British Rail: A New History by Christian Wolmar

CHRISTOPHER HOWSE British Rail: A New History By Christian Wolmar Michael Joseph £30

You can tell Christian Wolmar is really keen on trains when he enthuses about the ‘acrid burning smell’ the brakes used to make on the Seventies 125s. He found it ‘not entirely unpleasant’. The problem took 15 years to sort out.

Extraordinary details keep breaking in on the half-century of Britain’s nationalised railways, 1948-97. The book might have been dry, had the author kept to his declared aim of showing how British Railways’ ‘reputation has been traduced by those who sought to break it up’.

Wolmar, a long-time railway journalist and Labour politician, leaps to defend the British Rail sandwich, which he denies was curly, and was in any case saved by Prue Leith and shrink-wrap.

But even if those sandwiches were as fresh as new-mown cress, they went with something nasty in the trainshed that happened between the end of the Chatterley ban and the Beatles’ first LP (or, to be exact, five days after it, in March 1963). I mean Beeching.

And, linked with the Beeching Report, a couple of years later came the cosmetic change to British Rail that gives this book its title (although British Railways remained the legal name).

Beeching, like Suez, is more often cited than explained. Wolmar beguilingly narrates the events that, like Dutch elm disease, transformed the way the British saw their own country.

Richard Beeching, on more than twice the Prime Minister’s salary, shook to bits a railway system sprained by war. It covered 20,000 miles at nationalisation in 1948, employed 640,000 men and 7,000 horses, and until 1958 ran special trains to take 80,000 hop-pickers into Kent. It had last made an operating profit in 1955. Beeching decided to close a third of stations and 5,000 miles of line.

The election of a Labour government in 1964 did not stop the cuts. Only 940 miles had been closed by the end of 1963, compared with more than 1,000 miles in each of the next three years. From 1974, under Harold Wilson, Tony Crosland wanted more fare rises and more service cuts. The financial methodology for judging profitability was lamentable. There was naturally no inkling

The double-arrow logo (a word unfamiliar in 1965) and a livery of blue-green that ‘carried dirt well’ attempted to suggest modernity like the Mini and the miniskirt. The British Rail corporate-identity manual was sold as a coffee-table book for those already taking an interest in Terence Conran.

Nameplates for locomotives were guiltily dropped for bucking the trendiness, and not brought back until 1977. That would be on diesel locos, for the 16,100 steam engines in service in 1958 had gone, every one, by 1968.

They had to go, but they were hustled out sooner than necessary, on passenger services first, and the large variety of diesel replacements were prone to breakdown. Here, Wolmar includes a fine gricer’s detail of British Rail’s Vale of Rheidol narrowgauge line that in fact retained steam till the 1980s.

Apotheosis: Sir Edwin’s Office Party by Lutyens’s assistant R Walker. From Lut: Life in the Office of Sir Edwin Lutyens, ed Mark Lutyens (Anthony Eyre, £25)

that in a few decades an alternative to oil-guzzling cars might be wanted.

When Labour didn’t renew Beeching’s contract, John Lennon invited him to sort out the Beatles’ finances. He wisely declined.

But once the British Rail label was adopted in 1965, a lot of changes were made – for, I think, style reasons at best. Euston Station, with its Great Hall – ‘by far the most impressive railway waiting room in Britain’, as Wolmar acknowledges – had already been demolished so that its replacement could seem like an airport, though one with no seats.

Worse, many a small station waiting room, with simple benches and a cheery coal fire kept up by railwaymen, was replaced by a boxy prefabricated building system called Clasp which required ‘no design work before it appeared on site’. Some of the units came with asbestos, too.