WHAT THE DOCTOR ORDERED DR. BEECHING’S FOUR YEARS WITH BRITAIN’S RAILWAYS

Press, Volume CIV, Issue 30762, 28 May 1965, Page 10

WHAT THE DOCTOR ORDERED DR. BEECHING’S FOUR YEARS WITH BRITAIN’S RAILWAYS

IBy

ERIC JACOBS

in the ‘■Guardian." Manchester!

(Reprinted by arrangement)

If the last General Election had any single theme it was that of modernisation. All three major parties claimed that they alone were capable of leading Britain into a new world, and they invariably insisted that their rivals were wedded to outmoded dogma and practice. Yet when one examines the record of the two main parties on the problem of the railways over the last five years it becomes clear that neither Conservatives nor Labour have taken a consistent stand. While Conservatives have praised Dr. Beeching as the arch-moderniser and chief architect of an up-to-date transport system, individual M.P.s have opposed closures as hotly as anyone; and while Labour in Opposition consistently decned the Beeching plan—Mr Wilson called it “surgery before diagnosis”—in Government it has only applied a little light window-dressing to the plan, which has survived virtually intact.

For instance, Mr Tom Fraser, the present Minister of Transport, has said that where he authorises a closure the lines themselves may be left in place on the chance that they may one day be needed again. But in practice the track is coming up—after all, it is valuable scrap and the railways are still a long way from solvency. Conversely, many Tory M.P.s who refused to declare themselves before the election are now reported to be lining up behind the National Council for Inland Transport, the chief rallying point of railway enthusiasts and opponents of Dr. Beeching. Centre Of The Fuss For the last four years Dr. Beeching has stood at the centre of all the fuss. Committed to no party—he has in his time voted for all three—he has come to be regarded as the advance prophet of the technological revolution, the prototypical new man and admired or hated accordingly. Since he is due to return to Imperial Chemicals Industries at the end of this month, and the last major event of his regime—publication of the railways’ annual report for 1964—is to be unveiled this week, it is pertinent to examine the record of the railways since he took over in June, 1961. The traveller has not found conditions improved dramatically. There are now some 2000 fewer miles of track for him to travel over and he must still face the prospect of protracted, meandering journeys devised to avoid clashes with electrification and track renewal schemes. And, in so far as the comfort and cleanliness of the trip has improved, most of the credit must go to the start on dieselisation made by Dr. Beeching’s predecessors in their “Modernisation Plan” of 1954. In fact most of the recent improvements have occurred within the railways’ organisation itself, and the most important of these has been within the railways’ corps of management. There can be little doubt that when Dr. Beeching arrived at railways’ headquarters management was suffering from years, even decades, of petrified thinking. Since no really

radical questioning into the aims and size of the railways had been made for so long, managers had tended to become mere administrators of the status quo. Little attempt was made to sell the railways; competition with other kinds of transport had traditionally taken the form of buying into them or lobbying so that the terms of competition would be adjusted in the railways’ favour. The man who sold railways to business was characteristically a clerk who tended to arrive on a bicycle at the back door. Men From Industry It was one of Dr. Beeching’s primary aims to change all this. He brought in about twenty men from private industry to senior posts and introduced a register through which the careers of some 6000 railway officials are traced and mapped. A closer system of budgetary control has been introduced so ths’ a far greater degree of cost consciousness has been spread down through descending levels of railway management. Indeed the whole structure of railway organisation has being remodelled by the 1962 Transport Act, for which Dr. Beeching was largely responsible. Conservative Governments have consistently strained after a return to a form of organisation which most nearly matched the old private company structure. They may not have wanted the railway regions actually to compete against each other, but they were certainly pleased to think that waggons might be decked out in regional liveries and that porters might wear different styles of hat. Dr. Beeching at once saw the flaw in this. He realised that fundamentally the railways only had one thing to sell —transport—and that it needed a strong central control if it was to do this properly. Instead of a board consisting largely of lobbying regional chairmen on the British Transport Commission model, Dr. Beeching opted for a functionally composed board, and at regional level, boards firmly under the control of full-time railwaymen. Bringing functional control to

the centre helped not only to secure large long-term orders, but also eliminated waste in the notoriously poor use made of waggons and workshops, and in uncoordinated purchasing. Perhaps Dr. Beeching's other important contribution has been to instigate basic and extensive research into the traffic the railways carry now or might be expected to win if they went out strenuously after it. The studies began immediately Dr. Beeching took office in 1961, led to the “Reshaping Report" and the recent study on the future of trunk routes, and continue on the prospects for the intercity liner trains. No such fundamental questioning had been undertaken by the railways or any other transport undertaking in Britain, and as a result the railways are now in the position of being able to see their prospects very much more clearly.

Track Costs Then there is the question of track costs. Until the relative true costs of roads and railway lines have been established, It will be impossible for any Government to apportion the money for transport investment economically. But the Ministry of Transport refused to bother about the problem and the Geddes Committee, which is examining the present system of vehicle licensing, also declined. Dr. Beeching therefor weighed in with a study of his own which immediately aroused the hostility of the Ministry and road haulage interests when it was published last year. It was almost certainly biased in favour of railways (rather from ignorance than intent), but it served Dr. Beeching's main purpose, which was to provoke an authoritative body into examining and pronouncing on the question once and for all. This Lord Hinton is now supposed to be doing as the Minister's adviser.

As Dr. Beeching leaves the railways, the biggest doubt immediately hanging over their future concerns the liner trains. The unions are up in arms against them—not so much for the reasons they give overtly but because the question has come to a head at the end of three years in which 100,000 railway jobs have disappeared. Liner trains are altogether new. They do not fit any other existing stock. They will run in and out of their own special terminals. They represent, in fact, a railway rarity, something which is “incompatible,” that is to say which does not fit in with all other railway stock, and consequently with railway practice extending back over decades. Grafting New On Old

It is this problem of grafting the new on to the old which Dr. Beeching has had to struggle with for the last four years. It would have been much easier to build a completely new railway system than it was to break the habits of railwaymen and the public formed over a hundred years, and so to conjure a modern system out of an old one.

It is to the credit of the new Government that it has not reversed the essentially rational features of Dr. Beeching’s plan. But when one considers that it took a grave financial, crisis on the railways to stir the then Government out of its unwillingness to do more than play at trains and when one considers the degree of opposition from unions and public alike which accompanied the Beeching reform, the prospects for modernising other laggard sections of the British economy do not look too bright.