Fire and Steam (32 page)

The concentration on improving existing services meant that, for the most part, the urge to build long parallel lines to pinch traffic off rival railways had died out. The Great Central's lack of dividends clearly made this an example not to follow but that did not stop the companies running daft loss-making services to annoy their rivals. The Great Western, for example, operated trains down from Paddington to Southampton via Reading and Newbury, a journey few passengers would have chosen over the London & South Western direct service from Waterloo.

Despite the fact that the country was overrun with railways, in the early years of the twentieth century there were still dozens of little branch lines being built to connect any town that had been left off the system by reason of geography or topography. In order to overcome the lack of viability of such branch lines, the government, eager to foster the spread of the network into rural areas which had been affected by the depression of the 1880s, encouraged the construction of a simpler type of railway (built to a lower standard than the conventional ones) by passing the Light Railways Act in 1896. This enabled the construction of cheaper railways, able to carry axle-loads of only eight tons, far less than standard lines, at a maximum speed of just 25 mph, as a way of overcoming the high costs of conventional branch lines. The Act was an early attempt at rural regeneration as it allowed government grants to be paid for the construction of these lines, a rare form of subsidy for what the state always considered to be a private industry that should stand on its own feet.

While such light railways were commonplace in France, and particularly in Belgium, which boasted 2,400 miles of minor lines, a huge number for such a small country, earlier attempts to build them in Britain had foundered for lack of funding and the costs of obtaining parliamentary approval. On the Continent, there was a tradition of more powerful and financially independent local authorities which were willing to finance such important transport links. Before the Act of 1896, a handful of low-cost lines had been built in Britain during the 1870s and 1880s, the most notable being the narrow-gauge Ffestiniog
Railway in north Wales (see
Chapter 7
). It was used for slate-carrying and demonstrated the huge savings that could be made by building lines on a smaller scale and to lower standards. The line still survives as a tourist attraction today but it had few imitators in Britain at the time because building even a modest railway still required jumping the hurdles and costs of the parliamentary procedure and, occasionally, overcoming the resistance of local Luddite landowners.

Yet the 1896 Act, which attempted to boost the construction of these lines, largely failed. Agricultural decline accelerated in the 1880s, by which time most of the country was already well served by the railways. Moreover, the large companies rather turned their noses up at building rickety little lines for single-carriage trains to chunter up and down at 25 mph. While applications to authorize light railways poured in, few were actually built and even then the companies tended to revert to type by constructing them to conventional high standards.

Light railways had a strange and persistent advocate, one Colonel Holman Fred Stephens, who did the most to promote these toytown railways – still known today as Colonel Stephens's railways. Stephens was an enigmatic character about whose personal life little is known apart from the fact that he never married. He was tall, with a neat moustache, and always with a bowler hat and cane, and his whole life was devoted to creating seemingly impossible railways on the cheap, ‘the more rural the surroundings, the greater the challenge'.
¹⁴
Is there a railway with a better name than one of Stephens's early efforts, the Hundred of Manhood & Selsey Tramway, a seven-mile line from Chichester to Selsey in West Sussex, built for just £19,000 and so called, apparently, to avoid conforming to the normal standards of branch line railways? Stephens's lifetime work was making use of the Light Railways Act to construct or adapt a couple of dozen railways around the country, most of them, remarkably, standard gauge. He managed or funded several himself, ensuring everything was done on the cheap, creating a railway that Heath Robinson would have appreciated: ‘all [were] truly lines of character on which no new piece of equipment was ever purchased if anything secondhand would do'.
¹⁵
They ranged from the clay-carrying North Devon & Cornwall Junction Light Railway, which became a branch of the Southern Railway, to the Snailbeach
District Railway in Shropshire, built to half the standard gauge, which he rescued and made profitable for a while. Few survive, the most notable being a branch stretching out to Gunnislake, near Plymouth, originally built to a smaller gauge, and the Kent & East Sussex, which is a heritage line. Stephens was in the habit of turning up unannounced at his railways, ordering a special train and handing cigars around if everything was functioning well – but brickbats and coruscating memos if not.

It was not only the railway companies that turned their noses up at the notion of these ramshackle railways. The public had become accustomed to receiving a decent service and was reluctant to use them. In
The Country Railway,
David St John Thomas is critical of this attitude, which bumped up the costs of what might have been viable railways if they had been built without the usual bells and whistles: ‘Britain wasted every opportunity to develop basic, integrated country transport services at economic prices.'
¹⁶
He cites the Kelvedon & Tollesbury Light Railway, known locally in Essex as the ‘Crab and Winkle', opened in 1904 and costing £50,000, as an example that should have been more widely followed. It joined the main line just forty miles away from London's Liverpool Street: ‘The contrast between London's busiest terminus and a slow mixed train wandering over the Essex marshes a mere hour and a half later was as keen as anything experienced by air travellers even in the jet age.'
¹⁷
So what, he argues, if there were no signals because ‘the solitary engine had not acquired the art of running into itself' and why should passengers ‘be amazed when the fireman climbed down to open the gates at a crossing over the main road'. It was a railway that served its district well, carrying up to 1,000 people per day as well as huge amounts of jam from the nearby Tiptree factory, and was one of the successes of the 1896 Act. The jam kept the railway going for over half a century, but it closed to passengers in 1951, long before the Beeching cuts, and to freight a decade later.

With so many marginal lines built since the 1860s, it is hardly surprising that there were some early closures. By 1914, about 200 miles had permanently closed for passengers, including half a dozen railways of ten miles or more that did not even see out the nineteenth century. Most had been built principally to carry freight and some
continued to do so after closing for passengers. Overall they represented a tiny proportion of the total mileage. But that does not mean all the surviving railways were solvent – quite the opposite. Many were bankrupt almost as soon as they opened. The Bishop's Castle Railway Company on the Welsh border, for example, was insolvent as early as 1866, five years after it opened, but ‘its trains toddled to and fro between Bishop's Castle and Craven Arms'
¹⁸
until its closure in 1935.

