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Time Shift : The Golden Age of British Rail : BBC4
Doghouse Riley
Posts: 32,491 Forum Member
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As it's BBC4 I've no idea if this is a repeat, but I'd not seen it before.
It's one thing about the British, we can usually all enjoy a programme about trains and this was no exception..
Is it nostalgia, or just because it's a window into social history?
Trains. You know, those things that fewer people can afford to go on now.
It's one thing about the British, we can usually all enjoy a programme about trains and this was no exception..
Is it nostalgia, or just because it's a window into social history?
Trains. You know, those things that fewer people can afford to go on now.
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I would debate this due to the presence of railcards and online advance fares. I paid £12 for a train from London to Glasgow last summer, which given the distance wasn't a sum I considered huge. Admittedly if you just showed up at the station and bought a ticket in the morning peak, then yeah you're paying more than a flight to the United States and back (not an exaggeration - £361, cheaper than Norwegian Air charge for a return to Los Angeles) but very very few people are going to be doing that from their own pockets anyway.
What was the so-called 'golden age' out of interest? Presumably the pre-war steam days.
My father remembered that hell of trying to stay warm on windswept platforms and then being blinded by soot on foot bridges when you use to steam the children to help with chest problems.
Like with the canals we have slightly rose tinted view of the railways helped along by popular TV shows which show us the service and handy good old fashioned way things use to be. Like the post office and banks things change and the cheap shilling tickets and similar memories make it all seem all that more magical now that the world has turned and nothing is the same like 'Wagon Wheels' and 'Sherbet Lemons'.
(Wagon Wheels are smaller than the use to be and Sherbet Lemons don't seem to have any sherbet in them anymore or is it just me getting old).
I would disagree with that, passenger numbers are said to be at their highest level for the best part of 100 years.
Number of UK train passengers rises sharply.
Trains can be by far the cheapest way to travel, especially when booked in advance.
I do have a beef about the expense of modern train travel. Yes, if you know several weeks in advance exactly what time you will want to travel and exactly when you want to come back it can be extremely cheap. But if you want to persuade people to use the train as opposed to their car then you need to make the 'turn up at the station and go' option competitive too.
It was the 60s to the 80s, roughly. The phasing out of steam, introduction of diesel, electrification of lines, the development of the ill-fated APT, and the HST, which has now been in service for 40 years. I found it very interesting. Week worth a watch. And it wasn't a repeat.
The idea of "just jumping on a train" when you need to, is now only for the rich, the rest of us have to plan a journey in advance, just as you would "a military campaign."
I never use a train, I always go by car. There's very little difference in petrol prices, regardless of the supplier.
I wonder why that was?
That might not "click" with everyone.
It amused me that the TV critic of the Mail, as good as suggested this was a thinly veiled "promo" by the BBC for the Labour Party.
Suggesting the railways were "fine" under Labour.
He has a point, in that even I don't remember them being as good as the documentary suggested they were.
This is the age of the train ;-)
I remember a previous program shown on the BBC back in 2012 about the HST, that certain person was in many of the clips used. Doubt the BBC would repeat it again without heavy editing to remove him.
Pity the high speed tilting train got the typical British industrial treatment of the era - halfarsed and abandoned
That seemed quite reasonable, the journalists could have been the worse for wear as was suggested, from being plied with booze by BR on the previous evening. Then up at the crack of dawn to witness the horizon going up and down.
1) They had to do a major redesign when it was discovered that at its maximum operating speed the leading pantograph would displace the overhead cable in such a way that the trailing one(s) could not make reliable contact. To solve this they had to have a pantograph and motor carriage in the middle of the train but were not allowed to move passengers past this thus needing to split the train into two parts - requiring two restaurant carriages.
The motion sickness that they made something of a joke about was actually considered a serious impediment to general acceptance.
At one point they discovered that if the tilt mechanism on two trains travelling in opposite directions failed with full opposing tilt the trains would touch on certain bends.
(Somewhat tongue in cheek but actually something that did need to be considered: They needed to design an ACT: Advanced Catering Trolley because otherwise everything could fall off if it was in a carriage where the tild mechanism had failed.)
No I used them a lot then, the trains were late and filthy and the staff surly.
It very much depended on where you were travelling - something they touched on in the film.
I use a service in the South East to get to London and it was fast, frequent, and reliable with clean, comfortable (although not particularly new) trains.
Colleagues getting into London from the near North seemed to have a much worse experience.
I think there is almost the opposite of rose-tinted glasses about BR - its such an ingrained meme that it was awful that people tend to overlook how poor a service we get now. The balls up over christmas maintenance over-runs this year for instance.
Now I'd have to take out a mortgage to travel to London first class.
It would have to be between 1965 and 1997 - the name "British Rail" was only used then. Even British Railways only existed from 1948.
So the "Golden Age" would have been Beeching, Serpell, hopeless financial viability (losing £300,000 a day in the 60s) and the long delay of electrification. The introduction of diesel was dead-end - even at the time the decision should have been to go to electric
If you look at the aftermath of the Beeching Report many of the most contentious closures, The Waverley Line, The Great Central Railway, etc, wre done under Harold Wilson'e Labour government.
Neither The Waverley Line or the Great Central were suggested for closure under Beeching's proposals and, ironically, if The Great Central had remained open it would have been the ideal candidate for HS2....
A lot of that loss was later shown to be some, shall we say "creative" accounting by a Pro-road Conserative government determined to decimate the railways.
I agree about the move to electrification, though, that should have been done after the war. Even the introduction of diesel traction would have made more sense as it was considerably cheaper than steam to operate.
A lot of the public don't realise how "creative" accounting can be. It's not always revealed in public balance sheets.
A common question in the "halls of financial management" will be, "This expense is a bit embarrassing, which cost centre should we hide it in?"
Presumably someone didn't want the story of BR in the 70s and the two competing high speed train designs to be lost for ever due to the Jimmy Savile factor, so they remade it with a focus more on the general modernisation of BR than the HST specifically.
The end result was quite watchable.
I thought lines were already being closed down in the 60s, so it was probably the 'golden age' just briefly post-war when the network reached its height.