British Rail

The transformation of BR’s image was radical and swift. Out went the heraldry with the lions, wheels and badges, which seemed passé in the post-war world, and in their place there was to be a series of entirely new design features with four key elements: a symbol, a typeface, a style for station nameplates, and house colours. This was representative of a time when Britain was emerging from the long years of post-war austerity into a far more exciting period characterised by the modern clean lines of the furniture in Terence Conran’s Habitat, Alec Issigonis’s Mini, the compact car for the masses, and Mary Quant’s miniskirt. According to the Beauty of Transport website: ‘Beeching understood that turning around British Railways would require not only better financial management and business practices, but also a corporate identity that focused it on the future, instead of the past. Unlike previous chairmen, he was an unapologetic moderniser, no fan of the heraldic devices and steam railway colour schemes British Railways used for its trains’.³ So while Beeching’s name is synonymous with line closures and abandonment, the most lasting symbols of the railway, such as the logo, a raft of successful design features and even the name of the organisation, owe much to his business acumen.

The most noteworthy aspect of the design overhaul was the ‘corporate identity symbol’ (the word ‘logo’ had not yet acquired common currency) of the famous ‘double arrow’. Its simplicity is deceptive: try drawing it freehand from memory! But during a lengthy process it was selected over many other less notable suggestions. One had the letters ‘BR’ struck through with white stripes to give the appearance of the union flag; another resembled a noughts and crosses grid with an up arrow on the left and a down arrow on the right. But eventually it was Gerry Barney’s brilliantly simple design that triumphed. Initially, it was not without its critics, with some likening it to a piece of barbed wire or a bolt of lightning, though that was not necessarily a criticism given the push for electrification. But BR persevered and quickly started using the logo across the network, a unifying factor which, crucially, cut across the regions. In fact, within a couple of years, research by BR revealed Barney’s logo was as widely recognised as the Michelin Man, the ubiquitous comic-strip style mascot of the French tyre company. The success and durability of the double arrow logo are demonstrated by the fact that it survived rail privatisation and is used today on Google maps to show the location of railway stations.

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BR’s entire corporate identity programme became a benchmark in industrial design across the world and preceded the now much more famous Swiss railway’s unitary design, which did not emerge until 1980, more than a decade later. From having lagged behind the airlines in terms of branding, British Rail was now far ahead of them, and remarkably seemed more forward-looking and modern than its aviation rivals and even the space industry. British Railways’ corporate identity manual actually came out several years before NASA, the American space agency, produced a similarly iconic branding handbook.

[Barbara] Castle [minister of transport, late-1965 to early 1968] faced an uphill task not least because of the continued strength of the roads lobby, which sought to portray public transport as the enemy of the motorist in its attempts to influence popular opinion in its favour. The depth of the antagonism to the railway can be gauged by the intervention of the Automobile Association. In the spring of 1967, the inaugural edition of Drive, a magazine the AA sent out to its 3.75 million members every quarter, the director-general, Alexander Durie, claimed motoring was the life blood of the nation’s economy ‘and perhaps the most significant explanation for the great advance in living standards in the last decade. That was why, he said, ‘the AA is speaking out strongly against any attempt from any quarter to thrust inferior, inconvenient and inflexible mass transport on a society which is so determined to use the superior, flexible, transport of the motor car’ (my emphasis).³ In the same magazine, a year later, Durie reprised his argument, warning readers of the ‘sinister threat to prohibit the driver using his car in the centres of towns and cities’, which represented ‘dangerous thinking’ that would force people to travel by public transport, ‘an outmoded system they have so plainly rejected’.⁴

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[...] she sought, as she wrote in her autobiography, not ‘to allow the motor car to destroy the railway system and other forms of public transport on which people without a car depended for their mobility’. Her task was not made easier by her civil servants, who, she felt, were ‘temperamentally inclined to accept the Beeching cuts’, nor by the fact that British Rail’s annual deficit had grown to £159 million.⁵

It was utterly disingenuous of various Eurosceptics in the Tory party to argue strongly that an obscure and widely ignored directive had to be obeyed to the letter, but this irony was rather lost in the rush to push through the legislation. In reality, the track authority model was pushed through not because of some spurious claim that European laws had to be obeyed, but because the Treasury was dead set in its desire to liberalise the railway market and create on-rail competition.

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[...] Far from reducing the burden on the taxpayer, privatisation actually increased it. The initial cost of fragmenting and then selling the railway was estimated conservatively at £600 million, and many of its assets – notably the rolling stock – were sold very cheaply due to the rush to get the railway into the private sector. And, longer term, BR’s grant – the Public Service conservatively at £600 million, and many of its assets – notably the rolling stock – were sold very cheaply due to the rush to get the railway into the private sector.
And, longer term, BR’s grant – the Public Service whole period of privatisation. Rather than costs gradually reducing, as the government hoped, they kept on increasing, so that the railway subsidy hovered around £4 billion annually after privatisation, and Network Rail’s accumulation of £55 billion in debt to the government effectively added another £2 billion to the yearly subsidy since it will never be paid off.

