assume) hundreds of miles apart, both looking at high resolution screens on gadgets that do all manner of things that we now deem essential to life.

Similarly, road transport will evolve. It's simply too convenient with its door-to-doorness for road vehicles not to evolve with different methods of propulsion, as they already are.

Funny, I was at a services on the A1 the other week and, noting the dozen electric car charging points, I wondered out loud to my girlfriend that they still seem like a bit of a novelty, but I wonder how long it will be before petrol/diesel stations are a thing of the past and every parking space in a car park has a charging point or some sort of wireless charging embedded in the tarmac, charged (in terms of money) remotely via some sort of remote car identification system included with it.

Maybe not in our lifetimes, perhaps, but that'll be the kind of thing that appeals to the majority of people who don't happen to have railway stations conveniently situated close by, who are going on holiday and so on. There will be a huge market for it.

 

Look how quickly 4* petrol disappeared, when the political will was there. From being universally available in 1999 to a rarity it 2002, and now just a memory. My friend had a diesel engined car in 1987. He had to use the "DERV" pump to fill up like the lorries. Used to take about 30 seconds to put 12 gallons in the tank.

On Gauge: I'm driving to Cardiff every day at the moment. Can't help thinking its a damn shame those artic trailers won't fit in the British loading gauge. £90 quid of diesel each way Cardiff-London, minimum 3 hours. And drivers wages, maintenance, servicing. Imagine the business potential for a two hour city-city trailer train, at £100 a go. 40 trailers on a train.....Kind of exactly what the GWR was built for.

 

Different methods of propulsion, however, will not solve the problem of congestion. This has always been the great downside of road transport, and since all current trends suggest that the population density of our island is not going to decrease in the foreseeable future, it is only likely to get worse.

Most politicians of the 1960s - and probably most of the general public - just didn't think about this. Beeching did. He understood that railways were never going to be viable in rural areas; hence, he recommended closing many rural branches and secondary routes (although in doing so, he was merely accelerating a process that had already begun). Yet he believed that they were still valuable (and potentially viable) in densely-populated commuter areas, so he proposed to invest in those services. He was undoubtedly right about this. The M25 is bad enough as it is; how much worse would it be, if all the commuters who currently come to London by train came in cars, most of them probably single-occupancy? Electric or driverless cars won't solve that.

He didn't always get the detail right, in terms of particular line closures. Yes, there are certainly some lines whose closures we now regret; though I suspect that in many cases, that was due to changes in circumstances that were difficult to foresee. But the principles underlying his reforms, broadly speaking, were sound. The only possible exception to that was his determination to eliminate duplicate routes for long-distance services; but even there, we must remember that in the 1960s, it was difficult to anticipate that Inter-City rail travel would grow to the extent that it since has. Hence, in the 1960s it must have seemed unlikely that there would ever be enough traffic to justify keeping the Great Central open, whereas now we would have been very grateful for it!

But when somebody embarks on reforms as radical as Beeching's, it would be surprising if they got everything right. Something radical had to be done. In 1963, British Rail was losing £140m a year. That's almost £400,000 a day. At today's prices, that's about £7m a day. Just let that sink in for a moment.

No wonder that, in the 1960s, many people seriously thought that, preserved lines excepted, railways in Britain were finished. Even without the machinations of that wretched man Marples (who really was a villain), there was no way that the taxpayer could have supported such losses for much longer. Beeching was the only person to come forward at that point with a realistic plan to rescue British Railways. By and large, it has worked.

Beeching was the saviour of Britain's railways. It is true that he was in no sense a railway enthusiast: he was a practical, hard-headed businessman, and that is the very reason he succeeded. He was not "the demon Doctor". He deserves a place in the pantheon of railway heroes, alongside Trevithick, the Stephensons, Brunel, et al.

 

He had to do a runner because the customs and excise were after him. Still probably the most bent politician of all time, and there is some pretty stiff competition for that title!

 

Its worth making the point of course that many thousands of miles had been closed 'pre Beeching' from WW1 onwards. In no small part of course as a result of far to many lines being built in the first place

 

He was an amateur - unless you are paying the British political class a backhandered compliment.

Besides, you forget John Stonehouse - both corrupt and a foreign agent.

 

An excellent post. But I'll disagree on one point - I think the GCR main line deserved to be closed. It served secondary centres, and nowhere of substance in between. All of it's major routes were paralleled by other routes - routes which were capable of absorbing more traffic, and joining up with other routes.

The proof of the pudding was in the transfer of it's traffic - passenger and freight - which was absorbed on other routes which had the capacity to carry it.

I've often wondered what the implications of closing the Midland instead of the GCR would have been. My conclusion has been that much of the line would have had to be kept to serve flows focused on the Midland, while the Midland actually integrated with other routes in a way that the GC didn't. And, much as I loath Birmingham New St, I have to accept that putting cross-country flows through Birmingham opened up journeys that the GCR simply didn't.

None of which stops me regretting that I never had the chance to travel from Manchester London Road to Marylebone.

