How can British Rail’s failed Modernisation Plan teach us to ‘build back better’?

If we are to reshape our economy to achieve net zero emissions, our transport system must change radically. At the same time, as we emerge from the pandemic, there’s plenty of discussion about how we could ‘build back better’.

What historical precedents can we learn from? Policymakers could start by taking a look at the expensive disaster that was British Rail’s 1955 Modernisation Plan. This story may be well known to train geeks like me, but I am convinced it should be more widely understood. We could learn a lot from it.

After an initial post-war boom, by the early 1950s the newly nationalised British Rail was losing money as traffic began to shift to the roads. Aiming to reverse this, the £1.24bn Modernisation Plan – a staggering £29bn in today’s money – was announced in 1955.

With such an enormous remit and budget, how did they get it so wrong?

The vision seemed sound. Electrification and diesels would replace steam traction, freight handling would be streamlined, and signalling and stations would be brought up to date. The failure of the plan was a combination of incompetent execution, political pressures, and most importantly, fundamental miscalculations about the future. The two main areas in which this can be seen were traction and freight handling.

Initially, BR had continued to commission new steam engines, despite electric and diesel traction being increasingly used elsewhere, notably in the oil-rich US. Superficially that made sense. Steam locos used domestically-produced coal, when mining was one of Britain’s biggest employers. However, by the 1950s, this was beginning to look like a mistake. As labour costs increased, the labour-intensive nature of steam was becoming a problem.

In the decade of the Clean Air Act, railway yards and stations were becoming unhappy neighbours with their towns and cities. It also contributed to a PR problem: the perception that the railways were old-fashioned, dirty and reminiscent of the bad old days of pre-war life, in contrast with the dynamic consumerist happiness promised by car advertisements.

Unable to afford widespread electrification, diesels were the answer. Buying in proven designs from the US, when Britain had always built its own trains, was politically a non-starter. Instead, the idea was to trial prototypes from a range of British manufacturers, with the best performing types to be adopted as standard and commissioned in large numbers. So far so good. Until someone decided it wasn’t happening fast enough.

The result? BR started panic-buying batches of the untested prototypes. I’ve often wondered what back-handers might have been part of the procurement process here. But whatever the reason, instead of a standardised fleet, they ended up with a mixed bag of too many incompatible types from different builders. Some were so unreliable that they ended up being scrapped after only a few years. For some, the sight of a broken-down diesel being towed by a steam engine seemed to encapsulate the incompetence of the organisation.

Freight handling, too, needed huge work to modernise. At the time, most freight was conveyed in mixed trains and inefficiently handled at small facilities at most stations, much as it had been since Victorian times – as can be seen in this fascinating period video.

The Modernisation Plan’s answer was investment in vast, partly automated new marshalling yards around the country designed to sort trains wagon by wagon. These worked well, but by the time they opened in the early ‘60s, it was obvious that they were a giant waste. They would have been helpful a couple of decades earlier, but by now, lorries (aided by new motorways) were making the traditional mixed goods train a relic of the past. The new yards were a bang-up-to-date solution to a previous era’s problem.

The Plan’s failure was an enormous missed opportunity. Despite the investment, by the early ‘60s, BR was still in deficit. The government lost patience and shifted to a programme of cuts, which today are remembered as the infamous ‘Beeching Axe’. This set the tone for decades. The railway was a ‘parallel’, declining transport system, and what voters wanted was more spending on roads.

These assumptions persisted for a long time, but now themselves seem outdated. Faced with the threat of climate change, we need a transport revolution far greater than the changes BR attempted in the ‘50s, but at the same time we need to learn from the past.

A couple of themes ran through BR’s mis-steps. One was planning for the past, not the future. Another was a fundamental lack of imagination. Those empty white-elephant marshalling yards were an attempt to modernise the old, disappearing railway – a bit of foresight would have suggested investment in containerisation and bulk handling facilities instead.

We could be about to make a similar mistake with electric cars. Clearly, EVs will be a major part of the solution to drive down emissions. But EVs cannot solve the other problems of car culture, such as congestion or parking in cities. BR’s bad investment in too many types of diesel locomotives reminds me of the need to standardise EV facilities too. If we are not careful, we’ll end up with a plethora of incompatible battery charging systems and connectors.

Another of BR’s errors was simply replacing steam with diesel on a like-for-like basis, rather than recognising diesel power’s inherent advantage of less down time, meaning fewer locos should have been needed overall. Have we really thought properly about the possibilities of electric cars? Does a higher initial cost, but much reduced servicing requirements, make communal ownership schemes more viable, for example?

Whatever the advantages of EVs, a more pertinent question would be, should we even be seeking to replicate today’s car-centric transport system? With ever fewer numbers of young people owning cars or even acquiring driving licences, we have arguably already passed ‘peak car’, yet this is hardly ever reflected by policy-makers obsessed with the private car. BR’s Modernisation Plan seemed oblivious to the wider context of road building and increasing car ownership; today’s transport policy must avoid such a silo mentality.

On today’s railways, the myopic focus on speed – just like how BR focussed on wagon-load freight despite foreseeable trends away from it – seems to me to be a mistake. HS2 will lower journey times between some cities, but trains are already the quickest method for intercity travel. The emphasis instead should be on increasing capacity, and lowering ticket prices – that’s what most people actually want.

It’s also important to recognise when existing technology is the obvious solution. Electric express trains are the most effective and cleanest method of transporting people between cities ever invented. Just as the electric commuter train is the fastest and cleanest method of mass transit within cities. This doesn’t require any new technical innovations – just investment. It’s scandalous that some of Britain’s main routes are still entirely diesel-operated. Investment in overhead wires might not have made sense in the ‘70s or ‘80s, but times (and passenger numbers) have changed.

But the overarching lesson of the Modernisation Plan is that it isn’t just about having enough money to spend. In the 1950s BR demonstrated the risk of blowing a fortune on the wrong things because of outdated assumptions. To adapt to the coming green revolution, we need to ask ourselves what the transport system of the future will look like. Policy makers need to be asking people – especially young people – what their transport system should be for. Otherwise we’ll only end up trying to solve yesterday’s problems, just like BR did.

"British Railways Brush Type 2 D5500 (Class 31, 31018)" by Stuart Axe is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0