While the condition of the network undoubtedly improved, this was paid for by government money, as grant to Railtrack and later Network Rail, and therefore these enhancements cannot be ascribed to privatisation. The notion that government can ever escape responsibility for the railway was quickly disabused by the series of accidents mentioned above [Southall in 1997; Ladbroke Grove in 1999; Hatfield in 2000; Potters Bar 2002]. It was ministers who had to stand up in Parliament and explain what happened, as well as having to implement measures to mitigate future disasters. Moreover, since the dream of a subsidy-free railway proved ever elusive – and, as mentioned numerous times in this book, is a Holy Grail that will never be found – government remained as the guarantor of rail services as well as the determinant of how they are provided. The private sector’s role throughout was one of providing services and, at times, some investment; but the government was always in control.

The franchisees which took on the running of the railway have had a patchy record. While some provided good services with a focus on customer care, others performed miserably and several had their contracts terminated. Overall, they were not required to invest, since their contracts were, for the most part, too short to justify large-scale expenditure and, therefore, their focus tended to be short term. Oddly, because the franchises were short and the role of the private sector was limited, there was very little opportunity for the private sector to demonstrate its ‘flair’. As this book shows, there was, in fact, no shortage of commercial nous in BR when it was allowed the freedom to express it.

The competition issue is the most scandalous failure as the concept was flawed from the outset. As more perceptive politicians and commentators swiftly noted, the idea of franchising out chunks of the network was incompatible with open access – the notion that the railway should be opened up to on-rail competition – since there was the risk that profitable services would be cherry-picked by the franchisee’s competitors. Astonishingly, MacGregor himself realised this very early on, as Jon Shaw notes: ‘MacGregor argued that he knew on-rail competition would not work but delayed announcing this for tactical reasons.’⁸ In other words, rather shockingly, the politician pushing through the new structure for the railway was aware right from the start that the main premise for choosing it was invalid. In the event, the Rail Regulator resolved the problem by essentially banning competition, except on a few underprovided routes, such as London–Hull.

The attempt to undermine union power was another consummate failure. By splitting the network into twenty-five franchises, the government inadvertently stimulated competition between the various operators for labour, notably drivers, whose wages soared as they played off the franchisees against each other. However, in other respects, there was more contracting out of functions such as cleaning services, which made it more difficult for unions to organise workers.

A quarter of a century of trying to work within this deeply flawed structure did not create a system as good as the one that existed when the industry was sold off. It proved impossible to iron out the inherent flaws and now, as I write, the government has finally admitted that the whole structure is dysfunctional and has embarked on a root-and-branch reform.

As I was finishing this book in the summer of 2021, the government at last published a long-awaited review of the industry. The process which had started in 2018 under the chairmanship of Keith Williams, a John Lewis executive and former British Airways chairman, had been much delayed both by arguments within government and by the Covid-19 pandemic. Taking the form of a government White Paper, Great British Railways set out plans for the future of the railway.

The government is proposing to create a new ‘guiding mind’ for the industry – which is to be called Great British Railways, since it would be too embarrassing to simply reuse the British Railways name. However, despite the implication, and the use of the old BR double arrow design as the new organisation’s logo, Humpty Dumpty is not being put back together again. Given that whole chunks of BR, such as the rolling stock and the engineering companies, have been sold off, this is not a recreation of the BR described in this book. Moreover, the operations will still be provided by the private sector, although on a much more restricted contract basis, with revenue going to Great British Railways rather than, as with the franchising system, to the private operators. One cannot, however, fail to notice that this is a retreat from full-on privatisation and a return to the past, not least because the double arrow is going to be used on all trains and stations. Rather helpfully, the Paper accepts much of the criticism of the structure created by the 1993 Railways Act and instances many of the failures caused by privatisation. These criticisms reflect much of what I have written in the past quarter of a century, which I could summarise but are probably best expressed as a lengthy mea culpa from the Tory government.

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The White Paper, therefore, set out a catalogue of the mistakes that had been made in breaking up British Rail. The amusing aspect of this is the way that the tone of the White Paper suggests it was a party other than the Tories which created the privatised structure and kept on propping it up in various ways over the intervening quarter of a century. And the preferred solution is: ‘A simpler, more integrated structure [which] will cut duplication, increase Great British Railways’ purchasing power and economies of scale, and make it easier and cheaper to plan maintenance, renewals and upgrades’. One could hardly make it up.

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Railways pose a series of unique problems in terms of corporate structure. They are geographically spread, have huge sunk assets, require continuous investment, government subsidy and excellent safety standards, and employ thousands of people. Over the near two centuries of the existence of railways, most have been run in an integrated way through a single organisation. There is no mystery as to why. A railway system is a network in which all parts are connected. Carving out different aspects, such as signalling, engineering, operations and safety management, makes no sense, since none is a business in itself. They are all interdependent and therefore need to be run together. Strangely, it has taken politicians more than a quarter of a century to learn that lesson.