Nationalization of British Railways: What Went Wrong?
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- Опубликовано: 21 окт 2023
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In today's video we continue uncovering the story of railway development in Great Britain, as part of a special trilogy marking the Railways Explained's achievement of 100,000 subscribers!
This is actually the second video in series, and it covers a period from the aftermath of World War II to the momentous era of rail privatization, which was quite challenging period for British railways, full of ups and downs, but it is mostly marked by the formidable challenges.
We talked about the pivotal moments, such as the birth of British Railways, the ambitious Modernisation Plan, the influential Beeching Report, structural reforms, and the eventual transition to rail privatization, which all defined the British railways during this transformative period.
This insightful journey through time illuminates the intricacies and milestones of a railway system that has left an indelible mark on the United Kingdom's transportation history.
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#railway #history #uk
BR at the end was a remarkably efficient system doing so much with very little. The British Government simply didn't want to invest money into railways, so privatized the costs, having someone else pick up the cheque instead of them, while keeping complete control.
That's what happens in every sector every time - special interests get in power, defund services, point to the defunded services not working well and go "See? Public never works, we need to privatise it". Then they privatise it to their buddies among the private capital class and wreck the public interest.
Like they fucked up the British car industry?
I worked for BR and the privatised railway. Whilst it's true that the in final years BR did make their money go along way for new projects, the overall history is of profligate waste. BR was a lovely place to work but it ran for its own needs rather than that of the passenger or freight customer. The franchise system might have worked in a few cases, Chiltern, C2c, SWT, Gatwick Express mk1) but a lot of franchises were run badly, with the emphasis on solely maximising revenue.
The one truly privatised part of the system was the freight sector, where there has been genuine growth and assuredly improved service to customers.
Network Rail and Tfl are bloated and surprisingly corrupt. I say this as a contractor to them for many years, now retired.
@@23GreyFox British Leyland Motor Cooperation Ltd. the ultimate clusterfuck of fubars that resulted that people all around the world still having PTSD issues when British cars are mentioned.
The lunatics ran the asylum at BL
@@SvalbardSleeperDistrict Venture capitalist never go for the long run just for short term profits.
f.e. Arriva a subsidery from Deutsche Bahn in Germany is selling the Arriva parts in several European countries to an American venture capitalist companny.
Politicians, passenger and staff interest foundations outside Germany are very very concerned.
Selling off and forced leasing back public financed infrastructure scemes are known thing
The pick of the flesh of the bones and leave the carcass for us the taxpayer!
People whitter on about the lack of standardisation in BR, and running multiple types of locomotives. They ended up with a standardised range of locos with the Class 20, 37 and 47, which are still in service now. The reason for running multiple types was to see what worked, scrap what didn't, and they were left with those classes running which proved themselves to be the best suited to BR's needs. It didn't fail. It worked perfectly as they ended up with very well proven and reliable designs that are still in service 60 years later.
The classes you mention are hardly mainstream and are probably the most reliable survivors of the various types. What about class 40, 44, 45, 50, 55, 73, 81 etc ? If we are talking about standardisation today, I would suggest the Hitachi dual power IEP sets fit that criteria though they are not inspiring to travel on.
The German and French built loads of locos, and very few were considered duds. And none of them lasted 60 years, because they kept developing new and improved models. Talk about gilding the lily.
@@andrewlong6438 They were once the dross had been shaken out. The majority of the other classes you mention are either long scrapped, built in tiny numbers, electrified for catenery routes, have no where near the number of survivors, or had short service lives. All of those classes combined barely even totals the number of class 37s built.
@@SeverityOne SNCF and DB also had a great deal more freedom and investment. The Germans and French don't complain about right wing governments killing off their rail manufacturers, 60 years of underinvestment and privatisation.
What you stated about trialling multiple types & then scrap the ones that don’t work was the original plan. But around 1957 or 58 BR decided to hasten the dieselisation process & order production batches of numerous classes of locomotives. Hence where the lack of standardisation began.
We had the diesel hydraulics to begin with. While not necessarily failures, they were nonetheless non-standard machines that barely lasted 20 years. The diesel hydraulics totalled over 300 machines which could have been spent on diesel electrics instead.
And then we have literal failures ordered as batches because BR wanted more diesels at a whim. The 17s and 21s are prime examples of that. 58 of the North British machines were ordered in numerous batches, a number which could hardly be called trialling. Remember that all the pilot batches of classes ordered under the pilot scheme either numbered 10 or 20. Originally only 10 were ordered until BR decided to speed up dieselisation and ordered 48 more before they could even properly trial the prototype and they were massive failures.
