British Rail: A New History

Product Information

In his Great British Railway Journeys, now thirteen series old, he travels across the country in airy, noiseless carriages, with no hint of points failures, leaves on the line or cable theft, let alone industrial action. He itemises the poor decisions taken by BR that left the railways in Britain lagging behind their continental equivalents. Some of these proved effective, but the surplus was never enough to pay for the loss-making parts of BR’s business. With Britain stuck in a seemingly inexorable loop of lockdowns, there was a notion that trains and all who live by them were for the breaker’s yard. However, the book teaches us history of BR by giving us short stories about a railway in a certain time period.

The narrative does not flow at all, short one-sentence paragraphs are frequently inserted completely out of context. The favourites of late 60s/early 70s trainspotters, the Deltics, do get a couple of mentions - but no real details.

By the 1990s, Wolmar argues that British Rail was an excellent industry, one that “did not deserve the fate it suffered” throughout the privatization process (329), and that it was government intervention that slowed British Rail’s development toward the end of its life. Along the way, we take in the phasing out of steam (and why, unlike many other countries we mostly converted to diesel), the infamous Beeching cuts of the network in the 1960s, successes such as the 125 mile per hour High Speed Train with the InterCity brand and more. Forged from a partnership between a university press and a library, Project MUSE is a trusted part of the academic and scholarly community it serves. Certainly not the one engineered by George Stephenson – one of the first was laid down at Wollaton, near Nottingham, open by 1610, long before Stephenson's birth in 1781. With his nasal tones and maniacal bellows of excitement on station platforms, Bourgeois is either the apex of the breed or a strangely committed satirist of it.

I particularly liked the challenges to the misguided belief that BR was exclusively and permanently inefficient. From the mid-1950s up to privatisation, BR failed to make a profit, notwithstanding a series of cost-cutting expedients. Come down the travelators, exit Sainsbury's, turn right and follow the pedestrianised walkway to Crown Walk and turn right - and Coles will be right in front of you. And Christian Wolmar is no fan of the many restrictive practices that had to be gradually removed in the face of resistance from staff.The book covers some of that but rather than try to assemble a coherent systemic picture focuses more on telling the history of British Rail from nationalization to privatization. Important events like the 1923 Amalgamation, when the majority of railway businesses joined the GWR, LMSR, or LNER, as well as nationalization and privatization, are placed in their historical perspective.