The Railways: Nation, Network and People

by Simon Bradley

The Handy Book concurred: ‘an excellent weapon against bores … who can only be silenced by levelling a volume or a journal at their heads’.

The pair had kept the windows all but shut, ‘and were breathing the richest compound of the products of their own indigestion’ – an unusually explicit reference to the hazards of railway travel in flatulent company.

Yet all these perils are now routinely combined by the thousands who cycle in a dash to their local stations to catch the train to work, then pass the time in the carriage by making phone calls and catching old television shows on a tablet computer. Which may suggest that the risks of new technologies will always tend to be exaggerated, partly because danger makes a better story than safety, partly perhaps as a sort of displacement activity to avoid engaging with less far-fetched risks to health, such as those arising (say) from tempting things to eat and drink, or from a failure to take exercise at all.

How very true!

Many will remember what happened when the culture of safeguards on Britain’s railways was last seriously compromised. The culmination came on 17 October 2000, when a defective rail fractured on a curve just south of Hatfield as a Leeds-bound express passed over it at 115 mph, killing four passengers. By that date the maintenance of the tracks had passed into the hands of private contractors engaged by Railtrack, the privatised infrastructure company. These contractors worked under regimes of incentives and penalties for completing work on time, even as the railways came under growing strain from unexpected increases in traffic. The privatised system created in 1993–6, with its separation of operating companies, rolling stock companies, infrastructure and maintenance, was characterised by displaced or uncertain responsibilities. The changes went against the grain of the existing operation of BR, which had been successfully reorganised not long before into separate business sectors: InterCity (by then no longer hyphenated), Network SouthEast, Regional Railways and Railfreight. These were able to keep tighter control of their operating costs than the old regional divisions had done, while sustaining a close relationship with the engineering and infrastructure side of the network. Privatisation made no serious attempt to engage with the special character of railway operation and engineering; instead, it drew on the one-size-fits-all ideology of the free marketeer, by which eve...

Raymond Williams

Adrian Vaughan

Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960),

Fully Fitted Freight.

routines of the thousands of anonymous clerks at Eversholt

At the most basic, the building combined the functions of the sale of tickets, a place to wait and the point of departure for the train itself.

But enough has been said to show that stations should not be understood simply as pieces of architecture, rather than as diverse facilities within the greater system that is the railway itself.

Cole’s remedies included the introduction of warmer tints, painted or stencilled dadoes and friezes, simple wallpapers and picture rods, from which ‘the better class of framed and glazed advertisements’, or photos of local attractions and interesting places, might be hung.

This is how they first dealt with the station challenge