Losing Track - 4 - Modernisation

[@johnthomas5966]

Having spent the last 42 years of my life working to deliver better railways for society from mending trains to writing regulation I am in awe of Kerry Hamilton's insight into how we got to where we were in 1984. Dunno if you are still alive Kerry but this series is a masterpiece. Well, well done. Not seen anything comparable since.

[@haroldofcardboard]

just tried to look her up. no luck.

[@GreatWestern175]

And ironic its become now approaching the 2020's the railway system is now busier and popular than it was in the 50's & 60's. Many people turn to the trains as the roads every where from towns, cities and motorways have become so heavily congested that theres simply too many cars on the roads caused by heavy overpopulation.

[@daystatesniper01]

And even today in 2018 public transport in a LOT of areas is still a miserable and wretched experience

[@Muttleytech]

Kerry Hamilton has such a soothing voice as well as being very attractive.

[@johnstudd4245]

I dug around on the web to see if I could find a somewhat current photo of her, but no luck. Wonder how well she has aged.

[@blakaeg]

You like the plain looking woman 😂

[@kenstevens5065]

Having lived and worked through the latter half of the 20th century we have made a mess of the opportunities we had to rebuild our Country after WW2. Things I never seem to notice identified as to why we made a mess, living beyond our means, hanging on to the days of being a world power and a very influential class system and establishment prepared to rip off it's own people and undermine their democracy. Seeing Ernie Marples opening a motorway at the end this film, the word corruption springs to mind as well.

[@Bungle-UK]

Private car ownership was booming in the UK and around the world….why was building roads to meet this demand ‘corrupt’?

[@user-gi5nh6ng7g]

@@Bungle-UK possibly prioritising the needs of a small group (such as owners of hauliers) who were closely aligned to politicians against the needs of the majority-such as having an efficient transport system is what he’s referring to.

[@Bungle-UK]

@@user-gi5nh6ng7g But people who have private transport are the majority - the minority re those that rely on public transport. You have it all the wrong way round.

[@soundseeker63]

Wow, thats a class 86 being built in the clip at 8:25....some of them are still in mainline (freight) service today! What changes they have witnessed thought their considerable working lives...if locomotives could talk they's have some stories to tell!

[@ChristinaGXL]

It's always annoying how london centric these documentaries are, they always give london credit for things that had been done in the rest of the country much earlier. The L&Y were the first to electrify a mainline railway with the Liverpool to Southport line in 1904, and the Mersey Railway switching to electric traction in 1903.

[@andrewlong6438]

I don’t think the point was made that the movement of passengers and freight from rail to road was pushing railways into the red in the 1950s. BR was already closing lines in 1950s in response.

[@Bungle-UK]

And that change had started in the 1930s, especially with the expansion of bus services in rural areas which were far more convenient that many rail lines.

[@bobtudbury8505]

ah hindsight, it's a wonderful thing. At the end of the day under beechings report ( report only ) LABOUR closed the lines, not all on the list but 100s of miles on top, not on the report. .After labour closed them all and hundreds of pits in the 60's they gave beeching an award

[@Bungle-UK]

Labour closed more mines than Mrs Thatcher and more rail,lines than Marples, but lefties don’t like to be reminded of that as they like their bogeymen.

[@frederickmiles327]

Its partly a myth that the modernisation of the Italian, French and German railways was faster than that of Britsh Rail. All those continental systems took considerably longer to convert from steam. both italy and West Germany still had a thousand steam engines in mainline steam service in 1980 and in West Germany the last mainline steam was not withdrawn until 1977/ 78 and in Italy about 1980. Germany built three classes of new standard steam after WW2 including several express prototypes the last standard West German 2-6-2 tender engine did not appear until 1959. France builld and had delivered a large amount of new steam engines immediately post war with 1400 new steam 2-8-2 141R engines being supplied from US and Canadian builders in 1945-1957 and the last French express steam 35 Chaeleon Pacifics or Hudsons not being built to 1950-52 and working on some mainline expresses ocassionally on some routes till 1970. The 141 R heavy mixed traffic were sometimes in service to 1974-75 and were quite easy to spot till 1972

