The controversial Dr Beeching

The Horsham to Guildford line today
Look in the railway section of any bookshop and you can find whole shelves full of nostalgic books about lost rural branch lines. The villain in these books is Dr Richard Beeching, who was appointed chairman of the board of the nationalised British Railways in 1961 and who in 1963 published a report entitled The Reshaping of British Railways whose contents have been argued about ever since.

Not a railway man – in itself a crime in the eyes of railway enthusiasts then and since – Beeching had been technical director at chemical conglomerate ICI before being offered the British Railways post. His brief was to find a way to make the railways commercially viable at a time when passenger numbers were declining and they were losing increasing amounts of money. He proposed to do this by closing 5,000 of the 17,830 miles of track, and a third of the 7000 stations.

His idea was that proper investment could then be focused on what was left – a fact which is often ignored by his critics. Even at the time Beeching was aware that his cuts would be controversial. “I suppose I will always be looked on as the axe-man, but it was surgery, not mad chopping,” he said in later life.

To be fair to Beeching, the idea that some lines needed to be closed was neither new nor confined to the UK. Almost every country with a developed railway network was trimming its lines at the time. France shut huge numbers of rural branch lines and in the US the railways practically disappeared as a viable form of passenger transport. So the cuts in Britain were not unique, and nor were they the most savage.

Beeching’s report was also met on publication not with criticism but with praise. “Unanswerable. Dr Beeching has shown brilliantly how the railways may be made to pay,” said The Times, quoted by Matthew Engel in his book Eleven Minutes Late (see Further Reading). The Daily Mirror praised the plan as “Beeching’s blockbuster”.

The plain fact was that in the early 1960s railways seemed to be on the wrong side of history. The rise of cars and buses had already eroded passenger numbers in the 1930s but had then been interrupted by the Second World War. For a period after the war car ownership also remained low but in the late 1950s it took off. Bus services were also at their zenith, not yet hampered by traffic congestion. Road transport looked like the future in 1963.

The M1 motorway had opened in 1959 and it was regarded as modern and efficient, while by contrast railways, battered by the Second World War and suffering from underinvestment, were tatty, slow and old-fashioned. It probably did not help that Ernest Marples, the Conservative transport minister who appointed Beeching, was emphatically pro-road, having made his fortune by road construction (including being one of the main contractors on the M1).

Many rural branch lines had also become uneconomical. While we imagine people using the railways to travel from one side of the country to the other, most passengers in the Victorian era actually used them for local journeys - typically to a nearby city or town. In the 1870s the average journey length was just 10 miles, and most of the growth in passengers in the second half of the nineteenth century was short distance. It was this local traffic that was lost to bus and car in the first half of the twentieth century.

One also has to remember that a lot of places were smaller than they are today. Many rural towns ballooned in size as new housing was built in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and then again in the 1980s, making Beeching's decision to cut their rail services seem perverse in retrospect. An example is the line from Guildford to Horsham (see Lines we lost), which passed through now populous places such as Bramley, Wonersh and Cranleigh. Today they seem obvious candidates for railway services to London, yet all were much smaller in the late 1950s when this line was described as "pursuing a bucolic and uneventful existence". No great surprise, then, that it closed in 1965.

There there was freight. This was a massive contributor to the income of the Victorian railway companies, with rail the only viable method for transporting most items to most places. This was particularly true on branch lines, though even London termini had large freight operations, now long forgotten. St Pancras, for example, was built at first floor level to allow enormous warehousing for beer and other items to be built beneath it (this is the area now occupied by the new Eurostar station check-in and associated shops). Meanwhile, Paddington had a vast freight yard just to the north of it, which has now been redeveloped into flats and offices, and the same is now happening to the former goods yards at Kings Cross. Much of the 2012 Olympic site was also once freight marshalling yards.

In rural locations the station was an absolute lifeline, the route by which all cargo and parcels arrived. Pluckley, for example – now a classic un-staffed rural halt, apart from a ticket office open for a few hours on weekday mornings – would have had in Victorian times a stationmaster, two clerks, two signalmen, two porters who doubled as shunters, and a plate layer or lengthsman who maintained the track. All but the last would have spent a lot of their time dealing with freight – booking it in and out, loading or unloading wagons, shunting them in and out of sidings that have now long disappeared, dealing with parcels.

So important were railways to freight that they were by law common carriers – that is, they had to carry whatever was presented to them. But by the 1920s truck firms were springing up which had no such restrictions and could pick off the most lucrative business. Many of these firms had been started by First World War soldiers who had learned to drive in the army and acquired surplus military trucks on the cheap at the end of the war. Meanwhile the railway companies were forbidden by the government from getting into the road haulage business, except for short distance feeds to their stations.

British Railways (which was created in 1947 when the remaining four railway companies were nationalised) was not relieved of its common carriage obligation until 1957. By that time the decline in rail freight had become a rout. The old model of loading small freight consignments into wagons, which might then be marshalled and shunted several times during the course of a journey, was no longer viable.

Unfortunately, British Railways was slow to realise this and under a 1955 government modernisation plan instead invested £85 million (about £1.6bn in today’s money) in automating the process. Thirty massive freight yards were constructed around the country, using all the latest technology, but this could not hide the fact that road haulage was less complicated and more efficient. In the end, Beeching was right in saying in future rail freight would be confined to full trainloads of cargo, such as coal, aggregates or containers.

The loss of freight meant that many rural branch lines were no longer viable, and it didn’t help that railway costs were also rising. In the Victorian era working on the railway was a prestige job – a stationmaster was an important local figure – but that also meant that staff could be made to work horrendous hours – often from early in the morning till late at night, six days a week. From the 1890s onwards unionisation changed that and increased wages. The first national rail strike was in 1911 and there were two more in 1924 and 1926. Costs were just 25 percent of revenues in the early days of the railways: by 1900 they were 62 percent and by the late 1930s 81 percent. By Beeching's time they were more than 100 percent.

Many Victorian railways had had little idea of the profitability of their branch lines anyway. They tended not to keep figures on a line by line basis but instead looked at the revenues of the whole network. It was the more rigorous accounting in the modern railway that highlighted which lines were loss-making.

One last factor was the competition between the many Victorian railway companies. The British Railways Pre-Grouping Atlas (see Further reading) lists a staggering 150 different names, though some of these were joint ventures between railway companies already on the list. Such competition produced both duplication (two companies operating similar routes) and lines built largely to keep other railway companies out (see A miraculous survivor). Now the railways were under one nationalised entity it made sense to eliminate some of these.

All these factors had been building throughout the twentieth century and as early as 1914 they had resulted in 200 miles of line – mainly special freight lines – being closed. Between the two world wars another 1,240 miles closed - six percent of the total network - and of the 19,414 miles British Railways inherited in 1947, a further 1,500 miles had been shut by 1962.

Beeching’s plan was based on what seemed like logical analysis at the time. He did a traffic survey which found that a quarter of the fare income generated by the railways came from just 34 stations, or 0.5 percent of the total. Half of the 17,830 miles of line carried just four percent of the traffic. At his own local station – East Grinstead – which at that time had connections to Three Bridges and Tunbridge Wells as well as to London (see A miraculous survivor), he found that 950 passengers daily went to London, 300 to Three Bridges and 25 to Tunbridge Wells. Put like this, it seemed obvious to shut the lines to Tunbridge Wells and Three Bridges. (A joke at the time said that Beeching had kept open the line he used each day to get to work, and shut all the rest).

Later critics of the Beeching report have pointed out that the very same argument could be made about the road network, however. Rural roads carry a tiny percentage of the national total but no one argues that they should be allowed to revert to cart tracks as a consequence. Instead they are seen as vital infrastructure which the government must invest in and maintain. Yet if government money supports the railways, it is seen as a subsidy. As it was, it was not until 1968 that it was explicitly recognised that some public transport deserved government subsidies.

Diesel trains and unstaffed stations
might have kept more lines open
Beeching’s other failings were to ignore network effects – how much traffic branch lines contribute to main lines – and the external cost benefits of a railway line. Does it stimulate the economy, create jobs in the towns it serves? Does it reduce deaths from road accidents and so save the health service money? Today we take this kind of argument for granted. For example Brighton, which has a fast train to London, is more prosperous than Hastings, which does not. As it was, Beeching cut important towns off from the railway just to save a few miles of track.

