How can British Rail’s failed Modernisation Plan teach us to ‘build back better’?

If we are to reshape our economy to achieve net zero emissions, our transport system must change radically. At the same time, as we emerge from the pandemic, there’s plenty of discussion about how we could ‘build back better’.

What historical precedents can we learn from? Policymakers could start by taking a look at the expensive disaster that was British Rail’s 1955 Modernisation Plan. This story may be well known to train geeks like me, but I am convinced it should be more widely understood. We could learn a lot from it.

After an initial post-war boom, by the early 1950s the newly nationalised British Rail was losing money as traffic began to shift to the roads. Aiming to reverse this, the £1.24bn Modernisation Plan – a staggering £29bn in today’s money – was announced in 1955.

With such an enormous remit and budget, how did they get it so wrong?

The vision seemed sound. Electrification and diesels would replace steam traction, freight handling would be streamlined, and signalling and stations would be brought up to date. The failure of the plan was a combination of incompetent execution, political pressures, and most importantly, fundamental miscalculations about the future. The two main areas in which this can be seen were traction and freight handling.

Initially, BR had continued to commission new steam engines, despite electric and diesel traction being increasingly used elsewhere, notably in the oil-rich US. Superficially that made sense. Steam locos used domestically-produced coal, when mining was one of Britain’s biggest employers. However, by the 1950s, this was beginning to look like a mistake. As labour costs increased, the labour-intensive nature of steam was becoming a problem.

In the decade of the Clean Air Act, railway yards and stations were becoming unhappy neighbours with their towns and cities. It also contributed to a PR problem: the perception that the railways were old-fashioned, dirty and reminiscent of the bad old days of pre-war life, in contrast with the dynamic consumerist happiness promised by car advertisements.

Unable to afford widespread electrification, diesels were the answer. Buying in proven designs from the US, when Britain had always built its own trains, was politically a non-starter. Instead, the idea was to trial prototypes from a range of British manufacturers, with the best performing types to be adopted as standard and commissioned in large numbers. So far so good. Until someone decided it wasn’t happening fast enough.

The result? BR started panic-buying batches of the untested prototypes. I’ve often wondered what back-handers might have been part of the procurement process here. But whatever the reason, instead of a standardised fleet, they ended up with a mixed bag of too many incompatible types from different builders. Some were so unreliable that they ended up being scrapped after only a few years. For some, the sight of a broken-down diesel being towed by a steam engine seemed to encapsulate the incompetence of the organisation.

Freight handling, too, needed huge work to modernise. At the time, most freight was conveyed in mixed trains and inefficiently handled at small facilities at most stations, much as it had been since Victorian times – as can be seen in this fascinating period video.

The Modernisation Plan’s answer was investment in vast, partly automated new marshalling yards around the country designed to sort trains wagon by wagon. These worked well, but by the time they opened in the early ‘60s, it was obvious that they were a giant waste. They would have been helpful a couple of decades earlier, but by now, lorries (aided by new motorways) were making the traditional mixed goods train a relic of the past. The new yards were a bang-up-to-date solution to a previous era’s problem.

The Plan’s failure was an enormous missed opportunity. Despite the investment, by the early ‘60s, BR was still in deficit. The government lost patience and shifted to a programme of cuts, which today are remembered as the infamous ‘Beeching Axe’. This set the tone for decades. The railway was a ‘parallel’, declining transport system, and what voters wanted was more spending on roads.

These assumptions persisted for a long time, but now themselves seem outdated. Faced with the threat of climate change, we need a transport revolution far greater than the changes BR attempted in the ‘50s, but at the same time we need to learn from the past.

A couple of themes ran through BR’s mis-steps. One was planning for the past, not the future. Another was a fundamental lack of imagination. Those empty white-elephant marshalling yards were an attempt to modernise the old, disappearing railway – a bit of foresight would have suggested investment in containerisation and bulk handling facilities instead.

We could be about to make a similar mistake with electric cars. Clearly, EVs will be a major part of the solution to drive down emissions. But EVs cannot solve the other problems of car culture, such as congestion or parking in cities. BR’s bad investment in too many types of diesel locomotives reminds me of the need to standardise EV facilities too. If we are not careful, we’ll end up with a plethora of incompatible battery charging systems and connectors.