[@pearlyhumbucker9065]

@ Frederick Miles >> "Its partly a myth that the modernisation of the Italian, French and German railways was faster than that of Britsh Rail." Its clearly a myth that the modernisation of British Rail was faster than that of the Italian, French and German railways. And you are a hypocrit! It is a known fact that the British build their last steam loco in 2008! How backward is that! Its also a fact that the Wells & Walsingham Light Railway and the Romney, Hythe & Dymchurch Railway, both being public railways, do use steamers till today. Another fact is that the last steamers of BR went into private hands in the year 1989. But in the end it's not that important, if the British were really faster with the conversion of steam to diesel. In the end, it turns out that being faster is not really better: English diesels and trains have not prevailed - but American and German, and now Japanese .... Italy, France and Germany all own a high-speed network. And Great Britain ???? I honestly do not think there is any good reason to boastwith the British railway system. For this, Dr. Beeching and his successors have destroyed too much of it .....

[@glenatkinson1230]

Britain had moments of brilliance with the Deltic and some of the BR Western region's diesel hydraulic units. Early Southern electrification schemes were quite radical for the time as well. However, electric and high speed projects seem to have his a proverbial wall since then.

[@johnstudd4245]

@9:35, no high viz vests, no hard hats, no safety tethers, no gloves, no safety glasses and good heavens, no shirt! LOL. Our modern safety people would shit themselves.

[@Bungle-UK]

And lots of deaths and injuries because of it.

[@Martindyna]

I get fed up with the politicians going on about how successful the UK railways are nowadays, carrying so many passengers. It is clearly a gross exaggeration when you see so many cars on roads that run nominally in parallel with railways e.g. the M3 & M4. What the very high fares in the UK do is hide / choke off the demand for railways so that rail can be presented as successful. This is not new, back in the late 1970s BR soon increased the fares to cut down on overcrowding of the new IC125 HST. Spontaneous travel by rail is extremely expensive (e.g. if you wanted to go to York for the day from London). Instead of spending £ 100,000,000,000 ( £ 100 Billion US) on HS2 the money would be better spent on either enlarging the loading gauge to make large Dutch style double decker trains possible on major routes (not easy I know, I wonder how much it would cost to enlarge e.g. Box Tunnel (Box Hill, Wiltshire, England)) or providing much longer trains / platforms. If each train had much larger capacity then reduction of train frequency could in some cases be considered. I wonder whether HS2 will be somewhat of a white elephant unless they put huge taxes on domestic flights btw.

[@beardyface8492]

The railways are successful though, you can't actually get more successful that running at capacity. Best way to alleviate that is to remove the fast traffic to somewhere else so you don't need to leave huge gaps ahead of it to allow for catching up with slow trains, then you can run the slower services more frequently gaining a huge amount of freed capacity. As for the fast traffic you build a dedicated fast line to take it, fast enough to attract passengers from all the north/south main lines, at rather less cost than increasing the loading gauge on existing lines.. I suggest calling the new line thus created HS2. Seems like many others you've missed the point of HS2, which is the freed capacity elsewhere, not the line itself.

[@Martindyna]

@@beardyface8492 I understand your point but the railways aren't running at capacity. I would only agree that they were when all trains were 20+ cars long. The Pendolinos should be as long as Eurostar (numerous platform extensions necessary of course).

[@kenstevens5065]

HS2 is a vanity project approved in my view by the most damaging PM since Blair. It also illustrates perfectly that our Governments seem incapable of adapting to rapid change in todays world. Yes we need new railways if only because car ownership will shrink drastically when we go to electric cars because only the wealthy will be able to afford electric vehicles for one thing. HS2 is too far advanced to cancel which is a possibility. Government should have the guts to convert it to a 125 to 140 mph line speed which most existing passenger stock can do anyway and by maintaining such speeds on it's high speed alignment still cut journey times drastically by having no 'bottleneck' speed restrictions while saving a fortune on new train designs, signalling, maintenance and energy running costs. A country our size doesn't need 200mph trains or be competing with the world on the top service speed of our trains. We need more seats at affordable prices to more places.

