How the history of UK railway electrification suggests history could be repeating itself

Philip Haigh works his way through a new book on the history of railway electrification in Britain, and considers how history could be repeating itself.

Robert Riddles is a name that seldom appears in RAIL - not least because he’s chiefly associated with British Railways steam traction.

But he does appear in a new book that charts the history of electrification in Britain - Lines of Power, written by John Buxton and Donald Heath.

And if those names ring a bell, that’s because Don Heath is best known for delivering the East Coast Main Line’s electrification in the 1980s, while John Buxton was managing director of BR’s Valley Lines in the 1990s, when he came close to delivering the sort of electrified network that is now coming from Transport for Wales.

So both are very well-qualified to give a view on where electrification sits within the history of our rail network.

But what of Riddles, the man behind the ‘Standard’ classes of 999 steam locomotives built between 1951 and 1960?

Heath and Buxton reckon that while Riddles is often seen as a “man of steam”, he had a broad span of engineering experience and “was no more dedicated to steam locomotives than to other facets of mechanical engineering”.

But they add that Riddles “did not see main line diesel traction as a way forward” and suggest that he thought diesels “would inevitably defer, if not kill, the rolling programme of electrification that he had in mind”.

Former National Railway Museum Associate Curator Bob Gwynne took a similar view in a 2021 article for The International Journal for the History of Engineering & Technology. He said: “Riddles was not interested in diesel power as an interim measure before widespread electrification. He ‘could see no reason for introducing diesels as an intermediate step, a step moreover which would be so expensive that it could well result in electrification being financially impossible for many years’.”

The quote Gwynne uses comes from Colonel Rogers’ 1970 biography of Riddles.

The man himself appears pragmatic on the subject of motive power. The following passage comes from his presidential address to the Institution of Locomotive Engineers in 1950.

“If one accepted, by some other form of motive power as yet known or unknown or undeveloped, the eventual supersession of steam on proved economic grounds, 19,500 steam locomotives will take a long time to liquidate on any possible financial policy, and while a single one of them remains, it will pay a better return if well designed and maintained than if left unimproved and neglected.

“So, I think there is a case for continuing the development of the steam engine along with the diesels and electrics for some time yet.”

In 1953, he addressed the Institution of Mechanical Engineers: “If the choice is based on overall costs, as it should be, then an element of prophesy enters which is far removed from the exactitude in which engineers and accountants are trained.

“If an electrification is at issue, changes in price levels and in traffic volume during the preparation and conversion period can make the difference between profit and loss, while the modifications to train schedules for greater frequency and faster speeds may or may not attract sufficient traffic to cover costs.”

Riddles was surely right to suggest that business cases depend on assumptions which may prove too optimistic or too pessimistic.

But I think he was overly gloomy about the effect of improved frequencies and faster speeds - the ‘sparks effect’ that came with the next decade’s electrification of the West Coast Main Line proved that.

Yet Heath, Buxton and Gwynne’s strong suggestion that Riddles saw diesel traction disrupting an orderly transition from steam to electric trains bears scrutiny.

Lines of Power notes that introducing diesels to the West Coast Main Line would demonstrate that modernisation was under way, even if they were no more powerful than steam traction and “far from reliable when first introduced”.

Other historians back a view suggesting that diesels were good enough (a minimum viable product) to move Britain on from steam.

Terry Gourvish, in British Railways 1948-73 A Business History, recounts the arguments within the British Transport Commission (BTC), and between it and ministers.

These arguments saw WCML electrification caught in the wider failure of 1955’s Modernisation Plan, which a parliamentary select committee in 1960 said “meant handing over a blank cheque to the [BTC]”.

If this all sounds familiar, I suggest that’s because it is. We have today a situation where bi-mode diesels are seen as good enough, so there’s little need for further electrification - particularly when projects such as Great Western’s electrification in the 2010s went so badly over budget and schedule that it was cut short.

More widely, we have a dearth of enhancement schemes around the network, other than the big three: HS2, East West Rail, and Transpennine Route Upgrade.

