Are Trams Socialist Read online

  Are Trams Socialist?

  Series editor: Diane Coyle

  The BRIC Road to Growth — Jim O’Neill

  Reinventing London — Bridget Rosewell

  Rediscovering Growth: After the Crisis

  — Andrew Sentance

  Why Fight Poverty? — Julia Unwin

  Identity Is The New Money — David Birch

  Housing: Where’s the Plan? — Kate Barker

  Bad Habits, Hard Choices: Using the Tax

  System to Make Us Healthier — David Fell

  A Better Politics: How Government Can Make

  Us Happier — Danny Dorling

  Are Trams Socialist? Why Britain Has No

  Transport Policy — Christian Wolmar

  Are Trams Socialist?

  Why Britain Has No

  Transport Policy

  Christian Wolmar

  Copyright © 2016 Christian Wolmar

  Published by London Publishing Partnership

  www.londonpublishingpartnership.co.uk

  Published in association with

  Enlightenment Economics

  www.enlightenmenteconomics.com

  All Rights Reserved

  ISBN: 978-1-907994-57-9 (epub)

  A catalogue record for this book is

  available from the British Library

  This book has been composed in Candara

  Copy-edited and typeset by

  T&T Productions Ltd, London

  www.tandtproductions.com

  Preface

  Gothenburg tram. Photo by Diane Coyle.

  Transport was a bit of an afterthought in the creation of the UK’s system of governance. There was no government department responsible for all aspects of transport until the creation of the Ministry of Transport in the aftermath of World War I, and in its various successive incarnations the transport ministry has never been granted the kind of importance that such weighty matters as finance, defence or home ­affairs have been accorded. Transport ­remains low on the list of government priorities – a fact made clear by the small number of transport ­secretaries whose names have earned a place in the history books. Barbara Castle and possibly Alistair Darling are exceptions, but who, for example, knows that dear old ­Alfred Barnes, MP for the oddly named East Ham South constituency, held the post throughout the whole ­Attlee administration?

  This lack of prominence for the transport ministry is politically significant. Sure, there is the occasional big scheme, such as the arrival of a new fleet of trains or the opening of a stretch of road, where ministers cut ribbons and give speeches emphasizing the importance of transport, but for the most part it is a backyard ministry populated by politicians on the way up or, more usually, on the way out. Yet transport is a key feature of almost everyone’s lives almost every day. Step outside your front door and you are faced with decisions determined by the policies of successive transport ministers, overseen, of course, by the Treasury. Transport, in other words, does not get the attention it deserves.

  This short book, therefore, is an attempt to examine how this situation came about, and it considers why there has never been anything approaching a coherent transport policy in this country. By looking at the history of transport over the past century or so, I have tried to explain why there has been so little progress in establishing a policy that takes into account the importance for all of us of the accessibility of places of work, leisure or education and that takes into account the damaging effects of transport on the environment, and its potential negative impact on people’s lives, through air pollution, for example. Developing such a coherent policy is, of course, not an easy task, but some 200 years after the Industrial Revolution gave us the means, and created the need, for us to travel, we could have made a better fist of it by now. It is never too late to make a start.

  Acknowledgements

  My thanks to Jon Shaw, Ian Docherty and Peter Kain for reading through earlier drafts and making many useful suggestions.

  Chapter 1

  Why railways?

  Mass transport is a relatively new phenomenon. For most of human existence, people remained near to where they were born for their entire lives. They might roam to hunt or to seek food, but as agriculture developed settled lives became the norm. Why face the dangers of wandering around if you had a stable food supply nearby and the support of your tribe? There were exceptions – such as soldiers and sailors, and the occasional nomadic tribe – but for the most part the sheer difficulty of travel meant that it posed an unnecessary and unwanted risk. Walking routes were crude or non-existent, the sea was dangerous and horses were only for the relatively affluent (and were not, in any case, suitable for all climates).

  The Romans were keen on transport and created a system of roads across much of Europe including Britain, mostly for military reasons but also for trade. But after they left, in the fourth century, no one much bothered about the road network and precious little was done to maintain it during the subsequent 1,500 years.

  The condition of the roads and the lack of any cheap and efficient means of undertaking journeys on them meant that travel was limited to the desperate and the affluent, and even the latter did not enjoy the experience. When Archduke Charles – who later became the Holy Roman Emperor Charles VI – visited England in December 1703, his journey from London to Petworth House in Sussex, a mere fifty miles, took a gruelling three days. Indeed, he was lucky to survive the experience as his carriage overturned a dozen times as it slithered and skidded in the icy mud. Conditions in towns were even worse. The Gentleman’s Magazine described in 1756 how the Mile End Road in London’s East End ‘resembled a stagnant lake of deep mud’. It would have been a smelly one, too, as thousands of animals were driven along the main roads into central London to be slaughtered at Smithfield Market.

