BR did a lot of good, BR did a lot of bad - given the size of the organisation and its fiftyish year lifespan, of course there are shades of grey - and a lot of people will cherry pick the bits they want to remember to suit their political agenda.
A lot of things have to be seen against a benchmark of what was acceptable at the time - e.g. you could build a station with a few planks of wood once upon a time at the cost of 1% of what a modern station would cost and that would be okay - they could cut corners in safety/ customer service/ reliability that modern TOCs couldn't get away with but that was the way things were - not BR's fault.
I think that "the railway" will always be an easy target for people/ politicians to complain about - and "bring back BR" will always look like a simple solution, without having to explain what that would actually mean, what practical differences that would make that we couldn't do under privatisation (e.g. the Government could have cut fares and ordered new trains if they'd wanted to).
But we've seen how a few months of Government-controlled "Northern" hasn't allowed a magic wand to be waved and has actually made a few things worse (bigger Covid cuts than other TOCs, effectively scrapping some services/lines).
I think that it's a lot easier to find out about things going wrong now - you see people on the Forum (or on Twitter etc) complaining about every significant delay, you have access to exactly how late every train is - all of these things that people would have been unaware of under BR unless it happened to be a train they were on or it got mentioned in a monthly magazine that you paid for - people used to be blissfully unaware of problems.
Also, I think that BR's legacy is quite a carefully balanced one, where they seem to get praise for every improvement that was made but any negativities were the fault of the Government for not handing over enough money - so people praise the new trains BR introduced but it was the Government's fault that they only ordered two carriages for every three that they scrapped - people remember the proposals for various different types of train that BR wanted to order but blame the Government for the fact that there was only enough money to choose one option (e.g. 90s for the WCML or more Networkers for the Southern Region?).
"BR were great for ordering two coach 155s" but "it was the Government's fault that they had to be chopped into single 153s". That kind of thing.
There was a lot of "robbing Peter to pay Paul", where BR didn't have enough locos/units to go round, so would rotate some stock around the country to try to hide it.
How do you have a balanced argument when people absolve BR of blame for anything bad (singling lines when they "rationalised" junctions) and remember all of the proposals that came to naught (e.g. the Pic-Vic tunnel under Manchester).
I think that a lot of BR's reputation comes from the focus they had on marketing, design, liveries. I have a copy of that coffee table "Designed 1948-97" book that I occasionally dip into - they were really ahead of their time at this kind of thing (in an era where organisations like the National Bus Company paid little attention) - I think that BR's marketing/design was much better than the actual running of trains. But it's difficult to have a quantifiable discussion about how things compared, because there's so much emotion/politics involved - easy to moan about modern stats that show 90% punctuality on your local line but we don't have the equivalent figures from thirty/forty/fifty years ago to compare with.
The privatised railway got a lot more public money than what BR got
True, but a lot of the reasons for this are down to...
- The Government stopping cuts from being made (e.g. British Rail would have scrapped a number of failing lines by now - they were closing lines like Woodhead in the 1980s, it certainly didn't stop after the Beeching report), so deeply unprofitable lines are kept, frequencies of lines are preserved in aspic at the level that they were in the mid 1990s (e.g. BR may have turned a route like Burnley to Colne down to just a peak hour service but each new franchise sees the winning bidder having to commit to retaining the hourly frequency all day) - BR had a free hand to slash such things (Blauneu Ffestiniog would have been abandoned many years ago, if BR were able to.
- TOCs can only put up most fares once a year in line with inflation (plus one percent), rather than being able to increase fares whenever they wanted like BR were
- Construction industry costs have risen by a lot more than retail prices inflation over the past generation
- Safety standards have increased significantly, you can't get away with the practices that were acceptable in the 1980s - all of this pushes a lot of costs onto the railway
- TOCs are paying for things like "delay repay" that BR didn't have to - so of course that has to be accounted for somewhere
- Staff wages/costs have gone up by a lot more than RPI (are the people arguing privatisation has been bad suggesting that we should have carried on the conversion of lines to DOO at the rate that BR did, removed final salary pensions, imposed the same pay freezes that the rest of the public sector have had?)
Under a nationalised railway system at times of busy services their was always relief services to take the strain of the already full main services
This is the problem with these threads - people have this idealised view of BR, in which
all connections were
always held (not that trains were ever late in the first place!) and additional carriages were always rustled up at the last minute to extend any service with insufficient seats etc etc
It's true that it was considered. There was a lot of discussion around what form privatisation would take before the final version was settled on.
There's discussion about a lot of things whenever the Government come up with a "big" policy - they generally suggest several different flavours of policy (some of which will be leaked to "friendly" newspapers to gauge reactions) before they settle on a final policy to go into the manifesto or before parliament - I think people fall into this trap whenever new policies are proposed - e.g. there'll be some option in a Tory proposal to send troops in to solve any minor problem but that doesn't mean it was ever the actual policy).
Makes sense to at least review different options and be seen to reject some (in the way that, before re-open the next old railway, the Government will have to be seen to have at least paid lip service to some rather flimsy proposals) ...
...but then people "remember" that some of these and believe that a bit of "blue sky thinking" (that was only ever proposed to it could be rejected by a Government that wanted to have assessed all options) was ever a manifesto commitment or part of a White Paper.
I'm not saying privatisation has been perfect, but criticising a version of privatisation that never actually happened seems a bit of a straw man argument (when there are many serious targets that you could be aiming your fire on)
