What if British Rail had never been privatised? - Part 2: the Austerity Years
“Good morning, my name is Thomas and I’m Head of Imagined Histories here at Freewheeling.
Today, continue imagining what would have happened if the railway had not been privatised.”
For part 1, click here
The first run on a British bank for over a century in 2008 was only the start. The collapse of American giant Lehman Brothers was the middle. And the worst recession since the 1930s was the long drawn-out end.
Commuting revenues dipped and British Rail’s finances suffered. The boom years of the 2000s had been funded by PFI projects that committed BR to continued repayments over 40 years. Just like your mortgage provider is not bothered if you lose your job, so British Rail’s PFI debtors were not bothered about the recession.
As an increasing proportion of BR’s budget was absorbed by debt repayments, services started to be chipped away and routine renewals started to be deferred.
Moreover, the 10 year rolling electrification PFI came up for renewal at the worst possible time. 2009 was the height of the post banking crisis “credit crunch” and there were no willing takers. The electrification programme stalled, but the debt repayments continued.
However, the new transport secretary, Andrew Adonis, was determined not to ‘waste a good crisis’. With interest rates falling, he argued that now was the perfect time to invest in Britain’s long-term future with a full-scale high speed network linking London to the major cities of the north and midlands. Through sheer energy and determination, Lord Adonis was successful: not only in winning Labour party support, but even in creating a rare example of cross-party consensus.
The Cameron Years
In 2010, a Conservative-LibDem coalition Government took the reins of British Rail, though transport was always a job offered to a Tory. The new Government took office committed to a programme of austerity, which meant large real-terms budget cuts for every non-protected department. As transport was neither health nor international development, that included British Rail.
Over the course of the next decade, British Rail’s budget would be slashed by 20% in real terms. Unfortunately, the economic recovery was slow and sluggish, and not remotely enough to allow farepayers to make up the difference. British Rail entered the austerity period as the most efficient state railway in the developed world: there wasn’t much fat to cut.
There was good news. The new Chancellor, George Osborne (who understood the photo opportunities offered by hard hats and building sites), defied recommendations from the Treasury and maintained the committed capital investments in Thameslink, Crossrail and HS2. But new capital investment became incredibly hard to achieve. British Rail begged to be allowed to borrow to invest. With interest rates at a historic low, now was the time to replace the aging HST train fleet on InterCity and to build some new diesel trains for the neglected Regional Railways network. But BR debt was national debt, and the Government was committed to cutting the deficit. So investment costs (through PFI) continued but investment itself stopped.
Moreover, with year-on-year real terms cuts in operating budget, BR had to find ways of reducing expenditure. The flood of reopenings under New Labour dried to a trickle. No lines closed, but the phrase “Parliamentary Train” entered the political language, as routes like the Heart of Wales line, the West Country branch lines, local lines in Lincolnshire and even recently reopened lines in Nottinghamshire saw their services reduced to skeleton levels. There was a short-term controversy when it was spotted that British Rail had ‘forgotten’ to run any Parliamentary trains over the Avon branch line to Severn Beach for over a year, and a local user group took BR to court arguing that the line had been illegally closed.
Many branch lines saw services gradually cut, with some reduced to daily or weekly “Parliamentary trains”, as imagined by AI (Dall-E)
The Tories were more willing to grasp the politically contentious nettle of ticket office closures than Labour had been. Since the introduction of the national smarat card, ticket offices had been seen as somewhat anachronous but they were valued by user groups, representatives of the disabled and trade unions. Most had stayed open but now a rolling programme saw 90% closed in the first three years of the Coalition.
The London Overground continued to thrive. Boris Johnson ramped up TfL’s borrowing, so the capital’s transport authority seemed largely unaffected by austerity. Network SouthEast was now heavily dependent on its TfL fees, and services from commuter towns like Bishops Stortford and Luton were increasingly bare. The limited service on these routes was a significant election issue in the 2015 general election, though didn’t seem to have made much a difference to the result – which saw a narrow Tory win.
InterCity, which had been profitable for most years since its creation in the 1980s, continued to do well, though the long-standing sleeper service to Cornwall was axed (the ScotRail service survived: indeed, ScotRail was significantly less impacted by austerity than England and Wales). Despite the niggling worry about how (and when!) the HST fleet would be replaced, the fact that the routes covered their costs meant that service standards stayed high.
By 2015, British Rail was stable but an increasingly lopsided organisation, with a dense London network, a popular InterCity business and an increasingly skeletal service in the rest of the country.
Northern Powerhouse:
In the period following the Brexit referendum, the issue of regional inequality suddenly hit the headlines. Under various brand names (“Northern Powerhouse”, “Levelling Up”, etc), the idea of investing in the North was suddenly politically fashionable. The dire state of transport connectivity was painfully evident. Even the main routes between cities in the north were still primarily served by 25 year-old two carriage trains.
British Rail spotted the opportunity and put in a bid for a Northern Powerhouse Network of InterCity-style services connecting northern cities on upgraded tracks. The trains were to be HSTs released from the Great Western and Midland Mainlines, which would enable those routes to – finally – receive all-electric fleets, 15 years after the lines themselves were electrified.
“New” trains finally arrived for the Transpennine route, as imagined by AI (Dall-E)
The plans were approved, cancelled, approved and cancelled repeatedly throughout the chaotic post-Brexit referendum years but, eventually, something not a million miles from the original proposals came into existence. Even though the service was provided by “new” 45 year-old trains, the improvement in both comfort and journey times on the newly upgraded routes was dramatic. The levels of growth unlocked showed just how much latent demand there had been.