The class 37s were lucky. The 37s didn’t even have a prototype and it was really by luck they were successful. If they hadn’t, they’d have disastrous results like the Claytons. 117 ordered without trialling and all that money dumped into the sea. 117! No railway would ever order over a hundred machines for ‘trialling’. They ended up having to order more 20s to replace the 17s. Had they continually ordered more 20s the whole fiasco could have been avoided.
And then we have successful but non-standard classes that were batch ordered. We have BR, BRCW and Brush type 2s. Three families, five classes of locomotives in the same power category. While good machines (aside from the Skinheads, they were disastrous at first) I question the need for 3 families of Type 2s. The same goes for the Type 4s. The Peaks and Whistlers are in the same power category yet nearly 200 of each were built. If they had gone on with standardisation, they’d have only chosen one to mass-produce until the 47s emerge.
While the standardised classes are successful and still work to this day, don’t forget all the classes of locomotives that were mass-produced for BR which became colossal wastes. What you said was BR’s original intention but sadly they didn’t go along with it and mass-produced non-standard diesel classes that shouldn’t have been built further. Hence the lack of standardisation was sadly true and undeniably a failure on BR’s part.
Not sure how can you talk about Beeching without talking about Ernest Marples: Minister for Transport, who had large shares in a road building company, and thus wanted to destroy the competition.
Marples was undoubtedly bent, but does anyone think that without him, there'd be one less lorry on the roads today?
Rail is great for a few specialised flows of goods and people, but otherwise, it's woefully uncompetitive.
Marples was Beeching's brother-in-law
@@zetectic7968You can't trust these heterosexuals.
That would make sense if Marples was in the government during the cuts. They were actually made by the Wilson labour government…who got into power following their election pledge NOT to impose rail cuts.
The Beeching Report was 1963; it was the Labour government of 1964-70 that implemented it.
One of the political reasons the dieselisation of British Railways was sped up was the Clean Air Act of 1956, under which British Railways could be fined each time a steam locomotive made excess smoke.
That's good policy though, because at that time people were dropping dead like flies due to smog in places like London.
@@Tuppoo94 it is, and was a direct response to the killer smog of the winter of 1954.
I'd say having a transport minister who owned a road building company probably wasn't beneficial to the rail industry..
But it’s no different than the current Prime Minister who has a love affair with private helicopters and jets.
- French nationalized railways: - French TGV: 1st HST line in Europe Paris-Lyon (427 km) in 1981 + world speed records on rails: 380 kph (1981) 515 kph (1990) 574 kph (2007). High Speed TGV Paris-Bordeaux (575 km): 6 November 2023, departure Paris 9:04am - arrival Bordeaux 11:14am, travel time 2hr10 min. Cost 45 euros.
- French nationalized electricity production: nuclear reactors, 2nd greenest in EU "France Is Europe’s Top Power Exporter… most of the power flowing to Great Britain (8TWh) and Italy (9TWh)." Bloomberg 2023-08-07
Ouais mais tout ça va disparaître mon ami, notre gouvernement soumis à Bruxelles est en train de tout démanteler côté ferroviaire quand a l'énergie nous la revendons à des parasites privés qui ne produisent rien et revendent aux prix indexé en Allemagne
I taught English at Alitalia in Rome around this time. The word was that a speed line was built from Paris to Lyon to avoid the aggro and cost of giving Paris a fourth airport, and thus regionalise international air transport
The entire UK electrified train network runs on nuclear too. Some of it from France lol. The French also own all of our nuclear plants, because of course they do. We don't own any of our own infrastructure any more. The Tories keep selling it off.
French vanity lines…excellent. Fares…so high it’s now cheaper to drive even on the toll roads. French provincial lines…dreadful (I speak as someone who lived there until recently.j
French nuclear power…56 power stations, 52 of which are not just beyond their designed life but beyond the ten (or, with some, twenty) years added onto their design life. France has had the highest number of nuclear “incidents” in the world. One nuclear power station being built at the moment…original cost €3biilion coming online 2016. Still under construction, latest estimate of cost €27billion. Cost of decommissioning and replacing obsolete plants…€3trillion. I have no idea why anyone would want to copy their model.
