modern electric trains
The reason for this is twofold. One is the influence of London and people travelling to work and shop there. Today 70 percent of rail journeys in Britain either start or end in London, and this is surely why such rural stations as Stonegate and Pluckley not only still exist but have hourly services to London.
But there is also a reason that a culture of travelling up to London by train developed in the south east and survived into the car era, and that is because Southern Railways - the company that absorbed the London & South Western Railway, the London, Brighton & South Coast, and the South Eastern & Chatham in 1923 - was a pioneer of electrification.
The first electrified railway in the country (and indeed, the world) was the strange little Volks Railway along the seafront in Brighton, which opened in 1883 and still operates to this day. (It was created by Magnus Volks, in case you are wondering about the German name). His technology inspired the City & South London Railway, which ran between the City and Clapham South and is the ancestor of the Northern Line and indeed the whole deep tube system of London Underground.
Originally supposed to be cable-hauled, the City & South London switched to electric locomotives just before opening in 1890, becoming the first proper passenger railway in the country to use them. It was followed in 1893 by the Liverpool Overhead Railway, and in 1898 by the Waterloo & City line (built by the London & South Western Railway - see Terminus wars).
Electric trams were also making an appearance at this time. Trams as a concept had existed since the 1830s (though an early example in the Mumbles in South Wales had entered service as early as 1807), and initially they were horse-drawn. The first electrified tram in the UK (and one of the first in the world) was the Blackpool Tramway along that resort's seafront, opened in 1885 and still operating to this day. However it was from 1900 onwards that electric power became widely available, with a consequent boom in electric trams. In all 102 such systems opened across the country between 1900 and 1904.
These were severe competition for urban railways. They were cleaner and more convenient, with stops in streets rather than at stations. When London tramways were electrified in the early 1900s, traffic on the London, Brighton & South Coast Railway's South London Line from London Bridge to Victoria fell sharply. After the line was electrified in 1909 and dubbed the 'Elevated Electric", traffic bounced back, doubling by 1911.
By this time the deep tube lines that would later become the London Underground had also opened, starting with the Central London Railway (now the Central line) in 1900. By 1907 the core of what was to become the Piccadilly and Bakerloo lines were also in operation, while the City & South London had been extended to Euston. It would later join up with the Charing Cross, Euston and Hampstead Railway (opened in 1907 and widely known as 'The Hampstead Tube') to form the Northern Line. The Metropolitan and District railways had also electrified (see London's Victorian Railways for more detail on all this).
The Paris, Hamburg and Athens metros were all started during this decade, and many electrified suburban and interurban lines were created in the United States. (It was electric 'streetcars' and not the automobile that made Los Angeles the sprawling city it is today.) In the UK one suburban line into Newcastle was electrified in 1904, various lines into Liverpool from 1903 to 1914, and one line into Manchester in 1916.
Following the London, Brighton & South Coast Railway's example on the South London Line, other suburban lines in London were also converted from steam to electric in the 1910s. More details of this are in London's Victorian Railways, but in brief the LBSCR extended its wires to Crystal Palace and Streatham by 1912, while the London & South Western Railway (worried about competition from the newly electrified District Railway) converted its suburban lines to places such as Kingston and Hampton Court between 1913 and 1919. The London & North Western Railway opened the 'New Line' to Watford in 1911 (now partly used by the Bakerloo Line: electrification did not finally reach Euston until 1922, however), as well as electrifying its line from Broad Street (a now demolished station next to Liverpool Street) to Richmond. In all but the last case, electrification was accompanied by a dramatic rise - often a doubling - in traffic.
One might have thought that the logic for going onto to electrify the mainstream railways would have been obvious, but after the grouping of Britain's railways into four large companies in 1923 only Southern Railways really took up this idea. Under the visionary leadership of Sir Herbert Walker it set out to do nothing less than convert its entire system to the new form of traction.
It opted to do this with the third rail system used by the London & South Western (chosen to blend in with District line trains with which it shared some tracks) rather than the overhead lines used by the London, Brighton and South Coast Railway and almost every other electrification scheme in the country (and indeed the world, apart from the US). From Southern's point of view the third rail was cheap to install, less intrusive on the landscape, and, crucially, did not take up valuable space in tunnels.
The decision meant that the former LBSCR suburban lines had to be converted from overhead to third rail, but Southern made up for this by electrifying the lines out of London at a great pace. The third rail reached Guildford and Dorking in 1925, for example, and in 1930 it got to Gravesend and Windsor. Reigate and Three Bridges followed in 1932; Brighton on New Year's Day 1933; Seaford, Eastbourne and Sevenoaks (both routes) in 1935; Bexhill, Hastings (via the coast from Brighton), Haslemere and Portsmouth in 1937; Littlehampton and Bognor by 1938 and Maidstone by 1939. By this time Southern had 1,746 miles of electrified track, making it one of the largest such systems in the world.