There was also an almost wilful refusal at the time to consider whether branch lines would have been more viable with simplified operations. Experiments in the late 1950s and early 1960s showed that rural lines could pay their way if diesel railcars replaced steam trains, level crossings were automated, and staffing at stations reduced to the minimum. Yet nearly all the lines that Beeching closed still had fully staffed stations. There was a particular failure to realise that with the imminent end of freight traffic, smaller stations could operate without any personnel, as is common today. Meanwhile electrification had dramatically reduced costs and increased passenger numbers to the south of London (see The sparks effect), but this experiment was not repeated elsewhere.

Despite this, many of the lines shut before and after Beeching probably did need closing. Matthew Engel in his book Eleven Minutes Late (see Further reading) cites the very scenic line across Dartmoor to Princeton, home of Dartmoor Prison, which was marked for closure in 1955. The Prison Commission objected, but then had to admit it transported both its prisoners and its coal by road. Meanwhile fierce protests against the closure in 1954 of the line from Oxford to Woodstock (where Blenheim Palace is situated) was undermined by the fact that on average only five people travelled on each train. (Woodstock’s closure makes it all the more amazing that the even more remote Hanborough survived because, like Charlbury, it is on the line to Worcester).

In all, it has been estimated that of the 6,000 miles of line that shut in the 1960s, 4,800 would have closed anyway, however emotionally attached some people were to them. The 1,200 that should not have been would probably include the Great Central line from Marylebone to the Midlands (see Thames and Chilterns), which was the only line in the country with tunnels big enough to take continental freight trains, and the route around the top of Dartmoor from Exeter to Plymouth.

The latter line was shut because the alternative route – Brunel’s dramatic railway around the Devon coast at Dawlish – was considered sufficient. But running beside the sea, Brunel’s line causes endless corrosion problems in locomotives today, and - as was seen in February 2014 - is vulnerable to being washed away in storms.

The inland route may yet be revived. The section from Exeter to Okehampton (which had remained in place because it served a quarry) reopened to passenger service in November 2021, and Devon County Council is keen to restore the route from Bere Alston near Plymouth to Tavistock. If this succeeds, it is not fanciful that the remaining Tavistock to Okehampton section could one day follow.

Beeching's decision to close the line from Oxford to Cambridge – which ran near to the just-created city of Milton Keynes – was also not the brightest of ideas. The line from Bletchley to Bedford via Bow Brickhill and Woburn Sands is a small part of this former route that still remains open, and Chiltern Railways used the section west of Bicester for its new service from Marylebone to Oxford, inaugurated in December 2016. The East-West Rail project, which aims to recreate the whole line to Cambridge, is now relaying the Bicester to Bletchley section, which is due to open in 2025.

In the south east, the loss of the Uckfield to Lewes and Eridge to Tunbridge Wells links (the latter now the Spa Valley Railway) are particularly galling (though it could have been a lot worse: see A miraculous survivor), while the East Grinstead to Haywards Heath via Horsted Keynes line (now part of the Bluebell Railway) would today be a valuable by-pass route for Gatwick if it was still part of the national network. The Alton to Winchester line (now partly occupied by the Watercress Line: see Lines we lost) would also be a useful alternative route for the main Waterloo-Basingstoke-Southampton line, while Wareham to Swanage (now The Swanage Railway) would also surely be well used.

(The fact that all but one of these lines are now occupied by steam railways is interesting: one loves steam lines and they are big tourist attractions, but some of them now block the reopening of useful infrastructure. Equally it is worth reflecting that without the Beeching closures there would be no steam railways at all: had the lines not been closed, they would simply have been modernised and the preserved railway movement as we know it would not exist.)

Proof that some of the lines cut by Beeching could have been profitable if they had remained open comes from places where closures have been reversed. The line from Edinburgh to Tweedbank - a 2015 reopening by the Scottish government of part of the Waverley Line from Edinburgh to Carlisle - carried 50% more passengers than predicted in its first year of operation and more than double in its second. The Okehampton branch (see above) had four times predicted passengers in its first year. In retrospect one wishes British Rail had left the track of closed railways in place so that closure decisions could be revisited later.

But on the other hand it could easily have been a lot worse. Beeching actually produced a second report in 1965, suggesting reducing the railway to 7,500 miles. For his pains he was dismissed by the new Labour government of Harold Wilson, which nevertheless continued with the cuts in his original plan despite having campaigned against them in opposition. The last line closures did not finish till the early 1970s. But some dramatic closure schemes were rejected, including one to close St Pancras altogether and another to turn Hungerford Bridge (the one carrying the tracks to Charing Cross) into a road bridge.

Even in the 1980s there was a threat to close the Settle to Carlisle line in the north of England because one of its viaducts needed replacing, and in 1982 the Serpell Report presented six options to Margaret Thatcher’s government, one of which would have cut the 10,370 miles of railway still left to just 1,630 – London to Glasgow, Newcastle, Cardiff, Bournemouth, Portsmouth, Brighton & Eastbourne, Dover, Southend and Norwich, with even the majority of London commuter lines being axed.

Thankfully, the report caused a furore that even Margaret Thatcher could not ignore, and the railway network has been left alone - and even somewhat expanded - in the years since. As it happens, 1982 also marked the low point in passenger numbers, which climbed steadily for the next 20 years and in 2018-19 reached an all time record.

Despite a dip in traffic due to the Covid pandemic in 2020-2022, the long term trends still look healthy, with railways a key part efforts to tackle climate change. It is impossible to imagine a Beeching or Serpell being taken seriously now.

© Peter Conway 2010-23 • All Rights Reserved

The sparks effect

Charing Cross: sturdy Victorian bridge,
modern electric trains
If Beeching made some poor choices about closing lines (see The controversial Dr Beeching), something else that ought to have given him pause for thought was the experience of the lines to the south of London. If you look at a map of the UK rail network pre- and post-Beeching, you will see that the south east suffered relatively few railway closures. Amazingly we can still travel by train to rural spots such as Southease, Wadhurst, Yalding, Edenbridge and Hever that would surely have lost their railway service had they been anywhere else in the country.

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.

Electric trains today: an Electrostar
near Arundel, West Sussex
In short, Southern created the modern railway we use today, and showed how new technology and improved services could boost passenger numbers and profits. Sadly this was not a lesson that was copied by the other big three railway companies of that time. Main line electrification was recommended by the Weir Commission in 1931 and was looked at by both the Great Western Railway and the London & North Eastern Railway, but rejected by both companies on grounds of cost. Steam continued to rule until the 1960s - a stark contrast to Germany and the US, which both adopted diesels from 1933 onwards, and Italy, Switzerland and Sweden which were electrifying main lines by the same time.

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

Lines we lost – and ones we didn’t

It is fun to dream about what might have been. While the Beeching cuts of the 1960s were kind to the south east’s rail network, for reasons outlined in the previous section we did nevertheless lose some routes which might have been very useful for walkers. Equally, there were a few miraculous survivals.

A map in Victoria station
of the LBSCR lines at their height
One early closure resulted from the alliance between the South Eastern Railway and the London, Chatham & Dover Railway in 1899 (see Bitter Competition), which in 1911 led to closure of the SER’s line through Rochester and Chatham because it ran parallel to the LCDR track, the one we use today. The SER's stations were also badly-sited - its optimistically-named Chatham Central station was in fact in Rochester, not far from the LCDR station of that name (which remained in service until December 2015 when it was replaced by a new station 500 metres to the west). The SER line did have one lasting legacy, however, in that its bridge across the Medway is the one used by the railway today. The LCDR bridge alongside it was turned into a road bridge.

Rationalisation between competing SER and LCDR lines, this time after the two companies had been merged into Southern Railways in 1923, was also the reason for the closure of the SER line between Ramsgate and Margate. But in this case a new station was created which was actually less convenient for passengers than the two it replaced.