Were's the video for yesterday.... I was waiting for it all day!!!
Thanks for the video. Very detailed and well explained as usual especially on such a well talked about topic in British Rail. Keep up the good work👍
Many thanks!
@@RailwaysExplained No problem😊
Deutsche Bahn followed the neoliberal Thatcherite “reforms” in the 90s and 2000s, with the same thudding failure.
When the railways were private companies they wanted the owners of private wagons to invest in vacuum braking for their wagons but the private owners weren't interested so they ended up with a huge fleet of non vacuum braked wagons. Also in WW2 many people had learnt to drive a skill they would use after the war and with the government selling off wartime lorries cheap these people bought them and started their own freight haulage businesses in direct competition with the railways. The only business that railway freight has over road hauled freight is block loads where a train carries only one type of cargo. The haulage of "pick up" freight trains stopping numerous stations to pick up or drop off wagons only paid it's way when there was no road haulage competition. Road haulage had it all over the railways because road transport can deliver direct to a customers business whereas the railway can only deliver to the nearest station or goods shed. It's then up to the customer to find a way to transport it to where they need it.
Government ineptitude and corruption also played it's part in the ruining of the railways and that ineptitude and corruption carries on today.
Societal infrastructure like railways and powerlines should be on public hands.
Why?
_All_ infrastructure and workplaces should be in the hands of workers that work on them.
@@rickyl7231 The real "why" question you should really be asking is, why have parasitic private owners standing between workers and the wealth they produce, and why have these leeches making profit off the back of work done by others, instead of having an actual economic and workplace democracy.
@SvalbardSleeperDistrict you'd mald about SG helathcare
@@longiusaescius2537all public hospitals are owned by the government through MOH Holdings, so what’s your point?
Whilst British Railways did start in 1948 (not 1947 as you stated) with 1,223,634 wagons it ended the with 1,179,404 wagons of which 1,047,439 of these had no automatic brakes and had an average capacity 12.5tons. By the start of 1967 the total number of wagons had reduce to 551,422 of which only 466,623 wagindcremained in service by the end of the year, of which 275,770 wagons had no automatic brakes and had an average capacity of 16.94 tons. The reasons behind these numbers include the removal from service of pre-war privste owner wagons with wooden underframes, the withdrawal of wagons unfit to be repaired, thec withdrawal of wagons with no automatic brakes and the removal of low capacity wagons. The wagons removed from service were sometimes replaced by higher capacity wagons. These figures come from the BTC's annual reports.
Your simplistic usevof statistics gives a very misleading picture of the true state of Britain's railways.
The fact that British Railways was still using any train cars without automatic brakes in 1948 is ridiculous. The fact that they still had 275,000 cars without automatic brakes in 1967 is why people make fun of British Rail for being the most incompetent and backwards entity ever put in charge of a train.
@@michaelimbesi2314 there are many and varied readons for this state of affairs including ge fact that the average journey length for a wagon was less than 70 miles and that the vast majority of these wagons used axle boxes that limited their speeds to below 25mph the need for automatic brakes on wagons was not seen as necessary. Also due to having only a 9ft wheelbase there was limited space to fit an 18in to 21in diamater vacuum cylinder and brake gear especially on the medium (5-plank) coal wagons with bottom discharge doors which made up the vast majority of wagons in service in 1948. Around 3/4 of the wagons that BR received in 1948 were pre-WW2 private owner wagons a large number of which still had wooden frames and were quickly condemned.
Great video, can't wait for the third one... 😉
Coming soon!
The sequel that we actually wanted and will not be disappointed by.
I can't wait for the privatization video!
Great video. Could you please do a railways explained video on the irish railway system it has an interesting past and exciting future ahead
Thanks for the idea!
It’s kind of fascinating how the Japanese are the only ones who managed to make their rail network profitable
It also helps when your express trains have their own tracks running at 186 mph
The United States’ freight railroads are private profitable multi-billion dollar industries. If the government builds a bunch of roads with tax money and subsidizes airlines passenger traffic will never be profitable, stop subsidizing those things and rail is viable.
@@qjtvaddict The Spanish and the French have that too
@FlorianHWave the Spanish had very cheap projects too
@@FlorianHWave yep because when they were faced with the same problem as the UK they decided to invest in it, instead of ripping up the railways
In no shape or form can Beeching be described as a "saviour" of the railways. The only decent idea he came up with - merry-go-round freight - was pinched from Gerry Fiennes. Wholesale destruction of the rail network begot the marvellous heritage left to us by the Victorians and left us ill-prepared for modern transport needs and an over-reliance on road vehicles.