Another of BR’s errors was simply replacing steam with diesel on a like-for-like basis, rather than recognising diesel power’s inherent advantage of less down time, meaning fewer locos should have been needed overall. Have we really thought properly about the possibilities of electric cars? Does a higher initial cost, but much reduced servicing requirements, make communal ownership schemes more viable, for example?

Whatever the advantages of EVs, a more pertinent question would be, should we even be seeking to replicate today’s car-centric transport system? With ever fewer numbers of young people owning cars or even acquiring driving licences, we have arguably already passed ‘peak car’, yet this is hardly ever reflected by policy-makers obsessed with the private car. BR’s Modernisation Plan seemed oblivious to the wider context of road building and increasing car ownership; today’s transport policy must avoid such a silo mentality.

On today’s railways, the myopic focus on speed – just like how BR focussed on wagon-load freight despite foreseeable trends away from it – seems to me to be a mistake. HS2 will lower journey times between some cities, but trains are already the quickest method for intercity travel. The emphasis instead should be on increasing capacity, and lowering ticket prices – that’s what most people actually want.

It’s also important to recognise when existing technology is the obvious solution. Electric express trains are the most effective and cleanest method of transporting people between cities ever invented. Just as the electric commuter train is the fastest and cleanest method of mass transit within cities. This doesn’t require any new technical innovations – just investment. It’s scandalous that some of Britain’s main routes are still entirely diesel-operated. Investment in overhead wires might not have made sense in the ‘70s or ‘80s, but times (and passenger numbers) have changed.

But the overarching lesson of the Modernisation Plan is that it isn’t just about having enough money to spend. In the 1950s BR demonstrated the risk of blowing a fortune on the wrong things because of outdated assumptions. To adapt to the coming green revolution, we need to ask ourselves what the transport system of the future will look like. Policy makers need to be asking people – especially young people – what their transport system should be for. Otherwise we’ll only end up trying to solve yesterday’s problems, just like BR did.

"British Railways Brush Type 2 D5500 (Class 31, 31018)" by Stuart Axe is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

This viaduct is more impressive when you know what went into building it

Muslims visit the Al-Haram Mosque in Mecca, Catholics go to St Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican, Classicists go to the Colosseum in Rome, and British railway geeks go to Ribblehead on the Cumbrian/Yorkshire boarder to be awestruck by history.

The Ribblehead Viaduct has to be the most impressive viaduct in England. Opened in 1875 it spans Batty Moss, carrying the line that connects Carlisle to Settle. It has 24 massive stone arches that rise 32 meters (104 feet) above the moor. Take a second to look at the picture above and drink in vastness.

Ironically the viaduct is best approached on foot, not via the railway, to get the sense of its sheer scale. It dominates the landscape and symbolises humanity's domination over nature, a popular belief of the Victorian society that built it. When you approach the arches you are stuck by the sense that this structure has the proportions of natural feature, not a human building. It is built on the scale of the hills that surround it.

It is a scale that defies that sense as it is impossible to take in the entire structure in from one viewing point. At a distance, the craftsmanship is hard to appreciate. Up close, it is too big to be viewed by one individual. The same is true of monumental religious buildings, from St Peters to Borobudur.

The Ribblehead Viaduct is more humbling when you know the human cost that went into building it. So many navvies (manual labourers working on civil engineering projects) died in its construction that the railway paid for an expansion of the local graveyard. Shanty towns grew up around the viaduct, which took four years to build. There were smallpox outbreaks and industrial accidents that led to the death of more than 100 navvies.

British rail spent a substantial amount of money renovating the viaducts to keep it operational and it was listed in November 1988. Ribblehead might have been the vision of engineer John Sydney Crossley, but it was built by bloody hard graft from hundreds of ordinary Victorian workers.

Today when we think of the railways we think of big brands or the thrillionaire businessmen who own it, like Richard Branson. When we think about its history we think about Brunel or Stevenson, intelligent people of great vision, but we overlook the sheer volume of hard work that ordinary people did to make the railways.

