Life Stories

Looking back Loco-spotting BR remembered... You couldn’t pass through a large station in the Fifties and Sixties without seeing a gaggle of school-uniformed boys (never girls) at the platform end scribbling down engine numbers. years on Tens of thousands of boys spent all their 70 spare time and pocket money in pursuit of elusive locomotives. Today, the rather sneering Railway writer and former editor of Steam World magazine Barry McLoughlin N O T description ‘anorak’ is frequently applied to E L T T celebrates the 70th anniversary of the formation of British Railways trainspotters. And yes, we did wear anoraks and E N L we usually carried duffel bags crammed with Tizer U A P bottles and sandwiches. © RITAIN’S RAILWAY network used economic forces – most importantly, the railway technology, branding, marketing For my fellow ‘gricers’ and me, our favourite There’s no mistaking the huge BR B be a vast adventure playground for massive expansion of road travel. and organisation. spotting location wasn’t at a station but by the double-arrow logo on the side of this Class my group of friends during our It’s easy to become misty-eyed As with the NHS – founded in the same busy West Coast Main Line just south of 37 diesel – one of the more successful of teenage trainspotting expeditions. about BR: it wasn’t all gleaming green year – it was a substantial achievement Warrington. From our vantage point near the the Modernisation Plan locomotives – on an In the Sixties we scaled signals and bridges, engines, spotless ‘blood and custard’ after six years of total war. Twelve Arches bridge, we could see expresses excursion to Blackpool last year climbed into goods wagons, put coins on the (red and cream) carriages and smiling hurtling down the incline from the viaduct over the N The birth of BR I tracks… it was daft and dangerous but we porters. Like any massive organisation, it Manchester Ship Canal. On the other side, L compared with what would happen under H G were young and had to find something to do could be bureaucratic, inflexible The Thirties have been called the golden meanwhile, shunting engines fussed about in the U the Good Doctor after 1963. O L C marshalling yards at Arpley and Walton. It was a M during lulls between trains. and sometimes uncaring, and many age of Britain’s railways, with sleek, stylish As for traction, steam was still seen Y R trainspotters’ paradise. R Such activities would, rightly, attract the of its engines were scruffy, smelly high-speed trains on the main routes and A as the answer. In 1951 the BTC B attention of the British Transport Police and unreliable. an astonishingly diverse network of lesser And the key to this paradise was a small but © authorised the production of a dozen new today, but somehow this seemed a more Yet it inspired a camaraderie among lines. Under the so-called ‘Big Four’ chunky book: the Ian Allan abc Combined Volume More British Railways station signs at the classes of so-called ‘standard’ steam innocent era – the era of British Railways. both its workforce and users… and – railway companies, however, there was of British Railways Locomotives . In this we preserved Ribble Steam Railway in Preston locomotives to rejuvenate the antiquated Although it lasted less than 50 years albeit very remotely – it belonged to all of also much needless duplication meticulously underlined our ‘cops’, compared fleet. With hindsight, this decision turned from its foundation on January 1, 1948, us. You didn’t, for instance, have to worry and competition for business. them with our comrades and, like anglers, began the massive process of rebranding its out to be folly: steam traction on the main BR will have been a formative fixture in whether your ticket only allowed you to The Second World War put paid to all bemoaned the ‘ones that got away’. thousands of locomotives, carriages, goods line had disappeared by the summer of the lives of many Choice readers. travel on a certain operator’s trains. that. From August 30, 1939 the network was The craze survived the transition from steam wagons and stations. 1968 and some of the new locomotives – The butt of jokes about everything from its British Railways was a flawed but fully effectively nationalised under the control of to diesel and electric but most trains today are Harder to reform was the railways’ efficient and modern by steam standards infamously curly sandwiches to late-running integrated national network, unlike the Railway Executive Committee. what is known as ‘multiple units’ – instead of culture: the Big Four companies had – had a working life of barely a decade. being pulled by a locomotive, they are just a trains, BR nevertheless kept the railway on an today’s fragmented regiment of The war left the always jealously guarded their ‘patches’, Happily, however, a fine selection of them series of carriages with an engine