Fire and Steam (42 page)

The overall burden on the railways was far greater than in the First World War and again various outposts of the network became frantically busy. This time it was not Scotland but Norfolk where the construction of 150 bomber airfields required vast quantities of material to be transported, often ending up at tiny country stations
which might previously only have handled a couple of coal wagons each week. Moreover, once these airfields were built, the RAF relied on the railways to transport the personnel using them, and the fuel for the planes, which put further stress on these little-used lines.

The military traffic reached a peak in 1944 when the railways ran an average of 500 special trains for the government every day, many of them part of the preparations for the invasion of France. The complexities of such an exercise are impossible to exaggerate. Trains cannot just be put on the tracks randomly and allowed to follow whatever the signals and points instruct. Each additional train required a route plan – a train path – to weave the train into the existing pattern of traffic, taking into account the weight of the train, the power of the locomotives, and military requirements such as stops to feed the troops en route. Even goods trains had to be scheduled in a way that ensured the availability of crews with the right route knowledge,
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which was even more essential since the blackout conditions of the war made driving much harder. Normally such timetables would have been drawn up at leisure several months in advance using graph paper, by a timetabler who would need to know every nook and cranny of the route
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but with so many extra trains changes had to be made daily to accommodate them. The most extreme pressure was in the run-up to D-Day and its immediate aftermath, when the railways near the coastal towns were working at well beyond their maximum expected capacity, and it was only the skills of the railway managers, the signalmen and the drivers which ensured their smooth running.

On the freight side, the key issue was to reduce the wasteful carriage of thousands of empty wagons back to their home depots. To this end, the entire fleet of 655,000 railway-owned wagons, together with the 585,000 in private hands, was used as a single resource, controlled by the unimaginatively named but vital ‘Inter-Company Freight Rolling Stock Control' at Amersham. It set up a novel system, making every station in the country file daily returns on its need for wagons and the equally vital sheets and ropes to cover them. Thanks to coordination and these backroom administrative tasks, the amount of freight carried on the railway rose by nearly 50 per cent by 1943 without any extra wagons being introduced. Special services had to be accommodated on
the network, too, such as ambulance trains that had to travel particularly slowly and, most bizarrely, armoured trains which were built to help repel an invasion with a heavily protected locomotive at the front and gun platforms at both ends. They patrolled the south coast for the early years of the war but in the event served little purpose as fears of an invasion receded, and gradually they were left in the sidings.

To compound their difficulties, large swathes of the railways were frequently under attack and suffered substantial damage. Once the Blitz had started in earnest in the summer of 1940, the railway began to suffer massive damage and over the space of the next five years there were 9,200 ‘incidents', 247 of which put the line concerned out of action for a week or more. London and the Southern railway took the brunt of the attacks but the East Coast line and the Midlands suffered too. There were two bad phases: the bombing raids of the Blitz in 1940–1 and the flying bomb rocket attacks towards the end of the war in 1944–5. In the first series of attacks, the Luftwaffe made a concerted attempt to destroy communication links and some of the frequent hits on the City and St Paul's were actually aimed at the nearby Snow Hill to Blackfriars line, which, as in the First World War, was a vital route through London and was one of the most bombed sections of track in Britain. A particularly devastating attack on the rail network was the destruction of a bridge in Southwark Street, just south of the Thames, in April 1941, which cut off access to the Snow Hill line for a couple of months until a temporary structure could be erected; it took a year and a half to install a permanent new bridge. Marshalling yards, the dockyard railways and the London main line stations, just by their sheer size, proved to be easier and frequently hit targets. In Doncaster, a decoy goods yard was even built in order to protect the real one on the other side of the tracks. On the worst night of the Blitz in May 1941, seven London termini were damaged by bombs and only Marylebone of the capital's major stations was left unscathed. At Waterloo, the most badly damaged, it took a month to restore services fully. Of course it was not only London. Late in 1940, three arches of the brick viaduct carrying trains into Liverpool on the LMS were bombed and a second attack destroyed much of the repair work, while Middlesbrough station was completely destroyed in a raid in August 1942.

Despite the damage sustained by the railway, the Germans never even came close to paralysing the network. The duplication of lines helped, as it had done in the First World War, but the main reason was that the Germans found it virtually impossible to direct bombs on to a thin line of tracks without a guidance device. The Allies were to find this out in the latter stages of the war when attacks on the French rail network to prevent the Germans bringing in reinforcements proved ineffective. Instead, they had to call on the French railway workers sympathetic to the Resistance to sabotage the system. However, where the Luftwaffe's targeted attacks had mostly failed, the random aim of the V1 and V2 bombs later in the war caused more havoc on the railways. The first V2 happened to strike the railway at Bethnal Green and several others caused devastation to railway property including one which hit the track in front of a Kent Coast express that promptly fell into the hole killing several passengers.

Once the bombs hit, the unsung heroes of the civil engineering department came to the fore, men who had stayed at home, not always by choice, but nevertheless risked their lives like their contemporaries fighting in Europe. They did not wait until the ‘All Clear' was given, but as soon as they were alerted that the railway was damaged they went out immediately to start effecting repairs, working at great risk not only from continued enemy attacks but also from trains running on nearby tracks. Other railway workers, running isolated signal boxes or setting out to work during air raids, were equally heroic.