The SER line to Ramsgate - which opened in 1846 and came from Ashford via Canterbury West - originally ran to a terminus station half a mile from the town centre: the line then reversed out and crossed directly to Margate (a route still obvious on the Ordnance Survey map). The LCDR built its line to Ramsgate in 1863, coming in from Margate via Broadstairs. Its station, reached by a tunnel, was right on the seafront at Ramsgate Harbour. Both companies also had their own stations in Margate, the SER one being more or less where the Dreamland funfair is now.

In 1926 Southern Railways decided to link the two lines at Ramsgate to create the through line we have today. It used the LCDR's coastal route from Margate for this (incidentally opening a new station at Dumpton Park at the same time), and shut the SER's more direct Ramsgate-Margate line. Neither of the existing Ramsgate stations was in the right place to be a through station, so both were closed and a new station built on the link line. This leaves passengers today with a mile long walk to the town centre.

More useful for walkers might have been the railway that ran from Brighton to Devil’s Dyke at the top of the downs (the lunch stop on the Hassocks to Upper Beeding walk), which opened in 1887 and closed in 1939. Running from Dyke Junction on the coast line (now Aldrington), the problem with this line was that it stopped half a mile from the summit, while buses had no such problems. Part of the former track is now a very pleasant cycleway, the happy fate of many disused rail lines.

World War II then intervened, and one result was that in 1940 the line from Canterbury to Folkestone via the Elham Valley, which had opened in 1887 (see Bitter competition - and its benefits), was taken over by the army. It seems that the locals soon got used to the replacement bus service because the line only reopened to the public briefly in 1946 before closing again in 1947. Even now it is not difficult to go by train from Canterbury to Folkestone, but this line covered a corner of Kent - stations included Bishopsbourne, Barnham, Elham and Lyminge - that our walking routes currently don’t access.

More closures followed in the 1950s, some of lines that should never have been built in the first place. A good example is the Kent & East Sussex Railway – which is now resurrected as a steam railway from Bodiam Castle to Tenterden. Like many of these no-hope lines, it was built under the 1896 Light Railway Act, which allowed for the construction of railway lines to less stringent standards in return for a 25 mph speed limit. (Most modern steam railways operate under this law.) This particular line started life in 1900 as the Rother Valley Railway from Robertsbridge to Tenterden (its first terminus being the station now called Rolvenden) and was extended to the current Tenterden station in 1903. It got its present name in 1905 when it was extended to Headcorn.

Quite what the economic purpose of this line was is hard to say. Attempts had been made to build a line to Tenterden, one of the most important towns in the Weald in the early 19th century, since the early days of the railways. Back in the 1840s the South Eastern Railway had wanted to build its line to Hastings via the town, but had been forced by parliament to choose the current route via Robertsbridge and Battle instead (see South East to Dover).

But by the early 1900s Tenterden was a small prize for a railway company and the Kent & East Sussex line otherwise went through remote countryside, with stations that were sometimes far from the villages they claimed to serve (eg Rolvenden, which is actually nearer to Tenterden than to Rolvenden village, or Wittersham Road, which is over two miles from Wittersham village).

Even in its heyday the line was lightly used. The author of Forgotten Railways: Volume 6: South East England (see Further reading) describes a journey he made on the line on a July Saturday in 1939 when there were only eight passengers travelling from Robertsbridge, only one of which (himself) got off at Tenterden. Going on to Headcorn (where the remains of the branch line platform survive, hidden in the trees to the south of the current station) there were only four passengers. Freight was mainly confined to domestic coal and there were just five trains a day. The line was closed to regular passenger services in 1954 and its tracks torn up between Headcorn and Tenterden. But the Robertsbridge to Tenterden section was used for hopping specials (East Enders from London travelling down for working holidays picking hops in Kent) until 1959 and for freight until 1961.

The Kent & East Sussex was the brainchild of one Colonel Holman Stephens, who built a number of these light railways around the country. Another was the gloriously named Hundred of Manhood and Selsey Tramway, which ran from Chichester to the coast at Selsey. Opened in 1897, its trains are described by Matthew Engel in Eleven Minutes Late (see Further reading) as looking like Model T Fords on rails. The line did not last long once road transport took off, closing in 1935.

Some other lines that closed in the mid 1950s included the Meon Valley Line, which ran from Alton south to Fareham and which had opened as late as 1903. It had been intended as a main line to Gosport, but was never used as such, with the last through trains to London being withdrawn at the start of the First World War. In the Second World War it was busy with troop trains and in a carriage on this line on 2 June 1944 Winston Churchill met with army leaders to make final plans for D-Day. But after the war traffic declined rapidly and it closed to passengers in 1955. Passing through such villages as West Meon and Droxford, this line served pretty walking territory in the western half of the South Downs, albeit that journey times from London would be about two hours even today.

The nearby route from Alton to Basingstoke had an even shorter life. Another product of the Light Railway Act of 1896, it opened on 1 June 1901 to little fanfare - only ten people came to see the first train off. By 1913 it was already losing money and in 1916 its track was lifted for use on the Western Front in France. The local population clamoured for its reinstatement after the war and it reopened on August 1924, but almost immediately was made obsolete by bus services. The last passenger train ran on 10 September 1932 with only one passenger on board. The last freight train was in 1936. The line was used to film Oh, Mr Porter in 1937 and then lifted.

The South Downs west of Amberley and Arundel are in fact entirely inaccessible by railway these days, which is a pity as they have some stunning scenery. Today we can walk from Haslemere to Midhurst and come back by bus, but once three railway lines converged on the town.

For example, Midhurst was one of the branches of the London, Brighton & South Coast Railway line that splits off from the main Brighton line at Three Bridges and carries on to Horsham, which was reached as early as 1848. The line – known as the Mid Sussex Railway – was extended to Billingshurst, Pulborough and Petworth in 1859, and to Midhurst in 1866. In the meantime, in 1863, the line we still use today had been built south from Pulborough to Amberley, Arundel and Littlehampton.

The original intention of the LBSCR had been to carry on from Midhurst to Petersfield, but this would have encroached on the territory of the London & South Western Railway, so it graciously let its rival build this part of the line. The LSWR's Petersfield to Midhurst branch opened in 1864 but the result was a classic Victorian railway muddle, with both companies maintaining their own stations in the town and the link line between them being largely unused. Had through trains run from Pulborough to Petersfield, who knows if the line might still survive.

To make matters worse, when in 1881 the LBSCR built a line to Midhurst up from Chichester, passing through Lavant, Singleton and Cocking, it was for some reason routed into a third station, a half a mile to the east of the existing LBSCR station and a mile from the town by road. Bizarrely it was this inconveniently-sited station that was chosen to be the unified Midhurst station in 1925 after the LBSCR and LSWR had merged into Southern Railways. Petworth station was also a mile and a half south of the town it served.

Except when the Goodwood Races were on, the Chichester to Midhurst line had little traffic and it was closed in 1935. The Midhurst to Petersfield line then closed to passengers in 1955, and the Pulborough to Midhurst followed in two stages from 1964-6. Walkers might lament the loss of all these lines, but especially the route via Cocking, which is surrounded by wonderful downland walks.

It is worth noting that none of these lines was electrified in the 1930s (see The sparks effect) and that is almost certainly what sealed their fate. Two other LBSCR lines that got the chop in the Beeching cuts for this reason, even though on the map they look to be quite useful cross-country connections, are the ones from Horsham to Guildford and from Horsham to Shoreham-by-Sea, which closed in 1965 and 1966 respectively.

Opening in 1865, the Guildford line branched off the Horsham to Pulborough line at Christ’s Hospital (once a major junction with six platforms and a substantial freight yard) and for a hundred years chugged north via Slinfold, Baynards, Cranleigh and Bramley & Wonersh, crossing the Greensand Ridge as it did so. Baynards station on this route is lovingly maintained to this day in a private garden, looking for all the world as if the last train had just left – a surreal sight. At Bramley & Wonersh the platforms remain and are kept in good condition as a village park, and you can still see the former branch line platforms at Christ's Hospital, hidden under trees for more than 50 years, but cleared, refurbished and opened to the public in 2019.

(Christ's Hospital, incidentally, opened in 1902 to serve a housing development that never materialised, and to serve a nearby public school, which relocated at the same time from Central London. Interestingly, only now is a housing estate being built nearby.)

