Why do people have rose tinted views of British Rail?

[ChiefPlanner]

And in the 1980s into the 90s one of the largest electrification programmes in history. It was not all doom and gloom in BR days.

Not to forget the "total route modernisation" with a 6 month blockade Wootten Basset to Westerleigh Junction in 1975 to prepare the way for 125 working to Avon and South Wales. Total blocks were rare then - but it did the job. Innovative - and not used till West Coast Route modernisation which did not go so well !!!!

 

[Journeyman]

Well, I've been commuting for over twenty years, and it hasn't entirely jaundiced my enjoyment of day trips, family visits etc by rail.

Likewise, however grim commuting got for me, it never damaged my love of rail travel for pleasure - but I appreciate that's probably quite unusual.

 

[yorksrob]

Likewise, however grim commuting got for me, it never damaged my love of rail travel for pleasure - but I appreciate that's probably quite unusual.

Although at the moment I'm only commuting once a day, so its mostly leisure now !

 

[Irascible]

You could roll up to a station & get a cheap ticket ( how long was it £20 return with a railcard from Paddington to Devon? I seemed to buy that ticket for *years* ), sit where you could find a seat ( the places I went you learned the pattern of where people were likely to get on earlier ). Admittedly for a while my usual route was a more overcrowded IC route than anything I've seen since BR demise, but usually there was no problem. Other than that, BR until the mid 80s typified that grimy decay & sense of "make it work as long as we can because we can't afford to renew it" that the entire country seemed to have when I was growing up - while I've no doubt a modern shiny nation would have been a better place to grow up, all this old technology was at least fascinating. On the plus side, BR Research really did do some great work and inspired me to go into engineering.

 

[USRailFan]

bad catering.

Hold on.. You mean there actually exists good cooking in the UK?

 

[Sad Sprinter]

Hold on.. You mean there actually exists good cooking in the UK?

Of course! I was having this disucssion with my friend the other day-there is so much great food in the British Isles its a shame such a myth exists.

Back on topic, as someone who grew up in privatisation, and who's image of the railway is EWS livered class 37s, unbranded class 158s and "Dynamic Lines" FGW HSTS, looking at railway photo albums of BR days, or watching YouTube videos of train activity in Rugby in 1988, the railway under BR looks a million times more interesting than the system we have today. A hodge-podge of faceless organisations and the same utilitarian rolling stock. I am lucky to be old enough to have gone on the ocassional 4CIG trips, albeit in Connex yellow of course, but I would of loved to see locomotive changeovers at Euston or raced down to Dover on a boat train. Although I'm sure if I could go back to 1973 and say you can get to Dover in an hour via a 140 mph Japanese train from St. Pancras, they would forget their 4CEPs in a heartbeat!

I think the underlying question is; do people have a problem with privatisation in principle, or is it just the loss of the "BR feel"? Would people have preffered a BR Plc or a Intercity/Network SouthEast Ltd as Cecil Parkinson wanted?

 

[Vespa]

So the best option is a Tory run nationalised system. I will let you break that to the RMT

Funnily enough that's exactly what happened with Sectorisation, introducing private business corporate practice to a nationalised railway, I think it worked I thought the Intercity branding improved because of it, it showed what might have been had it carried on down that route, I enjoyed the Liverpool to London sleeper service especially.

Of course privatisation came along and the jury is still out on that, there some good, bad and simply awful.

 

[nlogax]

Hold on.. You mean there actually exists good cooking in the UK?

This from someone in Norway whose unofficial Constitution Day meal is the common or garden hot dog Yes, the UK finally has great cuisine..mostly.

I have a vague recollection that the perception of BR-era food was pretty poor. It was certainly the butt of jokes on 1980s tv shows. That said I've done a little looking back. @timmydunn posted a fantastic tweet some years ago..hope he doesn't mind me reposting it here! Anyway, that food looks great to me. I guess the Travellers Fare cardboard sandwich was a proper red herring.

https://twitter.com/MrTimDunn/status/907686793088299072

Look what you gain when you travel by train" - 1977 British Rail Travellers Fare food poster Refined by #GBBO @PrueLeith when on BR's Board

 

[Bletchleyite]

Hold on.. You mean there actually exists good cooking in the UK?

Of course there does.

 

[Railwaysceptic]

I'm not old enough to really remember BR being only about 7 or 8 when the privatisation process started, but I find it hard to believe it was all bad. It won't have been perfect but I'm sure most staff tried to do their job to the best of their ability

It wasn't all bad and I am old enough to remember it well without needing rose-tinted glasses.