Lack of protection of railway trackbeds led to a situation where, although an area would benefit from a rail link, the redevelopment of the trackbed since the 1960s means that it is too expensive and disruptive to reinstate a rail link.
What did Beeching achieve from his mad hacking? Where were the cost savings? A pittance as BR's main costs were due to insane staffing levels and an incompetent management which wasted funds on developing British alternatives to tried and tested European diesel engines.
Beeching called in as the nationalised railways were running up colossal losses....no profits meant no investment.
An interesting video but why were some of the images reversed? Very interesting to see the mirror image of the north end Sheffield Midland Station!
Public service is not meant to make profits. It is there to service people...
Yup
Can't wait for the privatisation video!
We're still waiting for electrification on much of the network. Having a stop gap solution always becomes the permanent solution in this country. It lets them kick the can further down the road.
It was all about saving money and the governement washing their hands of it, and then realised that they had to because the companies they got to do the job weren't up to it.
It was nothing to do with investment, it was corruption and graft. Making motorways made more money for Ministers, especially when they cant be bothered to pay any tax!
The Vale of Rheidol Railway was the only sole railway in Britain to operate steam engines during BR days.
There was nothing much wrong with the Nationalisation of Britain's Railways. The only things wrong were Government interference and lack of funding.
Nationalization is literally government interference.
This video just explained in detail that an awful lot of things were wrong, or at least went wrong, with the nationalisation of Britain's railways. So why you claim the exact opposite is a mystery.
Either nationalisation or privatisation is not the answer. Fixating on the how, rather than the why, ignores what the underlying problems of Britain's railways were, and still are.
The UK was one of the first - no, scrap that, _the_ first - to build nationwide railways, and one of the last in Europe to nationalise them. Most of the European railway companies that we know today were formed in the interbellum, between WW1 and WW2, although Italy - as it often is, a frontrunner in rail transport - did this in 1905. Britain, instead, opted to have the Big Four.
Therefore, where standardisation was already well underway on the continent when WW2 broke out, and continued afterwards, Britain still had patchwork of rolling stock, and a lot of duplication in lines because of almost a century of largely unfettered building of lines by competing companies.
My perception is that there are two major issues that have affected the UK's railways more than those on the continent:
1: underinvestment
2: political interference, such as artificially keeping demand for coal high
Or you could also say: Tories hate trains. Not to turn this into a political diatribe - and I have little sympathy for social democratic parties - but Beeching, privatisation and now scrapping of a large part of HS2: it's always the Tories.
Will things improve if the British voted the Tories out? It's hard to say. I have a funny feeling that political considerations will lay the groundwork for full re-nationalisation, but I also think that this will not, in fact, solve anything. Not until the choice is made to run the best railways possible for the budget that they're willing to spend on it.
I would actually disagree, in that Nationalisation, while did not start the attempt at interference of private enterprise, instead accelerated the growth at which the government would interfere in industry with not just Railways but nearly all industrial sectors in the UK. It was Clement Atlee who tried to continue Winston Churchill's wartime "temporary" economic interference but changed the rules from defacto nationalisation of most industries to de jure nationalisation from the *Bank of England* to *British Railways*.
Lack of funding was/is a problem of Britain's Railways.
I think Privatisation was not a mistake but it's plan was carefully chosen in order for it to fail eventually so that the government can further consolidate power by saying "look, see, this is what happens when we let free enterprise take ahold of "our vital infrastructure", it all turns to dust" even though a large "British Railways PLC" or "Big Four companies" approach would have not only worked better than further sectorisation but may have even allowed the industry to grow especially as the population of England has been rising more than 4x since 1997
You want nationalisation without government interference? Nationalisation is the definition of government interference lmao.
That was the point of privatisation, to give the government another level of smokescreen to avoid blame.
There were 3 important points omitted:
BR upon its creation was saddled with debt as it had to pay compensation to the share holders of the big 4. The Heath government extended the compensation scheme that is why BR was not turning a profit until the late 70's.
NIMBYs blocked the electrification of the old Southern region & so it has always been crippled by a 3rd rail system.
Thatcher was rabidly anti-union & that is why she wouldn't invest in the railways. Only poor people used trains because successful people owned cars & the road network didn't need public subsidy 🙄
What went wrong?: Politicians.