The Horsham to Shoreham-by-Sea line, opened between 1858 and 1861, also started at Christ’s Hospital, and took in West Grinstead (yes, there is such a place: a tiny village compared to its eastern sister), Partridge Green, Henfield, Steyning and Bramber.

Neither line was ever particularly busy. Horsham to Guildford was described in 1961 as "leading a peaceful and bucolic existence". It had just eight trains a day in the 1930s, the last one about 7pm, and only two on Sundays. Services could take up to an hour to traverse the 19 miles of single line track and connections at either end were poor.

Meanwhile Horsham to Shoreham was known as the "Linger and Die Line", with a 26 mile journey from Brighton to Horsham by this route also taking an hour in 1910. There were 13 trains a day in the 1930s and 17 in the 1960s, but they were lightly used. In 1953 the author of Forgotten Railways reports a Saturday afternoon train from Brighton largely emptying at Steyning, and no one getting on or off for the next four stops. Twenty changed at Christ's Hospital for Guildford and a handful were left when the train arrived at Horsham.

Alresford station on the Watercress Line
The Horsham to Shoreham line was considered for electrification in the 1930s, and who knows what might have happened but for the Second World War. Bramley, Wonersh and Cranleigh are today populous places that would almost certainly support a regular train service; there have even been vague murmurings about reopening this part of the line.

On the minus side there might now be a lot more development in the area had the line stayed open: we perhaps have Beeching to thank for the fact that the countryside between Cranleigh and Horsham could still be described as bucolic. Today the two lines combine to make a wonderful walking and cycle route - the Downs Link between the North and South Downs Way: for a photo see The controversial Dr Beeching. Who is to say that this is not a better use of the track?

There is an interesting contrast between the fate of these two lines and the one from Leatherhead to Horsham via Dorking. This line, opened by the LBSCR in 1867, still survives, serving sleepy rural stops such as Holmwood, Ockley and Warnham and giving a true flavour of what a rural Victorian branch line might have been like.

The reason for its continued existence is that it is was once the main line from Victoria to Portsmouth, with trains feeding at Horsham onto the Arundel line and then going along the south coast. Along with trains from Waterloo via Eastleigh, this was the main way to travel from London to Portsmouth by train until the electrification of the Guildford to Havant line in 1937 (see The sparks effect). The Leatherhead to Horsham line only lost this role due to the growth of Gatwick Airport. First express trains were diverted to serve Gatwick in 1978 and then all through trains to the coast in 1984. Yet luckily no one ever got round to closing this line, with its delightful walking territory.

A line through just as attractive territory which did not survive is the South Eastern Railway line from Paddock Wood south to Horsmonden, Goudhurst, Cranbrook and Hawkhurst. First mooted in 1864, this was another failed attempt to reach Tenterden in the Victorian era. In the railway mania of 1860s the fact that the line would also keep the London, Brighton & South Coast Railway out of SER territory was also a factor in its favour, but in fact it was to be 1892-3 before it finally opened.

While it did at least reach the substantial town of Cranbrook - another important early 19th century town that was fossilised in the Victorian era for lack of a railway connection - the Hawkhurst line was always very impractical for passengers. The difficult terrain meant that the line had to be built in the valley while the towns were on hilltops. There was consequently a steep mile-long climb to Goudhurst from its station, while at Cranbrook the station was two miles from the town. Hawkhurst station was 1.3 miles away.

The line really made its money from agricultural produce and from transporting hop pickers. But by the late 1950s trucks, buses (which stopped conveniently in town and village centres) and the decline of English hop growing had made it irrelevant and it closed in 1961

Elsewhere, there were a whole host of branch lines in the north of Essex and Suffolk which we might well have used for walks had they remained open. The line to Bures and Sudbury (which once went on to Cambridge and Bury St Edmunds) is a lone survivor.

There was also once a line to Westerham (on the Edenbridge to Westerham and Oxted Circular walks) which left the South Eastern Railway main line at Dunton Green, just north of Sevenoaks. There was fierce local resistance to its closure in 1961, with locals arguing correctly that it could be an important commuter line. Instead its route became part of the M25. The town continues to be well-served with bus routes, however.

A long forgotten line ran from Sandling on the Folkestone main line to Hythe and Sandgate. (Its trackbed is used at the start of the Sandling to Folkestone walk.) Built by the South Eastern Railway, this was originally proposed as an alternative route to Folkestone harbour, avoiding the steep gradients up from that town's cross-channel ferry harbour (see South East to Dover). But having opened the line as far as Sandgate in 1874, the SER dithered about purchasing the rest of the land into Folkestone and by the time it had made up its mind, housing development along the coast had made the project too expensive.

What was left was a branch line which was reasonably successful in serving Shorncliffe Camp, an army base on the hills to the west of Sandgate (which is still there and now home to the Ghurkas), and which had some tourist traffic in the summer, even direct excursion trains from the north of England. But both Hythe and Sandgate stations were inconveniently sited for the towns they served and during the First World War the line was so intensively used by the army that the locals got more used to using buses, which stopped in town centres.

There was a brief revival in the 1920s, when SER (and from 1923 Southern Railways) had some success in promoting the line for holiday traffic, but that died away at the end of the decade and the line closed beyond Hythe in 1931. After the Second World War the remaining stub had just two trains a day, and in 1951 it was closed altogether. All that remains of the branch today is the station of Sandling itself, which was opened in 1888 specifically to serve as a junction for the line - before that trains originated in Westenhanger.

In the Chilterns, a Great Western branch line from Princes Risborough ambled south west along the foot of the Chilterns escarpment to Chinnor and Watlington, a point four miles north of Stonor on the Henley via Stonor walk. Had it not closed in 1957, it would surely have been as useful to us today as the line from Princes Risborough to Monks Risborough and Little Kimble (see Thames and Chilterns).

One might also cast a regretful glance over the "Sprat and Winkle Line" in Hampshire (the origin of its nickname is something of a mystery as it had no obvious connection with seafood), which ran from Andover via Stockbridge and Mottisfont to join the current railway line north of Romsey. Opened in 1865, important for military trains in the run-up to D-Day, it was nevertheless closed to passengers in 1967, depriving us of easy access to this pretty part of the Test Valley.

Perhaps the saddest closures of all, however, are the ones that occured in the early 1970s, just a few years before attitudes to the railways changed. Invariably these closures happened despite fierce local opposition. An example was the link between Alton and Winchester via Alresford, which provided an alternative route between London and Southampton, missing out Basingstoke.

Closure of this 16 mile section of track was proposed in 1967 but was vigorously resisted until 1973. The problem was that unlike the rest of the line from Alton to London it had never been electrified. So instead of the through trains from London to Southampton that ran on it up to 1937, a shuttle operated between Alton and Southampton via Winchester. This was perversely (probably even deliberately) timed not to connect with onward connections to London or the south coast.

Even before the line was closed the Mid Hants Railway was formed to reopen it and Winchester Council offered to pay a subsidy to British Rail to keep the line's infrastructure in place. But British Rail ripped up the track with indecent haste and sold land between Winchester and Alresford for house building. As the Watercress Line, the Mid Hants now operates steam trains from Alton to Alresford (having laboriously re-laid the track), but access to the pretty Itchen Valley between Alresford and Winchester via the former station at Itchen Abbas has sadly been lost.

Another 1970s loss was the Wareham to Swanage line, which had not even been proposed for closure by Beeching. Why this useful branch to a popular seaside town was considered unviable is a mystery, but it still got the chop in 1972 after a five year battle with protestors. This cut off access not only to the beautiful cliff walks around Swanage but also to the tourist attraction of Corfe Castle and the surrounding Purbeck Hills.

Swanage station today
Once again, however, a steam railway stepped into the breach and has now completed the task of reconnecting the line to Wareham. They have experimented with operating a diesel railcar between Corfe and Swanage in the summer months that is competitively priced compared to the bus, and there has been talk of similar services to Warnham, though that has so far come to nothing. South Western Railway has also trialled summer services from Wareham to Corfe, though they have not yet become a permanent fixture.

