British Rail: The Nation's Railway

Contents

Title Page

Foreword

Introduction

1   Towards National Integration

2   Some Sort of an Organisation

3   Old-Time Passenger Services and Comforts

4   Reformation I: ‘Modernisation’

5   Reformation II: A New Creed

6   In Search of an Identity

7   Speed with Comfort: A Technological Revolution

8   The Social Railway and the Commercial Railway

9   Serving the Public Right

10   The London Problem

11   A Golden Age?

12   The Safety Case

13   Disintegration

14   What did BR do for us?

Glossary

Notes

Plate Section (Mono)

Plate Section (Color)

Copyright

Foreword

By Chris Green; an ex-British

Rail Managing Director

It is easy to forget that Britain’s railways have been in private hands for many more years than in public ownership. The sweep of history reminds us that our railways were private for over a hundred years from the age of George Stephenson before being nationalised for just half a century. They now seem set for a second long spell in the private sector, but this time in a much more restrained public-private style, in which the private operators are regulated and part-funded by state institutions.

My own career straddled the public sector and public-private phases, and I found both to be equally effective in their different ways. I joined British Rail in 1965 with a strong belief that a public industry could be made to perform as well as a private company – and I believe that we eventually demonstrated this when we were set free as business sectors. However, we never found a solution to the infuriating stop-go investment funding which seems to be an inevitable feature of public sector life.

My subsequent experience in the private-public era showed that, after an appalling start, the new industry was capable of attracting levels of investment that BR could only have dreamed of. The emerging Network Rail has the stability of five-year funding agreements, whilst it escapes the old stop-go funding by being allowed to raise debt in the private market. Its performance is also closely regulated by an independent Office of Rail Regulation, whilst the Department for Transport holds train companies to their legally binding franchise commitments.

Tanya Jackson’s new book takes us through this dramatic seesaw history of railway ownership from the pioneering days of the mid-nineteenth century to the becalming of the industry in the Great Depression. Then on to the high-minded rail nationalisation of 1945 to the golden age of the business sectors. And finally back to today’s more sophisticated compromise of private operation with public regulation.

Her well-researched book captures the atmosphere of Victorian travel perfectly, from the outrageous early extremes between first- and third-class travel to the huge human efforts that went into delivering an ever more complex and labour-intensive service. She reminds us how travel habits changed almost imperceptibly up to the Second World War with the gradual introduction of corridor coaches – and the means of reaching a toilet at last – electric lighting, the end of slip coaches, not to mention railway porters and closed compartments. The Great Depression saw the private companies unable to provide investment and becoming penniless by the end of the Second World War.

She then turns to the half century of the nationalised railways through which many of her readers have lived. She rightly reminds us that nationalisation brought a gigantic modernisation plan worth £25 billion in today’s money – which had been unavailable to the Big Four. She then traces how this was squandered, with the result that Whitehall lost confidence in rail travel and abandoned rail to Dr Beeching whilst it diverted investment to the motorways.

British Rail did however belatedly get its act together in its final decade when it entered a golden age in which lively new brands such as InterCity, ScotRail and Network SouthEast appeared, bringing with them household names such as Inter-City 125, Sprinters, Networkers, Railcards, Travelcards and Savers.

Tanya Jackson concludes her scholarly narrative with a look at the current era, starting with the Big Bang which fragmented the industry into a hundred companies. She traces the appalling start that resulted in a spate of accidents before politicians and the rail industry managed to work successfully together just in time. There can now be no doubt today that we are living in a new golden era of rail on a scale that we have not seen since the mid-nineteenth century boom.

Passenger travel in Britain has doubled in the fifteen years since privatisation and has now reached unprecedented levels and is predicted to keep on growing. The big change is that Whitehall is now backing rail as a business with a future again and there seems to be all-party agreement that long-term investment is needed to develop rail capacity to meet and encourage the growth trend.

The future of the railway looks better in 2013 than it has done in any period since the nineteenth century – when the industry was untroubled by road or air competition. This book offers a timely review of the roller coaster that the industry has had to ride since the 1830s to get to this stable and encouraging position.

