Spotting 2024 – Week 41

This has been a week in which I have had a very swollen knee – I think due to having to stand on downward sloping surfaces for periods during our Saturday visit to Chatham. Combined with all the steps I put in that day, it set me up for a week of bad pain involving my right knee and the muscle above the patella. This is ongoing but I’m fighting it. However, my immobility gives an opportunity to talk about some history as hinted in last week’s first post.

Let me start by making it clear that this is not a historical treatise with treasure chests full of carefully researched and previously unseen data. On the contrary – these are my thoughts on changes that happened on the UK rail network in a period that predates my birth by 8 years and continued until I was 12. It’s fair to say that the effects of that 20 years is still being felt today. And even then we have to go back a little earlier…

Two World Wars… At the end of the first, the UK’s private railway companies were in financially a poor state and the government decided to group them into what became known as the ‘Big Four’. Full nationalisation was seen at the time as being an unpalatable solution. Some were made for each other and some were very strange bed-fellows. To compare the companies that inherited the routes to Scotland is to compare chalk and cheese – The LNER incorporated companies that had always worked together to forge a path into and through Scotland as business partners. The LMS, on the other hand joined together two rivals with very different engineering philosophy’s.

At the end of the Second World War, the UK’s railways were once more in a mess having been run into the ground in the fight for the UK’s survival and the ultimate allied victory. It is rumoured that the LNER was now effectively bankrupt and would soon be unable to continue to provide services. That seems to be a probable assessment of the situation at the time although I think the other three companies were also on the brink. Whatever the truth, the Government had to make the difficult decision and nationalise the railways. The Nationalisation took effect under the Transport Act of 1947.

From this point on we find ourselves carried into a never-neverland of strange choices and decisions that suggest that within the new organisation departments were so separated from each other that they did not know what was being done elsewhere. But on the surface and for public consumption, in 1948 a series of trials were carried out seeking to test the best locomotives from the four companies against each other in an attempt to establish the best locomotive practise for some new Standard designs. In reality, the choice by the board of the new Chief Mechanical Engineer and staff meant that the new locomotives would inherit largely LMS design standards with some minor improvements.

The trials took no account of new forms of traction waiting in the wings – In the early 1950’s, diesels entered mainline service on the LMS and the Southern while the the Woodhead route saw the introduction of electric locomotives…

…New traction introductions that were already in progress with the LMS, Southern and LNER before Nationalisation. I’ve read in one of the many books about the period that the attitude of the BR Board was ‘Steam in our time, Oh Lord, Amen! So in 1951, the Standard Class Steam Locomotives started rolling off the production line and 70000 Britannia was among the first of the new Standards…

…They were the future, the way forward. Only they weren’t. It seems to me that no one from the marketing department was telling the engineering side about the way that freight traffic was haemorrhaging to the recently demobbed lorries of a rejuvenated road industry. All in all, 999 Standard steam locomotives of different types were built, many of them after the modernisation plan of 1955 which was instituted just 4 years after their construction started.

By this point some form of realisation was setting in – retaining staff to operate a fleet of grimy steam locomotives was pretty hard. There were also the clean air acts of the 1950’s. The railways would have to change and so the modernisation plan was put into effect. Steam would be replaced by diesel as soon as possible. But this too seems to have been a case of blinkers on. Significant numbers of diesel locomotives were ordered to fulfil the roles of their steam counterparts. Lots of small shunters…

…lots of small loco’s for trip freights. They even built new marshalling yards while all the time the wagon load freight was being taken by the roads. The equation that 1 diesel locomotive could replace 4 steam locomotives may have seemed good on paper but that would only have been viable if the rail traffic market stayed as it was before the war.

So here we are in the late 1950’s – I’m toddling and my father is proudly showing me a Gresley A3 Pacific on the front of our overnight sleeper to Scotland. Meanwhile, the future is in a state of crisis. There are a thousand brand new steam locomotives out there that the next generation rail worker is not going to want to drive and there are goodness knows how many new and untested diesel types being delivered into a system that by that stage has lost a significant part of its market. So much waste and all because no one seems to have been talking!

It’s like there was one panic followed by another. And I’m not convinced that it’s all that much better now. In the UK back in 1950 the first mainline diesels had yet to make an impact. I can understand how the board may have felt that initially the way forward was modern steam. Then having identified diesel and electric traction as the way forward, a steady phased introduction would seem to be a better way to progress. The Standard steam locomotives saw between 7 and 15 years of service. Some of the diesel types that were rushed into production and service saw less than that. It was a massive waste of effort and tax-payers money and all overshadowed by governments that were committed to road-building.

Picture a mid-1970’s model where the Standard steam classes were still earning a viable living alongside fewer but tried and tested diesel classes with electrification progressing to replace both. That was something that might have been achievable with some forethought. Other European countries were able to achieve it!

There is a degree of irony in that the earliest of the mass produced mainline diesel types, the English Electric Type 1, proved to be an outstanding example of the reliability and longevity that could be achieved…

…You can still see some of these plying their trade on our modern railway!