The title should be: privatisation of BR, what went wrong?
That will be our next video 😅
The dude who was axing the railways had a big interest in building the motorways.
11:10 you do need to keep in mind all the statistics in this report were l ies.
The Blue Pullman was the early version of the HSTs.
BR was the most cost efficient rail network in Europe it did not collapse it was destroyed, what went wrong was politically motivated privatisation as we now have the most inefficient disjointed railway network in Europe which is run purely for profit where the passengers needs are very low on the priority list.
You do understand that there's a massive amount of railway regulation in the UK, dictating every aspect of train operations? For example, the railway companies have to operate routes that are not economically viable? The problem with UK's railways is that once the politicians decided to go ahead with privatisation, the effort was half-assed, so the UK was left with all the disadvantages of a nationalised and privatised railway system, and none of the advantages.
@@Tuppoo94 You are so wrong, all railways are subject to regulation to ensure safety, what I believe you are referring to is the crazy system pf privatisation, even if you agree with privatisation (which I do not) you could not create a worse system.
@@davidpeacock4132 I'm not talking about safety regulations here. One would have to be very special to say they're not important. I'm talking about the UK government(s) forcing the TOCs to operate unprofitable services, and then giving them subsidies for it. If the government is going to demand that unprofitable services must be operated, then there's no point in having a privatised railway, because in that case the current system is only funneling taxpayer money into private pockets. If we're looking for maximum efficiency, then the TOCs should get to decide which routes to run and how often, without government intervention.
@@Tuppoo94 So in other words sod the passengers who rely on those services? More subsidy now than there ever was under BR most of which is pocketed as profit for the pirateised TOC's and don't get me started on Rosco's
Rail privatisation is a disaster.
Sported an error in the title, should be 'Privitisation'.
This is something that Nashville needs. It just makes sense.
🇺🇸 hello from Kansas
Denationalisation of British Railways went a lot wronger.
Ideology, dogma and incompetence is what went wrong
Geography and per capita income also responsible for rail devlopment ,, in America geography demand air travel ,, in india per capita income is drive us to use cheap rail transport system
You should be asking Privatisation of Britain's Railways : What Went Wrong?
That's the real catastrophe, just travel round any European network and compare it to the utter shambles the tories have left our railways in
Privatisation has transformed the network for the better....utterly failed under nationalisation.
Most trains seem to be running WRONG LINE 😂
Shouldn't the REAL question be:
' The re-privatisation of our railways - what went wrong?'
- because most people are more interested in getting to the bottom of this question, than of how or why BR fell apart.
People genuinely didn't envisage the kind of problems we have with our railways now, back in the 1990's; when the railways left public ownership and became privately owned again. They genuinely thought things would get alot better......but they haven't.
And you know why? ....the Tories. That's the answer. And their whole approach to railways and rail travel in the UK. This is largely the reason for why we are where we are, in 2023....soon to be 2024.
Don't forget that it was Blair who continued with rail privatisation after his 1997 landslide victory. I detest the Tories, but I also detest Blairite Labour.
When will the Big Four railway companies be returning?
APT, if we keeping going itll eventually work
Thatcher, no too much money stop
APT, ok we'll give the technology to the italians
Several years later, hey the Italians have these tilting trains lets buy some and see how they work
APT, seriously?!
Current British prices for rail travel are slap in the face. Rip off Britain. Same distance example in Italy is half cost or less than what British companies charging.
It was always government policy in Italy to ensure some level of equalisation from north to south. Rail fares were low to encourage national mobility. It was policy for leading industries to operate in the south as well as the north
Starting with an advert from a German company from 1945, risky.....
Nothing ‘went wrong’. The railways were nationalised because the Big Four were effectively bankrupt after the war and unable to invest in the aged, damaged infrastructure never mind modernise. The UKs economy needed a railway, nationalisation was a rescue mission, no more.
The GWR was largely against being nationalised as the management felt that the company was still viable. The LNER on the other hand had been on the brink of being bankrupt since the 1930's....
@@maghost_rider5698 The LNER had initiative, though. The "Silver Jubilee" and the "West Riding" were succesful. The supplement on top of the normal fare covered the cost of building the former. The Leeds train did not run for long enough to achieve this aim. The Coronation was less successful. Whilst plenty of businessmen from Newcastle and Leeds travelled to London regularly, there was very little such traffic from Edinburgh. For its first few months, the down Coronation did not even stop at Newcastle.