Introduction

This book started out with the working title of British Rail: A Passenger’s Journey, because it is an account of passenger services on British Rail. In discussions with the publisher it was agreed that that the original title was slightly confusing and didn’t really explain what the book was about. So I suggested British Rail: The Nation’s Railway, as I had always wanted the book to show BR as a national asset, as ‘the people’s railway’, one that served the entire country. The focus of the book, however, remains on passenger services.

It could be argued that this is quite appropriate since one of the most important changes that came about in the BR era was that the British railway system became predominantly a passenger railway, with freight very much in decline. The point to be made is that the enthusiast’s habitual focus on the Beeching cuts and the demise of steam traction has hidden a much more significant story of the railways and their part in our wider social history. The time of BR was to see a revolution in the way we used the railways, and the way in which the railways were changed to suit modern needs and conditions. That is what the following is really about.

Research for this book really started when I was appointed British Rail carriage steward of the Historical Model Railway Society. That is an odd story in itself, as initially I applied for another stewardship. Two of these became vacant at once: the ‘private owner wagon stewardship’ and the ‘carriage stewardship’. Having had a lifelong interest in private owner wagons I wrote to the committee offering to fill that post, only to be told that, very unusually, two people – myself and another – had applied. They pointed out that often no volunteers came forward to fill such posts. I took this as a subtle hint that the carriage steward vacancy was uncontested. As I am also interested in the subject of railway carriages and passenger services on British Rail, and also wanted to appear accommodating, I withdrew my application for the wagon stewardship and applied to be British Rail carriage steward. It has all worked out very well, I think. My ‘rival’ for the PO wagon stewardship turned out to be none other than John A. Arkell, someone who already knew far more about PO wagons than I did then, or indeed possibly had more knowledge on that subject than I ever will. I hope that I have made myself useful as British Rail carriage steward during my time in the post.

Soon after I found myself part of the Historical Model Railway Society (HMRS) team that helped sort the British Rail Board residuary archive at Porchester Road. This was a colossal task in which the National Archives, the National Railway Museum and then the HMRS took turns respectively to record historically significant material from the mass accumulated by BR. I had my hands on real railway history at last! It is impossible to describe the volume of material we sorted through or to portray the atmosphere at Porchester Road archive, a dim Victorian building with bars on the windows, reminiscent of a prison, or perhaps a workhouse, or even possibly an asylum! It had originally been constructed by the Great Western Railway right beside the main line from Paddington. It is a great shame that the archive was broken up (the building has now been converted to luxury flats) but at least it has made much of the useful material accessible to future generations. The rest – we couldn’t save it all – had to be destroyed, and I am sure I am not the only one who still has nightmares about that. Those were the rules – there was no fourth sift. Taking it home was not an option, but it was tempting.

One of the most important resources available to me for this book was a set of copies of Modern Railways, dating from the time the magazine changed its name from Trains Illustrated towards the end of the BR era. A large part of the collection – whole years – was donated to me by Alan Norris of Woking Railway Correspondence and Travel Society (RCTS), to whom I am very grateful indeed.

I had always had great respect for Modern Railways as both a popular magazine and one which carried serious professional insight into the industry, but that view was reconfirmed when I started turning the pages. In his 100 defining Aspects of BR, Roger Ford listed Modern Railways itself as number 100. As someone who helped make the magazine what it is, some might think him biased in his praise, but I can quote his words with objectivity: ‘In turn enthusiastic supporter, candid friend or severe critic, this magazine grew up with BR. In return the railway used these pages to fly kites, grind axes or pursue vendettas. For 34 years all BR life was there.’

Thanks are due to James Abbott, the current editor of Modern Railways, who gave me carte blanche to quote from the magazine. Thanks are also due to the publishers who have given me permission to quote from their works, particularly Ian Allan Publishing Ltd who have been most gracious in their assistance.

Thanks are also most certainly due to the Railways Archive http://www.railwaysarchive.co.uk/ which has made the task of accessing material so very much easier than it would have been. Many thanks also to many people, and I am not sure I have remembered them all in the list below – mea culpa.