  The inadequacy of the roads was partly due to the fact that they were the responsibility of local parishes, which had neither the money nor the will to keep them in good repair. In response to the dire state of the main roads, a system of toll roads, called turnpikes, emerged in the eighteenth century. The turnpike trusts were allowed by parliament to charge for the use of their roads and were supposed to ensure they were well kept, although the latter part of the deal was often not adhered to.

  Stimulated by the continued inadequacy of the roads – and created to serve the needs of the industrial revolution and carry its products – the country’s system of ­canals had a brief heyday. The canal age effectively ­began in 1757 with the completion of the twelve-mile-long Sankey Brook Navigation (many ‘canals’ consisted partly or even completely of rivers made navigable through dredging and the creation of stable banks). The purpose of this first canal was to move St Helens coal to Liverpool but other uses, such as giving Cheshire salt manufacturers access to a far larger market, soon began to emerge. The success of the Sankey Brook Navigation and, in particular, the Duke of Bridgewater’s canal linking Manchester and Liverpool led to the first of two ‘canal manias’, which resulted in the creation of a national network of waterways. By reducing the cost of transport by as much as 75%, the system of canals, navigable rivers and coastal shipping that emerged widened the market for manufactured goods and consequently began the economic take-off that was greatly accelerated by the advent of the railways.

  The key financial mechanism that enabled the canals to be financed and built was the joint stock company. The concept had been around for centuries (there are competing claims in several European countries to being the first such venture) but the canal age gave confidence to the small investor, given the comfortable returns on these pioneering projects. Consequently, it was private capital, with permission from parliament through the ‘Bill process’, that created this
network.

  Some canals did carry passengers but the barges were slow, since they were towed by horses and legged through tunnels by men. This made them unattractive, even compared with the ghastly roads, for long journeys. It was the development of steam engines in the eighteenth century that would transform transport. Gradually they became both smaller and more powerful, and it was initially thought that they would eventually be put on wheels and run on roads. However, there were enormous technical difficulties and early attempts mostly ended in mishap or disaster, such as being driven into a ditch or having a boiler explode.

  Crucially, though, it was the awful state of the roads that was a barrier to the development of these steam cars. The roads had to some extent improved thanks to the turnpikes and the inventions of the likes of Thomas Telford and John Macadam, and by the turn of the nineteenth century a journey between London and Edinburgh could, in fair weather, take two days rather than a fortnight, which had been the norm a century earlier. However, the roads were still not robust enough to bear the load of the steam carriages that were being developed by various pioneers. As well as much better roads, to get a workable and reliable steam vehicle to perform well on the road required major improvements in the technology for steering, wheels, suspension, trans­mission, boiler and engine. These were not forthcoming until much later in the nineteenth century.

  There was also hostility from the turnpike trusts towards the idea of self-powered steam vehicles on the roads, and they imposed very high charges on them – sometimes fifteen times the amount charged to a horse-drawn cart – because of quite justified fears that they would damage the road surface. Parliament, too, was suspicious, and in 1865 it passed the Locomotive Act, popularly known as the Red Flag Act, setting a speed limit of four miles per hour in rural areas and two miles per hour in towns, as well as the requirement for a person with a red flag to walk ahead of the vehicle to warn horse riders and pedestrians of the approach of a self-propelled machine.

  The solution, therefore, was to build a railway – in other words, to provide a permanent way on which the vehicles could travel. Rails could bear a heavier load than roads, and locomotives required little springing because they travelled on a hard smooth surface. Technological developments – such as more efficient boilers and, crucially, the clever idea of flanged wheels (rather than flanged rails) – also gave railways a key advantage. Moreover, they did not require steering: a function that took some time to master. A single steam locomotive on the tracks could pull several wagons or carriages, making it far more economically efficient, and since iron on iron (or steel on steel) generates far less friction than wheels on dirt or even tar roads, it also meant that vehicles on tracks were far more fuel efficient.

  For all these negative and positive reasons, it was therefore a collective, rather than individual, form of transport that broke the mould and enabled faster transport for both people and goods. The railways triumphed for the best part of a century, and supporters of cars and their ilk had to bide their time until motor vehicle technology was developed, as had happened with the railways, in a piecemeal way. They would, however, get their revenge.

  The railway century

  The railway age began, accompanied by considerable fanfare, with the opening of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway in September 1830. There had been numerous cruder predecessors but, in terms of sophistication and technology, the Liverpool and Manchester was groundbreaking in numerous respects: it was double tracked; it used exclusively locomotive power, rather than horse power; it linked two major towns (which later became cities); and it carried both passengers and freight. Numerous early passengers testified to the excitement of going faster than had previously been possible – the speed of a galloping horse was the fastest that anyone had travelled to this point.