I worked for British Rail in the last 11 years of their existance and then worked for the private railways it became for a further 13 years, so have seen both sides.
British Railways delivered a faultless service for very little money. The trains were old and shabby because the Government subsidy kept reducing. You cannot modernise rolling stock without money to do it.
Yes, passengers liked the new shiny trains under privatisation, but were less keen about the continued increase in fare prices year on year to line the pockets of shareholders.
Mark 1 rolling stock still has the finest standards of passenger comfort; 4-SUBs, and 4-EPBs were far more comfortable than the 455's. The drivers preferred the older trains too. 4-CEPs were about the same, before and after refurbishment, but 4-CIGs are, especially the original sets, far more comfortable than 377's. Again, drivers seem to prefer the older trains. There may have been a need to replace rolling stock, but why not more of the same? Most modern trains are anti-passenger.
Rishi Sunak AKA Richard Beeching 😅
Don't forget Mark Harper, Jeremy Hunt and Huw Merriman.
One is an elected politician and cancelled HS2. The other wrote two reports and never closed anything.
Chris Grayling cancelled some electrification projects.
tory mentality: buy it up and close it down.This has happened a number of times railways ,coal industry aircraft industry ,motor industry ,ship building ect its .not the torys fault .Labour partyis mainly at fault by instituting nationalization, . What elsecan you say about this situation .The loss of jobbs is the worst aspect a funney part of Labour part of their pollitics. Its all very depressing boath mentaly and actual It becomes very boreing . ttfn&ty
Privatisation of British Railways since 1994 is an excellent example that privatising rail is a dumb idea and I'm grateful that the Brits did that experiment so no one else has to. It's been a disaster for ridership, ticket prices and reach to smaller towns. Rail should never work as a for profit enterprise since value of a well working rail system to the society, economy and climate is hard to quantise in the simple terms. Every pound of "loss" brought by the rail system easily pointed out by the bean counters, accounted for many pounds of hard to quantize gains like people living happier more productive lives in cities less strangled by car congestion and pollution being, rail being much cheaper in upkeep than roads per passenger and ton kilometre/mile, lives saved by reduced road casualties, less used fossil fuels and so on and so on. Even the economy would be better off if a large portion of people needed in road transit worked other jobs instead. (of course you'll always need a truck for the last few miles, or time sensitive deliveries, but it's a waste of man hours, infrastructure spending, cost of insurance payouts of the inevitable accidents and diesel to haul by truck cross-country compared to trains)
I remember the promises made by John Major and John MacGregor that privatisation would deliver improvements and lower fares, but losses are far greater than under British Rail. While I agree that British Rail wasn't perfect but I think they kept things moving better. Very few people realise that the Big 4 and British Railways were run by the same people.
@@sandletters39 Pre-90's.....rail system was clapped out, decaying and falling apart.
Transformed by privatisation and the free market.
@@malthusXIII-fo3ep Rail started to transform itself before privatisation. Privatisation has made them less-effective.
@@sandletters39nah privatisation increased passenger ridership by millions.
@naramsaishanmukh1087 I see. So what's privatisation got to do with it?
Was Dr. Beeching a good guy or bad guy?
A bad guy. Next question!
Essential....his plan massively improved a stagnating and decaying nationalised system.
Dr. Beeching was the chairman of British Railways and he replaced steam engines with diesel and electric engines
Was Dr. Beeching a hero or villain?
Dr. Beeching did his job wrong during his career as chairman of British Railways
Oh yes, the cabinet papers released from John Majors “poll tax on wheels” rail privatisation state the main aim was to reduce Trade a union power; which it failed at.😂😂
What an engaging video! It's fascinating to explore Britain's railway history from post-World War II to privatisation. The discussion of pivotal moments like the birth of British Railways and the Modernisation Plan is enlightening. If you have an interest in delving deeper into the history of the British railway system, I recommend exploring this playlist: ruclips.net/video/cH0IVL7a9U0/видео.html&pp=iAQB
Why is so much of your footage reversed, we run on the left side here!
Good summary though.
🛤️
If the Big Four haven’t gone bankrupt, then there wouldn’t have been British Railways.
Blame Hitler!
Lack of money.