Colin Divall; Susan Major; Terry Gourvish; Alan Norris of Woking RCTS; Malcolm Peakman; Bob Reid; Robert Carroll; Ashley Butlin; Irene Rabbitts of Woking RCTS; Adrian Vaughan; Chris Green; Peter Rayner; Terry Silcock (who has done sterling work for years as RCTS librarian); Stephen Poole; Helena Wojtczak; Howard Sprenger; Graham Feakins; Mark Brinton; Neil Flower; Douglas Lindsay; Adrian Curtis; Mike Robinson; Kit Spackman; David Halfpenny; John Atkinson; Ernest Bate; Jim Snowdon; Geoffrey Coward; Sophia Brothers of Science and Society Picture Library; Bill Bedford; Colin Boocock; Laurie Mack; Jonathan Wagstaff; Peter Stanton; Richard Gaff; Geoff Noakes; Hesham Gneady; Adrian Curtis; Anthony McDiarmid; Lawrence Mack.

The company stewards of the Historical Model Railway Society, particularly John Lewis, Paul Bartlett, Ivor Lewis, many members of the RCTS, the Southern email group, the LMS email group, and the Trackwork email group.

Indexing with the aid of PDF Index Generator: http://www.pdfindexgenerator.com.

Apologies to anyone I should have thanked but have overlooked.

1

Towards National Integration

By 1851, just twenty years after the opening of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway, over 6,000 route miles of railway had been constructed in the British Isles. A transport system connecting most of the major towns and cities of the United Kingdom had come into being within the lifetime of a single generation. In that year thousands of people from all over Britain travelled to the Great Exhibition by special excursion trains. The success of the Great Exhibition would not have been possible without the railways,¹ nor would the many railways then operating the system have been able to cope with the task had there not been an organisational system in place.

How had this happened? In the 1830s it was not at all certain that the railways then constructed would link up physically, let alone that railway companies would co-operate with each other in providing a national service. There had been at least one visionary seeing the need for a national system. The monomaniac Thomas Gray – a suitable candidate for the title of the world’s first railway anorak – had published a series of pamphlets urging ‘the establishment of a General Iron Rail-way’ with lines running throughout the nation. Yet the early engineers created railways that didn’t link up, and sometimes were of different gauges; not only was there Brunel’s broad gauge of 7ft ¼in but there was also the 5ft gauge (until 1844) of the Eastern Counties Railway. Brunel arrogantly predicted that there would be no need for his Great Western Railway to exchange vehicles with other companies, as it would be entirely dominant in the west of England.

In Britain there was no planning of the railway system. Instead, railway schemes were each considered individually, supposedly each on its own merits. They were initiated by private individuals or companies sponsoring a private bill in parliament. Parliamentary powers were needed to compulsorily purchase other people’s land. Private bills were by tradition considered by committees with little or no debate in the actual House. Only the committee members voted to pass the bill and, contrary to the norm of today, they were picked because they had a specific interest (stake) in the matters concerned – in other words, they held constituencies local to where the railway was to be built, or were involved with the railway company itself. This may seem objectionable to modern eyes but contemporaries, such as the Prime Minister, Peel, were willing to defend this robustly. In 1844 a rule change prevented MPs whose constituents were affected by proposals from participating, but that just left those with financial interests in the schemes to fix matters amongst themselves.²

The committees saw themselves primarily as umpires between the interests of the landowners whose properties were to be affected and the railway companies themselves. Apart from that the main aim seems to have been to guarantee the fairness of tolls upon the railway. This was because it was originally envisaged that the railways would be run like the existing turnpikes and tramways, such as the failed Surrey Iron Railway. Railways were simply a new type of road upon which all would be able to drive their vehicles, as long as the appropriate amount was paid to the company that owned it. In 1840 a parliamentary committee recognised the impossibility of this:

The intention of parliament cannot be carried into effect; the payment of tolls is only a very small part of the arrangement necessary to open railroads to public competition; any person with the mere authority to place an engine or carriages on a railway would be practically unable to supply his engine with water, or to take up and set down passengers … The safety of the public also required that upon every railway there should be one system of management under one superintending authority. On this account it is necessary that the company should possess a complete control over their line of road although they should thereby acquire a complete monopoly …³

But this didn’t change anything in the way that railways were authorised.