 

[Journeyman]

Although British cuisine has a reputation for being bland and stodgy, I really appreciate British classics like a nice roast or cooked breakfast if they're done properly, with decent quality ingredients. A lot of the time, these meals are poor because when cooked in industrial quantities, using indifferent or poor quality ingredients, they really don't turn out well. They're not meals that can be abused, frozen, reheated, microwaved etc, like curries or other sauce-based things like bolognese etc.

 

[yorksrob]

You could roll up to a station & get a cheap ticket ( how long was it £20 return with a railcard from Paddington to Devon? I seemed to buy that ticket for *years* ), sit where you could find a seat ( the places I went you learned the pattern of where people were likely to get on earlier ). Admittedly for a while my usual route was a more overcrowded IC route than anything I've seen since BR demise, but usually there was no problem. Other than that, BR until the mid 80s typified that grimy decay & sense of "make it work as long as we can because we can't afford to renew it" that the entire country seemed to have when I was growing up - while I've no doubt a modern shiny nation would have been a better place to grow up, all this old technology was at least fascinating. On the plus side, BR Research really did do some great work and inspired me to go into engineering.

I can't help thinking that the "modern shiny nation" built on computers and financial markets is a house of cards.

 

[frodshamfella]

Personally I felt the BR days the fares were generally less restricted and lower than todays equivalents. More manned stations and just one company for information.

 

[WesternLancer]

I think the underlying question is; do people have a problem with privatisation in principle, or is it just the loss of the "BR feel"? Would people have preffered a BR Plc or a Intercity/Network SouthEast Ltd as Cecil Parkinson wanted?

The model was driven by an ideological obsession with internal (on rail) competition that could not be made to work within the framework used - and then the loss of power, in 1997, of the advocates of that model but the lack of desire of the incoming labour govt to fundamentally tackle it, apart from being forced to tackle the track aspect. IE Blair would not bring it back to sttae control (too old labour) but not obsessed with competition in the way the Tories were.
If we had stuck with the ideas of the '92 govt then the question to ask would have been 'where is all the open access competition, and where is the structure to allow that - train paths etc?'

So competition got watered down tot he idea of competitions of the franchises and no more than that - which the 2010 govt stuck to even when the wheels were falling off.

It would indeed probably have been better to have had a BR plc or a sector based privatsed model - but with the regulatory regime that would have needed.

Also of course for peak hour / big city commuting - the competition is from the private car - not within rail

But some of this arose because Tory utility 'privatization model mk 1' simply create private sector utility monopolies - eg took a fair while before you could get a phone from anyone other than BT, or fule from anyone other than the ex state owned org. A bit like water supply still is - ands the Tories were open to criticism about that from their own ideological starting point.

In the context of all this the more varied rolling stock in the BR era is a bit of a niche issue, albeit important for this forum - but yes it was - partly of course due to it being a legacy of the 1955 Plan and stuff not being life expired until 30 years after - but the relevance of that being the Treasury having a long memory of all the money supposedly wasted in that plan, and them not wanting a repeat of that or any desire to had BR more of the same any time soon...

So ironic that privatization has resulted in massive levels of spend all signed off by the Treasury - but that's back to ideology - no politician is going to let their great idea look bad if all it takes to make it look less bad is to spend other people's money on such an objective...

I mean you only have to look at covid testing / track and trace / £50m of useless PPE etc etc to see that after all!

 

[Meerkat]

So ironic that privatization has resulted in massive levels of spend all signed off by the Treasury - but that's back to ideology - no politician is going to let their great idea look bad if all it takes to make it look less bad is to spend other people's money on such an objective...

The Treasury don’t like capital spending - getting the private sector to pay for all that and then paying higher operational spending to pay them back is much nicer for them.
Politicians like it because you can announce huge capital schemes (billions on trains etc) that you don’t have to pay for - you just committed the next 30 years of governments to paying for it.

 

[LNW-GW Joint]

No, there were a pool of 4(?) Newton Heath-allocated Class 158s that did 3 trains per day Manchester Airport-Scotland plus 1-2 Liverpool-Scotland trains. This was roughly between about 1994 and 1998-ish, and were Intercity/Virgin Cross Country services (but in the standard 'Express' grey/beige livery).

