Fire and Steam (40 page)

First, though, the companies had to start providing trains they could boast about. The LNER began to make much play of its punctuality, issuing its guards with large pocket watches, and giant clocks began to proliferate at its stations. The GWR boasted of having the fastest train in the world, the rather lightly loaded
Cheltenham Flyer,
which covered the stretch from Swindon to London (yet with no equivalent fast service in the other direction) at a thundering 71 mph.
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Initially, the focus for improvement was on providing long non-stop runs. LNER soon started running a non-stop service from King's Cross to Newcastle, a distance
of 268 miles, but quickly realized that offering a similar service to Edinburgh would be a promotional boon.

LNER's most famous train was the
Flying Scotsman,
the name given to trains leaving both London King's Cross and Edinburgh Waverley at 10 a.m. every day since its introduction in June 1862. The timings had not improved since the post-race truce (see
Chapter 9
) but now Nigel Gresley, the company's illustrious chief mechanical engineer, thought up a great wheeze to ensure the train could run non-stop between the two capitals and spearhead the whole company's drive to improve its image. The problem for such a long run was that the crews, particularly the fireman, could not be expected to operate the train for over eight hours without a break. Gresley, one of the greatest ever locomotive engineers, hit upon the idea of incorporating a narrow corridor, just five feet high and eighteen inches wide, into the tender carrying the water and coal, which the crews could squeeze through to and from the locomotive. They could then rest ‘on the cushions' as the railway workers say, while the relief crew took over. Gresley built the first corridor tender in great secrecy and it was introduced in May 1928.

In 1932, the LMS and LNER finally tore up the thirty-year-old agreement of a minimum of eight and a quarter hours between London and Edinburgh when it became clear that railway services would have to be speeded up in order to keep ahead of the road competition. The trains not only had to go faster, but they had to look good, and the idea of streamlining became popular. While it might seem a relatively simple matter to streamline an engine, the covering had to be carefully sited to prevent smoke blowing down into the driver's face, and Gresley had spent considerable time perfecting the design. In 1932 the LMS appointed William Stanier as chief mechanical engineer but his efforts to streamline the locomotives were less successful as they caused smoke problems for the drivers. Even the Great Western tried, briefly, to streamline their ‘Kings' and ‘Castle' series but it ruined the appearance of these beautiful compact locomotives.

Stanier and Gresley, though fierce rivals to produce the best steam locomotive, were also friends, with offices barely a mile apart and they met frequently to discuss developments. The high-speed trials themselves attracted a lot of publicity as one of Gresley's Pacific
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A3
engines reached 108 mph, beating the
City of Truro
's disputed 100 mph claim on the Great Western thirty years previously (see
Chapter 9
). The test runs proved successful, and in 1935 the LNER started a service using streamlined engines on the London and Newcastle called ‘Silver Jubilee' in honour of King George's quarter of a century on the throne. They ran at a maximum speed of 90 mph, far faster than any other British train, which gave a timing of just 240 minutes for the 270-mile run, a whole hour less than the previous best journey time.

The success of the Silver Jubilee prompted demands for a faster service to Edinburgh and also incited Stanier and the LMS to respond, despite the steeper gradients and greater number of curves on the West Coast line. The LMS, which had previously been intent on improving all its services rather than concentrating on one express, now retaliated by introducing the
Coronation Scot
, using Stanier's streamlined ‘Princess Coronation' Pacific engines, which connected London with Glasgow in just six and a half hours, a rather conservative schedule given that a test run had achieved five and three-quarter hours.
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But it was the LNER that caught the headlines. The company introduced the
Coronation
train from London to Edinburgh which took six hours, and on a covert run under cover of a brake test in July 1938 one of Gresley's A4 Pacifics, the famous
Mallard
, achieved the remarkable speed of 126 mph, a record for steam engines that was never to be broken. The regular
Flying Scotsman
service between London and Edinburgh was reduced to seven and a half hours in July 1932 and then precisely seven in 1938.

But it was not only speed that was used to attract customers. Services were improved with passengers being given free newspapers and magazines, and even offered, for a shilling, the loan of a headphone on which, thanks to a cable socket at the back of their seats, they could listen to the latest news and a selection of gramophone records, hosted by the world's first mobile DJ. Another time-honoured way of marketing the railway was to apply names to superior services, a practice that had started in the mid-nineteenth century but was now exploited to the full on all kinds of obscure routes. While some, like the
Flying Scotsman
or
Golden Arrow
, were universally recognized, it would take a fully qualified trainspotter to know what stations the
Orcadian
, the
Palatine
, the
Granville Express
, the
Further North Express
or the
Comet
might have served. There was also a secret way of getting a fast train without taking one of those crack expresses, and that was to jump on one of the newspaper specials that left London in the small hours and, of necessity, made good time. The Taunton night train from Paddington took precisely two and a half hours to cover 143 miles while Philip Unwin recalled travelling on the 1.25 a.m. from Waterloo which reached Exeter, with only two intermediate stops, at 5 a.m.; and a bit further down the line ‘an obliging porter at Okehampton would fill my mug with boiling water so I could shave in comfort while the train waited there'.
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The promotion of these expresses was the highpoint of the publicity campaigns run by the Big Four. According to a history of
Mallard's
achievement, ‘LNER express drivers became almost as famous as today's football stars'.
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Indeed, after the war, drivers of the A4 Pacifics had a little slot on the cabside in which they put their own nameplates and enthusiasts eagerly sought their autographs. The company produced all kinds of paraphernalia, ranging from paperweights and small models to special versions of Snakes and Ladders and dozens of different sets of playing cards.