Beeching is no savior! He's The Railway Murderer, and now he spends his time burning in Hell
The blame rests with the government who commissioned his report and cherry-picked the bits that fit their ideology… but they were Tories, they were going to hell anyway and just want to make Earth a bit more hellish to ease the transition
Railway lines and stations were being closed from the start of WW1 onwards to reduce duplication or because they were hopelessly uneconomic in competition with buses, trams etc. All Beeching did was to write a report. He didn’t have the power to close a single line - you need to blame the various Transport Secretaries for that. All the haters love to hate Beeching.
Lol 😅😅😅😅
Ernest Marples: *looks away*
I have three thoughts about Dr. Beeching.
First... The guy was in a tough position. BR was struggling and something had to give. This was a situation where an ounce of prevention wasn't used, and thus a pound of cure was necessary. Had the modernization plan been executed a lot more slowly and carefully, costs wouldn't have skyrocketed nearly as much and customer satisfaction wouldn't have tanked, and as a result these cuts wouldn't have been necessary. Unfortunately, though, things got to the point where they were.
Second... while I can agree that cuts were necessary, the way Beeching went along implementing them was anything but. They called him an axeman, but it's more like he was using a chainsaw to do brain surgery. He also seemed to try and justify a lot of his blanket cuts with only marginally reasonable explanations.
Finally... even with all that being said, Beeching was the Darth Vader, not the Palpatine, in this situation. Ernst Marples was the one to blame for actually killing so many branch lines and services, as he had interests in the road building industry. Beeching intended for his closures to be mothballings, with lines being restored to service as needed or closed as necessary. He also intended that if some of those lines close, an efficient bus service he proposed would compliment those said lines, and take over should the lines close.
Everything!!!!! The UK trained for Brexit 😂😂😂😂😂
Nothing to do with the European Union. It's our own political dogma.
I hate beeching
In my early years I worked for a nationalised electricity board, or rather I attended. I earn't 3 times as much as my previous job for 1/4 of the work.
Nationalisation does not work, employees feel entitled it job for life, no one was sacked - they were moved sideways out of harms way,, any bit of hassle is a strike trigger, deliberate poor workmanship ensured your call out on faults, dragging a fault repair out to midnight ensured you got paid to 8am that morning, the fault was usually cleared by 15min past midnight.
"My anecdotal evidence of my supposed experience in a position I worked in at one time should be taken as holding more weight than the myriad of publicly observable debilitating outcomes of privatised railways in the UK and elsewhere, including the ongoing strikes of British rail workers fed up with private rail fatcats that have been shafting their conditions and pay while lining their pockets with wealth produced by other people's work for decades".
@@SvalbardSleeperDistrict straw man much? He said nothing about privatization, only about public companies. I worked for crown corporations, the ones that are designed to tolerate losses are grotesquely inefficient. Some private companies are this way too, but at least this is not done on my dime. People just struggle to grasp that there is such a thing as efficient government companies where employees work and earn competitive wages while providing competitive services. People who support state ownership no matter the model or its downsides, which is usually a sizeable number of people, are the reason that ill-conceived privatizations happen when governments run out of money. It become much more politically palatable to privatize things than to reform them
@@ramzanninety-five3639 I took what was said and criticised statements like "Nationalisation does not work" from it by using the actually existing reality coming out of privatised rail services. The fact that I added the part contrasting their supposed experience with that reality has nothing to do with "strawman" - it's there to illustrate the ridiculousness of an anecdotal evidence of an "uncompetitive" workplace with the far more destructive outcomes of when private capital takes over anything in society.
@@SvalbardSleeperDistrict you provide anecdotal evidence dressed up as systemic failures, yet pretend that systemic failure of a system 'public no natter what' are mostly rhetorical. Both extremes are artificially binary, there is more than one kind of public company and more than one kind of private company.
@@ramzanninety-five3639 Yeah, go ask Mick Lynch and Eddie Dempsey if their unions are out in the street for "anecdotal evidence". And "public no matter what" is not an argument that was used anywhere above - how things are done always matters. That does not change the fact that well-operated publicly (or even better, cooperatively) owned workplaces are always preferable to private ownership, and there is nothing "artificial" or "extreme" about workplace democracy.