Beeching and those who followed him did not always win, however. One of the lines slated for closure by Beeching was Ashford to Hastings (the line that passes through Rye). But this delightful little line across Romney Marsh still lives, despite not being electrified. The case for closing this line was accepted in the aftermath of the Beeching report, but it was reprieved pending upgrades of the roads across the marsh (which would carry the putative bus services that would replace the train, this being the supposed rationale behind all railway closures at the time).

Happily the Department of Transport proved slow to do the upgrades and in 1974 the line was given indefinite leave to remain open. So we can still travel to remote stations such as Winchelsea (albeit only every two hours these days, but a reduction of trains to this station to the statutory minimum of two a day a few years back has now been reversed) and also Appledore, a station a good walk from the pretty village it serves and a wonderful example of an old-fashioned branch line stop. There is even talk of upgrading the line to allow high speed trains from St Pancras to serve Hastings.

Just beyond Appledore, incidentally, there is a spur line which for a long time served Dungeness nuclear power station. There was once passenger service on this line to Lydd, where the line divided, with one branch going to New Romney & Littlestone on Sea and the other to Dungeness. This line was opened in 1883-4 because the South Eastern Railway was considering Dungeness for a port, but the plan never came to fruition and the line closed for passengers beyond Lydd in 1937 and between Appledore and Lydd in 1967. However you can still get to both New Romney and Dungeness by rail on the minature Romney, Hythe & Dymchurch Railway, opened in 1927 by two train enthusiasts and still going strong.

© Peter Conway 2010-24 • All Rights Reserved

A miraculous survivor


A map at Eridge station of the lines
into Tunbridge Wells in their heyday
What would it have been like to travel on a Victorian branch line? You can visit one of the many preserved steam railways up and down the country to get some idea, of course, but these are all careful exercises in nostalgia.

To experience a quiet rural line in the modern era, try travelling on the line from London Bridge to Uckfield, which runs south from Oxted and Hurst Green through Edenbridge Town and then a series of isolated country stations to Crowborough and Uckfield itself. Get off at Hever, Cowden, Ashurst or Eridge and you have some idea what it must have been like to travel to such deep country halts in the nineteenth century.

That this line exists at all is a true miracle, given that many other lines in this area disappeared in the 1950s and 1960s. The Uckfield line itself has been slated for closure more than once, but somehow survives to provide excellent jumping off points for rural walks.

The line is in fact the last remnant of several which were built by the London, Brighton & South Coast Railway in the second half of the nineteeth century. They were fairly typical of late Victorian lines in that their profitability must always have been somewhat questionable. But their real purpose was to prevent rivals such as the South Eastern Railway and London, Chatham & Dover Railway from encroaching on LBSCR territory. The LCDR, for example, proposed in 1864 to build a line from Beckenham to Brighton, and in the same year the SER was talking of a line to Eastbourne.

The response of the LBSCR was to extend a line it had already opened in 1855 from Three Bridges on its Brighton main line to East Grinstead (the first railway line to reach the town). In 1866 it drove this line eastwards via Forest Row, Hatfield and Groombridge to Tunbridge Wells West (so-called to distinguish it from the other Tunbridge Wells station, the one opened by the SER in 1846 - see South East to Dover - which in Victorian times was known as Tunbridge Wells Central and which is the station we still use today).

The LBSCR used this new line to run trains from London to Tunbridge Wells, competing with the SER route via Tonbridge (then still known as Tunbridge: the spelling was not changed until 1893 to avoid confusion with Tunbridge Wells). Because SER trains at that date all still ran via Redhill - see South East to Dover - the new LBSCR route was only four miles longer. That changed in 1868 when the SER opened its cut-off line via Sevenoaks (see Bitter competition - and its benefits) making its route to Tunbridge Wells shorter, but the LBSCR put a brave face on it, marketing its line as "the pleasant route".

Next the LBSCR started to build a line from Balcombe to St Leonards near Hastings, known as the Ouse Valley Railway. Construction had only been underway for a month in 1866 when the bankers Overend & Gurney collapsed, sparking a financial crisis that hit the LBSCR and other railway companies particularly hard. Work on the Ouse Valley Railway stopped in early 1867 and never resumed. Traces of it can still be seen on the ground to the east of Hayward's Heath.

The LBSCR recovered from the crisis, however, and was soon back in construction mode. Previously, in 1858, it had opened a line from Lewes to Uckfield. In 1868 it extended that to Buxted, Crowborough, Eridge, Groombridge and Tunbridge Wells West.

Further plans by the SER and LCDR to encroach on LBSCR territory followed in the 1870s but none came to fruition. In particular the SER continued to nag away at its plans for a line to Eastbourne. The LBSCR's response was a branch, opening in 1880, that ran from Eridge on the Tunbridge Wells to Lewes line down through Heathfield, Mayfield and Rotherfield to Hailsham, where it met up with a branch line coming up from Polegate.

The following year a track between the two Tunbridge Wells stations was opened as part of a deal with the SER, which got permission to run trains via this link from Charing Cross down to Eastbourne. But it only used those rights for eighteen months (between April 1884 and December 1885) and for the rest of the Victorian era the link line between the two Tunbridge Wells stations was lightly used, with just five passenger shuttle services and one freight train a day in 1894.

The Eridge to Polegate line - known as the Cuckoo Line, after the Cuckoo Fair in Hailsham - became a dozy rural route. While on paper it offered a more direct way from London to Eastbourne than the one we now have, it was never used by express trains.

Another LBSCR line, opened in 1884, struck south from Croydon to East Grinstead via Oxted. It provided a direct route from London to a new low-level station in East Grinstead (the one we use today) and linked into a line opened in 1882 from East Grinstead to Lewes via Kingscote, West Hoathly, Horsted Keynes, Sheffield Park, Newick and Chailey and Barcombe. A year earlier, in 1883, a spur had also opened (whose trackbed still exists, now owned by the Bluebell Railway) from Horsted Keynes to Haywards Heath, with an intermediate stop in Ardingly.

The northern part of this line as far as Oxted was also used by the South Eastern Railway, which had jointly funded the construction of this section. It built a link (now lifted, though it survived into the 1960s) from the line to its own Redhill to Tonbridge main line near Edenbridge, allowing it to run trains from Croydon to Hastings while avoiding congestion at Redhill (see Bitter Competition).

Sheffield Park station today
The line onwards from Oxted to East Grinstead was mainly used by the LBSCR as a shorter route to Tunbridge Wells West. There was a curve - still in existence but now overgrown - which allowed trains from this line to get onto the Three Bridges to Tunbridge Wells line via the original (now lost) higher level part of East Grinstead station.

One last LBSCR line, opened in 1888, went south from Oxted (or more precisely Hurst Green) to Edenbridge Town, Hever, Cowden, Ashurst, Groombridge and Tunbridge Wells West. This gave the LBSCR an even more direct route from London to Tunbridge Wells.

It will be noted that the trains from Lewes, East Grinstead and Oxted all ran into Tunbridge Wells West. The three lines met at Groombridge, which was consequently a very busy station, with up to 200 trains a day. A link had also been opened in 1888 between Ashurst and Eridge bypassing Groombridge and allowing direct trains from Hurst Green to Uckfield, Lewes and Brighton but it was not in regular use until 1914.

By the 1930s there was an "Inner Circle" route where 20 trains a day ran via East Grinstead and then either Haywards Heath or Lewes down to Brighton, and an "Outer Circle" where 12 trains ran via Oxted and Eridge to Tunbridge Wells West. This provided connections at Groombridge to Lewes and Brighton, or Eastbourne via the Cuckoo Line, but a few trains also bypassed Groombridge and Tunbridge Wells and and ran directly down the Ashurst-Eridge link to Lewes and Brighton. Some of these carried carriages which detached at Eridge and went down to Eastbourne on the Cuckoo Line, giving that line an occasional through service from London.

Trains also ran to Tunbridge Wells via East Grinstead, with the Three Bridges to East Grinstead line usually operated by a shuttle. A shuttle also operated between the two Tunbridge Wells stations, as well as some through trains from Brighton via Lewes to Tonbridge, and occasionally even Maidstone or Chatham.