This is why the railways belong to us all, regardless of how it is broken up into companies and bits of it are sold to different owners. The hard, dangerous work that our ancestors put into building the railways cannot be dismissed or forgotten. The sacrifices that the railways’ builders made (many with their lives) cannot be bought by private companies or traded on stock markets.

The only fitting tribute to the thousands of people who lost their lives building the Ribblehead Viaduct, or Box Tunnel, or many other Victorian civil engineering projects is to bring the railways back into public ownership. That way the benefits of the hard work of the ordinary people who build the railways can be shared by all of us, and not captured by a few ultra-rich individuals.

The monumental, awe inspiring scale of Ribblehead stands as a testament to what the hard work and sacrifices of ordinary people can achieve. It is part of us all and we should all own it.

Did politics kill British Leyland?

January 2018 marks fifty years since the formation of British Leyland Motor Corporation, a company (latterly a publicly owned one) synonymous with failed industrial policy. Whilst the disastrous history of what had been hoped would be Britain’s ‘national champion’ is hard to dispute, the question remains: did politics kill British Leyland?

The decision to form BL in the first place via the government’s Industrial Reorganisation Committee was an inherently political one. Harold Wilson’s Labour government was deeply interventionist by today’s standards. It all fitted in with the Wilson administration’s ‘white heat of technology’ rhetoric: Britain’s car industry would be a dynamic part of high-tech, forward-looking nation of the future.  In the deal brokered by politicians, Britain’s two biggest motor manufacturers, BMC (who made Austin and Morris cars) and Leyland (Triumph and Rover cars, plus trucks and buses) would merge to create the fifth-largest vehicle maker in the world.

The Industrial Reorganisation Committee was a tool of a government that believed intervention in the economy was not only necessary, but desirable. This is the first way in which government policy has been accused of killing BL – by enforcing an unworkable merger. The desire to form such a huge company was not an ideological socialist one; the aim was not to take the car industry into public ownership. The theory was that if the two manufacturers joined forces, they could benefit from economies of scale, on costs like research and development, and sharing components. In doing so, they’d be more focussed on fighting foreign competition, rather than each other, and assisting Britain’s balance of payments.

None of this was an inherently bad idea. The decades since 1968 have seen a consolidation of the car industry globally. BL was the right size, had some strong products, and should have been well positioned to benefit from combining the abilities and capacity of both companies – this is, after all, what VW has done in recent decades to great success. In retrospect, it is easy to say the merger shouldn’t have happened, that Leyland (the structurally stronger of the two) would have been better off alone. It was equally reasonable to assume that the newly merged company would get its act together.

The merger was far from a myopic, ideologically-driven scheme, ploughed ahead with by a bluntly technocratic government, as it is sometimes portrayed. It was a pragmatic plan, and it was met with huge optimism at the time. Yet, by the end of the ‘70s, BL was in a state of near-constant crisis and had ceased to be a serious global player.

Even so, one political failure did massively affect the fortunes of Britain’s car industry - France’s veto on Britain’s EEC membership application in 1963. This mattered because steep import duties were charged on cars from outside the Community, whilst a free market existed within it. Fiat, VW, Renault and the rest benefited from this, whilst Britain – the only significant Western European car manufacturing nation outside of the EEC – lost out.

It would have been the optimal time to join, too. At the time, BMC made a range of cars that appealed to European drivers – especially the Mini, and its larger brother, the 1100 series. Both were smart, well-designed cars, and already big sellers in the UK. They were sold at a significant premium over comparable European cars within the Community.

BMC, instead, concentrated their export efforts on the old Commonwealth countries, but cars designed for Britain’s well-maintained roads were never going to be ideal for South Africa or Australia, and it was these markets that the emerging Japanese car industry first conclusively conquered a few years later. All this meant BMC was in a weak position by the time of the ’68 merger.

Of course, Britain did eventually join the EEC in 1973. BL strongly supported the campaign. But by then – perhaps due to lack of understanding of the European market – it wasn’t in as strong a position to compete. Yes, the Mini’s sales increased – but what was really needed was a mid-size model that would be as strong a contender on the continent as BMC’s 1100 could have been in the ‘60s. But instead, they produced this.

