The Great Days of the Country Railways [Paperback]

At one point in this book there is an intriguing short account of a minor disaster that occasionally occurred when shunting railway rolling stock. What could happen was that the wagons got into such a position that nothing could move until something else moved first, a kind of deadly embrace. When I read at another point the best short summary I have yet seen of the attitudes and mindsets that led to the wholesale obliteration of Britain's rural railway network in the 1960's I thought again of those wagons in their deadly embrace that a little foresight and competence could have avoided.

The book is basically for the flourishing railway nostalgia market. It is one of the best and most comprehensive of its kind, and I hope that the paperback edition does as much justice to the superb photography as the expensively-produced hardback does. It aims to pack in a lot of information and comment, and when I came to the second plate following the contents page I momentarily feared it might be overdoing the detail a bit - the actual snapshot is magnificent, a kind of High Noon on the West Highland line, and the effect is not really enhanced by the information that another locomotive, not attached to either train let alone shown in the picture, had 'failed before Dumbarton with a broken pin on the right hand valve gear radius rod'. No worries fortunately, the contributors keep their understandable enthusiasm and garrulity in check thereafter. The text is mainly by David St John Thomas with attributed contributions from other writers. These are miscellaneous in nature, the general idea being to communicate the 'feel' of the rural railways in their heyday. Ireland as well as Great Britain is given extensive coverage, and there is a welcome amount of comment on some of the quainter enterprises that could surely have been undertaken nowhere else in the world such as my own beloved Leek and Manifold Light Railway which, as the text says, 'went from nowhere to nowhere'.

The main narrative is knowledgeable and provides some handy correctives to popular misconceptions, notably in pointing out that the decline of the country railways took place later and more abruptly than is commonly thought. However the most significant and enlightening section relates to the 'reshaping' of the railways carried out in the 1960's. What had happened was this. After the war the British Railways Board was managed by placemen, amateurs and timeservers. They had no concept that the world of rail services needed fundamental change. They ploughed on with the production of steam locomotives instead of converting at once to the cheaper and more passenger-friendly alternative of diesel. They maintained the elaborate system of semaphore signalling instead of replacing it with modern lights, they retained the antiquated profusion of manual signal-boxes, they put up a pig-headed resistance to converting stations to unstaffed operation, they refurbished stations and track only days before closure, and they connived inertly at maintaining jobs that had no modern relevance. To their uncomprehending frustration they found that the railways were losing money hand over fist, government policy thwarted their attempts to raise fares, and the outcome was one of the most deplorable strategic studies that ever masqueraded as a business review.

There was no feasibility study evaluating alternatives. A crude and question-begging cost-effectiveness formula was applied, and for all its grandiosity and pretentious presentation the supposedly new strategy was only a front for a panicky wholesale application of what had been the Board's thinking for years, namely to prune the network savagely. Undoubtedly, the situation had got out of hand. Dieselisation and resignalling were now in progress, but desperately late. Undoubtedly, the trades unions were dinosaur organisations with an inbuilt resistance to change. However the fact seems to me undeniable that there had been a total lack of vision at management levels. It was late in the day, but still not too late to consider other scenarios, and while only the most myopic enthusiasts objected to every last closure, the general arguments put forward in the reshaping document were so full of holes that the more appropriate cases were tarred with the disingenuous crudity of the overall presentation. The opposing sides were now locked in their deadly embrace, neither able nor willing to budge. A very British solution was therefore invoked, namely a public enquiry that for sheer dishonesty would have disgraced the Soviet Union. The terms of reference were blatantly rigged to prevent proper questioning or argument, and the whole wretched panic-stricken apology for a strategy was implemented almost without change.

The results can be seen in Britain's rural communities to this day. In particular, the compensatory bus services that the reshaping plan blithely envisaged materialised only briefly where at all. These communities are now largely without public transport, bus conveyance is a busted flush, and the ecologically positive alternative of rail will have to be reconsidered after the unnecessary damage has been done. I remember the gist of a wry poem giving a roll-call of the stations for closure read by Michael Redgrave on television. Fairford, Coniston, Moretonhampstead, Gosport, Minehead, Silloth and even Barnard Castle, some of you may yet see rail service again in my lifetime.