Wherever electrification reached, passengers experienced what was called "the sparks effect". Electric trains only needed one driver (instead of the driver, fireman and someone to clean the boilers at the end of the day required for steam locomotives). They did not need to be refuelled and watered, or spend hours being fired up in the morning. They could accelerate faster and brake more sharply than steam trains, and did not need to be turned round on turntables or run around to the other end of the train at each end of the route.
Electric trains also made light work of lines on which steam trains had struggled. For example the Guildford to Portsmouth line was not a main line before electrification because of its challenging gradients. Instead London to Portsmouth expresses went from Victoria via Arundel and the south coast, or from Waterloo via Eastleigh. Eyebrows were therefore raised when Southern decided to electrify what at the time was seen as a dozy branch line. Post-electrification it soon became the principal route.
The London to Brighton line, meanwhile, has three summits (Merstham, Balcombe and the Clayton Tunnel outside Brighton) which were noticeable in steam days but are imperceptible today. Electric trains could routinely do the line at speeds previously managed by only a few prestige expresses.
In all, Walker estimated he could run two and a half times as many electric trains for the same cost as the old steam ones, and Southern responded by increasing the frequency of service. It is from this era that we get the now standard idea of running trains at the same time every hour. Each time a line was electrified Southern produced a proud new timetable, with designer covers and the words "Brighton Electric" or "Portsmouth Electric" blazoned across them.
Electrification worked. Passenger numbers jumped sharply whenever new electric routes opened - by 29 percent in the first year on the Brighton line - and a culture arose that it was quicker to take the train to London than to drive. Southern also promoted the idea of living in the country and working in London, with slogans such as "Live in Kent and be content" and "Live in Surrey, free from worry." Commuter traffic doubled between the First and Second World Wars, and Croydon, Purley, Coulson, Merstham, Redhill, Horley, Gatwick, Haywards Heath, Brighton and Hove all grew as a result. People even commuted from as far afield as Chatham, Alton or Portsmouth.
Allied to this was its promotion of the south as a leisure destination, Southern figuring that people would prefer to buy a house in a place they went for pleasure or on holidays. To this end it produced walking guides for ramblers (see The Golden Age of Railways) and a 1930s brochure called "Evenings by the Sea" - the idea being that you went down to Brighton after work in the summer, or that you lived in Brighton and worked in London.
near Arundel, West Sussex
One reason, perhaps, was that for the other big three railway companies freight was a much more important part of their business, and the benefits of electrification here were less obvious. On LNER in 1931 freight accounted for half of all train miles, for example. At the same time Southern had 24,500 passenger train miles and just 3,000 of freight.
As it happens, the British approach was probably an advantage during the Second World War when steam trains could be far more flexible in getting around bomb damage than electric ones. Their use of coal, which Britain had in abundance, rather than imported oil was also a major plus. But when the network was being rebuilt after the war, modernisation of locomotives should have been a priority. Instead a cash-strapped Britain Railways opted for the technology it knew and built an astonishing 2000 steam locomotives between 1948 and 1960. All of these which were to be scrapped by the late 1960s when steam was finally phased out.
The post-war period did at least see a resumption of electrification in the south east. Wiring the lines out of Liverpool Street had been considered as early as 1905 and again in 1925, but had been rejected on grounds of cost. A plan agreed in 1935 was scuppered by the Second World War. Work finally started in the late 1940s, with the Shenfield line converted by 1949 and others from 1955 onwards. Even so, Cambridge was not reached until 1970 and Norwich not till 1987.
Under the 1955 British Rail Modernisation Plan electrification on the Southern network also resumed, with the Kent coast line from Gillingham to Ramsgate and Faversham to Dover given a third rail in 1959, Sevenoaks to Canterbury West and Dover following in 1961, and Basingstoke to Bournemouth in 1967.
That still left Tonbridge to Hastings and the line to East Grinstead. The decision had been taken not to electrify the former in 1938 because its narrow tunnels (see South East to Dover) would have meant it would have needed special rolling stock. Instead these lines were converted from steam to diesel in the 1960s and were not electrified until 1986 and 1987 respectively (the narrow tunnel problem being solved by making the lines through them single track, a cause of delays ever since).
Other lines which would have been electrified had not the Second World War not intervened were not so lucky, however, and were closed in the Beeching cuts (sometimes despite having better passenger numbers than electrified lines, though in general passenger numbers on non-electrified lines continued to decline despite the revival on electrified ones).
Two surprise survivors in this category are the Ashford to Hastings and Hurst Green to Uckfield lines, which are still diesel-hauled to this day (See Lines we lost and A miraculous survivor). Only one electrified line in the south east was closed by Beeching - that from Haywards Heath to Horsted Keynes via Ardingly - now disused but owned by the Bluebell Railway.
On the rest of the network post-war electrification was largely confined to trunk routes to the north (one exception being a few suburban lines in Glasgow, converted from the 1960s onwards). In 1959, as part of the British Rail Modernisation Plan of 1955, work started on the west coast main line. London to Manchester and Liverpool was converted by 1965, Birmingham by 1967, and Crewe to Glasgow by 1974.
