I joined British Rail at the start of 1967 in the Signalling and Telecommunications Department of the then London Midland Region. I was sponsored by BR through university, making me relatively wealthy compared with most of my contemporaries – at the princely salary of £550 per annum!
Electrification of the southern part of the West Coast Main Line was completed in 1966/7 and train services were transformed with 100 mph operation. There were ten trains a day each way between London and Manchester – a dramatic increase – with journey times of around two hours forty minutes. The East Coast route had five daytime services from London to Edinburgh, with the flagship “Flying Scotsman” taking six hours. Trains on both routes are much faster now but the most dramatic change has been in frequency, with three trains an hour to Manchester and two trains an hour to Edinburgh, supplemented by five open access “Lumo” services. Long distance inter-regional services have also been transformed – the much-derided TransPennine route is much faster and more frequent than it was then.
Services in the metropolitan areas have also been transformed over time, a dramatic improvement driven by the Passenger Transport Executives set up following the 1968 Transport Act. As an example, the route from Birmingham to Redditch had a vestigial service of just two peak trains in each direction and no stations between New Street and Selly Oak. It now has a frequent electric service, including Bromsgrove as well as Redditch and one of its new stations, University, has been so successful that its capacity has had to be massively increased.
Similarly, TfL’s London Overground has transformed previously run-down orbital routes into key elements of the city’s transport network. However, there has been less progress south of the Thames, as the Southern Railway had already electrified its suburban network – there have been few step-changes in frequencies and journey times.
British Rail’s approach fifty years ago was entirely logical for a cash constrained industry without any wider economic remit. In the round, devolution has been an astounding success.
Freight has been a story of structural change. In the sixties, and for years afterwards, coal was king although much of it was still carried in small 16 ton mineral wagons which only had handbrakes; tiny 10 ton vans were the mainstay for general merchandise traffic; these were fitted with vacuum brakes but, after some worrying derailments, were also limited to 45 mph operation. Traffic costing was rudimentary at best; I suspect the general merchandise traffic, together with lots of other flows, was horrendously unprofitable but it wasn’t clear that anyone really knew what was profitable at a disaggregated level. Meanwhile, the motorway network was being built and road hauliers were taking massive chunks of rail’s volume while holding down rates.
Rail freight has reinvented itself as a smaller operation based on full trainload movements and single person crews and has absorbed the demise of coal, the massive shrinkage of heavy industry and the loss of traditional markets like mail and newspapers. Intermodal and aggregates are the remaining significant markets. The privatised freight operators have been very successful in managing these changes, albeit with wafer thin profit margins – freight privatisation has been a success and, sensibly, the Government is not changing this: if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it! However, Great British Railways will need to be structured to ensure there are sensible safeguards for freight capacity in the future.
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Safety is another vital area which has changed out of all recognition, partly as a result of dreadful accidents such as Clapham and Ladbroke Grove but also in line with broader societal changes.
Staff safety has been transformed. I remember two activities during my initial training in the Signal and Telecoms Department which now make my blood run cold; they were incredibly dangerous and I would hope that anyone asked to do work in the same situation today would, quite rightly, refuse. But 50 – 60 years ago that was the norm and the inevitable consequence was that there was a high number of staff fatalities. Today, Network Rail’s key staff message is “Everyone home safe every day”
The industry is much safer for passengers too, although inevitably risks remain and accidents will still occasionally happen such as the 2020 derailment caused by a landslip near Stonehaven and the collision between two trains on the Cambrian Line in October. Lessons have been learnt in both these cases and risks will be further reduced. But absolute safety could only be assured by closing the network down – and shifting travel to road, which is much more dangerous.
The challenge is to find a balanced way forward, delivering continued improvement without disproportionate cost and without disproportionate disruption to the network – suicides and trespass incidents need to be managed, if at all possible without shutting the railway for hours. And the industry should be willing to challenge the Office of Road and Rail when its requirements become unreasonable, for example the almost total prohibition on any extension to third rail electrification. An attitude that absolute safety must be pursued irrespective of cost is seductive but disreputable.
Ownership has proved to be irrelevant but empowered management with appropriate delegation is vital. Ironically, towards the end of its term, the Conservative government achieved the worst of all worlds with operation nominally in the private sector but micro-managed from Whitehall.
In contrast, in my first senior management role in British Rail as sub-sector manager for the regional services on the London Midland Region, I had bottom line accountability but considerable freedom of action. We could experiment and take responsibility for the success or failures of our decisions. As an example, the route between Burnley and Hebden Bridge was moribund, with a couple of passenger trains each way on summer Saturdays only and virtually no freight. The obvious options were closure or development: so we experimented by introducing five trains each way between Preston and Leeds with old diesel units. The route now has an hourly interurban service from York to Blackpool, a new station at Burnley and, more recently, an hourly service to Manchester via Rochdale. Without empowerment, it would have been easier to shrug my shoulders and maintain the status quo.
It is essential that Great British Railways delegates bottom line responsibility to meaningful individual business units and empowers their managers to drive them forward, working with their key stakeholders. There will be mistakes but these will be greatly exceeded by the successes.
I am enormously grateful to Mark Walker for giving me the opportunity to comment on the ups and downs of the rail industry over the past three years. This time, I’ve indulged myself by looking back over the span of my career, as it’s now time to hang up my keyboard – nothing is forever. Many thanks to you all and every good wish for the industry and its people going forward. I very much hope the best years are still to come!
Photo credit: Chris Stokes
