Nationalization of British Railways: What Went Wrong?

BR at the end was a remarkably efficient system doing so much with very little. The British Government simply didn't want to invest money into railways, so privatized the costs, having someone else pick up the cheque instead of them, while keeping complete control.

People whitter on about the lack of standardisation in BR, and running multiple types of locomotives. They ended up with a standardised range of locos with the Class 20, 37 and 47, which are still in service now. The reason for running multiple types was to see what worked, scrap what didn't, and they were left with those classes running which proved themselves to be the best suited to BR's needs. It didn't fail. It worked perfectly as they ended up with very well proven and reliable designs that are still in service 60 years later.

One of the political reasons the dieselisation of British Railways was sped up was the Clean Air Act of 1956, under which British Railways could be fined each time a steam locomotive made excess smoke.

Not sure how can you talk about Beeching without talking about Ernest Marples: Minister for Transport, who had large shares in a road building company, and thus wanted to destroy the competition.

- French nationalized railways: - French TGV: 1st HST line in Europe Paris-Lyon (427 km) in 1981 + world speed records on rails: 380 kph (1981) 515 kph (1990) 574 kph (2007). High Speed TGV Paris-Bordeaux (575 km): 6 November 2023, departure Paris 9:04am - arrival Bordeaux 11:14am, travel time 2hr10 min. Cost 45 euros. - French nationalized electricity production: nuclear reactors, 2nd greenest in EU "France Is Europe’s Top Power Exporter… most of the power flowing to Great Britain (8TWh) and Italy (9TWh)." Bloomberg 2023-08-07

I'd say having a transport minister who owned a road building company probably wasn't beneficial to the rail industry..

Deutsche Bahn followed the neoliberal Thatcherite “reforms” in the 90s and 2000s, with the same thudding failure.

Societal infrastructure like railways and powerlines should be on public hands.

When the railways were private companies they wanted the owners of private wagons to invest in vacuum braking for their wagons but the private owners weren't interested so they ended up with a huge fleet of non vacuum braked wagons. Also in WW2 many people had learnt to drive a skill they would use after the war and with the government selling off wartime lorries cheap these people bought them and started their own freight haulage businesses in direct competition with the railways. The only business that railway freight has over road hauled freight is block loads where a train carries only one type of cargo. The haulage of "pick up" freight trains stopping numerous stations to pick up or drop off wagons only paid it's way when there was no road haulage competition. Road haulage had it all over the railways because road transport can deliver direct to a customers business whereas the railway can only deliver to the nearest station or goods shed. It's then up to the customer to find a way to transport it to where they need it. Government ineptitude and corruption also played it's part in the ruining of the railways and that ineptitude and corruption carries on today.

Whilst British Railways did start in 1948 (not 1947 as you stated) with 1,223,634 wagons it ended the with 1,179,404 wagons of which 1,047,439 of these had no automatic brakes and had an average capacity 12.5tons. By the start of 1967 the total number of wagons had reduce to 551,422 of which only 466,623 wagindcremained in service by the end of the year, of which 275,770 wagons had no automatic brakes and had an average capacity of 16.94 tons. The reasons behind these numbers include the removal from service of pre-war privste owner wagons with wooden underframes, the withdrawal of wagons unfit to be repaired, thec withdrawal of wagons with no automatic brakes and the removal of low capacity wagons. The wagons removed from service were sometimes replaced by higher capacity wagons. These figures come from the BTC's annual reports. Your simplistic usevof statistics gives a very misleading picture of the true state of Britain's railways.

Public service is not meant to make profits. It is there to service people...

Thanks for the video. Very detailed and well explained as usual especially on such a well talked about topic in British Rail. Keep up the good work👍

It’s kind of fascinating how the Japanese are the only ones who managed to make their rail network profitable

Were's the video for yesterday.... I was waiting for it all day!!!

Great video, can't wait for the third one... 😉

The sequel that we actually wanted and will not be disappointed by.

We're still waiting for electrification on much of the network. Having a stop gap solution always becomes the permanent solution in this country. It lets them kick the can further down the road.

In no shape or form can Beeching be described as a "saviour" of the railways. The only decent idea he came up with - merry-go-round freight - was pinched from Gerry Fiennes. Wholesale destruction of the rail network begot the marvellous heritage left to us by the Victorians and left us ill-prepared for modern transport needs and an over-reliance on road vehicles. Lack of protection of railway trackbeds led to a situation where, although an area would benefit from a rail link, the redevelopment of the trackbed since the 1960s means that it is too expensive and disruptive to reinstate a rail link. What did Beeching achieve from his mad hacking? Where were the cost savings? A pittance as BR's main costs were due to insane staffing levels and an incompetent management which wasted funds on developing British alternatives to tried and tested European diesel engines.

Can't wait for the privatisation video!

There were 3 important points omitted: BR upon its creation was saddled with debt as it had to pay compensation to the share holders of the big 4. The Heath government extended the compensation scheme that is why BR was not turning a profit until the late 70's. NIMBYs blocked the electrification of the old Southern region & so it has always been crippled by a 3rd rail system. Thatcher was rabidly anti-union & that is why she wouldn't invest in the railways. Only poor people used trains because successful people owned cars & the road network didn't need public subsidy 🙄