The Austin Allegro was not the car Europe wanted. It was hardly even the car that Britain wanted. It never met the sales precedent set by the model it replaced, the 1100. There’s so much to say about what was wrong with the Allegro. It was not the VW Golf, a car launched the following year, and exactly the car Europe wanted.  

The Allegro is symptomatic of how capable BL was of sabotaging itself, regardless of the political context. All that capacity for market research, development and innovation somehow resulted in a car slower, heavier, uglier and with much less export appeal than the 10 year old design it replaced.

What about the other kind of politics – the kind that no conversation about BL is complete without? Industrial relations at the company were increasingly terrible as the ‘70s wore on. BL was hardly unique; the root cause being, to a great extent, that wages were not keeping up with inflation by the late ‘70s.

To me, that makes the grievances of those striking in the run up to the ‘Winter of Discontent’ far more sympathetic, despite the Thatcherite narrative through which the period is often recounted. Greater prominence has always been given to the – admittedly damaging – strikes over getting an extra five minutes on tea breaks and the like. Besides, even accepting the destructive behaviour of some shop stewards, poor industrial relations ought to be seen as a symptom of a structurally unsound company rather than the cause.

BL became a political football in 1975, when its precipitous decline reached the point where the government had to save it through nationalisation. The formation of BL in 1968 had been part of a political strategy, its nationalisation was reactive. Letting BL go to the wall, as some members of the Thatcher administration would later argue should happen, would have meant mass unemployment in the Midlands.

From then on, politics did kill BL, essentially. The Wilson, Callaghan and – interestingly – Thatcher administrations gave it sufficient bailouts to keep it going, but never enough to undo the strategic mistakes of 1968 – 1975. Thatcher’s solution was to break it up and sell it off in the late 1980s. That was, undisputedly, an ideological decision. The slimmed down group was beginning to turn itself around by then – and one of its privatised successors, the Rover Group, went on to have an (admittedly temporary) renaissance in the ‘90s, making re-badged Honda models. Dismantling BL was not the only option. In France, Renault went through a period of state ownership and emerged intact into the private sector.

Today’s economic and political climate has changed vastly since 1968. No longer is Britain a primarily industrial country, a land of trade union policy and Industrial Reorganisation Committees. No-one seriously suggests the kind of intervention that led to the creation of BL nowadays. However, the car industry is as hot a political potato as ever.

Car makers are footloose transnational corporations; the Japanese owned car factories in the UK are here because of Britain’s openness to trade, especially within the EU. What’s the government’s strategy for keeping them here after Brexit? Meanwhile, intervention is once again being seriously discussed to cajole the industry. Only when legislation began to be implemented by national and local governments to restrict fossil-fuel powered cars did the manufactures start to take electric vehicle development seriously. Last year’s VW emissions-test scandal suggests that, without insufficient oversight, corporations often don’t act in society’s best interests. The cars, and the people making them have changed, but political intervention in the car industry is here to stay.

Austin Allegro image created by Thomas Pics and used under creative commons.

The Left’s Elephant in the Room

My last piece for this blog was about the over-use of political clichés. So what better way to start my next one than to use one of my own? When it comes to the identity of the modern Left, there’s certainly an elephant in the room, and it’s a bloody huge one: public ownership.

Start a conversation about nationalisation now, and the conversation will quickly descend towards striking grave diggers in the ‘Winter of Discontent’ via curly-edged British Rail sandwiches and surly ticket collectors. What actually happened in those troubled years of the late 1970s is more nuanced than the accepted version of events would have us believe, and is too complex to go into here. But it did not happen because too much of the economy was in state hands. Neither was it the root cause of union militancy, the decline of Britain’s influence on the world stage, or the dodgy rust-proofing on your dad’s Austin Allegro.

The problem with referring back to the ‘70s is that customer service was awful in both public and privately owned businesses back then. The slick, market-researched customer experience of today was still a long way off in the service sector. One of the decade’s best-loved comedies, Fawlty Towers, lampooned these shortcomings so effectively. Singling out BR or the gas board is simply unfair. And yes, British Leyland cars were dreadful, but the Fords and Vauxhalls of the time were rot-boxes as well. Besides, BL was taken into public ownership only as a last ditch attempt to prevent much of the Midlands from being turfed onto the dole should the company collapse. However understandable the decision, it was hardly carefully thought out – the government effectively had not choice – so it does not make a good example either. At any rate, the shape of Britain’s economy has changed immeasurably since then. Among the big nationalisations of the post war era were huge employers like coal and steel, which have all but disappeared. Leaving the trappings of this era behind, I would argue that not only should public ownership be up for discussion, it needs to central to a modern, and modernising, Left.