  Fears of being unable to breathe at such speeds or of being killed by an exploding boiler (a more realistic concern but still a relatively rare occurrence) soon abated and a remarkable period of railway growth ensued. The railway mania of the 1840s resulted in the creation of a network of more than 5,000 miles just two decades after the opening of the Liverpool and Manchester – around half of today’s remaining mileage.

  Passengers flocked to use the trains. The Great Exhibition of 1851, for example, was an astonishing success, attracting more than six million visitors (a third of the population of England and Wales at the time) from all around the country to London thanks to the railways. Special trains were run from every major regional centre, giving many people their first ever ride on a train.

  The railways had arrived as a mass form of transit. They were to be unchallenged for the remainder of the century, meaning that the private firms that owned and operated them were able to amass sufficient capital to enable them both to improve the existing network – speeding up services, building magnificent stations and providing more facilities – and to extend it to every corner of the country, even sparsely populated areas where lines were never likely to return a profit in order to prevent rivals establishing territory. By the turn of the century, the British network had extended to 18,700 miles and average speeds on main lines were generally around forty-five miles per hour. The roads had a minor role, connecting people with the local station by means of horse-drawn carriages or carts, or simply Shanks’s pony.

  As a means of inter-urban transport, the railways had a virtual monopoly. There were still some stagecoaches but, as can be seen from Sherlock Holmes’s encyclopaedic knowledge of the railway timetable as he rushes off to the scene of the latest crime, the railways were the predominant form of travel. While there was some consolidation, and the emergence of a few major railway companies such as the London and North Western and the Great Western, there were still a couple of hundred railway companies at the outset of World War I.

  In the cities and major towns the situation was somewhat different. There was an alternative in the form of trams, initially horse drawn but later electrically powered. They were a marked advance on their predecessors: the horse-drawn omnibuses that had appeared on the streets of several cities around the same time as the opening of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway. Omnibuses were slow, inefficient and expensive because of the cost of horses, which not only required expensive feed but also lived short miserable lives as a result of the harsh nature of the work. ­Consequently, omnibuses were the preserve of the middle classes since they were too expensive to be a genuinely mass form of transport.

  Trams, on the other hand, were able to cater for the masses. The advantage of trams was similar to that of the railways: since the roads were so bad, laying tracks enabled far more efficient progress. The first horse-drawn trams (coincidentally the brainchild of a man called George Train) appeared in London along the ­Bayswater Road between Marble Arch and Notting Hill Gate in 1861, but they were a failure.

  By the end of the decade, however, tram systems had been laid in Liverpool, Glasgow and Edinburgh, and London saw its first regular tram service running in south London between Brixton and Kennington in 1870. The electrification of trams, which began as early as the 1880s, enabled them to reach their full potential. Even in those early days, electricity proved to be far cheaper than horse traction, and as a result fares were reduced at the same time as services improved. Trams therefore enjoyed a boom and were widely used by the working class, who had hitherto largely been unable to travel distances of any great length to employment except in areas where there happened to be suburban railways, many of which provided cheap ‘workmen’s trains’.

  Cheap tickets had first been offered, to dockers, by Eastern Counties Railway as early as 1847, and by the 1860s numerous railway companies were providing some kind of discounted offer for workers, normally usable only on early morning and late evening trains (cruelly, many of the early morning trains delivered the workers too early for their employers, leaving them to hang around for a couple of hours in the wet and cold). As a consequence, whole London suburbs of cheap housing were built on the basis of t
he availability of this discounted access to employment. These workmen’s trains were a great improvement on the previous provision for cheap travel: the requirement under the 1844 Railways Regulation Act for every company to run at least one train per day on every line, serving all stations and costing just one pence per mile.

  Tram systems, however, were far cheaper to build and therefore became widespread in many towns that were too small to develop suburban rail services. They offered cheap fares all day long, unlike the railways. They were an early version of a partnership between local authorities and private enterprise since they were dependent on installing rails in municipally owned streets, for which the private promoters needed to obtain permission. In fact, local authorities soon became the dominant partner, helped by the 1870 Tramway Act, which provided for the acquisition of tramway networks by local authorities after a suitable length of ownership by the original private promoter. Over time most tramway systems – which, incidentally, were highly profitable for a time – therefore became municipally owned. This pattern of municipal ownership was initially greatly beneficial for the growth of trams, but eventually, after World War II, it hastened their demise. Trams were not universally welcomed, precisely because they catered for the working classes. The City of London, which had prevented the construction of any mainline stations on its patch, refused to allow trams on its streets, arguing that they ‘catered for an undesirable class of person’.¹ It was an attitude that was not confined to the City.