The pattern changed a bit after electrification of the Brighton main line in 1933 (see The sparks effect) in that through trains to Brighton no longer regularly used the East Grinstead-Horsted Keynes-Hayward's Heath line. But the line was considered important as a diversionary route for the main line, and the section from Haywards Heath to Horsted Keynes was even electrified in 1935.

The one line in this network that was little used was the one going south from Horsted Keynes to Lewes, which had just a few trains a day. It had always been a backwater, with only one of its stations - Barcombe - being near a village. The other two - Sheffield Park and Newick and Chailey - had been built purely to serve the country houses of the line's aristocratic backers.

As early as 1955 British Railways tried to close the line (as well as ceasing passenger service from Horsted Keynes to East Grinstead), but were stopped by local resident Margery Bessemer, who discovered a clause in the 1878 Act of Parliament giving permission for the route requiring them to run at least four trains a day in each direction. BR then ran what was known as the “sulky service” – the bare legal minimum – until it could change the law and close the line legally in 1958.

This closure started to change our view of railways, because almost immediately a group of volunteers got together to reopen a part of the line, and in 1960 the Bluebell Railway was created. It was not the first volunteer steam railway – that honour goes to the Talyllyn, a narrow-gauge track in North Wales which was saved in 1950 - but the Bluebell started a trend that has spread all over the country. In the south east alone there is the Mid-Hants Railway from Alton to Alresford, the Spa Valley Railway from Tunbridge Wells to Eridge and the Kent & East Sussex Railway from Bodiam to Tenterden.

Nearly all of these companies originally aimed to re-start scheduled services on their lines, but they soon discovered another market as tourist attractions, tapping into the nostalgia for steam locomotives that disappeared from the rest of the railway network in the mid 1960s.

For the other lines described above the future seemed bright in the late 1950s - at least to HP White, the author of A Regional History of the Railways of Great Britain: Volume 2: Southern England. After noting the closure of the Horsted Keynes to Lewes line and that "a voluntary society has bought the section between Horsted Keynes and Sheffield Park", he wrote: "At least the immediate future seems assured for the rest of the system. The basic flow is to London and inter-urban traffic is growing, for stations are conveniently sited, services are frequent and fares competitive." Data in the book shows a 61 percent rise in ticket sales at Forest Row station from 1955 to 1957, for example, and a 35 percent rise in season ticket sales.

Beeching took another view, however (some speculated that he had to close some lines in the south for political reasons, given that so many lines were being closed in the rest of the country), and in the mid sixties the closure notices went up. First to go was the shuttle from Horsted Keynes to Haywards Heath, one of the very few electrified lines to close, which ceased service in 1963. At the same time the line from East Grinstead to Haywards Heath ceased to be used as a diversionary route.

Next was the Cuckoo Line, which closed in 1965, the timetable having been revised in 1964 to make connections at either end of the line inconvenient (a common British Railways tactic at that time). The last train carried the poignant words “Farewell, faithful servant” though by this time the line had only 23 season ticket holders. It probably did not help that at least two of its stations - Rotherfield and Mayfield - were far from the villages they served. But contrast its fate with that of the Guildford to Havant line, similarly dozy in Victorian times, which became the main line from Waterloo to Portsmouth after electrification in 1937 (see The sparks effect).

A disused platform at Eridge, former junction
for the Cuckoo Line
Two years later the line from Three Bridges via East Grinstead to Groombridge was also closed. The Beeching report found that only 25 passengers a day used trains between East Grinstead and Tunbridge Wells, though 300 travelled from East Grinstead to Three Bridges. The entire length of the line can still be followed on foot or bicycle.

All these cuts left only three of the former LBSCR lines still running. The one from East Grinstead to London was a popular commuter route (and Beeching's own route to work: see The controversial Dr Beeching), so closure was never considered there. But the lines from Hurst Green to Tunbridge Wells and from Lewes to Tunbridge Wells had never been electrified and ran through quiet rural territory. The towns at the ends of the lines had adequate rail links via other routes, and they were both branded by Beeching as “unremunerative”. In 1966 British Railways applied to close them.

Helping their case was the fact that the section from Lewes to Uckfield was doomed anyway. In 1964 a new road bypass was being planned around Lewes, which would cut across the Lewes to Uckfield line. To provide a bridge over the railway would have cost £135,000 on top of the £350,000 costs of building the road. Another option might have been to re-route the line using a track abandoned in 1868 into the Wivelsfield to Lewes line, but that would have cost £95,000. The government refused to fund either option, and the Lewes to Uckfield line closed in 1969. The folly of this decision was highlighted only three years later when an accident closed the Brighton main line for a month.

That should have been the final nail in the coffin of the remaining lines between Uckfield and Hurst Green, but it was not. Some 3000 objections to closure were received, and for the first time protestors used cost-benefit analysis to argue their case. They showed that the cost of closure in extra travel hours for passengers would be twice as much to the economy as keeping the loss-making line open. Government ministers hemmed and hawed, and in 1968 gave way, one of the rare examples of a closure recommended by Beeching being halted by public pressure.

With the line saved, the dominant pattern of service was to run trains from Uckfield to London Bridge, as happens today, bypassing Groombridge and Tunbridge Wells West. The once busy line through Groombridge was reduced to an hourly shuttle from Eridge to Tonbridge via the two Tunbridge Wells stations. This lasted until 1985 when the track and signalling needed replacing and it was decided that the cost could not be justified. To widespread consternation the link was closed - the last line closure carried out by British Rail anywhere in the country. Most of the route - the section from Tunbridge Wells West to Eridge - was taken over by the Spa Valley Railway, which now runs a steam service on it.

The Spa Valley Railway
The line to Uckfield survives in normal passenger use, however – still unelectrified, and still serving its dozy rural halts. It had a doubtful period in the late 1990s and early 2000s when its trains were old, its stations run down and it had no Sunday service for most of the year. For a time it looked as if it might be closed after all, but somehow it survived and was given new trains and smartened up stations. In the winter of 2015-16 Network Rail even extended the platforms on the line to take ten carriage trains. There is talk of electrifying the line as part of a "Thameslink 2" or "Crossrail 3".

The reopening of the Uckfield to Lewes line has been proposed several times. In 1987 Network SouthEast agreed to contribute £1.5m, a quarter of the projected cost, but local authorities would not fund the rest. In 2000 the train operator Connex promised to conduct a feasibility study into reopening the line in their ultimately unsuccessful bid to retain the South Central (now Southern) franchise. In 2008 a government enquiry looked at reinstating the link but decided that the £140m cost could not be justfied by the two percent increase in traffic expected. In 2017 a study into capacity constraints on the London to Brighton main line concluded that trains via Uckfield would be slower than the current Brighton line and so not viable competition for the existing route.

Despite this the pressure group Railfuture also continues to campaign for the Uckfield to Lewes link to be reopened, perhaps as an improved route to Newhaven or as part of development plans for the area. The Outer Circle may yet live again.

© Peter Conway 2010-19 • All Rights Reserved

The golden age of the railways

Ah, those were the days! Hearing a steam train hoot on a heritage line, or visiting one of their lovingly recreated stations, it is easy to get romantic about the golden age of the railways. We imagine ourselves on comfortable trains chugging to rural stops where the smartly-uniformed and unfailingly polite staff would rush to carry our bags.

It was never really like that, of course. The Victorians did not particularly love their railways, and tended to give them mocking names, usually referring to their slow speed, lax safety standards or dirty carriages. The London, Chatham & Dover Railway, for example, was the “Undone, Smash’em and Turn’em Over”. The London & South Western Railway was “The Long and Slow Way Round”.

Don’t think that complaints about delays, overcrowding or unhelpful staff are anything new, either. In The Middle Class: A History (see Further reading), Lawrence James quotes an eyewitness report of the “furious impatience” of railway users when delayed returning from day trips to Epsom and Crystal Palace in 1870.

“Nothing incensed the middle classes more than kicking their heels on platforms waiting for overdue trains, or being squeezed into carriages,” James notes. Two years later, he points to a long correspondence to The Times about signal mishaps, mechanical failures and drivers delaying departures by bantering with station staff on the Portsmouth line.