Mark Casson finds that parliamentary decision-making tended to the creation of the worst possible options. Main trunk routes could find themselves compelled to have several additional branch lines tacked on and this created inefficient hubs which were poor value in distributing traffic. Lines that should have been built sometimes weren’t because they faced fierce opposition from existing powerful interests. Such a case was the proposal for a line from Oxford to Cheltenham. The GWR put up its own rival scheme, never undertaken. On the other hand, the system favoured aristocrats seeking to build uneconomic ‘vanity lines’ for their own purposes – the Lewes–East Grinstead ‘Bluebell’ line would be a good example here. Competition between railways led to the creation of surplus hubs, some in locations remote from places actually served.⁴

Sometimes the process of getting a bill through parliament did forge successful alliances to allow successful proposals and this resulted in useful lines, such as the Great Northern and its loop line through South Yorkshire and Lincolnshire, but it also resulted in multiple lines between those same places. In theory this should at least have brought the virtue of competition, but, as we shall see, the railways did their best to work together to avoid undercutting one another.

All this activity prompted the following criticism, addressed to Robert Peel in 1837:

the great mistake … consists in viewing these vast projects as local measures, and in referring them to local committees. No one can doubt that they are far too important in a national point of view to be so considered. It is in fact this very thing which leads to the infusion of a local, consequently a restricted and not infrequently a selfish and exclusive, spirit in these undertakings.⁵

There was one attempt to scrutinise the bills presented to parliament and recommend the best according to an overall plan. During the winter of 1844 Lord Dalhousie, then President of the Board of Trade, had chaired a committee sorting through and recommending which railway bills should be authorised and which should not. The final say was parliament’s, however, and this was where the plan fell through. Dalhousie opposed the extension of the broad gauge into the Midlands, yet the Oxford, Worcester and Wolverhampton Railway (OWW) wished to be a broad-gauge line. When it came to a vote the Prime Minister, Peel, voted for the OWW, leading Dalhousie to resign in objection to his recommendation being ignored. The idea of planning Britain’s railway system outside the chaos of parliament’s bill-by-bill approach vanished with him. Ironically, the OWW subsequently changed its mind and was built as a 4ft 8½in gauge line. The failure of Dalhousie’s plans happened right before the ‘Great Mania’ – the second and most serious major influx of railway bills – when parliament seriously needed some guidance on which schemes to approve.

As early as 1844 the chairman of the London and Birmingham railway, George Carr Glyn, was to look back with regret and comment ‘if a new start were being made, I would be for a state system’.⁶

Some commentators have put the lack of government guidance and intervention down to the trend of laissez-faire economics popular at that time, but Henry Parris, who made a study of the parliamentary proceedings, wrote that ‘Nothing is more striking in these debates than the infrequency with which the voice of economic orthodoxy is heard.’⁷ The conflicting causes of protecting the rights of landowners and free trade were themselves the subject of a wider national debate that was to result in the split of the old Tory party. Another possibility suggested is that victory in the Napoleonic wars was considered to have demonstrated the superiority of British liberty over state control.⁸

If parliament’s approach to the construction of the railway system was disorganised, then its attempts to regulate them was laggardly. The first major piece of legislation was the Railway Regulation Act of 1840. This was not a government bill but was introduced on behalf of a select committee that had been appointed in 1839 as a result of traders’ protests at the monopolistic behaviour of the London and Birmingham Railway Company. The act authorised the Board of Trade to appoint inspectors of railways and require companies to give the board one month’s notice before a railway was opened. In 1842 a further act allowed the board to suspend the opening of a line if it wasn’t satisfactory. Serious accidents were made reportable and drunkenness by staff constituted an offence.