The reason for the small number of closures was simple. In the rush to build railways, no legislative provision had been made to allow for their closure, so there was no legal way to close a railway. Indeed, Parliament felt that as landowners had been forced, sometimes very reluctantly, to release their land with the expectation of creating a useful and permanent service, it was incumbent upon the railway to keep lines open. A parliamentary procedure was required, even for the abandonment of a scheme authorized by an Act but not actually built.

While assessing the profitability of building and running a branch line would appear to be a simple matter of subtracting the cost of maintenance and operation from the income from ticket sales and carriage of freight, the issue is far more complex in reality. As we will see in the debate over the Beeching cuts (in
Chapter 14
), the kernel of the problem was to determine what proportion of that revenue would be permanently lost, as many people using a branch line travel on it at the start or end of a far longer journey. As regards maintenance too, determining the precise cost of keeping a small section of track in good fettle is more art than science given how difficult it is to identify the costs attributed, for example, to a gang of trackworkers who spend only part of their time on the branch. Since most branch lines soon became incorporated into a large company's portfolio, such minutiae were of little concern. Was it worth antagonizing a local community, or possibly breaking the law, to save a few bob when it was impossible to know how much revenue the branch contributed to the main line network? Clearly, with so few closures occurring before the First World War, the companies' implicit answer until then was a resounding ‘no'.

The Light Railways Act had also come too late for another reason, as demonstrated by the failure to build a long-proposed extension of the eight-mile-long Helston branch in west Cornwall. The Great Western
had expressed strong support for the idea put forward by local people to extend the little Helston line – itself only completed in 1887 – to serve several villages in the Lizard, but negotiations dragged on for several years. Eventually the Great Western lost interest and in August 1902 began to operate a service with a petrol-driven motor bus instead, the first such service ever offered by a railway in Britain. The bus had arrived, stymying any further growth of the railway in rural areas, where its flexibility and the fact that, unlike the railway, it did not pay its track costs, would ensure it was cheaper than building little-used lines. However, initially buses were confined to feeding the railway by serving the nearest station, rather than competing over longer routes, since neither the roads nor the buses were good enough to cover substantial distances.

The railways, though, missed a trick here. They were in a strong position to extend their monopoly from the track to the road by creating bus networks specifically tailored to serve their interests by linking with train services. While several railway companies did begin to run quite extensive bus networks, they were slow to exploit their advantage or to invest quickly enough to establish a monopoly. Mostly, railway companies did not want to demean themselves by operating road vehicles, but it was a mistake for which ‘they paid heavily in the twenties and thirties'.
¹⁹

There was also the aeroplane, but it had only just been invented and the notion that it would ever challenge the train seemed far-fetched. War, too, seemed for much of the Edwardian period a distant prospect, and little did the railway companies realize that the coming conflict, more than anything else, would change the structure of the industry for ever. However, there was one threat which the railways did face before the war: their own workforces – ‘the enemy within' as Mrs Thatcher would later call them – who, as living standards rose, became more militant and ready to challenge the hegemony of the railway owners.

As we saw in
Chapter 8
, labour on the railways had been slowly becoming more organized but attempts at industrial action were met forcefully by the railway companies which remained reluctant to recognize any workers' rights. The worst labour conflict of the nineteenth century on the railways had been in Scotland in 1890. The
North British Railway had traditionally overworked its men, with twenty-five-hour shifts not uncommon at holiday times. Its ‘express' trains were slow, taking up to three and a half hours for the under-fifty-mile journey between Edinburgh and Glasgow, and the company struggled even to keep to this undemanding schedule because of overcrowding on the tracks and lack of both platform capacity and passing loops. The opening of the Forth Bridge had merely made congestion worse and the men were angry that they were paid only for the scheduled time of the train, with no extra for overtime caused by delays, which meant they frequently worked ninety hours in a week while being paid for just sixty.

The other large Scottish railways, the Caledonian and the Glasgow & South Western, were little better and the exasperated men from all three companies went on strike on 22 December 1890, timed to cause maximum disruption in the holiday season. The union, the Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants for Scotland, had organized effectively for several months behind the scenes and 9,000 drivers, firemen and guards walked out, stopping both passenger and freight trains. Many English people hoping to return home for Christmas were stranded because there had been no forewarning of the industrial action, and many factories ground to a halt as the coal trains, the lifeblood of the economy, stopped running. Apart from the Clyde and a few lochs, there was no alternative form of transport since the horse and cart had mostly been put out of business by the intense network of railways in Scotland. Food began to rot in the warehouses, which, stuffed with carcasses and vegetables in those days before cold storage was widespread, could be smelt for miles around.

The railway workers' demands were hardly revolutionary – a ten-hour day and recognition of overtime – and consequently the strike attracted widespread public sympathy at first, but as shortages became more acute, criticism of their action mounted. The men became more desperate, putting boulders on the line to stop a ‘scab' express that they heard was running between Perth and Inverness. Early in the New Year, the Caledonian, needing to accommodate blacklegs who had come from England, evicted railway families from tenements at Motherwell, sparking a riot that led to the local station being wrecked. After a
fortnight the strike began to weaken, with the return of the Glasgow & South Western men, but many others held out for a further four weeks, costing the companies an estimated £300,000 in lost revenue. The strikers gained little, except to show the potential of solidarity and to confirm their ability to disrupt not just the railway but the economy as a whole. However, their action did attract the attention of Parliament, which held its first-ever debate into railway workers' long hours.