Not much had improved by 1883, when another critic stated that "the great blots on the South Eastern are its unpunctuality, its fares, its third class carriages and the way that local interests are sacrificed to continental traffic" - this last being a reference to the company's focus on running boat trains to Dover and Folkestone - while in 1894 the Investors Review wrote of the company that "none travel by it who can find another route".

In 1888 the SER was described as being "audaciously unpunctual", with only 67 percent of its trains arriving within three minutes of schedule, while its rival the London, Chatham & Dover Railway was even worse at 58 percent. Another writer described both companies as "bywords of poverty-stricken inefficiency and dirtiness".

The trains would have seemed very slow by our standards. Locomotives travelled at about 20-30 miles per hour at the start of the railway age, though to be fair in those days this seemed miraculously fast compared to the stagecoach. At the opening of the Liverpool & Manchester Railway in 1830, observers thought 30 mph was so fast it was like flying, while mid-Victorian writers such as Charles Dickens constantly stress the hideous speed - and noise - of trains, and the way they made it impossible to properly see the countryside one was passing through.

But speeds continued to average 30-35 mph in the south east right into the twentieth century, not helped on branch lines by the fact that rural trains sometimes had to make extended stops to unload freight or detach goods wagons. A 26 mile journey from Brighton to Horsham on the Shoreham-by-Sea to Christ's Hospital branch (see Lines we lost) took an hour in 1910 (The route was popularly known as "the Linger and Die Line"). At around the same time, my grandmother could remember taking the branch line from Axminster to Lyme Regis in Dorset. “We used to joke that you could get out and walk faster,” she said.

Speeds of express trains were better – as early as 1852 the Great Western Railway had a train that went from London to Oxford in just over an hour, an average speed of 55 mph and about as fast as the best services on this route today. But this was very exceptional at that time, and it was not until the end of the century that this became a normal speed on major routes.

By then some companies had a prestige train that went even quicker. Between 1888 and 1895 there was a “race to the north”, as the three companies operating from London to Scotland competed to have the fastest train. But at the same time, notes Jack Simmons in his book The Victorian Railway (see Further reading), correspondents to The Times were debating “the crawl to the south”, wondering whether the South Eastern Railway or the London, Brighton & South Coast was the slower. One correspondent recounted a train from Hastings to Victoria arriving an hour late and another a 93 minute delay on a train from Sutton to London Bridge. The Times commented “It is difficult to say with certainty which of the two has the better right to call itself absolutely the worst line in the country.”

Horrible crashes were common. 1,100 people were killed and 3,000 injured in railway accidents in 1872, which was not a particularly unusual year, and in 1876 there were ten major crashes and derailments. On 8 June 1865 Charles Dickens, who had a livelong hatred of railways, was very lucky to survive a crash near Staplehurst in Kent. He was on the way back from a trip to France to see his mistress (who he had installed in Boulogne to hide her from prying newspaper reporters) and had taken a South Eastern Railway train from Folkestone to London. Engineering work on a bridge overran, but someone forgot to warn the oncoming train, which plunged off the bridge into the river, killing ten people. For the rest of his life Dickens had what we would now call post-traumatic stress disorder, which may have contributed to his death almost exactly five years later at the age of 58.

It took a lot of nagging from the government, and even more foot dragging and grumbling on the part of the railway companies, for basic safety measures to be introduced. For example, even though the technology had existed since the 1870s, vacuum brakes on all carriages – so that if they become detached, they simply stopped – were not made compulsory until 1889, after a terrible rail crash in Ireland. In the early days of the railways carriages had no brakes at all – they simply slammed into each other when the train slowed. (Goods wagons continued to do this until the 1950s and such clanking of railway rolling stock was once a common sound.)

The way it should have been: railway nostalgia
on the Spa Valley Railway
Signalling was not regulated until 1871, and even then the regulation was voluntary. Block signalling, which means that it is impossible for two trains to be on the same section of track, was not mandated until 1888. Before that companies had all sorts of different systems, many of which were prone to human error. There was a famous crash in 1861 where one train ploughed into another in the Clayton Tunnel – the one that carries the Brighton main line under the South Downs and whose portal can be seen on the Hassocks to Lewes walk.

If you despair of toilets being out of action on trains today, you would not have liked the Victorian railway either. Early carriages had no corridors – they were just single compartments with no doorway to the rest of the train. So there were no toilets, because there was no way to access them. (Some carriages of this sort remained in service on London commuter routes well into the 1990s.)

Long distance trains made what we might now call comfort stops, but when Great Western trains stopped for this purpose at Swindon you only had ten minutes and everyone on the train would be rushing to the same place. Women could get round the problem with portable bedpans concealed under their voluminous skirts, while men used a bottle fed by a funnel and a rubber tube. But you could only use such devices if there were no members of the opposite sex in the compartment.

The carriages were not heated either. In first class you might get a footwarmer - a metal container full of hot water - but these soon went cold. From 1881 sealed containers with a solution of sodium acetate lasted longer and you could shake them to get more heat. But most Victorians simply carried a "railway rug", sometimes in a special carrying case. You could rent these from WH Smith bookstalls on station platforms. A hat with ear flaps was also recommended.

Not till 1870 did train companies start to offer footwarmers to third class, and only in 1893 did they start to use steam from the locomotives to heat their carriages. By that time some trains had corridors, and with them came toilets and – on longer distance routes – dining cars. Prior to this date (and afterwards on many companies and routes) if you wanted to eat you had to buy a picnic basket from a platform vendor - you could even telegraph your order ahead. Typically these might contain cold chicken, ham or beef sandwiches, cakes, biscuits and brandy. Thermos flasks were not widely available until 1904, so if you had tea it was cold.

An alternative on some routes were scheduled refreshment stops. These were combined with the comfort stops mentioned above, so you might have just ten minutes to perform both tasks. Not surprisingly service was a desperate free-for-all. It it is from these railway refreshment rooms that we get the British pub habit of ordering at the bar - previously unknown. Well-bred gentlemen were disconcerted - and perhaps somewhat titillated - to have to compete for the attention of the none-too-polite young women who made up the serving staff.

The food quality was notorious. The Great Western's Swindon refreshment room was said to serve soup scalding hot to make it impossible to eat, then pour the slops back into the tureen to be sold again. The Sheffield Daily Telegraph in 1865 described railway tea as "liquid nausea" and its coffee as "made with a slight suspicion of coffee, as if a coffee berry had bathed in it earlier in the day". Trollope lambasted railway sandwiches - starting a long tradition that lasted into the 1980s - and Dickens complained of the "unknown animals" within pies.

This started to change in 1879 when the Great Northern Railway offered the first British dining car on a train from London to Leeds (copying the Americans, who had had them for a decade or more), but this was only for first class passengers actually sitting in the car (a Pullman). Its rival, the Midland Railway out of St Pancras, took up the idea with enthusiasm, but it was the flashy newcomer – the Virgin Atlantic of its day - that tried to win customers from more established rivals by offering better service. Many other companies didn’t copy it until the 1880s or 1890s, by which time dining cars were widely extended to third class as well.

Once you were in the dining car, prices were very reasonable: they were treated as something of a loss-leader by the rail companies to attract well-to-do customers. On the Midland a chop or steak, fried potatoes, bread, butter, and tea or coffee cost half a crown - around ten pounds in today's money. The idea of a buffet car - where you went to a bar to have a drink or snack - did not come in until the 1930s: Victorians expected to be served a meal in a seat.

But all this was on prestige expresses, not branch line trains – and not all prestige expresses even then. Christian Wolmar in Blood, Iron & Gold (see Further reading) cites a lady travelling from Calais to Nice in 1886 on a train with no toilets, no dining car and no corridors – and she was travelling in first class. At the time both the South Eastern Railway and the London, Chatham & Dover Railway were notorious for the poor quality of their carriages, so try and imagine what it might have been like travelling on them in third class.

That is if your train carried third class carriages at all. In the early days of the railways many trains - and all expresses - were first and second class only. Where carried at all, third class passengers might be confined to an open wagon, with a bar to hold onto if they were lucky.

This changed with the Railway Regulation Act of 1844, passed by William Gladstone as president of the Board of Trade. This mandated at least one third class train a day on each line, stopping at all stations and with a penny a mile fare. Passengers also had to be "protected from the weather in a manner approved by the Board". This at least meant a roof and walls, and as the century went on also included such luxuries as windows: by 1860 even the amount of glass in them was being specified. Seats were wooden, but this was actually fairly common for domestic seating at the time, upholstery being only for the rich.