The Modernisation plan of 1955 did indeed involve the replacement of steam locos by diesels and electrics, but the original plan would have been to oust steam traction in 1972, subsequently 1970. In the end, steam finished in 1968, and thousands of locos were scrapped long before they were life-expired. One would normally reckon that a main line loco would last 25-30 years, and branch line or shunting locos up to 40 years. A3 Pacifics were being used on front-line duties as late as 1961/2. In about 1957, somebody realised that scrapping steam locos before they were life-expired would be a waste of money, and suggested that a strategic reserve should be retained until c1985. The Western Region's decision to go for diesel hydraulics was reasonable. They were lighter than diesel electrics, so could haul heavier trains, especially on the main line through Devon and Cornwall. Whilst all the North British hydraulics were a disaster, the Swindon Warships were relatively successful, and the Hymeks and the Westerns were as good as many diesel-electrics, if not better. The Class 47 may have been a success, but, on the East Coast Main Line, as Deltic substitutes, the less said the better. I suffered numerous late-running journeys between Newcastle and London, or vice versa, with a 47 on a Deltic job; if you were lucky, the lateness would be 20 minutes. We keep on praising the HST; the fixed formation was too short. The Western Region sets were to have nine coaches, the East Coast Main Line ten, but the publicity people clearly included the two power cars. There were complaints about overcrowding on the East Coast Main Line, and rightly so. Before the HST, a typical East Coast express would have eleven coaches, with one or two extras even at busy times, and about 450 second class seats, depending on the formation. The HST had 288 seats, and, to make things worse, the seating bays and windows were out of alignment, and the tables were larger. Further, on those trains which were not immediately converted to HST, they had fewer coaches, typically eight or nine instead of the usual eleven. BR publicly said that rail users would have to get used to shorter trains. Perhaps a Deltic with eleven or twelve on would delay an HST. Whilst Edinburgh had extra trains, Newcastle did not. Then a guard's compartment was added at the second class end, reducing the seating still further. In the end, one of the catering cars was removed, and a fifth second-class coach added, but this meant the end of the Restaurant Car on a number of trains, or restricting the Restaurant to first-class ticket holders. The initial regions worked. Unfortunately, BR decided on a "one city, one region" policy. Whilst some regional changes were reasonable, such as the transfer of the LTS network to the Eastern Region, others were not. Take, for instance, the transfer of the Great Western network north of Banbury to the London Midland Region at the beginning of 1963. The LM region promptly announced that when the Euston to Birmingham electrification was complete, Snow Hill Station would be closed, just over two years after the station had been resignalled. (This was before the Beeching Report was published.) As regards freight traffic, the principal reason why BR was losing to the roads was the continued building of unbraked wagons. Marshalling yards had no place under Beeching, hence the decline. Wagonload traffic was to be discontinued, and the railways would cease to be common carriers. The parcels receipts were misleading; at some stage, parcels receipts on a branch line were calculated at the junction station, so a branch line station could have taken parcels, but they were accounted for elsewhere. The break-up into sectors had two bad points. First, British Rail decided that Inter-City services had to serve London; Londonlink would have been a better name. Second, catering on trains and on stations was to be run by different bodies, the principal effect of which was to ban second-class passengers from Restaurant Cars. BR promised that hot meals would be served in the buffet, but this materialised only very briefly. All one can get these days is a grotty BR sandwich and a packet of crisps, and some companies call that a "meal deal." Provincial Inter-City services, such as Newcastle to Liverpool lost their main-line stock for Class 158 multiple units, typically two two-car sets coupled together, with no catering other than a drinks trolley, if you were lucky. 19:25
What went wrong? They nationalized the railways, that's what went wrong!
The Big 4 and British Railways were run by the same people. Not many people realise that.
@@sandletters39Even in the Privatisation times lots of the Management was ex BR. They were the only ones who knew how to run the Railways.
@rockerjim8045 I understand how it worked. After privatisation, they were briefly "propped up," but not entirely so. It started to spiral downhill over safety and many other issues.
sorry horrible accent stopped watching because of that after half a minute already
What went wrong was that the railways were nationalised
Privatized you mean?
@@gijskramer1702 No, and to say the railways of Britain today are privatised is complete nonsense as the government owns all the infrastructure and are the ones who contract the maintenance out to different companies through network rail to maintain it. The rail operators rent the trains they run on the lines which they have to bid to get the running rights from the government it’s a complete joke especially to call it ‘privatised’
@@andrewevans7660 fair enough.
Thatcherite ideologue detected
@@SvalbardSleeperDistrict in the netherlands we use the british railsystem as a how not to do it, wether its privatized or not. It does not work (the british railways)
The film is wrong way round. Trains are keeping to the right!
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