The end of Austerity:
One of the side-effects of the Brexit vote was the end of the political narrative of austerity. As well as the Northern Powerhouse, British Rail was increasingly able to argue for individual projects. Now that PFI was off the agenda, they returned to the concept of Whole Route Modernisation. In preparation for the launch of Crossrail and Thameslink services, a “Whole Route” approach was taken to the relevant tunnel approach routes towards Paddington, St Pancras, Kings Cross, Liverpool Street and Blackfriars; with signalling, track and station improvements to create a “new railway” feel for when the new or upgraded tunnels opened.
HS2:
One of the stranger experiences for British Rail during the 2010s was sponsoring the building of HS2.
Curiously, HS1 (which was largely built under Labour but initiated under the Tories) had been built as a private venture. HS2 (which was initiated under Labour but largely built under the Tories) was sponsored in-house by British Rail and built by Network Rail.
The result was that British Rail was simultaneously attempting to slash costs, and make the biggest ever investment in railway history. In some ways, it wasn’t a bad combination. British Rail adopted a cheap and efficient design, learning the lessons of HS1 and previous high speed projects abroad. There was some criticism for adopting ballasted track (which costs less upfront, but costs more to maintain and reduces the maximum potential line speed) but British Rail was so used to value engineering that it had never seriously considered the alternative. Similarly, the designs for city centre stations were efficient but sometimes controversial. In Birmingham, the largely disused Moor Street station site was repurposed, which necessitated closing the Snow Hill tunnels to the remaining local trains. Suburban services from Solihull and Stratford-upon-Avon were diverted to New Street, making use of surplus capacity from the austerity cuts. Euston station was made as small as possible. HS2 was connected to HS1 and to minimise the need for platforms in central London, it was even planned for some HS2 services to terminate in the unused Eurostar platforms of Stratford International. Overall, HS2 was a compromise but the core goal of a high speed network connecting each major city was slowly but surely progressed.
Boris
Britain gained a new Prime Minister in 2019. The former chairman of Transport for London became PM promising to “Get Brexit Done”.
An end to Open Access
In anticipation of a reduction in focus on the separation of track and train, British Rail and Network Rail had already started to cooperate more - in the process, putting the squeeze on the open access operators. But it was the Covid pandemic that did for them. As demand collapsed, British Rail was given a series of emergency funding packages to get it through. The Open Access operators did not. They all ‘paused’ services for the duration of the pandemic. But with Network Rail taking its lead from British Rail, they found that the market for train paths was somewhat more hostile when they came to restart. The various foreign state railways involved were less keen than they had been, and the few that half-heartedly relaunched soon died away. British Rail had a monopoly over InterCity once again. Whether this tuns out to be a good thing for passengers (or, indeed, British Rail) remains to be seen.
London
Ironically, given the new Prime Minister’s focus on ‘Levelling Up’, the big focus of the period was the completion of the two flagship London projects. The East-West Crossrail project had been named the “Elizabeth line” by Boris when he had been Mayor of London, while the North-South Thameslink project opened as the “Cathedral line” (so named because it connected Peterborough, St Albans, St Paul’s and Southwark cathedrals). The majority of services on the Cathedral line were TfL-awarded contracts, though not all.
Covid
The Covid pandemic decimated British Rail’s revenue. However, BR’s largest “customer” (Transport for London) was keen to restore a full service on the Overground, Cathedral and Elizabeth lines as quickly as possible, and British Rail was keen to support them. There was Tresury scepticism, with an argument made that BR should reduce the timetable to match the new reality. But British Rail Chairman Alex Hynes argued energetically that delivering a full service was the best way to minimise future subsidy requirements, and he won the day. As a result, a full timetable was restored within a matter of weeks of the end of the final Covid restrictions.
Hydrotrain
With the pandemic dealt with, Boris Johnson now turned his attention to transport. He announced the creation of a new “Hydrotrain”, which was to be a world-leading, world-beating green energy locomotive, to be used in the UK and sold overseas. The brief from DfT on what, exactly, the Hydrotrain should be was somewhat sketchy, but the PM needed something to unveil. Boris Johnson had already left office by the time the Hydrotrain was ready and his successor bar two seemed somewhat less interested in railways. It was the Transport Secretary Mark Harper who actually revealed Hydrotrain, which appeared to be a Transpennine HST, imaginatively reengineered to run on hydrogen. After that, the project quietly lapsed.
The first (and only) Hydrotrain ready for its inaugural run, as imagined by AI (Dall-E)
More encouragingly, British Rail was able to use Boris’s interest to make the case for restarting the rolling electrification programme. This time, the scheme was to be funded from general taxation as opposed to PFI. British Rail pointed out the need to support the energy transition and that interest rates were at a historic low. It was agreed, with the Transpennine route was to be the first to be electrified. The scheme restarted in 2021 and cancelled by Rishi Sunak in 2023.
Ready for Rishi
British Rail entered the era of the fifth Conservative Prime Minister in a row in bad shape.
The Network SouthEast service was thin, and - north of the Thames - still relied heavily on aging units from the 1980s and 1990s that now needed replacing, and for which there was no money.
The trains south of the river and the contracted Overground fleet had all been bought at the same time in the early 2000s and would all need replacing in one go in around 10 years time, and there was no plan for it.
Regional Railways had not yet seen much of the benefit of “levelling up”. The majority of services would have been recognisable (both in terms of times and trains) to someone travelling in 1990. Where they had changed, they’d got worse as a result of austerity-era cuts. Transpennine now had a fleet of HSTs and was partially electrified, but there was no clear plan to make use of the wires.
The bright spot was Intercity, which was doing well as the British Rail flagship, and was busily preparing for the integration of HS2.
On the 4th October 2023, the Prime Minister Rishi Sunak (economically the most right-wing Conservative leader since Margaret Thatcher) announced that he was putting an end to 30 years of failed consensus and instigating the privatisation of British Rail.
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