Nationalisation good or bad ? (ex cheerful 2015 thread)

Was nationalisation good or bad""?
Yes - BR having a set of 12 standard steam loco designs and in later years one centralised Technical Centre etc were positive results.
Bad - Under financial control of the Treasury. Look at the ECML electrification; the Treasury allocated a sum of money and no more. The class 91s were built down to a budget rather than up to a standard leaving privatised companies to pat for their mid life rebuilds. The OHLE pylons are also the furthest apart they can be to save on construction costs and look how often the weather interrupts the ECML OH equipment compared to the WCML.

Line closures came about when those who's careers had climbed in the time of the Big 4 were probably consulted by HQ, rather than HQ looing at a map and making impartial decisions. In Norfolk the GER lines survived much better than those of the "rival" M&GN. Other side of the country and former GWR men presided over closure of the S&D, the Midland line from Bristol to Bath and the SR route from Exeter to Plymouth.

In a book by Paul Beevor(?), he suggests that after 1948 locos should have been looked at as national rather than region assets. The author suggested Black 5s and V2s to the Southern with MNs operating Liverpool - Glasgow and WCs heading North out of Leeds. If that sort of transfer had gone through, there's be no need to build the 12 standard classes.

 

Well yes it did but did BR, the Ministry of Transport and the governments of the day, do as much as they could to make the railways a success in the nationalised era? This is where I have doubts and believe that a privatised network would have reacted differently to the challenges posed by BR. It's fine to say that BR lost money without looking at why it did as if nothing it could have done would have changed anything.

 

If road transport wasn't considered serious competition why did the LNER and the LMS buy 50% of Scottish Motor Transport when it began to establish a profitable business?

 

The railways were working effectively in an unbalanced market in the 1950s though. Firstly, as common carriers they had to take any load offered, which meant maintaining specialist infrastructure and wagons just on the off chance. Road hauliers could refuse traffic and thereby just take the most lucrative loads. Secondly, the entire infrastructure cost, and all the regulation and maintenance of safety (and the manpower needed to ensure that) was a direct cost, whereas the road hauliers effectively had all that provided from general taxation. In the circumstance, it was hardly surprising if the road hauliers could cream off the lucrative traffic. There was also a direct benefit (effectively a Government subsidy) to the industry in both 1918 and 1945 of lots of war-surplus equipment and trained drivers flooding onto the market at knock-down prices: the railways didn't get a similar capital boost at the same time.

Tom

 

It is unlikely that they did the maximum they could, nationalised industries were not models of efficiencies but look what happened in the USA under free market economics.

 

My knowledge of American railways, at any level, is not very good, what happened?

 

Basically with the coming of the motor car and the airlines, there was a very rapid withdrawal of passenger services on the majority of routes, with either bankruptcy or contraction to freight only operation.

Without the closure process that we had in the UK, services would sometimes disappear 'overnight' even on commuter routes.

 

Common carriage was undoubtedly a millstone around the railways neck. It is often forgotten the efforts that Beeching went to to get the railway to concentrate on the traffic it could profitably carry, rather than carry everything that was on offer.

There is also great confusion in some people's mind ( comment not aimed at you) between being profitable and offering a social service.
The Guildford cranleigh line being a classic example. Yes if it had not closed it would allow the good citizens of Cranleigh speedy access to Guildford and London, but should someone in Newcastle, say, pay additional taxes to allow that to happen?

 

The USA is not a good model for Britain. Especially in the west, the population density is low, with big distances between towns and relatively cheap land. That lends itself to a system that runs a small number of very large trains per day. Many lines are single track, but line safety is maintained effectively by verbal instruction to crews, rather than the mechanical means use in Britain since the nineteenth century. So low staff costs, low signalling infrastructure costs, but big capital expenditure on a small number of very powerful locomotives. Even if you wanted to reshape the UK's railways along US lines, the loading gauge wouldn't allow it, there wouldn't be space in the freight yards (and expansion would be prohibitive) and the passenger trains would get in the way - and if you got rid of the passenger trains, the road infrastructure would collapse under the number of cars.

Tom

 

That is an argument against subsidy in any shape or form.

 

I accept that. However, what I was attempting to show was that under private enterprise loss making passenger rail services were quickly withdrawn on both long distance and local services. Those that survive mainly do so as they are subsidised.

 

Not necessarily. If the good people of Cranleigh can show the positive externalities of reopening their line exceed the loss the line would make, they would have a good case. But so far to date, I believe they have failed to do so.

 

Didn't racing stop in the nineteenth century?

 

What Pacifica were those?
I think LNWR/ LMS was a 7P job. But some were North Staffs tanks from Manchester to Stoke then LNWR onwards.
Or GC/LNWR to Marylebone with various types.
Or 5XPs and Compounds from Central to St Pancras
I suppose you could buy a GWR ticket from Exchange via Chester.
Was competition more in service than speed?

 

Having read some of the BR internal memoranda surrounding the 1955 plan, I was struck by how poor the management's understanding of transport marketing was. They resorted to appointing a consultant, and still considered the need to 'sell' transport as something of a 'black art'. Furthermore, they listed some excuses why marketing had been allowed to fall by the wayside, one of which was that railwaymen were railwaymen and that they were too busy or unqualified to effectively market services. This suggests that canvassing was at a low-ebb in the 1950s. Compare that to the respective managements of the 'Big Four', who equated jobs with success in attracting traffic and constantly drilled this into their staff, and therein lies one of the key problems of the nationalised railway. Another issue with nationalisation of transport is that potentially useful bits can be hived off and placed under the jurisdiction of a different organisation. An example was an attempt in 1951-1952 to merge the Road Haulage Executive's lorry fleet with that of the Railway Executive to reduce what was considered costly duplication. It was only problems with the unions that stopped this from happening.

 

ATOC recommended it for reopening but the financial crisis intervened, otherwise it would have happened by now. Hence the ongoing efforts of the small group I founded to pursue a heritage-style reopening. It has been difficult and humiliating at times, and we found out the hard way that our ambition (mine especially) greatly exceeded our competence! One thing we have learned was that the closure of the line was definitely the result of corruption, a personal conspiracy between three drinking buddies - the local Lord, a property developer who demolished Cranleigh station with indecent haste and built the present structure on the site without the appropriate permission -and the third? A certain R. Beeching... The last train ran with the explosives already in certain overbridges, and they were blown up later that night, effectively killing a preservation project which had already provisionally reserved an unidentified locomotive from Barry. Same thing happened with the Ilfracombe branch, plunging said seaside resort into the bottom 20 poorest areas in the country (where it remains today). The whole thing was a massive con.

The axe wielded in the USA was held by an oleo-automotive cabal consisting of the oil giants and the Big Three of Detroit. Where lines could not be retained for freight alone, they were torn up. I seem to recall that Los Angeles lost a very modern electrified elevated metro system in favour of clogged freeways, single-figure MPG and choking smog.

 

Would you please provide links to your sources for the accusations you make.

 

Beware these comparisons with the USA. They have a different combination of circumstances that lends itself better to rail freight, namely long distances and heavy loads that make going by road much more costly. The same do not exist over here.

 

Difficult to do so when it's all from the verbal testimony of local residents of the time who still live in the area. One of them has proved a fascinating mine of information and I've tried to persuade him to write a book. Suffice to say, his version of events is entirely believable and has been corroborated by several others, including a Parish Councillor.

 

My comparison had nothing to do with freight. It was that under a free market passenger services were withdrawn often with little or no warning and certainly were not kept going year after year when losing money. Hence Amtrack had to be formed.