All of these rules only applied to the "parliamentary train", however, and its timing was left to the railway companies. The London to Brighton put them between 6pm and 10pm, and was later considered generous for offering three of them a day.

Third class carriages were fairly basic
To be fair to the railway companies, they probably reasoned that the working classes had neither the money or leisure for travel, though that was to change as the century wore on, when an increasingly large percentage of passengers were third class. Eventually the railway companies started to notice this growing market. The Midland Railway was revolutionary in 1872 in carrying third class passengers on all trains. In 1874 it even abolished second class, upgrading its third class instead.

Other rail companies were slow to copy this, however: second class lasted until 1912 on the London, Brighton & South Coast, till 1918 on the London & South Western, and until they were absorbed into Southern Railways (see below) in 1923 on the South Eastern and London, Chatham & Dover. The latter two companies kept their third class deliberately cold and dark to encourage passengers to upgrade. Eventually only third and first class remained, and in 1956 British Railways re-designated third class as second class (now known as standard class). Briefly after the Second World War a single undifferentiated class was even discussed but never implemented: American railways never had different classes.

Though the railways were accused of encouraging trash fiction by selling cheap novels on station bookstalls, you would have struggled to read a book at night on a Victorian train too. In the early days of the railways a first class compartment might have one smelly oil lamp giving out a feeble light, while second class shared one between two compartments. Third class was dark.

The light from the oil lamps was just about good enough to find one's seat and get a vague idea of who one's fellow passengers were. Reading was a big challenge. There were pocket reading lights consisting of a candle and a reflector, with suction pads to stick them to windows. These were still being sold in Edwardian times.

Gas lighting, which was first used on the North London Railway in 1862 and the Metropolitan Railway (today the Metropolitan Line on the Underground) in 1863, seemed like a radical improvement. The Daily Telegraph noted that on the Metropolitan "newspapers may be read with ease" (remembering that they had tiny print in those days). But gas lighting was not adopted widely until the 1880s and the light would have still seemed pretty feeble to our eyes, accustomed as we are to electric light.

A brighter gas light came in from 1905 onwards but was used as an excuse by some companies to delay the introduction of electric light, pioneered in the 1881 by the London, Brighton & South Coast Railway but not widely adopted by other companies until the 1890s. In 1914 three quarters of carriages still had gas lighting. In 1948 it was still ten percent.

Reading a book was anyway difficult because the ride would have been very bumpy. Right into the 1980s there was an art to holding a coffee cup or reading a book on trains in the south east because the train lurched so much. The problem was the joins between the rails, which have now been eliminated by a technique called continuous welding. This was first used by London Transport in 1937 but was slow to catch on across the main network, with only a third of track continuously welded by 1974. Once introduced it removed the "diddly-dum" rhythm of trains, but on the other hand makes rails "sing" when a train is coming. This is because the rail is stretched taut when laid down to allow for expansion on hotter days.

Other factors would have made the ride on Victorian trains worse. Carriages initially had four fixed wheels, and only later were enhanced to six, and then eight, with four each on two swivelling bogies, which gave a smoother ride. The hapless London, Chatham & Dover was notorious for its old rolling stock – it used four wheeled carriages until the end of the 1880s. Far from giving out a jaunty rhythm, these would have thumped and banged and screeched, a bit like the four-wheeled Pacer trains used until relatively recently in the north and west of England.

You could also forget about a regular hourly service on a branch line. Trains on rural routes were timed as much for the convenience of milk churns as for passengers. The line from Horsham to Guildford was quite typical in having six trains a day on weekdays, with the last one at about 7pm. On Sundays a line might only have a couple of services. Many companies observed a “church interval” – that is, there were no trains on Sunday mornings, so that the working classes wouldn’t be tempted to skip church and go for a day out.

This actually got more prevalent rather than less as the 19th century went on, with a quarter of the network having no Sunday service at all by 1914. The Metropolitan Railway kept its church interval until 1909. Some lines in rural Wales still had one into the 2000s.

So if there was a golden age of the railways, it was probably not the Victorian era, and the 1920s and 1930s were not much better. In World War I the government had effectively taken over the railways, and as a result it was realised that the myriad independent Victorian railway companies were not very practical.

Rural trains might be timed for milk churns
as much as for passengers
So “grouping” was forced through in 1923, whereby the companies were merged into four large players. Southern Railways was one, incorporating the London, Chatham & Dover; the South Eastern; the London, Brighton & South Coast; and the London & South Western. The other three companies to emerge from grouping were the Great Western Railway (the Victorian company plus a few smaller ones); the London & North Eastern Railway (the east coast main line); and London, Midland & Scottish (the west coast main line).

By this time the companies were starting to notice the threat from road transport (see The controversial Dr Beeching) and so for the first time they developed publicity departments. This is something the Victorian railway companies never bothered with – indeed, the whole idea would have been alien to them. As Jack Simmons says in The Victorian Railway: “Most Victorian railway managers continued to think it was their function to provide whatever service they deemed best, which their passengers must take or leave as they choose.”

The Big Four, as the grouped companies were known, threw themselves into publicity with gusto, however, and none more so than Southern. A stream of glorious posters and brochures were produced portraying resorts such as Bexhill, Seaford or Folkestone as the ultimate in chic, or proclaiming “South for Sunshine” or “Sunshine Holidays in the South”. Southern even offered “Winter Sunshine Holidays”, which was stretching it a bit.

(It had other motives for all this promotion, hoping to persuade Londoners to go and live on the coast or in the countryside, so becoming commuters: "Live in Kent and be content", "Southern Homes on the Conqueror's Coast". Posters and booklets insisted that places such as Bexhill, Seaford or Eastbourne were "recommended by doctors": "As far as expectation of life is concerned, it is better to live in the country than in the town, and the south than the north").

In a similar vein (and with similar ulterior motives) Southern encouraged walkers, rambling being a popular new pastime in the 1920s and 1930s. You could get rambling tickets, which allowed you to return from a different station to the one you set off from (bring these back, please!) and group tickets allowing eight to travel for the price of four. Posters exhorted “Don’t miss autumn in the country”.

To back this up, there were five editions of Southern Rambles for Londoners between 1933 and 1938, with walks of up to 15 miles and suggestions of what to wear and see. One, quoted in South for Sunshine (see Further reading), had advice that is still pertinent to this day: “The official weather forecast is seldom correct. The unofficial weather forecast of the postman or farmer is equally unreliable. The English weather defies all prophecy.”

So was this the golden age of the railways? All of the rural branch lines were still intact in those days, but as Matthew Engel puts it in his book Eleven Minutes Late, this was really the golden age of the railway poster, not the golden age of the railway. The new electric trains (see The sparks effect) were doubtless state of the art, but on steam-operated branch lines services were slow, carriages tatty, and aged tank engines often broke down.

But fast forward to today and look around you. Whatever the political or economic rights and wrongs of privatisation, we have modern, comfortable carriages (particularly the wonderful Electrostar trains on Southern and Southeastern, with their variable seating layouts, spacious interiors and air conditioning) which – on the whole – run exactly to schedule and take us almost everywhere we need to go with an hourly service that runs from early morning to late at night.

We can no longer take the train to West Hoathly or Mayfield or Goudhurst, but we still have Edenbridge, Balcombe, Hassocks, Amberley, Saunderton, Rye, Southease and dozens of other lovely stops from which to explore the countryside.

We also know that the dark days of the 1960s and 1970s are behind us, and governments no longer see railways as an anachronism that will fade away before the all-conquering car. From the 1990s onwards passenger numbers saw a steady recovery and, before the coronavirus pandemic, were at record levels. True, the fall in commuting after the pandemic has caused something of a downward blip, but leisure travel is already back at or exceeding former highs, boding well for the medium term. Rail has an unarguable role in transitioning to a low carbon future, and there are active plans to reopen closed branch lines.

So yes, there is such a thing as the golden age of the railways. You are living in it.

© Peter Conway 2010-24 • All Rights Reserved