It was in 1843 that the first published call for railway nationalisation emerged. This was a book entitled Railway Reform, written by William Galt. Galt was actually a proponent of laissez-faire, but excluded the railways from the free market, seeing them instead as a basic service that the state should provide to all.⁹ Galt was a witness before Gladstone’s Select Committee on the railways in February 1844, and as a result a railway bill was published giving the state the power to purchase any railway fifteen years after its inauguration, for a sum equating to twenty-five years of the net profits accrued by the railway. In the Commons this was changed to a clause enabling the government to purchase railways established after 1845, but not allowing this before 1 January 1866, and for a payment amounting to twenty-five years’ profits averaged over the three preceding years. This power was never invoked, but there could have been little point in the government purchasing a fraction of the system anyway. Another proposal was passed, and this gave the act the alternative title of the ‘cheap trains Act’. It required the railways to run workmen’s trains, one in each direction once a day, at a fare of not more than a penny-a-mile and at a minimum speed of 12mph. It also set minimum standards for passenger carriages, including the requirement that they had roofs.

In 1845, faced with an upsurge of railway bills, parliament passed the Railway Clauses Consolidation Act, which set out standard clauses to be inserted into all new railway acts. This was at least a form of standardisation, but it left a number of routes that were authorised on a different basis.

In the early days of the railways passengers were the prime users of trains, as opposed to freight, but there was already concern for those using railways to transport goods. The Common Law had set out the role of a Common Carrier, with various duties and responsibilities, but this was largely dispensed with by the Carriers Act of 1830, which set such a role on a statutory footing. It was never tested in court whether this act applied to the railways, so, as the railways quickly became a dominant monopoly, parliament made sure of the railways’ duties.¹⁰ Section 90 of the Railways Clauses Consolidation Act had required that railways should treat customers equally, but of course it only applied to railways built after 1845. ‘Cardwell’s Act’ – officially the Railway and Canal Traffic Act 1854 – stated that they should not ‘make or give any undue or unreasonable preference or advantage to or in favour of any particular person or company, or any particular description of traffic …’¹¹ The companies now had to ‘afford all reasonable facilities for the receiving and forwarding and delivering of traffic …’ In other words, railways now had to provide suitable facilities to carry whatever was presented to them unless particular exceptions were made. An act of 1868 required that charges be ‘disintegrated’ – meaning that the railways had to be open about what they were charging for and itemise their bills. A further act of 1873 compelled the publication of all rates in force and their disintegration upon request by any interested person. A body of ‘Railway Commissioners’ was also set up, with the purpose of hearing cases of dispute over railway charges and their obligations.

A further Railway and Canal Traffic Act was passed in 1888, after two select committees reported. This set up the Commissioners on a permanent basis and renamed them the ‘Railway and Canal Commission’. This was the prototype body of the Transport Tribunal that oversaw the pricing structure through much of the British Railways era. At a time when the railways were in a monopoly position this affected them little, but later, when they faced competition, restrictions on pricing led to protests from the railways that the law was unfair.

Parliament was very slow to regulate in terms of safety. Numerous horrific accidents occurred whilst it turned its face against interference in the railways’ affairs. The number of company directors in parliament, or the number of MPs who became company directors, is a plausible explanation for this, but there were also technical disagreements over which safety devices should be applied. (The companies couldn’t even agree over what type of couplings should be used.) Sometimes these issues boiled down to self-interest as well; for instance, several senior locomotive engineers in the companies had their own patents on braking systems.

In the mid-1860s two high-profile murders aboard trains, in successive years, led to the adoption of a standard system whereby passengers aboard trains could raise the alarm. In 1868 parliament finally made such a system compulsory on all passenger trains.

But it took the Armagh disaster of 1889 to seriously change parliament’s attitude regarding the need for regulation to prevent accidents. A public outcry ensued after this event and parliament was finally stirred to regulate.

By this time technology existed to enable the brakes on each vehicle of a train to be controlled from the locomotive or guard’s van, and to automatically apply the brakes if the vehicle became detached from the train, or if some other fault occurred with the braking. This was now made compulsory in the Regulation Act of 1889, as also was block signalling and interlocking of points and signals.