Nostalgia for the better points of pre-Thatcher Britain can pre-occupy the Left too much (I’ve been as guilty of this as anyone) but this isn’t the game the Left should be playing. The Left ought to be forward, not backward looking, only retaining a cautious eye in the rear-view mirror. Tony Blair was able to play on this notion of out-datedness when, in a largely symbolic gesture of defiance to Labour’s left wing, he removed the commitment to public ownership from Clause 4 of the party’s constitution. Blair, with none of the ideological grounding of his predecessors, argued that in their fixation on state ownership the left was ‘confusing the means with the end’. This might have been a fair argument at the time, but the intervening 20 years prove the opposite: the Blairites were confusing the ends with the means. Unless the desirable ‘end’, of course, was a society with a perpetually widening wealth gap and our infrastructure in the hands of private profiteers. Ostensibly believing in a fairer society, Labour’s acceptance of the free market ought to be seen as a failed experiment. Putting shareholders instead of the public at the economy’s heart never fosters greater equality. Instead of Thatcher’s dream of popular capitalism, a share-owning democracy, we’ve ended up with most of the former national utilities in (often foreign) millionaires’ hands. Remember when they belonged to us – all of us?

 The Left isn’t just ignoring its own past, it’s also missing its chance to shape the future. Public ownership doesn’t need to mean returning doggedly to the past. There are other models of public ownership – for example worker’s or consumer co-ops for example – that should be explored. Or other methods of encouraging competition whilst maintaining a decent service. Take the German railway’s system of ‘open access’ for example. In contrast to the UK’s daft decision to totally break up BR, the German government retained the ownership and operation of their system. But there’s no state monopoly: if a firm thinks it has spotted a gap in the market, or thinks it can run a better service than the state company does, they have to be given access onto the network. Surely this is the best of both worlds. Unlike here. Competition? Choice? if I want to travel to Newcastle from Carlisle for example, I can choose between Northern Rail or, er, Northern Rail.

But above all, the Left needs to be more explicit in challenging some accepted wisdom. First of all is the belief that nationalisation is inherently unpopular. It’s not; look how careful the Tories have to be when they air ideas about ‘introducing competition’ to the NHS. There was never a majority of public opinion in favour of breaking up BR, either, and there’s been a well-deserved outcry over the cheapo sell-off of Royal Mail. And then there’s your grandma’s gas bill. Each winter we hear about more vulnerable people forced to choose between heating and eating. And there’s sod all we can do about it, because the energy companies are private, for-profit concerns. When the price of wholesale energy goes up, so do the bills. But when the wholesale price falls, there’s immediately talk of worn-out infrastructure and expensive renewal programmes.

So you know what I think Labour should do? Commit the next Labour government to taking gas and electricity supply back into government hands. It would mean the worn out infrastructure could be replaced in a proper, logical way (infrastructure that last saw major investment when it was state owned) and policies could be put in place to help the most vulnerable afford this basic comfort. For some reason, economic planning has become a no-go area for politicians, but surely all they would need to say is explain that in the same way a sensible household plans its finances, it makes sense for a government to do the same, as far as essential services go. Of course the tabloids would chuck out the usual ‘Red Ed’ platitudes, but so what? Based on the reaction to Miliband briefly laying into the energy companies not long ago, it could actually be very popular. After twenty-odd years of kowtowing to the Tories’ economics, the Labour Party stating that it will re-nationalise an unpopular privatised sector for practical, sensible reasons could have Cameron and co. on the back foot and running scared.

British Rail image created by Steve Jones and used under creative commons.

HS2: On the Right Track?

