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Authors: Christian Wolmar

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28
Edwin Pratt,
British Railways and the Great War,
Selwyn & Blount, 1921.
29
Hamilton Ellis,
British Railway History
1877–1947, p. 304.
30
Michael Bonavia,
The Four Great Railways,
David & Charles, 1980, p. 9.
31
C. F. Klapper,
Sir Herbert Walker's Southern Railway,
Ian Allan, 1973, p. 12.
32
Ibid., p. 93.
33
Vaughan,
Railwaymen, Politics and Money,
p. 317.
 

TWELVE:
Compromise – The Big Four

1
Adrian Vaughan,
Railwaymen, Politics and Money,
John Murray, 1997, p. 315.
2
This was a locospotters' paradise as there were 404 different classes of locomotives!
3
A very early use of this American term in a UK business.
4
C. Hamilton Ellis,
British Railway History,
1877–1947, George Allen & Unwin, 1959, p. 329.
5
The initials of the LMS and the LNER are used throughout this chapter as these companies were commonly known by their acronyms.
6
Michael Bonavia,
The Four Great Railways,
David & Charles, 1980, p. 34.
7
Ibid., p. 66.
8
Hamilton Ellis,
British Railway History 1877–1947,
p. 321.
9
Third-rail systems are powered by d.c. (direct current) while overhead systems can use either direct current or alternating current (a.c.).
10
This was a factor in the 1999 Ladbroke Grove train crash where it is thought the driver of the Thames train that went through a red light had difficulty seeing the signal because of relatively new gantries installed for Heathrow Express services.
11
Jack Simmons,
The Railways of Britain,
2nd edn, Macmillan, 1968, p. 38.
12
Cited in Hamilton Ellis,
British Railway History,
1877–1947, pp. 325–6.
13
Today, with around a third of route mileage, the electrified proportion of the British network is well below that of comparable European countries, which average at least half and in some cases far more.
14
The Southern did receive government help in 1935 with a £45m loan towards its electrification programme.
15
Bonavia,
The Four Great Railways,
p. 6.
16
The unions representing miners, railway workers and dockers had formed a triple alliance vowing to support each other in the event of industrial action.
17
Hamilton Ellis,
British Railway History,
1877–1947, p. 340.
18
Interestingly, today's figures are similar with 1.1bn journeys in 2005 on a much smaller network but with a far bigger population – though there is some double counting as now journeys involving a change are counted as two, which they were not in the days of the Big Four.
19
Philip Unwin,
Travelling by Train in the 'Twenties and 'Thirties,
George Allen & Unwin, 1981, p. 59.
20
I remember travelling on these trains as a boy in the 1950s and being served teacakes and scones by incredibly friendly and efficient waiters.
21
Unwin,
Travelling by Train in the 'Twenties and 'Thirties,
p. 14.
22
Quoted in Bonavia, The Four Great Railways, p. 100.
23
Geoffrey Freeman Allen, The Illustrated History of British Railways, Basinghall Books, 1981, p. 116.
24
Bonavia,
The Four Great Railways,
p. 110.
25
It was the modern version of that train which was involved in the Ladbroke Grove train disaster in which thirty-one people were killed in October 1999.
26
Pacific is the name given to engines based on the wheel arrangement of 4-6-2, which means there are four bogie wheels, six large driving wheels, and two trailing wheels at the back. This very common type of locomotive was first developed by the Southern Pacific in the USA.
27
Today's schedules give a best service from London to Glasgow at just under four and a half hours.
28
Unwin,
Travelling by Train in the 'Twenties and 'Thirties,
p. 61.
29
Don Hale,
Mallard,
Aurum Press, 2005, p. 44.
30
It has some similarities with Johnston, the typeface designed for the precursor of London Underground in 1915, and which, slightly updated as New Johnston, is still in use today.
31
The history is set out in Roger Burdett Wilson,
Go Great Western,
David & Charles, 1970.
32
Long before the idea of ‘integrated' transport became a politicians' catchword.
33
Simmons,
The Railways of Britain,
p. 41.
34
For more detail on London Transport's 1930s heyday, see Christian Wolmar,
The Subterranean Railway,
Atlantic Books, 2004,
chapter 13
, pp. 254 ff.
35
Simmons,
The Railways of Britain,
p. 42.
 