[@Martindyna]

@@kenstevens5065 Agree but Blair did a lot of good imo apart from his warmongering / sucking up to the US.

[@dhdove]

That’s an interesting take, but not totally fair I think. In the late fifties and early sixties disposable income was rising. You couldn’t park a train on your drive and people wanted independent travel. There was a rush to new technology, “the white heat”. The railways were hamstrung by their recent history but did themselves no favours by their unwillingness to embrace change. In their defence they were caught by a shortfall in development of realistic alternatives to steam, underpowered diesels and a lack of investment in practical electric traction. The development of motorways was inevitable. Please don’t blame the decline of railways on that, otherwise we would still be trapped in the nineteenth century.

[@lassepeterson2740]

Pluss war time damage

[@Bungle-UK]

Exactly….the drain from rail to road had begun before the war and just accelerated as motoring became more affordable. Independent transport was and still is very attractive.

[@funguyfarage3615]

nothing to do with beeching either. it was the labour party .they closed more track then beeching also RECOMMENDED

[@frederickmiles327]

One wishes the Blue Pullman train sets had been much more widely built and developed, with say 60-100 sets built by 1963 with better ride and capacity. Electrification took far too long because by 1966/the car and glamour of the old steam engines pulling the.Bournemouth Belle ornAberdeen Mail.had in a sense trumped the modernisation

[@Martindyna]

Note the loose nuts 14:58

[@laurenceskinnerton73]

A bit of a shambles.

[@conscienceaginBlackadder]

She was blatantly Labour + put off viewers who were not, airing during Labour's disastrous CND years. But TV was a one-way experience, there was no equivalent of KZbin comments then to tell folks you thought this.

[@Bungle-UK]

Exactly….she has a very basic ‘public good, private bad’ attitude and this film is produced through that prism. Ironically, the railway system she loves was entirely built using private money.

[@swedishdissident3406]

The thing that I find straing and illogical is as southern is connectedc to the french network. Despite this they continue with a mishmash and pathched overhead and track electric. Ripp out the old conductor track and use overhead in order to standardise.

[@gmfinc18]

Makes you think that if all the strikes in the motor industry didn't happen then perhaps more rail lines would have closed and there would be more traffic problems closer to those in big US cities.

[@PeaveyPV20]

gmfinc18 was talking to a canadian colleague at work who prefers the rail network here, with a network of mainlines and branch lines, something you dont really get alot off in canada and the usa

[@SomeGuy-lw2po]

@@PeaveyPV20 company to North America our rail is topnotch, compare to the rest;f Europe and Asia we're lagging behind.

[@andypandy9013]

Ernest Marples was an out and out crook. 😠

[@Bungle-UK]

Evidence for this statement?

[@brianjones2899]

Very biased old documentary. Thinks the nationalised industries were great in the early 50s despite having completely failed to provide a decent service.

[@theflyingsteamerstoke8534]

Nationalised industries can and often do work but only when the levels and degree of governmental control is right. A state owned industry can simply be sponsored by the government department and should be allowed to manage itself. It's when government intervention dictates where and when money should be spent that the system breaks down and when it is a public service (as opposed to private ownership or enterprise) it has a constant knock on effect that makes the industry look bad and at fault, instead of government mismanagement.

[@brianjones2899]

@@theflyingsteamerstoke8534 I think you could be quite right. DB and Swiss Rail presumably as you say. I knew BR in the 70s and god it was bad.

[@Bungle-UK]

Exactly - every industry in Britain that has been nationalised has subsequently failed. Look at aircraft manufacturers….Britain was once the world leader but government interference effectively killed the industry off.