Fifty years ago, the infamous Beeching Report was published by the government, aimed at dealing with the spiralling losses incurred by British Railways. On Dr. Beeching’s recommendations, over 2,000 stations and around 5,000 miles of line would close down, leaving many towns and regions without any public transport at all. And even after all that, BR still ran at a loss. At the time, coinciding with a huge motorway building programme, it seemed to represent an epochal shift from public to private transport; from rail to road – as inevitable, it appeared, as the shift from canals and stagecoaches to railways one hundred years earlier.

Fast forward five decades, though, and investment in railways is once again on the political and economic agenda. Passenger numbers have increased hugely since the 1990s, and are now at their highest level since the 1920s. Any closures suggested nowadays would be political suicide, for any government. And there is even broad consensus on building a new high speed line, HS2, to connect London and the North. A lot has changed since the Beeching era. Or has it?

To begin with, I was a strong supporter of HS2. In a context of ever deeper cuts and austerity, the HS2 project looked like one decision the government had got right. Aside from improving public transport, it’s an example of using infrastructure investment to prime the pump of the economy – the sort of thing which the Tories are, elsewhere, ideologically opposed to. There is a wide range of opposition to the scheme – not just from the usual nimby brigade, but more concerningly from groups such as Greenpeace and the Campaign for Better Transport. In these quarters, it’s not so much a question of whether rail investment is a good idea or not, but whether the £30bn about to be spent on HS2 could be used better elsewhere on the network. This is the source of my own doubts about the scheme.

For a start, I would argue that ticket prices, not the speed of the trains, is the main change ripped-off passengers would like to see in intercity travel. At its best, public transport can be a great equaliser – whereas HS2 will be of the greatest benefit to a minority of business travellers who can afford to pay for high speed. At 125mph on many parts of the west coast main line, train speeds into the capital are already pretty good. Capacity on existing lines into London could be improved to some extent by laying more passing loops to prevent slower freight trains delaying expresses, and by improving signalling to get more trains onto the line at a time. As far as London goes, the rail scheme Londoners really need isn’t another main line terminus – it’s Crossrail. And then there’s the small matter of the rest of the country. Away from the glitz of the main lines, local services in many areas are still appalling (not to mention overpriced). A Northern Rail train I was on recently reminded me of the BR of my childhood – draughty, grimy, late, and for all the private sector branding everywhere, giving the sincere impression that the operator just didn’t give a damn.

So what could we invest in instead? The association of train operating companies (ATOC) has proposed 14 lines, closed by Beeching, that should be re-opened as a priority. I’d add a few more to the list too. The former line connecting Penrith on the west coast main line with Keswick and Cockermouth in the traffic-clogged Lake District looks like an obvious candidate, as does the Carlisle to Edinburgh Waverley Route, the closure of which left much of the Scottish Borders isolated from the rail network. But reopening these lines doesn’t just benefit the localities in question, it also strengthens the network as a whole with increased versatility. Similarly, several main lines (such as the Western and Midland main lines) are still diesel operated. Electrification does more than improve train speeds and reduce carbon emissions – it also ‘cascades’ down newer diesel trains to replace clapped out rolling stock in non-electrified areas (the hateful, cheap-ass 1980s ‘Pacer’ units favoured by Northern Rail in my part of the country being particularly prime candidates for scrapping). And that’s even before we get to more general improvements such as better station facilities, longer trains on busy routes and more services extending into the evening.

Of course, HS2 won’t be without its benefits – I’d rather have that than nothing – but the money could be used to give a much more evenly spread beneficial impact on the network as a whole. The much vaunted reduction in flights probably wouldn’t happen either – it would have to extend to Scotland, not just Manchester, to achieve that.

As always, the elephant in the room is still the obscenely powerful road lobby (look how much fuss petrol duty causes, for example). It has more than anyone to lose from rail investment. But unlike road building, which only benefits those who can afford to use them, improving public transport benefits everyone, both by reducing carbon emissions from transport and increasing quality of life. Back in the Beeching era, the common complaint was that government shouldn’t subsidise BR, and that it must run at a profit – even though motorway building effectively subsidised haulage firms and car manufacturers.  But it isn’t the idea of HS2 that frightens the road lobby. Trains are already the quickest and most convenient way for most people to travel into London. What actually terrifies them is the idea of a net improvement in public transport across the UK – an efficient, accessible, systematically invested in railway system.

British Rail image created by Steve Jones and used under creative commons.