British Rail: A New History

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Ultimately Wolmar demonstrates that just prior to privatisation this new breed of railway managers had beaten the not-fit-for-purpose formerly privately created and operated system into a sleek and pretty much as efficient and as effective as possible state owned business. Managers had, after a number of years in the immediate postwar period and particularly after the 1965 modernization, learned to respond to political flak and efficiently defended the organisation. Born into post-war austerity, traumatised, impoverished and exploited by a hostile press, the state-owned railway was dismissed as a dinosaur unable to evolve, and swept away by a government hellbent on selling it off. He is less good on business practices: his attempt to explain compulsory competitive tendering, for instance, will have readers turning to Google.

With his nasal tones and maniacal bellows of excitement on station platforms, Bourgeois is either the apex of the breed or a strangely committed satirist of it.

If anything, the book packs in so much detail that it may become overwhelming for casual readers, especially when it comes to the more complex wording. Whilst the period covered is largely early 1960s, the last years of the steam era on British Railways Western Region, the earliest pictures in this volume are some Dufaycolor slides of Tintern station taken in the 1930s. One of the striking aspects of Christian Wolmar’s new history of British Rail (BR) is how prominent its leaders were on the public stage.

British Rail was the last big state run company to be privatised and as the author states Mrs Thatcher was reluctant to be responsible as she knew that most people had a strong attachment to it. From 1923 all the way to the 21st Century, the author details the rise and fall of British Rail, showing the major financial struggles, changes in leadership and the attitudes of both government and the population at large. Pivotal moments including the Amalgamation of 1923 when most railway companies became part of the GWR, LMSR, or LNER, nationalization and privatization are set in their historical context. And, of course, the story ends with the disastrous privatisation, just when BR was getting its act together, that has resulted in far more public subsidy than was previously the case - plus terrible services in some areas. A signed paperback copy of British Rail: A new history - published by Penguin is Christian Wolmar's latest book and an account of the 50-year history of the organisation, both good and bad.We are able to send untracked parcels to bona fide PO Box addresses, friends and family members and to work addresses. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation. The favourites of late 60s/early 70s trainspotters, the Deltics, do get a couple of mentions - but no real details. Similarly, the London-centric management never properly handled what was dismissively referred to as the 'Provincial' region.

The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. Wolmar is fair in his dissection of Beeching noting that along with the poorly thought through hatchet job he instigated against the network there were many key issues including the operation of uneconomic seasonal services, the common carrier albatros, and freight traffic more generally that required attention. I thought this book would be quite dry and a slog to read but this turned out to not be the case at all. The HST, also known as the Inter-City 125, offered new levels of speed and comfort for passengers, but most continental rail operators had by then electrified their lines, meaning that its export potential was minimal. Colin Maggs also ventures his views on where Britain's railways will go in the future, including HS2 and beyond.Wolmar reminds us that this was merely the peak of a continuous retrenchment drive, which saw successive rounds of station and branch-line closures, staffing reductions and sales of assets, including the fifty-four hotels, the multi-million-pound wine cellar and the handful of golf courses BR had inherited from the Big Four.

The bottom line, or cost, was always foremost, with railway managers under constant pressure to make savings while starved of the investment they required to make the improvements necessary to turn the system around. In the early days sandwiches could indeed be found wilting under a glass dome in a station café, but BR had brought in expert chefs, including foodies such as Clement Freud and Prue Leith, and pioneered fresh shrink-wrapped sandwiches.A worthy scholarly work that sometimes it feels like British Rail telling its story in its own words.