They did Liverpool-Portsmouth too (maybe XC from Blackpool as well).
It's not much different with Nottingham-Cardiff or Stansted-Birmingham on XC 170s today.

 

[Ianno87]

Personally I felt the BR days the fares were generally less restricted and lower than todays equivalents.

It's probably fair (fare?!) to say retrictions were generally less complicated.

But then XC's standard "not before 0930" is a simple restriction, but a very blunt instrument at the same time...

 

[tbtc]

Back on topic, as someone who grew up in privatisation, and who's image of the railway is EWS livered class 37s, unbranded class 158s and "Dynamic Lines" FGW HSTS, looking at railway photo albums of BR days, or watching YouTube videos of train activity in Rugby in 1988, the railway under BR looks a million times more interesting than the system we have today. A hodge-podge of faceless organisations and the same utilitarian rolling stock

The same could be said of BR in the 1980s/1990s, most loco hauled services replaced by DMUs/ EMUs/ HSTs, and most loco hauled services that remained used just two classes of engine (37s/47s) - hundreds of 150/156/158s - it'd have happened without privatisation, it was happening before privatisation.

I think the underlying question is; do people have a problem with privatisation in principle, or is it just the loss of the "BR feel"? Would people have preffered a BR Plc or a Intercity/Network SouthEast Ltd as Cecil Parkinson wanted?

Interesting question - the pro-BR camp seems split between people who want everything to be the same (e.g. one blue livery on everything) and those who liked the colour and variety of the late 1980s/early 1990s - but there was no reason that the Government didn't insist that the NSE franchises retained the same colour scheme - if people's main bone of contention is that they liked NSE but don't like modern liveries that change when the franchise does then that's not anti-privatisation per-se, it's more a case of liveries being the most important thing to them!

 

[WesternLancer]

The Treasury don’t like capital spending - getting the private sector to pay for all that and then paying higher operational spending to pay them back is much nicer for them.
Politicians like it because you can announce huge capital schemes (billions on trains etc) that you don’t have to pay for - you just committed the next 30 years of governments to paying for it.

Yes, point very well made!

Interesting question - the pro-BR camp seems split between people who want everything to be the same (e.g. one blue livery on everything) and those who liked the colour and variety of the late 1980s/early 1990s - but there was no reason that the Government didn't insist that the NSE franchises retained the same colour scheme - if people's main bone of contention is that they liked NSE but don't like modern liveries that change when the franchise does then that's not anti-privatisation per-se, it's more a case of liveries being the most important thing to them!

Interestingly the only occasion I can really recall when what might be termed a livery related issue arose in respect of transport privatization, was when London buses were on the privatization list and the Tories accepted the lobbying that resulted in a uniform predominantly red bus fleet - instead of the rainbow sets of private operators colour schemes that would otherwise have probably emerged, and which many commentators argued should not be allowed to happen.

 

[Irascible]

I can't help thinking that the "modern shiny nation" built on computers and financial markets is a house of cards.

At the risk of going very off-topic, being built around public share-trading & financial markets in general is not a modern concept, and crashes big enough to cause misery are not a modern problem either. I guess a discussion of the best model to allow competition but keep enough resilience so you don't wipe your industry out in a bad patch *is* tangentially on-topic when we're talking about rail privatisation though ...

The state of the railways is an obvious reflection of the economy, & the state of it in the 70s was a very good reflection of post-imperial decay, I'd say.

 

[Meerkat]

The state of the railways is an obvious reflection of the economy, & the state of it in the 70s was a very good reflection of post-imperial decay, I'd say.

I would say post-socialist decay myself but I‘m probably on a lonely soapbox!

 

[GRALISTAIR]

I would say post-socialist decay myself but I‘m probably on a lonely soapbox!

When you look what got done 1979-1997 despite obstacles including a channel tunnel getting built and an electrification program that was amazing, I will join you on that soapbox.

 

[LMS 4F]

As a regular user of the Bedford to St Pancras service on Sunday nights on the late 1960s going back to camp I never bothered with looking at times. It was a case of wait and see what turned up and get on. The general thought was that on a Sunday the system or that bit of it was run by a porter on a rotation so they all had a go.
We didn’t bother with the train to the camp in Tidworth because some enterprising local ran a bus that was cheaper, later and direct to our camp.
Not good memories of BR in that era.