 

just one wish.... hmm, I wish I had more time to think about that









dammit

 

I've always understood that one flaw with the closure of rural branch lines was the loss of traffic that they fed onto the rest of the network. If you can't go nearly all the way by train and need to use a car for a significant part of the journey, you may as well use it for the whole journey. Consequently, weren't BR's losses after all the closures much the same as they had been before?

 

I think that whilst there may have been some impact, the growth of car parks at stations indicates that the impact wasn't as great as claimed.

 

Certainly, Beeching over estimated the willingness of people to drive to railheads rather than for the whole journey. But whether you can ascribe the continued losses to that foregone revenue is debatable. The excellent articles in Backtrack on closures highlight how often the fundamental weakness of these branches was the sheer cost of running them, far in excess of the contributory revenue they may have added to the network.


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The most significant failing in British Post-war transport strategy is that having nationalised the railways, road transport was not also immediately nationalised, and then when it was, road transport was nationalised as a separate, competing nationalised company(companies) robbing the country of a genuine integrated public transport system.
Imagine what might have been if local buses brought passengers to main line stations. Lorries served to deliver and distribute containerised freight which was long-hauled by rail.
The potential of all public transport operating under one national transport strategy is mind-boggling

 

An interesting case; I accept your points that much of the GCR route ran through rural areas, and that its connectivity was not as good as the MML. My comment was based on the general growth of North-South traffic which is now prompting the construction of HS2 to relieve the WCML, which has almost run out of capacity. Admittedly the GC didn't serve Birmingham, which will be one of the most important stops on the new route. Nevertheless, I cannot help but suspect that if the capacity of the GC route was still available, we probably wouldn't now be seeing the construction of a new route. And as we all know, the GC was designed to accomodate Berne-gauge trains once the channel tunnel was completed, which would have been very helpful now!

 

Even though a lot of people do think they know that, it's not actually true.

 

I'm afraid I'm not so sure. It's a wonderful idea in theory, but the idea of trying to make it all work in practice is daunting, to say the least. Such a grand scheme would almost certainly have to be co-ordinated by the government, so I suspect it would end up delivering inconvenient services because everything would be planned in Whitehall by civil servants with no knowledge of local conditions.

However, I do think that more could be done to get freight back onto the rails in rural areas. I remember a few years ago there was a proposal for a roll-on, roll-off rail wagon which would allow lorries to be loaded directly onto trains, and I cannot understand why it has not been developed further. It could have great potential on routes like the Cambrian line, which currently see very few trains, while the adjacent country roads are choked by lorries. Instead of driving down those narrow roads the whole way the lorry could make most of the journey by train, come off at the nearest station and just drive the last mile or two to its destination. It wouldn't need lots of expensive sidings to be provided, just a loading dock beside the line near a station, or at any other convenient point. You could incentivise haulage firms to use the servcie by introducing congestion charging for lorries on the adjacent roads.

 

You'd need to knock down all the over-bridges and the overhead wires too.

The genie will have its work cut out.

 

So what is the truth of the matter? What was the GC loading gauge?

Perhaps we should ask the genie to go back to the building of the GC London Extension and give it a much bigger loading gauge, such that even in the heyday of closures it would have survived for that reason.

 

Transport economics isn't really my field, but I'm wondering how that stacks up. For example, with articulated lorries, if you just transport the trailer, you need a tractor unit at each end (and drivers presumably) which adds to the capital expense. For some destinations, they might not get sufficient traffic to make that worthwhile, but if you just concentrate distribution on a smaller number of regional centres, you are starting to lose whatever initial advantage there was in having lorries just do "the last mile". You've also got the fact that you slow down the movement - which is significant for high value cargoes - since a load may be waiting a period of time before sufficient lorries are assembled to make up a viable train.

I suspect to fundamentally change the pattern of transport, you've got to really radically reassign where the costs are. I get the sense that a lorry is a large capital expense but the running cost is low (wages, fuel, maintenance and the contribution to the actual cost of providing roads is low). So the current economics relies on working the capital asset hard, i.e. with high daily utilisation in revenue service.

It's probably a minefield to interpret, but the annual cost of road provision in this country divided by the number of vehicle miles would be interesting, to get a cost per mile - I suspect it is higher than the amount per mile paid in vehicle and fuel taxes for high mileage vehicles. It's also undeniably true that for railways, the high cost of maintaining lightly used railways was seen as unsupportable in the 1960s, whereas rural roads are also expensive relative to usage, but a large rural road network is maintained for social reasons that were not applied to the railways. Essentially we value roads as part of the underlying core infrastructure of the country - there to support other economic activity without needing to be "profitable" themselves, whereas we see railways primarily in terms only of whether they do or don't make a profit in and of themselves.

Tom

 

We all know wrong. Its a myth dating back to the 1960s which is disgracefully perpetuated by wikipedia. It was constructed to the same loading gauge as other GC lines. It was one of the larger pre group gauges, at 9ft3 wide by 13ft5in high, but the I believe the Berne Gauge was about 10ft2in wide and 14ft high. I've gathered some data on pre group loading gauges here: http://www.devboats.co.uk/gwdrawings/loadinggauges.php

 

Wikipedia contains 'fake data'? Say it ain't so!!!

{Apologies for the off-topic, couldn't resist. One of my hot buttons.}

Noel