The most famous tale of heroism on the railways during the war was the action of the driver and fireman of a long munitions train of fifty-one wagons, carrying tons of bombs and detonators, in the small market town of Soham in Cambridgeshire on 2 June 1944, just four days before D-Day. As the train was going through the town, the driver, Ben Gimbert, noticed flames coming up from under a wagon. Instead of just abandoning the train where an explosion would have flattened the whole town, he got his fireman Jim Nightall to uncouple the rear part of the train and then carried on with the burning wagon to try to reach the open countryside. However, he had got only a short way out of the station when the remaining wagons on the train, loaded with forty-four 500-pound bombs, blew up, causing the biggest explosion on British
soil during the war. Amazingly Gimbert survived, despite being thrown 200 yards by the explosion, but both Nightall and the signalman, Frank Bridges, were killed and though every window in the town was shattered, its inhabitants were saved by the actions of the railwaymen. Gimbert and Nightall (posthumously) were awarded the George Cross, the highest award for bravery available to a civilian. There were countless other heroic deeds by railway workers, many of which went unrecognized. Helena Wojtczak
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uncovered the tale of a stewardess on a Great Western liner, Elizabeth Mary Owen, who saved several lives after her ship, the
St Patrick
, was sunk on the way to Rosslare in Ireland. She repeatedly dived into cabins to bring out passengers and was awarded the George Medal. Sadly, her efforts were totally ignored in the company's official account in its
Great Western Magazine
.

The outdoor suburban sections of the London Underground were frequently damaged by bombs too, while its deep-level Tube lines became a refuge for hundreds of thousands of people. Originally the authorities had tried to dissuade Londoners from using the Underground to hide from the bombs, but soon bowed to public pressure. Up to 200,000 people a night took shelter in the system at the height of the Blitz, while the trains kept running normally during the day and evening. The numbers in the shelters fell sharply when the worst of the Blitz subsided in 1941 but people returned en masse during the attacks of 1944. Although there were a handful of incidents when bombs did, through terrible bad luck, penetrate deep into the system, the shelters undoubtedly lived up to their reputation as the ‘best shelters of them all'. The deadliest incident was not a result of enemy action but involved a panic at Bethnal Green station in March 1943, started by the noise of anti-aircraft guns. The long, poorly lit stairs had no handrail and a woman with a baby fell over, triggering an horrific stampede that left 173 people, including sixty-two children, crushed to death.

Whereas in the early days of the war, passengers had accepted the injunction not to travel unless they had to, as the conflict wore on the trains filled up again as people were desperate to get away from the troubled cities whenever they had a chance of a break. Huge numbers of service men and women on leave, as well as newly arrived Americans desperate to see the London sights and experience the night life, crowded
on to the system. By the latter stages of the war, when the V1 and V2 flying bombs were raining down on London, the war-weary population flocked to the railways and ignored the injunctions. By the end of the war, railway usage had reached record levels. There were about a million passengers per week more than in 1938, with the annual total for 1944 reaching 1.3bn journeys.
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Of the Big Four, only the Southern, which had lost much commuter traffic, showed a decrease, while numbers on the Great Western had risen by over 50 per cent.

O. S. Nock had no doubts about the achievement of the railways in this grim time: ‘In plain terms, the cumulative effort of the British railways over the years 1940–1945 represents the greatest achievement in railway transportation in the history of the world.'
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Yet, the public, ever critical of the railways, did not fully appreciate this success. Many of the more affluent classes, who had been forced out of their cars to travel by railway for the first time, were not impressed by their uncomfortable and slow journeys on overcrowded trains, and that climate of criticism helped to ensure that public protests against Labour's plans to nationalize the railways after the war were muted.

In a near repeat of events after the First World War, the railways were dealt a rough hand by the government over the financial arrangements resulting from their wartime nationalization. The government, a coalition of all three main parties, had initially promised to allow them to have first call on any profit up to £40m and a share of subsequent profits up to a total £56m. But a couple of years into the conflict the railways were being allowed to retain only £43.5m of their profits annually, divided in set percentages between the Big Four and London Transport,
¹¹
an arrangement which proved lucrative for the government. While before the war the five railway businesses (including London Underground) had an annual income of £200m, and made profits of £40m, by 1944 they were netting £93m on double the turnover. There seemed to be no rationale for the government to retain just over half the £350m in profits generated by the railways during the war, although in compensation it created a trust fund for investment in the railways and most of the money, about £150m (£3,750m today), was handed over to the British Transport Commission (which ran British Railways after nationalization).

Immediately after the end of the war, the General Election of 1945 brought to power a Labour government committed to nationalization, not just of the railways but also other key industries such as coal and steel. In a November parliamentary announcement, Herbert Morrison, the Deputy Prime Minister and the creator of London Transport, confirmed the manifesto promise of nationalization. The policy was not as controversial as might have been expected. The struggles of the Big Four in the run-up to the war and the efficient running of the system as a unified network since 1939 had ensured that there was no question of returning to the old system. Moreover, support for nationalization was again not confined to left-wing circles. Large public corporations like the BBC, the Central Electricity Board and London Transport had been created between the wars by the Tories. As Terry Gourvish, the official historian of British Railways, put it, ‘an increasing body of opinion in all parties certainly favoured a greater measure of governmental control in the interests of both industry and the consumer'.
¹²

The railways were on their knees and ripe for nationalization: the war had drained them far beyond the experience of the First World War and the industry had already been in a financially strained situation in 1938, with only the Great Western paying a dividend that year. Intensive use had also taken its toll: by the end of the war, the railways were carrying 50 per cent more freight and passenger mileage had increased by two thirds with the same amount of equipment; to make matters worse, routine permanent-way maintenance had been slashed, creating an estimated backlog of 2,500 track miles,
¹³
about two years' work in normal circumstances. Bridges, tunnels and buildings had also been allowed to decay, while many locomotives were at the end of their useful lives. Over 8,000 locomotives, 40 per cent of the total, were over thirty-five years old as was a fifth of the 56,000 coaches. Moreover, apart from resuming work on a couple of long-planned electrification schemes, no improvements to the network were carried out. Previous commitments made during the war to a major modernization of the system were quietly dropped and not revived until the mid-1950s.