That’s in large part because the railway’s recent track record in delivering to time and budget is so poor that authorising spending runs the risk of writing a blank cheque, from ministers’ point of view.

The counter view is that an electric railway is a better railway however you measure it. But it comes with very high up-front capital costs at a time when ministers have little spare cash.

An alternative to diesels is batteries. Their credibility has largely advanced on the back of development for automotive purposes - electric cars. They can be reasonably easily inserted into the design of an electric multiple unit because they are a source of electric power (just like overhead line or third-rail supplies) when they’ve been charged.

Great Western Railway’s recently completed trial with a Class 230 testbed on the Greenford branch shows that batteries work - in this case in conjunction with fast-charging facilities, placed for the trial at West Ealing.

This opens the way to removing diesel traction from GWR’s Thames Valley branches without the need for expensive overhead line electrification.

The technology also applies to GWR’s West Country branch lines - even the longer one to Barnstaple - with intermediate fast-charging points.

It translates more widely to other operators such as Northern because GWR’s reason for testing fast-charge batteries has been its realisation that 40-year-old diesel multiple units such as its Class 150s are becoming more expensive to maintain.

Even its newer Turbo DMUs date from the early 1990s, and are beginning to need more extensive repairs to cracks in their aluminium bodyshells.

GWR’s challenge now is to create a business case that pays for battery trains and lineside charging infrastructure off the back of savings in running diesels.

In Lines of Power, Heath and Buxton provide some historical pointers. They note how Network SouthEast funded electrification of its six-mile branch line from Watford Junction to St Albans Abbey in 1988. Much of the funding came from the savings accrued from no longer needing to run an empty DMU to and from Bletchley depot every day for fuel and maintenance.

The story was similar in 1992, when NSE pushed overhead electrification on from Cambridge to Kings Lynn - another 41 miles.

It saved the cost of diesel locomotives, which also needed staff at Kings Lynn to run the locomotive round its trains of Mk 2 coaches. And the new service used electric multiple units that were already in the fleet (although this suggests that the fleet was underused until the extension).

More widely, Lines of Power is a good read. It charts rail electrification from its early days, including failed attempts in 1902 to use batteries on the Swansea-Mumbles line.

Using electricity to power trains sparked early interest around the country.

Liverpool Overhead Railway’s 525V DC service started in 1893. The Midland Railway wired Lancaster-Morecambe-Heysham with 6.6kV AC in 1908.

Meanwhile, the Lancashire and Yorkshire, North Eastern, and London and North Western Railways all electrified some of their routes, chiefly around suburban areas.

And, of course, London’s underground railways were interested, as were the three main line railway companies south of the River Thames.

George Westinghouse established a works at Trafford Park, Manchester, in 1899 as he anticipated an electrification boom.

Without the First World War, there may well have been a boom. But Lines of Power recounts the war’s shattering effect on the rail industry’s self-assurance and stability.

“Furthermore, government control during the war also eroded the railway companies’ sense of independence,” it adds.

With funding tight following WW1, rail companies made the best of what they had, which was steam, rather than investing in electrification. The Southern Railway was the exception, using its cheaper third-rail system.

The LNER tried - most famously with its Woodhead Line proposal that was terminated by the Second World War and left to British Railways to complete in the 1950s, just as its 1,500V DC overhead system was becoming obsolete in favour of the more efficient 25kV AC system.

Beyond this history of which lines were electrified and when, Heath and Buxton take their readers through the peaks and troughs of electrification policy as successive governments have blown hot and cold over funding.

The pair believe in electric railways. “Besides being cheaper to operate, the procurement cost of electric trains is lower than diesel trains, thus reducing the cost of replacing the existing ageing UK diesel fleet,” they argue.

For this to happen, three things must be delivered, in their view:

• Win back political confidence at local and national level.
• Reduce the first cost of electrification.
• Initiate a rolling programme to deliver a firm national strategy that incorporates robust project planning.

And while I didn’t set out to write a book review, this one has a place on the shelves of anyone interested in railways. Lines of Power was published in June by Unicorn Publishing Group. It’s a hardback, priced at £30.