THIRTEEN:
And Then There Was One

1
It was intended to mean that munitions trains should have priority!
2
Helena Wojtczak in
Railwaywomen: exploitation, betrayal and triumph in the workplace,
Hastings Press, 2005, p. 185, cites the case of a woman signal worker who was receiving £5 10s after deductions compared with just £1 10s as a teacher.
3
Reg Robertson,
Steaming through the war years,
Oakwood Press, 1996, p. 5.
4
David Wragg,
Signal Failure,
Sutton Publishing, 2004, p. 100. The Great Western had, in fact, supplied the least, just forty compared with Southern's fifty-five.
5
C. Hamilton Ellis,
British Railway History,
1877–1947, George Allen & Unwin, 1959, p. 377.
6
‘Knowing the road' is essential for safety as the driver needs to know all the features of a track, such as the position of signals, the gradients and the curves, to be able to operate safely and therefore a driver is not allowed to be in control of a train on tracks where he has not been before.
7
There is a fantastically detailed article on compiling timetables by G. E. Williams in H. A. Vallance (ed.),
The Railway Enthusiast's Bedside Book,
B. T. Batsford, 1966, p. 33. The diagram was often done with the help of weighted strings pinned to the top of a board with the x axis as time, and the y axis the route, a simple but time-consuming effort.
8
Wojtczak,
Railwaywomen,
p. 151.
9
This is virtually the same number as in 2006. As mentioned in the previous chapter, today's network is about two thirds the size, while the population is nearly double, and of course the market share of the railways is now far smaller.
10
O. S. Nock quotes this himself in his
150 Years of Mainline Railways,
David & Charles, 1980, p. 134.
11
The formula was based on pre-war revenues and ranged from 34.3 per cent for LMS and 23.6 per cent for LNER to 15.5 for Great Western, 15.4 per cent for Southern and 11.2 per cent for London Transport.
12
Terry Gourvish,
British Railways
1948–1973, Cambridge University Press, 1986, p. 16.
13
These figures are from the official history of British Railways: Terry Gourvish's
British Railways
1948–1973, p. 5.
14
According to Terry Gourvish, precise financial and usage details during this period are difficult to obtain because of the complex accounting arrangements established by the government.
15
Hansard, House of Commons, 17 December 1946, Vol. 439, col. 1809.
16
Gourvish,
British Railways
1948–1973, p. 27.
17
In compensation for the forgone profits in the war, and the damage caused to the railways, British Railways was eventually given around £210m for investment.
18
The name British Railways had no official status until the 1960s as the organization was technically the Railways Executive of the BTC.
19
My personal copy of the ABC is dated 1963, when there were still thousands of steam locomotives and ‘bunking' a shed with its engines in steam and the complete absence of security was a memorable experience.
 

FOURTEEN:
An Undeserved Reputation

1
This chapter and the next one are covered in greater detail in my book on rail privatization,
On the Wrong Line,
published by Aurum Press, 2005.
2
Horses were still commonplace in the 1950s; our milkman in Kensington, West London, used one until the end of that decade.
3
Terry Gourvish,
British Railways 1948–1973,
Cambridge University Press, 1986, p. 5.
4
Michael Bonavia,
British Rail, the first 25 years,
David & Charles, 1981, p. 61.
5
Conversation with author.
6
Email to author.
7
The normal sequence of signals is double yellow, yellow and red. The yellows in effect warn of an impending red signal.
8
As mentioned in
Chapter 12
, AWS was not made mandatory until after the 1997 Southall disaster, when a train with a failed AWS crashed into a freight service, killing seven people.
9
The exchange rate in the 1940s was $4 to the pound but was then fixed at $2.80 in September 1949, representing a 30 per cent devaluation and consequent increase in the cost of oil, which was priced in dollars.
10
David Henshaw,
The Great Railway Conspiracy,
Leading Edge, 1991, p. 54.
11
Henshaw quotes a figure for steam haulage of just under a shilling per mile compared with 3¼d for diesel.
12
Henshaw,
The Great Railway Conspiracy,
p. 51.
13
Gerard
Fiennes, Fiennes on Rails, fifty years of railways,
David & Charles, 1986, p. 49.
14
Bonavia,
British Rail, the first 25 years,
p. 52.
15
Quoted in Gourvish,
British Railways 1948–1973,
p. 270.
16
Calculated by the Central Statistical Office and quoted in Gourvish,
British Railways
1948–1973, p. 68.
17
If the railways'contribution to the British Transport Commission's central charges are included, the loss for 1959 is doubled to £84m.
18
See also
Chapter 13
. Nearly all, about 1,000 miles, were kept open for freight.
19
Of course Marples divested his shares when he was Minister of Transport – to his wife.
20
Anthony Sampson,
Anatomy of Britain Today,
Hodder & Stoughton, 1965, p. 582.
21
Henshaw,
The Great Railway Conspiracy,
p. 117.
22
Ibid.
23
The Buchanan report on traffic, published in 1963, specifically warned that new roads would inevitably clog up. Ministry of Transport,
Traffic in Towns
(The Buchanan Report), HMSO, 1963.
24
I have happy memories of travelling as a child to Louth from London by train on this line.
25
Henshaw,
The Great Railway Conspiracy,
p. 232.
26
Gerard Fiennes,
I tried to run a railway,
Ian Allan, 1967.
27
Jack Simmons and Gordon Biddle (eds),
The Oxford Companion to British Railway History,
Oxford University Press, 1997, p. 29.
28
Hunter Davies,
A walk along the tracks,
Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1982, p. 11.
29
British Railways Board,
The Development of the Major Trunk Routes,
British Railways Board, 1965.
30
The shorter name began to be used widely from 1965 and was virtually universally applied by 1970.
31
Interestingly, Birmingham was reached from Paddington and Manchester from St Pancras, completely different routes to the main ones used today.
32
It was originally known as Inter-City.

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