“The death knell of British railways” is commonly held to have been rung by Dr Beeching in 1963 but, surprisingly, at least one writer heard it as early as 1912, claiming that “motor cars must supplant them” – despite there then being only about 150,000 slow motorised vehicles using often indirect roads.
Even the ardent automobilists at Autocar, while recognising that “the railway services are capable of vast improvement”, regarded this declaration premature.
We countered that “while the motor car is undoubtedly a rival of the railway, we still think the best results to the country at large would be obtained by a well-devised system of co-operation between the two”.
Railway companies certainly perceived the rise of self-propelled road vehicles as an existential threat. “Ninety per cent of the motor cars on the roads today are unnecessary and ought not to exist,” said 83-year-old LNER director Sir Hugh Bell in 1927, and five years later we even accused rail lobbyists of waging war.
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“The first campaign was directed against the motor bus and coach, and the present restrictions and enterprise-killing regulations are the fruits of it,” wrote Autocar. “This year we have an offensive against the motor haulage contractor, who is to be harried and irritated by such things as periodical inspection, licences to operate within areas and so on. The ancillary motor user (he who employs vans and lorries for the delivery of the goods he makes or sells) is the next logical victim. Then would come our turn.”
The railways were nationalised after World War II – and quickly sank into the red. By 1955, British Rail (BR) was losing £2m-£3m every week, and so Autocar, ahem, railed: “The Englishman’s affection for railway trains is in fact a burden on the country’s economy; if this did not exist, an enquiry would have been held long ago into the British railway system and an unbiased verdict given as to whether or not its survival was worth while. This question needs answering before more money is poured down the nationalised drain.”
An army engineer, Thomas Ifan Lloyd, promptly answered our plea with a report on the potentiality of converting the nations’ railways into a “reserved roadway system”, concluding that it offered benefits in terms of capacity, costs for both passengers and freight, manpower, safety, engineering and strategy.
Supposedly the work of the railways’ 1.242 million transport units could be done by 10,300 fully laden lorries and buses working eight hours a day, six days a week, with those buses consigning waiting crowds to history.
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