Even so, the act did not specify which type of brake needed to be fitted, only that it needed to be automatic and had to be of a type approved of by the Board of Trade (BoT). Here the BoT could have imposed uniformity by choosing only to approve one type, but it did not. The Westinghouse air brake and the vacuum brake were both approved. Most companies opted for the simpler vacuum brake, but some, like the London, Brighton and South Coast Railway, opted for the air brake. This inevitably led to problems with the interworking of stock. Another issue that arose was that, after all this negotiation, the companies were unable to agree on the size and position of the connecting hoses on stock.

One most important piece of legislation parliament did manage to implement was the Railway Clearing House Act of 1850. This gave statutory recognition to the Railway Clearing House (RCH), the most important unifying organisation of the British railway system until the creation of British Railways.¹²

Originally formed by the companies in 1842, the RCH was inspired by a similar organisation that facilitated stagecoach travel. This was based at the Golden Cross near Charing Cross in London and enabled accounts to be settled between stagecoach companies. Tickets sold by one stagecoach company often authorised passengers to use the coach of another company on a part of their journey. Revenues accrued were divided between the companies on a mileage basis through the Clearing House. Such a system greatly aided travel and the railways realised they needed something similar.

The RCH pioneered a ticketing system to facilitate through travel. This was devised by Thomas Edmondson. It involved a robust form of ticket made of card and measuring 1¼in by 2¼in. Issued complete with serial numbers and date-stamped, the ticket was a token in an accounting circle, being carried by the passenger throughout the length of the journey; it authorised travel until it was surrendered to the ticket collector at the end. Then it was bundled up with others to be sent to the accounting department. If the passenger’s journey had been confined solely to the lines of the ticket’s issuing company, then its journey ended there; if not it went to the Clearing House for an ‘inquest’ to determine the correct apportioning of revenues due.¹³ The Edmondson system required that stations be ‘closed’. This meant that no one was allowed on to or off the platforms of a station without a ticket check, or surrendering a ticket at the end of the journey. This system was essentially for the apportioning of revenues when many companies existed, but survived well into the BR era, ‘open’ stations only becoming common as the level of staff dwindled. Main-line stations did not become open until the 1980s, and Southern terminals at Waterloo still have a ticket check at barriers.

The Clearing House adopted the Edmondson system and made it compulsory for all members. In doing so they achieved their aim of enabling through booking from one company to another, to yet another, wherever the passenger needed to go.

By 1845 more than half a million people had been booked straight through to their destinations at great convenience to themselves and minimal cost to the companies.¹⁴ The Clearing House also solved the problem of through coaches, proving that Brunel was wrong in his belief that companies would not trust their carriages and wagons in the hands of others. From January 1842 a system of charging by the mile was introduced, by which one company would in effect ‘hire’ a coach from a foreign railway when it passed onto its rails. Now customers could relax and get comfortable in their carriage, since it would take them for the whole journey, whichever railway’s line they were to end up on. As we shall note later, that is a level of comfort that has been dispensed with. Similar arrangements allowed freight wagons to travel onto rival lines. There were, inevitably, some disputes about accuracy of charges centring on such things as the accuracy of maps but, on the whole, thanks to the RCH, sanity had broken out and the system had passed a most essential hurdle in integration. As well as providing the facilities for revenues to be distributed between the companies it also provided a neutral ground where managers of different companies could meet and sort out matters of mutual interest or settle disputes.

From 1851 the RCH played an important part in organising excursion traffic, with the Great Exhibition functioning as the spur and Joseph Paxton himself urging matters be taken in hand. Excursions had been a feature of the railways since at least the early 1840s, but from 1851 the trade grew with the assistance of the Clearing House. Many would have got their first experience of rail travel on a journey to the Great Exhibition.¹⁵

Although Thomas Cook is usually credited as being the inventor of the railway excursion there are other candidates. Cook’s clientele were the middle classes, but cheap trips were also offered by such entrepreneurs as Henry Marcus, who served as agent for the LNWR and was proclaimed as the ‘father of cheap trips’ in a later testimonial.¹⁶ The cheap excursion was to be a feature of the railway system for well over a hundred years, until they were finally abandoned in the profit-driven 1980s.

