British Rail: A New History

Peter Hitchens reviews Christian Wolmar:

British Rail was killed off just when it was starting to succeed. Here was a nationalised industry, long-derided and mocked, which had taken huge steps to serve the nation, endured gigantic staff and track cuts, brought in modern and efficient management and had been forced to sell off many of its most precious assets for a song, to please Whitehall Scrooges and dogma-driven free marketeers.

Its reward was to be subjected to a mad break-up, unique in the world, which introduced chaos in the name of competition. This scheme ended up costing the British taxpayer far more than the old BR. Most of the private operators who milked it in good times cleared off as soon as the going got tough. Ludicrous claims were made that it increased traffic.

Actually, a well-run railway would have expanded far more, opening new lines and stations, running longer and more frequent trains. Government pressure has for many decades forced the railways to choke off extra business by raising fares, while billions are spent instead on expanding the road network, and officialdom pretends that this is not a subsidy to drivers and road hauliers.

Everyone now admits, openly or by implication, that privatisation was a mistake, but it is hard to see how it can ever be undone. Calling the reformed mess ‘Great British Railways’ will not, alas, make it so.

Even so, if anyone is looking for a sensible way to run a railway, they would do well to read Christian Wolmar’s description of poor BR’s brave attempt to keep within budgets and use its resources – human and engineering – to the maximum.

Of course he is fighting against a myth. Millions will never stop believing in the supposed awfulness of BR catering and the famous ‘BR sandwich’, allegedly curling with age, which never existed. They will continue to blame the mess of post-war railways on nationalisation, when in fact this gigantic industry had been shattered by six years of war during which it was not just bombed, but pounded to pieces by frantic use of every last inch and ounce of resources. And they will mistake a sensible preference for clean, efficient, environmental railways for a dim trainspotting obsession with the age of steam.

I cannot personally see why a modern electric railway cannot still have cheerful warm waiting rooms at country stations, preferably patrolled by cats, and gardens on their platforms, and I will miss the comforting, domestic, utterly British atmosphere of the old iron road till the day I die. Why are we so keen to smash up such things? I have never understood it.

But the question that this excellent, thoughtful book kept raising in my mind was this: do we actually have a Ministry of Transport, or have we for the past 70 years had instead a Ministry for Roads, Lorries and Cars that would long ago have killed off the railways if people did not love them so much?