Whilst much of mainland Europe was electrifying its major routes, the UK was continuing to build steam locos of the Big Four designs, as well as new standard classes. Now Riddles could clearly see that diesel ocos were ideal for shunting and that electrification was the natural successor for main line services. However, Riddles realised that with restrictions on capital investment, the strength (or weakness) of the £ and various import barriers, all tipped the balance towards thermally inefficient, but low first-cost, steam locos. ["BR 1948-73; A business history". Terry Gourvish, 1986].
Correct, but this is only part of the story.
Other people
at the time questioned Riddles' decision but because of the disfunctional way the railways and other transport businesses were organised on nationalisation in 1947 nobody, not even the British Transport Commission which nominally controlled the activities of the Railway Executive - for which Riddles worked - could change or even influence the RE's decisions.
In the short term - until 1950 or 1951 - there was clearly no alternative than to continue building steam locomotives, but there is a big question mark about the need for new designs and the lack of interest shown by Riddles and the RE in the potential of diesel traction. With this in mind, the BTC's records show that it took action after noting the speed with which the Executive was tackling the standardisation of steam motive power. The RE set up the Locomotive Standards Committee within a week of nationalisation on 8 January 1948. In April (the same month that the well known locomotive exchanges took place) the Commission's Chairman (Hurcomb) wrote to Sir Eustace Missenden, the Chairman of the RE, to express his dissatisfaction with the progress made in assessing the merits of different forms of traction. The reaction was grudging - over 8 months later, on 20 December 1948, a committee was set up under J. L. Harrington, the Chief Officer (Administration) at RE Headquarters to study the issue. It reported at the end of 1951.
Wow! The RE started work on new steam locomotives within a week but it took 3 1/2 years to reply to a letter.
One of the extraordinary features of the Harrington report was the very crude nature of the financial figures presented. The cost comparisons were for built cost only - no effort whatsoever was made to relate operating costs to different utilisation, manning levels, fuel costs or maintenance costs at depot and workshop levels or the effect on journey times of more power. It would seem that the Railway Executive had little need for complicated analysis in deciding its traction policy, nor did it need the BTC to shove its oar in. Until electrification was practical it considered that modern steam locomotives should haul the trains.
Riddles claimed that the capital cost of diesel traction was 5 times more expensive than steam in his speech to the Institution of Locomotive Engineers in 1950, but J. S. Tritton, in his Presidential Address to the Institution of Locomotive Engineers on 17 December 1947 - three years earlier - referred to the capital cost ratio of 1.6 to 1, diesel to steam, based on US experience. One can't help feel that Riddles' figures were chosen to prove a point.
Admittedly BR added diesel shunters to its build programme and picked up railcar development again in 1952, a decade after the last GWR railcars were built. Diesel mainline locomotive development restarted in 1955 with the publication of the Modernisation Plan. But by this time the second or third iteration of, for example, the Ivatt designs could have been putting out 2,000 bhp or more with much operational experience behind them.
Road vehicle reliability and capability had increased enormously as a result of developments in the Second World War as well as an army of ex-servicemen who could operate them - yet the basic unit of freight production remained the 10 ton unbraked van ambling from siding to siding.
The RE did not look at all at these changes and ask itself how the railway should be adapted to compete. The biggest failing of the ‘direction’ of the railways in the early years of nationalisation was that the traffic studies and analyses that Beeching had done in 1961 should have been done 14 or 15 years earlier. But they weren’t. As a result hundreds of pointless steam and diesel locomotives were built for traffic that was already disappearing.
You may well be right, but the politics of the time meant that such places of employment couldn't just be closed.
Possibly, but there was a general shortage of labour at the time.
At the end of the Second World War there were serious labour shortages, some 350,000 men had been killed - they were all fit and most of them were young. The
Empire Windrush arrived in 1948 with people who helped fill the labour shortage. Wages were increasing, it was becoming increasingly difficult to attract staff to the dirty jobs done during unsocial hours.
I suggest that abandoning the production of steam locomotives even over a short period of time would have had no measurable effect on the unemployment statistics.
