Modernisation

Anyone who lived in the UK during the 1960s will remember the name of Dr Beeching. He became the head of British Railways and, in response to political pressure, set about cutting out some of the huge deficits being run up by the railway industry in the UK. Many country lines and stations were simply axed. To be fair to his name though, rail traffic was steadily dwindling at the time, for many reasons, prime among them the growth in the number of motor cars on the roads and the construction of the first motorways. But the Beeching axe was swung wide and many lines serving the coal and steel industry were closed, pushing this traffic onto the roads, building problems for future generations that were, then, unseen.

There was a renaissance in the late 1970s when the first Inter City 125 trains were introduced linking the West Country, Wales and the North-east to London. During this period a vast amount of electrification took place, electric and diesel locomotives replacing steam, though some areas, particularly the Southern Railway, had used third-rail electrification for years. The last BR steam service was on August 11th 1968, when the Pacific class "Oliver Cromwell" pulled the last steam train between Liverpool and Carlisle. Scheduled steam services had finished a week earlier. It was the end of an era, yet today there are dozens of heritage railways throughout the world, still using steam – and they count millions of passengers a year on their services.

The end of steam meant other forms of locomotion must be used. Diesel had been around for years and so too, in certain regions, had electric power. The Southern Railway was the first mainline electric railway in Britain in the 1930s, between London and Brighton, using the 660v third rail system that is still in use throughout the south of England. Several cities had built subway systems using electric power before this – London had them by 1890 – and the first electric railway had been demonstrated as far back as 1879 at the Berlin World Trade Fair. The world's first electric railway had been opened in Germany in 1881. But from about 1959 when the electrification of the West Coast Main Line between London and Crewe, eventually being extended to Glasgow, most of the main lines in the UK were electrified. The vast majority of the lines in the south of England are electric with the Southern Railway being almost unique in using third-rail electrification whereas most others use overhead catenary. The West Country, parts of Wales and many other places are still using diesel where the cost of electrification would not be commercially viable.

But during this period of modernisation there were a few examples of diesel or electric locos that caught the imagination in some extraordinary way, and prime among these was the class 55 – the Deltic. The Deltics were built between 1961 and 1962 by English Electric, designed for express passenger services on the East Coast Main Line between London and Edinburgh. They gained the name "Deltic" from its Napier Deltic power units. In total only 22 locomotives were built and dominated services on the line until their withdrawal at the end of 1981 when the new HST 125 trains came into service.

Railways had a difficult time in the UK in the early 1980s. Many of the problems were man-made, with insufficient management skills, sloppy engineering and a general malaise that affected staff morale. Trains were late for the most ridiculous reasons, one of the best being, "the wrong type of snow" to go alongside the inevitable, "leaves on the track" – as if autumn comes as a surprise ! Yet it was also a time of renaissance with new styles of train being designed to replace the old "slam-door" carriages that were in extensive use, particularly in south-east England. Privatisation of the railways in 1996 under John Major's government initially produced a major increase in the modernisation of rolling stock and motive power, but with privatisation (and the need for rail companies to make money) fares increased by huge amounts.

The 1970s also saw an attempt by the engineers of British Railways to launch a tilting high speed train, the Advanced Passenger Train. There was always political interference in the development programme and the project ended up as a failure, though it did give some interesting pointers to the future. The APT did, briefly, go into service but it did not last long.