What-if....?

I do believe they were, they were also looking at the Strathspey Railway too but decided against it due to it being far away as most of the members were based in the Central belt, in which a spliter group formed to go for the line themsevles and we all know the rest is history. But the Dollar line was the favorite among many who I've spoken to at the SRPS and it's worth speculating at all these various things that could've been.

 

intriguing question. I think the difference would be there would be no queues of locos awaiting overhaul and more Austerity tanks and larger industrials in service on shorter lines. There would undoubtedly be less lines too as Barry was the catalyst for the preserved lines boom.

 

If the Kemp Town branch in Brighton had stayed open (can't blame Beeching, the passenger service ended as early as 1933!), there'd be an impressive single track viaduct to terrify vertigo sufferers with uninspiring views of urban Brighton, followed by an increasingly deep cutting before a view of nothing very much through the long, single track tunnel to finish 1/4 mile from St.James St shops, about the same from (and 60ft above) Volks' Electric Railway and the same again from that well known tourist magnet, The Royal Sussex County Hospital. No great shakes as a preservation prospect, I realise. In fact, it was only built in the first place to forestall SER incursion into LBSC territory....so why even mention it?

Because at least, were it still with us, the long suffering motorist, cyclist or pedestrian using the A270 Lewes Road to get out of town wouldn't have that godawful Vogue Gyratory (where the viaduct once stood) to negotiate!

 

What if the Diesel engine had never been invented.

 

or Marples had been exposed the way the media would have done today......

 

Most Southern suburban services would look much as they do today.

But slightly seriously.... had the rigours of Riddles work on combustion been applied, say, when superheating took root, a lot of coal would have been saved. While a few engineers such as Raven were keen to direct efforts towards electric traction, too often so-called empirically inspired improvements were based on least-worse-case near guesswork. If only more had approached their work with Churchward's methodology! Controversial, I realise, but the (small 'c') conservative approach to design, understandable from many standpoints, bordered on complacency. Fuel was cheap and plentiful, but even so, many services were borderline - or worse - downright unremunerative.

Where latter day engineers such as Bulleid sought to improve the viability of steam in terms of manufacturing technique, preperation and disposal times and cab ergonomics (Leader's firing position aside!), and later, Riddles with similar, if rather more conventional efforts, it always amuses me to see their work slated by those wedded to arguably better looking, but ultimately near useless machines.

And that's just a few small observations from one bloke on the traditionally fueled Stephensonian beasties! I'm certain other, better informed contributions will make mine look like 'My First Ladybird Book On Making Choo-Choos Go A Little Bit Better'

 

More to the point what were the 'near misses?' The Ilfracombe line appears to be one

 

In reply to my own post, there would have been fewer lorries and therefore more railfreight.

 

If the Southern Railway had standardised on LB&SCR Electrification (i.e. AC overhead) instead of L&SWR (DC third-rail)...

 

If the London & Bristol Railway had said no to Brunel, stuck to 4'8 1/2" gauge and shared Euston as its London Terminus, would it have joined the London & Birmingham, the Manchester & Birmingham and the Liverpool & Manchester Railway to form the London, North & Western Railway...

 

So the North West London network could've been as irredeemably awful as the southern approaches to the capital!

Conversely, had the shipping magnates of Bristol woken up just a few years earlier, the whole mainline network could've been 7 ft 0 1/4 in gauge! I'd bet the tunnels on the Hastings line would still have been built with inadequate clearances!!

Mind you, had a certain flight of fancy by some connected with the LNWR actually occured, 'Merddin Emrys' might have run the odd special through to Euston in little over 12 hours or so.....with the odd refueling stop or twenty thrown in for good measure.

 

It would certainly have done a roaring trade in fish & chip specials, given the reputation (justified, in my opinion) of the Anstruther chippy

Is it worth it? What does it actually achieve?

IMO that's an incredibly simplistic view. If the diesel engine had never been invented then other forms of propulsion would have, or maybe we'd be much further down the road towards properly usable electric propulsion for road vehicles? You can't just say that if one particular thing had not been invented then all the bits you don't happen to like that are extrapolated from it would have simply never existed - life isn't that simple.

People would have still liked the convenience of door-to-door road transport and so something else would have been invented to take advantage of it.

 

What if....Droxford had been more successful

 

I suspect without the diesel engine, there would still have been lorries taking rail traffic, they just would have been petrol-powered.

My understanding is that the rise of both the lorry and bus industries in the 1920s - which formed the first significant threat to the monopoly railways had previously held on bulk and mass transport - was due to the market becoming flooded with huge numbers of war-surplus lorries at knock-down prices, along with thousands of men trained to drive and maintain them. Which probably gives rise to a different what-if that might be bigger than this thread: what if the First World War hadn't happened? Maybe the same developments would eventually have occurred, but probably more gradually.

Tom

 

If WW1 didn't happen might we have seen grouping happen differently? After all it was when the railways were brought under government control during the war that it was discovered that it might be a good idea for more joined up thinking in peacetime too! I suppose that's just the old question of what'd happen if grouping hadn't occured, LNWR swallowed up more, GWR carried on much as it was, southern constituents??...

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The internal combustion engine certainly provided the first serious competition between towns and villages. In urban areas, the rise of the electric tram from 1890 onwards was a serious enough challenge to spur development (a term I employ loosely!) of the first generation of steam railmotors ahead of WWI.

 

No grouping and perhaps no Nationalisation? Maybe we would be reading in the history books how Gresley spent most of his time preparing his next bid for the East Coast franchise!!

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The logic of the 1923 grouping sometimes escapes me. Why, for instance, was the Midland grouped with the west coast group, yet the GC with the east coast? Had Derby fallen to the LNER and Gorton to the LMS, the LT&S would surely have developed differently (hardly the greatest leap of logic!), and the politics of grouping would have been very different. Perhaps the LNWR would even have kept it's identity to the same extent as the GW.

Anyone care to speculate on how things might have developed?

 

More to the point thought why were some of the minor railway's excluded such as the colonel Stevens empire

 

That one has puzzled me too. The 1921 Act only applied to SG lines, except where some arrangement with a pre-grouping line made absorbtion logical. The Festiniog was proposed to be part of first the LMS, then the GW before being exempted. This was related to WWI government control (Blodge did war work 'for the duration').

I know that both the WC&PR and West Sussex Railway were examined in the 30's by the GW and Southern respectively, both coincidentally rejected for the same principal reasons viz cost of upgrading PW and sheer number of ungated crossings. Quite how the K&ESR escaped the clutches of Waterloo, I haven't the foggiest.