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End of the Line by Paul Atterbury Exploring Britain's rural railways Soft Cover
End of the Line by Paul Atterbury
Exploring Britain's rural railways
Soft Cover
160 pages
Copyright 1994
CONTENTS
Introduction 6
The Esk Valley Line 8
The East Suffolk Line24
Wessex Wanderings38
The Heart of Wales Line52
The Cumbrian Coast68
West Country Branches86
The Conwy Valley Line116
The Cambrian Coast Line 128
The Far North of Scotland146
INTRODUCTION
The railways are dreadful ... Today I have come an immense distance, about 200 miles, continually changing carriages & lines.' These are typical comments from the 1851 diary of the famous Victorian architect and designer, Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin who, although dependent upon the burgeoning railway network in Britain was, like many of his contemporaries, no lover of trains. There are many references to delays caused by poor connections, inefficiency and inadequate services, and to the practical difficulties and inconveniences that were the inevitable results of a fragmented but often expensive system of independent and often localised companies.
The whole pattern of railway development through the 19th century, in Britain and elsewhere, was a steady progression towards the creation of a large network operated by a small number of major companies, able to handle the complexities of a truly national railway. The experience of the First World War proved once and for all that small companies simply could not cope, either operationally or financially, with the demands of a national network, and this resulted in the 1923 groupings that formed the big four, the Great Western, the Southern, the London, Midland & Scottish and the London & North Eastern. In the 1930s the big four, backed by continued investment and financial success, were notable for their record of achievement, quality of service and social concern. However, even they were stretched to the limits by the Second World War, and the creation of the nationalised British Railways in 1948 was the next logical step, as much for practical as for political reasons.
British Railways, who inherited a network whose labyrinthine operating techniques and huge mileage reflected decades of private ownership, found the railways' traditional traffic steadily eroded by increasing government support for roads. By the late 1950s something had to be done and Dr Beeching was brought in to impose order on a chaotic system. His rationalisation programme, carried out through the 1960s and into the early 1970s, was draconian, depriving many parts of Britain of any kind of railway service. The rural lines bore the brunt of the cuts, with social needs increasingly buried beneath government-sponsored emphasis on profits. At the same time, the whole cost structure of transport remained heavily weighted towards roads. Despite this, British Railways continued to operate a genuinely national service that maintained a balance between main lines and the surviving rural routes in the face of constantly reducing government support.
For doctrinaire political reasons that have little to do with the needs of a national network, British Rail is being sacrificed on the altar of privatisation. At a time when, on a global scale, railways are increasingly seen as the only viable land-based transport system, the British network is to be fragmented and regionalised in order that money may be made from the sale of the profitable sectors. The direct result of this has to be the reduction of services and ultimately the loss of those lines that, though socially vital, can never hope to be independently profitable. It is easy, on a map of the network, to identify the lines that are now under threat and to see that, if current policies are maintained, large of areas of Britain will be deprived of the most practical form of public transport at a time when the whole emphasis on roads is being forced by international and environmental pressure into reverse.
This book is a record of journeys on rural railways throughout Britain, an exploration of some of the lines that may soon disappear. Included are West Country branch lines, the last survivors of their type, long cross-country routes in Wessex, Wales, East Anglia and Scotland, and journeys round the coast of Cumbria and along the valley of the Esk. A common theme is the sea, with all the lines starting or finishing on the coast. It is a book about history and landscape, linking the past with the reality of the present, about people, and above all else about the last days of British Rail as a truly national network, before the enforced return to the fragmented, expensive and socially unbalanced system that Pugin knew so well.
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