Changing tracks: can railways reconnect the UK 200 years on?

This year, Railway 200 celebrates 200 years since the opening of the Stockton and Darlington Railway (S&DR) in the north-east of England. The historical significance of that particular moment in the development of railways to one side – the S&DR is neither the first of anything or the last of anything – it provides a welcome opportunity to evaluate what our railways have done, what they are for and how we can best harness them for good.

Railway realities

The earliest examples of railways we would recognise today emerged in Central Europe in the 14th century. Migration of Protestant mining engineers during the Reformation brought this technology to the UK, in places like Cumbria in the late 1500s. By the 1700s, high quality and easily mined coal gave Britain the edge in producing iron for the rails themselves, and in the 1810s the use of steam locomotives emerged as a practical way to greatly increase the haulage capacity of the system. The first modern railway began operation in 1830 – the Liverpool and Manchester Railway harnessed all of the technological developments of the preceding centuries and combined them with operational innovation and the capital freed by the demise of the transatlantic slave trade – at which point there was an explosion in the growth of the railway network, globally.

In the UK, this was led by hundreds of chaotic private enterprises, with many railway proposals essentially being elaborate frauds. This meant that the network lacked any real coherence, with duplication and doglegs being commonplace. Huge tracts of it were barely profitable, if at all. By the 1920s the railway network had already begun to retreat, a trend accelerated by the Second World War and nationalisation. Britain’s rail map required pruning.

From 1955 onwards, the nationalised railway industry invested massively in modernisation – including replacing and remodelling track, new centralised signalling, electrification and new fleets of trains – without an immediate improvement in its balance sheet, and government patience quickly ran thin. Unlike the embryonic motorway building programme, which was being delivered regionally by the then hugely powerful local authorities, railway modernisation was centrally administered with a need to satisfy the patience of the Treasury.

Industry reform followed in 1962, and the newly formed British Railways Board needed a Chair. Enter one of the great villains of contemporary British folklore: Dr Richard Beeching.

Beeching’s 1963 report, The Reshaping of British Railways, is possibly the most infamous white paper in British history, being remembered unfondly by many for swinging an uncompromising axe at the railway, intending to reduce network mileage by around a third and to close more than half of stations. Modernisation was already reducing railway mileage and simplifying railway operations, but Reshaping refocused these efforts, grasping the nettle of network and service ‘rationalisation’ far more assertively, listing what services would be lost, what stations would close and precisely how much smaller the railway would be.

As a result, then and today, it is understood as the ‘weapon that destroyed Britain’s innocence’, dragging us into the modern age where gently puffing branch lines were a thing of the past and the future was the motorway.

But our memory of this document is shaped by the story told about it rather than the actual impact it had. Beeching conjures up images of rolling soft countryside and stone cottage stations shuttered up mainly because it is the residents in these areas that had the time and wealth to paint that picture. Whether through the poetry of John Betjeman or the public campaigns in the Scottish Borders, the enduring memory of the ‘Beeching Axe’ is rural.

But the greatest negative impact of the government’s railway cuts – Beeching put his name to them, but successive governments enacted the closures – was not in lightly populated rural areas.

Further closure

In March 1967, Minister of Transport Barbara Castle began a process establishing a funding framework for railways which provided a necessary social good, acknowledging at last that an operating profit in a narrow commercial sense was an impossibility for Britain’s postwar railway system.

Beeching was long gone by this point. Railway closures continued into the 1980s, but the last year of significant contraction was 1970. British Rail had still not managed to find its way into overall profitability by then and so, by that narrow metric, reshaping had failed just as modernisation did.

The creation of the National Bus Company in 1969 had brought some level of coordination to bus services. However, the overall decline in bus services was not arrested, and there was no integration with rail provision. Then, less than two decades later, bus services were deregulated, obliterating a key component in Beeching’s justification for ceasing rail operations on many lines. Bus services continue to be cut to this day, with public transport provision in large parts of rural and semi-urban Britain being essentially non-existent.

Despite the long-lasting negative impacts of the Reshaping report on the fabric of British society, history judged Beeching’s dismissal of social benefit as a factor on the scale of railway closures as correct, as Castle’s social railway concept did not change the post-reshaping map very much at all. Cuts continued for a further decade.

Today, our contracted railway network is still trying to unpick the aftermath of Beeching. It is a jack of all trades and a master of none, with mixed traffic lines resulting in an intensively but inefficiently used system that prioritises long-distance passenger trains over local or suburban ones. High Speed 2 (aka HS2), originally intended to provide new high speed lines linking Manchester and Leeds in the north with Birmingham and London in the south, would have unleashed the full potential of our railway by taking the express trains – the ones that only stop in major stations – on to their own tracks. This would have freed up significant space on the existing railway for many more stopping trains, reversing the impact of Beeching by enabling more trains at more local stations, as well as creating capacity for more feeder lines to be opened to the in-between places that have suffered so much.

But this story of that enormous opportunity was not told, replaced in part by empty tales of economic rebalancing and faster trains. And that made it easy for government to throw the project on the skip when it wanted to tell a different story about Britain’s future.