The east coast main line got the same treatment from 1985 onwards, with wires reaching Leeds in 1989 and Edinburgh in 1991. The London to Bedford section of the Midland main line was also electrified by 1983 as part of the Thameslink project, but plans to continue to Sheffield were shelved.
Electrification did not then resume until 2009, starting with one of the routes between Glasgow and Edinburgh. A further four lines between the two cities have since been converted. Liverpool to Manchester also went live in 2015, with lines to Preston and Blackpool added in 2018 and Bolton in 2019. In 2022 the government re-committed itself to the electrification of the Manchester to Leeds and York Transpennine route, with work currently underway near Manchester and York, though wiring of the whole line may not be complete until the mid 2030s.
In the south, electrification of the Great Western lines from Paddington to Didcot was completed in January 2018, with electric services to Bristol Parkway and Newbury following in January 2019, and Cardiff in January 2020. Wiring from Swindon to Chippenham has also been completed. Sadly, plans to electrify Didcot to Oxford, the Henley and Marlow branches, and line from Chippenham to Bristol Temple Meads have been put on the back burner, but long distance trains out of Paddington are all now bi-mode - that is, able to run under electric power where available and otherwise using diesel traction. This enabled Paddington to become an all-electric station in June 2019, leaving Marylebone as the only London terminus still operating diesels (apart from the Salisbury-Exeter service out of Waterloo).
Bi-modes will also be used on the Midland Main Line from St Pancras to Nottingham, Derby and Sheffield. Electrification from Bedford to Market Harborough near Leicester is now complete, and plans to carry on to Sheffield were revived in 2012, only to be put on hold again in 2017. In 2022 they were officially revived again, but no announcements have been made about this since.
A bi-mode diesel-electric train at Paddington
In the south east there has been talk of electrifying Hurst Green to Uckfield, as well as Reigate to Guildford and Ash to Wokingham to allow electric trains to run from Reading to Gatwick. Ashford to Hastings could also be converted under a plan to run high speed trains to Hastings. But these are of much lower priority than other electrification plans and so unlikely to happen soon. Tragically, as a result of the Covid pandemic in 2020-21, Great Western abandoned plans to operate tri-mode trains (capable of diesel, overhead line or third rail traction) on the Reading-Gatwick route, citing falling passenger demand - this despite having already leased the trains.
On a broader scale, with urgent action needed to combat climate change, electrification of the bulk of the UK rail network is surely on the cards. The Scottish government has an ambitious plan to decarbonise its network by 2035, but there has been no corresponding commitment in England.
In its Decarbonising Transport report in 2021 the UK government did endorse a Network Rail plan that would see most of the network wired up by 2050, with a few branch lines operating battery or hydrogen-powered trains, but has failed to act on it since. As of July 2021, only 38% of the British network was electrified, compared to an average of 60% across Europe and 100% in Switzerland. What would Sir Herbert Walker have made of it all?
© Peter Conway 2010-2024 • All Rights Reserved
Electrification did not then resume until 2009, starting with one of the routes between Glasgow and Edinburgh. A further four lines between the two cities have since been converted. Liverpool to Manchester also went live in 2015, with lines to Preston and Blackpool added in 2018 and Bolton in 2019. In 2022 the government re-committed itself to the electrification of the Manchester to Leeds and York Transpennine route, with work currently underway near Manchester and York, though wiring of the whole line may not be complete until the mid 2030s.
In the south, electrification of the Great Western lines from Paddington to Didcot was completed in January 2018, with electric services to Bristol Parkway and Newbury following in January 2019, and Cardiff in January 2020. Wiring from Swindon to Chippenham has also been completed. Sadly, plans to electrify Didcot to Oxford, the Henley and Marlow branches, and line from Chippenham to Bristol Temple Meads have been put on the back burner, but long distance trains out of Paddington are all now bi-mode - that is, able to run under electric power where available and otherwise using diesel traction. This enabled Paddington to become an all-electric station in June 2019, leaving Marylebone as the only London terminus still operating diesels (apart from the Salisbury-Exeter service out of Waterloo).
Bi-modes will also be used on the Midland Main Line from St Pancras to Nottingham, Derby and Sheffield. Electrification from Bedford to Market Harborough near Leicester is now complete, and plans to carry on to Sheffield were revived in 2012, only to be put on hold again in 2017. In 2022 they were officially revived again, but no announcements have been made about this since.
On a broader scale, with urgent action needed to combat climate change, electrification of the bulk of the UK rail network is surely on the cards. The Scottish government has an ambitious plan to decarbonise its network by 2035, but there has been no corresponding commitment in England.
In its Decarbonising Transport report in 2021 the UK government did endorse a Network Rail plan that would see most of the network wired up by 2050, with a few branch lines operating battery or hydrogen-powered trains, but has failed to act on it since. As of July 2021, only 38% of the British network was electrified, compared to an average of 60% across Europe and 100% in Switzerland. What would Sir Herbert Walker have made of it all?
© Peter Conway 2010-2024 • All Rights Reserved