Posters were the mainstay of the publicity campaign, as they could make use of the acres of free wall space available at stations and the costs could often be shared with the local resorts they were promoting. Cecil Dandridge, the man responsible for LNER's marketing, produced a series of forty posters promoting seaside towns and Scottish tourist attractions reached easily by the East Coast line, and even commissioned a designer, the illustrious Eric Gill, to produce a typeface to blend in with the elegant illustrations on the posters.
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The LMS responded by commissioning a famous series of vivid posters in a characteristic 1930s style from the artist Norman Wilkinson, featuring lochs, ships and locomotives. Indeed, this period saw the production of a wonderful array of posters, showing streamlined engines speeding through the bucolic splendour of Britain, far away from the nasty industrial regions which the railways had helped to create. Many of these posters still adorn many living room walls today, creating a rather more romantic image of the railways than perhaps they merited.

Until the battle between the LNER and the LMS, the Great Western had long been the most innovative in terms of promoting its services and developed the slogan ‘Go Great Western', which was used extensively in books and leaflets,
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even on jigsaws and inkwells. Now the Great Western got in on the act by making much play of its hundredth anniversary in 1935, a unique event since no other railway company before or since was able to boast such continuity. Oddly, the main publication to celebrate this anniversary was a jokey booklet entitled
Railway Ribaldry
, produced by Heath Robinson, the man whose name is synonymous with impractical and eccentric inventions. The Great Western was responsible, too, for ‘Quicker by Rail', the most famous line of advertising copy at the time, which was first used in 1934 and soon adopted by all the companies. Although death rates on the roads were far higher than today and car transport posed a much greater risk to travellers than the railways, railwaymen were too superstitious to use another suggested slogan, ‘It's safer and quicker by rail'.

These publicity campaigns were an important part of the railway companies' belated response to the threat from the roads. The railways felt that they had been treated unfairly by government in comparison with road transport, and were particularly angered that the longstanding rules which controlled the prices they could charge for freight had not been changed, allowing road hauliers to cherry-pick the best loads. In 1930 a Royal Commission granted them a few concessions, such as forcing road transport to be licensed, which did slow down their growth but did little to redress the fundamental imbalance between the two industries. The railway companies also finally rid themselves of the Railway Passenger Duty, first imposed in 1832: at the time of its abolition in 1929, courtesy of the then Chancellor of the Exchequer, Winston Churchill, the duty was levied on all passenger fares above 1d per mile. But the decision to abolish it was out of concern about rising unemployment rather than any largesse towards the railways. In 1935, the government also provided some direct support to the industry, providing loans for investment in locomotives, station improvement and modernization which they could not afford to undertake themselves.

There were other changes too. Under legislation in 1928, the railways were given the right to run their own bus services, which spurred some
into linking up with existing bus companies to form integrated
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transport organizations. However, coordination between bus and train was the exception, with bus times rarely shown in the timetable. Strangely, the railways invested heavily in the two main bus groups – British Electric Traction and Tilling – leading to the development of services that took traffic away from rail. In 1933, the railway also bought a controlling interest in the famous Pickfords haulage and removal firm, as well as another big haulier, Carter Paterson. And the railways even obtained a toehold in the aviation business, forming the Railway Air Service, based at London Croydon airport, which flew to Scotland, Northern Ireland and several provincial towns.

But greater government involvement could also be a poisoned chalice. The Big Four effectively became government tools of wider macroeconomic policy since they were a huge source of employment and found themselves at the mercy of government whims, which were not necessarily in the railways' interest. They were encouraged to undertake inappropriate investment because of the government's desire to protect jobs when a carefully drawn-up programme of culling the most uneconomic branch lines and several of the duplicated longer routes might have given them a more stable financial basis. Not only did the government provide little financial support, it refused to endorse moves by the companies to reduce capacity. It was certainly not a commercial decision that left the LMS, at the outbreak of war, with three major rolling stock manufacturing and repair facilities with a combined workforce of 100,000: the government would not sanction closures of such major plant at a time of fragile economic recovery.

During the inter-war period, only 1,240 miles of railway were closed, just 6 per cent of the total, which Jack Simmons reckoned was ‘not nearly drastic enough',
³³
especially as part of the rationale behind the amalgamation of 1923 was to improve efficiency and reduce duplication. In fairness to the railways, as mentioned before, the precise economics of a branch line were little known and as a result of the reluctance to close lines, the rural railway, that spider's web of branches built in the nineteenth century, largely survived, uneconomic though they were. Because of the railways' obligations as a common carrier, very slow goods trains ran on many of these lines, picking up a parcel
here, delivering a ton of coal there and averaging 5 mph or possibly on a good day 10 mph.

As a result, the Big Four struggled financially, especially in the 1930s following the depression. They were not completely unprofitable and most started off by paying reasonable dividends to their shareholders, with the Great Western giving 8 per cent in 1924 and the LMS 7 per cent. The Great Western maintained payments of 3 per cent throughout the period, though only by dipping heavily into reserves and raising eyebrows at the Stock Exchange, while the LMS, with far greater expenses despite the efforts of Stamp, eventually paid nothing at all during the bad years following the depression. The LNER and the Southern, which both had more complicated share structures, also struggled to pay adequate dividends. Compared with the other railways, both the LNER and the Southern were keener on investing in the railway than paying their shareholders.

A clearer relationship between the state and the railways was needed; the one part of the country where there was anything akin to a coherent transport policy was London. The London Passenger Transport Board, known universally as London Transport, was created in 1933 and brought together all modes of transport in London except, unfortunately, suburban rail services, which were excluded at the last moment under pressure from the Big Four. However, London Transport was an example of how to coordinate rail and bus transport with strong direction from the government on the type and frequency of services that should be provided. Creating this massive combine, which was disliked by the Big Four, allowed public transport in the capital to compete much better with its true rival, the motor car.
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