Book Review
Holding the Line: How Britain’s Railways were Saved
Terry Gourvish reviews Holding the Line: how Britain’s railways were saved by Richard Faulkner and Chris Austin
T
his is an informative and entertaining book, written by two insiders who know the railways well: Lord Faulkner, orchestrator with Will Camp of the ‘No Rail Cuts’ campaign of 1975, subsequently a public
relations adviser to British Rail, and more recently Chairman of the Railway Heritage committee (until 2009); and Chris Austin, formerly a manager with British Rail, then the Strategic Rail Authority and ATOC, and currently a board member of the Association of Community Rail Partnerships. It charts the successive attempts by post-war governments to rationalise Britain’s Victorian railway network; or as the authors put it, concerns ‘the British people’s love affair with their railways… and the repeated attempts made during the second half of the twentieth century to destroy them’. The book covers the milestones
in the search by policy-makers for the holy grail of a smaller, profitable ‘core’ railway, and the contradictions to which it gave rise: the failure to recognise that closures of peripheral lines made little or no difference to the railways’ overall finances; a misplaced faith in bus substitution; the impracticalities of converting railways into roads; and, above all, the ‘bad planning, dogmatism, political chicanery, ineptitude and lack of imagination that characterised rail policy in the middle of the 20th
century’ (p.130). It ends with a
sideswipe at the McNulty Report of 2011, criticising it for misleading comparisons of the net cost to government of different categories of franchise (pp.127-8). What cannot be denied is that from the
early 1950s the railways were a loss-making business. There followed an oscillating and sometimes fierce political debate about how much railway should be supported, how much of the cost should come from the fare-box, and how much from taxation. It is well-known that over the years there have been numerous plans to prune the British network, none more draconian than the Serpell report’s ‘fully commercial’ Option A of only 1,630 miles in 1983. Some railwaymen, like the redoubtable Fred Margetts, were enthusiastic cutters, and maps continue to be unearthed (cf. Sim Harris in Railnews, November 2012).
Half a century has passed since Beeching’s famous Reshaping
report of 1963, and there are several books on the good doctor’s work and on subsequent rationalisation. They range from the shrill, e.g. David Henshaw’s Great Railway Conspiracy, and Adrian Vaughan’s Greatest Railway Blunder, to the more measured, e.g. Charles Loft’s Government, Railways and the Modernization of
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Britain. Faulkner and Austin steer something of a middle course, less encyclopaedic than Gerald Daniels’ and Les Dench’s Passengers No More, but politically astute, and their overall message is certainly not in doubt. Duplicitous politicians, unctuous mandarins, and hostile and volatile advisers are identified, together with their peccadilloes, the roads-favouring transport department is rebuked, and at several points railways are seen to have suffered from the ‘toxic combination of very strong or very weak ministers and senior civil servants’. The closure of around 6,000 miles
of passenger railway after 1955 was accompanied by the lack of a clear idea of attributable costs and revenues, and little or no attempt was made to provide a backcheck on the results of earlier closures.
All this is serious stuff, but it is leavened with some wonderful photographs, the reviewer’s favourite being Berney Arms in Norfolk, where the passengers using the station are more numerous than the ticket statistics reveal. In assembling the book,
Faulkner and Austin reveal a preference for biography over works of analysis, and while some new material has
been unearthed, too many items are presented as the product of new research,
when they have been explored at length elsewhere (notably the mysteries of the secret Stedeford Committee of 1960, for which see Gourvish, British Railways, and Loft). A major criticism is the lack of data on network size. Instead of listing all the ministers of transport, the authors might have shown how the route- mileage has contracted over time, contrasting the experience of passenger and freight services. The operating losses made on wagon- load traffic, in particular, were a potent driver of change (e.g. with the M&GN, which was essentially a freight route). And after Beeching, freight rationalisation was more extensive, and in environmental terms, significant. For example, between 1965 and 1990 the mileage open to freight fell by 38 per cent, from 14,900 to 9,200, compared with only 18 per cent for passenger, from 10,900 to 8,900. In the
latter case, it is remarkable how little was actually reshaped in network terms. Many branch lines have been axed, only to make a comeback through re-opening, or through the provision of a ‘heritage’ railway. What, then, can the readers of Rail Professional derive from this book? The basic question underlying the debate on rationalisation
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