To further facilitate through services from 1850 the RCH co-ordinated time-tables between the companies at monthly meetings, an arrangement that stayed in place until nationalisation. Given this you would have thought that the publication of a national timetable would have been possible and that the RCH would have been the organising body, but that was not so. It was left up to private individuals and Bradshaw was just one of several publishers who provided such a guide.

In September 1847 the Clearing House Committee resolved to recommend that its members adopt Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) as a standard. Prior to this every town in the country had its own local time, based on the position of the sun at that location. This standardisation of time was speedily adopted by the members of the RCH. Even the GWR, not yet a member of the Clearing House, adopted GMT by the early 1850s. Clock towers sprang up across Britain as time became a ‘modern’ preoccupation.¹⁷

The RCH could and should have also been a forum where important safety measures were agreed but here the individuality and resistance of its member companies meant that little headway was made in an area that did not promise to increase profits. Such issues would have to wait – and wait – on parliament for regulation.

What the Clearing House did achieve though, was to bring about a (sort of) universal Rule Book (note the capitals, it is the Rule Book).

For those unfamiliar with the railway Rule Book, it is the basic regulatory document upon the railway, laying out regulations on conduct, safety, signalling and basic working practices whilst operating lines and trains. The railways of Britain, having grown up individually, were very inconsistent in terms of things like signalling practice, and such variations led to accidents. A classic example is that red discs were used on some railways to indicate proceed, while the same colour discs were displayed by other companies to indicate danger.

The first Rule Book issued by the RCH started out amidst concerns regarding crews’ working trains over ‘foreign’ lines, that is, lines of another company where they would otherwise have to be issued with that company’s rule book as well as that of the company they worked for. Thus was born the ‘Rules of Working Over Foreign Lines’. It was to serve as an appendix to be bound in with the companies’ own Rule Books and was drafted so as to ‘avoid any interference with existing rules’.¹⁸

This situation did not last for much longer (too long, of course, for those who died in the intervening time). By 1874 there had been enough carnage to even ruffle parliament, which was threatening legislation. In March 1874 the General Managers’ Conference approved a far more comprehensive set of rules, this time expressed in authoritative terms. Although individual peculiarities remained, the RCH rules now had supremacy over those of individual companies.

One of the most debatable aspects of the RCH was its function in stifling competition amongst the railways – or in ensuring the survival of competing services – you can take your pick.

The RCH became the mechanism by which the railways came together and agreed on rates and fares, this co-operation sometimes having the effect of eliminating competition between them.

The Select Committee of 1872 on Railway and Canal Amalgamations stated that:

There has on different occasion been effectual competition between railway companies in the matter of charges, and it is probable that the charges now made still bear the traces of that competition. But it may be taken as a general rule that there is now no active competition between different railways in the matter of rates and fares.¹⁹

It seems that early on the general managers recognised a truth that was to be summed up, many years later, by Sir W. Guy Granet, general manager of the Midland Railway, ‘The paradoxical position under the rule of unlimited competition is that competition must be restricted or ruin will inevitably follow.’²⁰

In order to maintain some sort of competition parliament resisted, to some degree, attempts to amalgamate companies. Some amalgamations made sense, such as the one that created the LNWR – giving single control to the main trunk line from London to Manchester to Birmingham (also known as the West Coast Main Line) and this was authorised in 1846 – the first big merger. Other attempted mergers were thwarted as they made little sense apart from preventing competition. Nevertheless, there was a gradual move towards combining operations from larger companies. An alternative was the creation of joint lines which, as Mark Casson points out, were often attempts by multiple companies to poach a rival’s traffic. Where competition did break out – as between the South Eastern Railway and the London Chatham and Dover Railway (LCDR), the results were not necessarily for the good. Parliament had to accept a forced marriage of the two companies when the LCDR came close to bankruptcy. The Midland Railway,