 

[Fireless]

There is quite a similar attitude towards the Bundesbahn/Reichsbahn (former western german and eastern german state railways which were reformed into the DB AG in 1994) amongst many railwaypeople in Germany with the main argument being that it was one railway with a common goal (safe, punctual and economic operation) instead of various independent (sometimes even competing) companies running on the same infrastructure (even the DB AG is formed of a lot of different subsidaries) for profit.

 

[Ashley Hill]

One thing that I think hasn't been mentioned (apologies if it has) was the camaraderie and variety of work in BR.
You worked for one company and looked out for each other. You could say hello to a PW bloke as easily as you could to a parcel porter or passing fitter and get a reply. You knew crews from other depots and work alongside them. You could be on a freight job one day,a local passenger the next and a postal the day after. Nowadays instead of a big depot there's several TOCs with separate messrooms and never the twain shall meet. You're encouraged to not only to report your mates but also yourself. Say hello to somebody outside of your company and you may get a grunt back unless they're ex BR themselves and you'll get a cheery hello. Traction wise your now stuck with various versions of DMUs/EMUs on the passenger side or mainly 66s on frieght.
We also had collective bargaining so generally all grades had the same pay and conditions across the country. So yes I do look back at BR with rose tinted glasses.

 

[Richard Bishop]

No, there were a pool of 4(?) Newton Heath-allocated Class 158s that did 3 trains per day Manchester Airport-Scotland plus 1-2 Liverpool-Scotland trains. This was roughly between about 1994 and 1998-ish, and were Intercity/Virgin Cross Country services (but in the standard 'Express' grey/beige livery).

Units were 158748-158751 might have been a couple of others at various times.

 

[Ianno87]

One thing that I think hasn't been mentioned (apologies if it has) was the camaraderie and variety of work in BR.
You worked for one company and looked out for each other.

That's a bit of a double edged sword. No doubt some unofficial practices went under the radar as 'the done thing' that would not be deemed acceptable today.

"Reporting your mates" is fine providing its done openly in an environment where this is free of potential retribution. It is a poor environment where calling out unsafe practices is seen as a bad thing, or where there are perceived negative consequences of "doing the right thing".

 

[JonathanH]

Units were 158748-158751 might have been a couple of others at various times.

Five - 158747 to 158751 as posted elsewhere in this thread.

By the time the fleet was fully introduced, the allocations were
158701-158746 ScotRail
158747-158779 North East
158780-158797 Central
158798-158814 North East (3-car)
158815-158841 Wales & West (Perkins engines)
158842-158862 Central (Perkins engines)
158863-158872 Wales & West (400hp)
158901-158910 West Yorkshire

Subsequently, around 1994, 158747-158751 were released to Intercity Cross Country, 158752-158759 went to North West to run North Wales services (having been carved out of the North East (Neville Hill / Heaton) allocation). By the time of privatisation, 158842 had moved to Wales & West. The next changes didn't really happen until the 170s came.

 

[peteb]

Not exactly rose tinted but they used to bend the rules a bit more before profit drove the business and health and safety became paramount. Now the latter I can understand but the former had its benefits, eg: paying cash for breakfast in 1st class on a student 2nd class ticket and being allowed to remain there for the rest of a 120 mile journey with no bother from the conductor. Also getting one or two mainline cab rides in the 1980s, most notably Euston to Rugby in a class 86, something I'll never forget; even a ride in the cab of a 37 on a track laying train, all completely unthinkable nowadays I suppose. Just as being invited into the Royal Brunei 767 cockpit as we passed over the equator on my way to Australia in 1995 is but a memory now - we live in a different world.

 

[Ianno87]

Not exactly rose tinted but they used to bend the rules a bit more before profit drove the business and health and safety became paramount. Now the latter I can understand but the former had its benefits, eg: paying cash for breakfast in 1st class on a student 2nd class ticket and being allowed to remain there for the rest of a 120 mile journey with no bother from the conductor. Also getting one or two mainline cab rides in the 1980s, most notably Euston to Rugby in a class 86, something I'll never forget; even a ride in the cab of a 37 on a track laying train, all completely unthinkable nowadays I suppose. Just as being invited into the Royal Brunei 767 cockpit as we passed over the equator on my way to Australia in 1995 is but a memory now - we live in a different world.

Ah yes, 7 year old me (plus my brother) were invited into the cab of a Class 305 from Manchester Piccadilly to Manchester Airport. The driver even let us have a go at the controls as the train was moving! (I'm not joking).

Unbelievable now (just like kids being invited to see cockpits mid-flight pre-9/11).