underneath. even keel at a time when it was in decline as competing companies. railways nearly and the six new BR regions – London are now still working on preserved lines. Coupled with security fears and health and safety a result of social, demographic and And despite rail being seen in the Sixties Midland, Eastern, North Eastern, laws, it’s made trainspotting the preserve of a The Modernisation Plan and Seventies as outmoded and evocative of dedicated band of mainly adult enthusiasts. Western, Southern and Scottish – were in Below: With the early ‘cycling lion’ emblem the Victorian era, BR pioneered some some ways re-creations of the pre-war As the growth of the road network on its tender, and the dignified lined black important developments in situation. As late as the Sixties, BR continued to eat into railway revenues, livery of BR mixed-traffic locomotives, bankrupt, with locomotives and enginemen would still refer to particularly on the freight side, BR’s preserved ‘Black Five’ No 45407 The infrastructure devastated. However, the locomotives from other regions working finances remained precarious and in N O Lancashire Fusilier stands at Bury Bolton T E L wartime nationalisation had shown how a in their areas as ‘foreigners’. 1955 it posted its first operating loss. T T Street Station on the East Lancashire E N unified system could pull all the railway’s BR was bequeathed an incredibly The BTC grasped the nettle by L Railway. It is ‘double-heading’ a train of U A P disparate strands together, and Clement diverse collection of rolling stock, some publishing its much-vaunted Modernisation © mixed ‘Rail Blue’ and BR maroon carriages Attlee’s triumphant Labour government of dating back to the Victorian era, and Plan early in 1955. It proposed investment 1945, with its radical programme of public around 20,000 route miles of track. Many of more than £1.2bn – £25bn today – in a ownership of vital industries, saw no reason of these were overlapping and 15-year drive to revive the railways’ fortunes to change things. competing, a legacy of the days before the with new locomotives, rolling stock, The Transport Act of 1947 received Big Four were created in 1923. particularly for goods trains, track royal assent in August that year, and put Another major problem was the massive electrification and signalling. the war-ravaged railways under the network of secondary and branch lines, Just four years after the authorisation of control of a new British Transport with tiny stations, some of which were the new standard steam locomotives, the Commission (BTC). used by only a handful of passengers every report recommended the rapid British Railways came into being on day. Competition from the expanding bus replacement of steam by thousands of New Year’s Day 1948, inheriting a vast network was putting a further strain on new electric or diesel trains. The new enterprise that also included subsidiary their profitability. In the 15 years before diesels that began to appear were a shock for businesses such as shipping, ports, road the Beeching Report, some 3000 route a generation brought up with romantic but haulage and even hotels. It immediately miles were axed, though this was nothing smelly and smoke-shrouded steam engines. t 78 CHOICE FEBRUARY 2018 FEBRUARY 2018 CHOICE 79 Looking back infamous report on the ‘Reshaping of privatised railway industry of the 21st routes electrified included the East Coast, The fires go out on steam N O British Railways’. century. Indeed, one of the main South Western and Great Eastern Main I T C E Fifty years ago this summer, in August 1968, the L The statistics were telling. In 1938, fewer criticisms aimed at him is that he failed to Lines. Coupled with an intensive TV L O C final main line steam locomotives ran on BR. than two million private cars were registered; take into account the social value of the advertising campaign, the ‘Sparks Effect’ D R A Steam had powered Britain’s railways for 150 K by 1961 there were around six million, and railways. Post-Beeching, the railway attracted thousands of new passengers to C I P years and BR had inherited some 20,000 steam D road haulage had grabbed more than 40 per rumbled along, with its market share the electrified network. R A N locomotives; now there were none. R cent of what had once been a railway being steadily eroded by road transport. One much-publicised mis-step, E B As the BR board sought to modernise the © monopoly. The railway’s problems were Critics claimed it was in a period of however, was the tilting Advanced In the days before high-vis clothing, a compounded by a spate of industrial action, ‘managed decline’, an acceptance that Passenger Train, introduced in the early railways’ image, it had dramatically telescoped the group of BR workers takes a break outside caused by poor labour relations.

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