The Age of the Train

This is the story of how we rediscovered our love affair

with high-speed rail travel.

And how an unpopular nationalised industry

created the ever-popular 125 train.

In the 1970s, British Rail was the butt of jokes

for the nation's comedians.

British Rail intend to maintain their standards.

But now for the good news...

Him! Parker! Mr Parker!

The man that is responsible for the tragedy of this railway.

During a period of industrial gloom and political upheaval,

how did the unexpected triumph of the InterCity 125

help save British Rail and give us the age of the train?

A bit of fresh air and fun is easy, because...

# This is the age... #

..of the train.

Mr Peter Parker.

In 1976, Peter Parker became the new boss of British Rail.

He was a high-profile businessman,

but he was facing his toughest job yet.

Trying to turn around an industry

that was near rock bottom.

Pray silence for Mr Peter Parker.

A member of the Royal Victorian Order

and chairman of British Railways' board.

A distinguished guest of honour.

APPLAUSE

Five years for us is short time.

Five years is longer than most governments dare to think.

'It's not fashionable to be the kind of man who is'

a captain of industry.

A socialist,

and man about the theatre

who had been an actor.

An authority on Blake.

A man who spoke Japanese.

I mean, he was a really extraordinary man.

I wouldn't mind having a look inside, actually.

British Rail had suffered 30 years of decline

and Parker was assessing the business from top to bottom.

I often think that, you know,

industrial democracy's got a lot to do with the standards

in the lavatory as well as appearances in the boardroom.

-What do you think about it?

-Worth every penny!

LAUGHTER

From Birmingham to Bristol, Liverpool or Leeds,

buy a ticket, take a train, and travel where you please.

To Manchester or Glasgow...

Parker was in charge of a rail system struggling to promote itself

to customers in a new age of travel.

The message wasn't always getting through.

So take a seat on the midday train,

and be in time for the start of the game.

Good morning!

Good evening. When they came to me

and asked me to say some kind words about British Rail,

frankly, I told BR to be off. LAUGHTER

Then they offered me 1,000 quid.

I said, "I'm not a man who can be bought."

Then they offered me 2,000 quid.

Good evening. LAUGHTER

Everybody loved their cars. Me too.

And the train at last

seemed to be fading.

Beeching had just axed everything.

And it was really the pit

for the poor old train.

Parker had more than the railways to worry about.

The new chairman was in charge of 55 ships, 29 hotels,

and more than 200 restaurants and cafes.

-Derek!

-Good morning.

The bags are here.

He was at the head of 250,000 employees.

For years, British Rail had complained

about inadequate government investment.

But to its critics, it was overstaffed, out of date,

and a waste of public money.

Now, you do your bit, and we'll do our bit,

and we'll try to lose £100 million of your money every year.

For Parker, there wasn't much to smile about.

He had to modernise at a time of cutbacks.

Too many trains were late, and too many looked old-fashioned.

It's a bit of an early stage, really,

to say what I can see ahead.

My feeling of it is I've got

a view of the Himalayas.

I've just got to that point

where the peaks stand out very clearly.

I haven't scaled any yet.

But I can see, I think, more and more what the problems are.

There was just too much short-termism.

His message all along,

his understanding was that railways were very long-term.

When you invest something in a railway,

and when you build a new train like the high-speed train,

you're looking at something that's got a life of 35, 40 years,

maybe longer with refurbishments.

But politicians were never looking further than five years ahead.

Peter Parker knew he had to change the way

we thought about the railways.

He'd have to take on the doubters and that included the unions.

I'm pleased...

SHOUTS FROM AUDIENCE

That's the man you should ask! Him!

Parker! Mr Parker!

Parker had to reduce the complaints, get more customers,

make more money, and keep his workers happy.

It wasn't going to be easy.

British Rail in the late 70s, early 80s,

was really set up not much different from Victorian lines.

So it's very, very difficult for the railways.

They were in an almost impossible position.

It was a perfect storm of things going against them.

The man that is responsible

for the tragedy of this railway!

If he comes and starts charming,

or endeavouring to charm us out of the trees,

then I'm afraid that would be the wrong way

to do industrial relations on British Railways Board.

It wasn't particularly well run,

I think, at that point.

From the consumer's point of view.

Engineering wise, I mean, it was a very safe railway.

But, I mean, the consumer did tend to get left out of it a bit.

We had the most appalling unions at the time,

and they just objected to everything.

We're down to earth people.

We see things as they are,

and we want to give a service to the public of this country.

And I don't think we want to be charmed into doing it.

You stop complaining...

Sometimes, the criticism went beyond a joke.

..and simply do what you're told whenever you see this sign.

There we are.

LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE

I think British Rail will always be a butt.

It's like mother-in-laws.

It doesn't matter if it does well, or does badly.

It's either the trains are too full

and you can't get a seat, and therefore it's rubbish.

Or it's stone empty and, you know,

"Why can't they run a proper business?"

Never once have I understood a railway announcement.

For instance...

The train now standing at platform

four in a four forty-five four four fet...

LAUGHTER

I think people have a dual attitude to railways.

It's "Bloody railways! Bloody British Rail!"

Commuters, for instance,

don't REALLY want to go to work on the train each day.

It's a distressed purchase.

If you provide a perfect journey for a commuter, he doesn't notice it.

He takes it for granted.

And if you have a slight delay, that gets it.

So railways are always struggling with their image.

But, amid the doom and gloom,

Peter Parker had worked out a new strategy.

He was going to revive Britain's love affair with high-speed trains.

And find new ways to reach beyond the Channel into Europe.

Parker knew there had always been a special kind of glamour

about high-speed trains.

The express trains of the 1930s set speed records

and created new standards for luxury travel.

The steam trains were romance.

Just wonderful. Very, very fast.

As fast as anything that moves today in this country.

And they were beautiful things to look at.

Long before Peter Parker arrived at British Rail,

it was obvious Britain needed a new high-speed train.

In 1968, Barbara Castle, the Transport Minister,

visited British Rail's engineering works in Derby

to give the scheme her public backing.

Railways were all trying to go faster.

What they did was you bought a fast locomotive and train,

and then you tweaked the infrastructure.

You eased the curves, you moved track across,

so they didn't have to slow for curves and so on.

You eased junctions.

And you went faster, but eventually, you got to the point where

you're going as fast as you could with the trains you've got.

And then you moved up another step.

An ambitious new project was launched.

The Advanced Passenger Train.

A tilting train which could travel

on old-fashioned curving rail tracks at 150mph.

Now, into this came British Rail Research,

which was a new organisation set up

and it took on a lot of engineers from outside the industry.

Not all from the aircraft industry, that's a myth.

But a lot of engineers,

and they came in and looked at existing railway engineering

and thought, "Old-fashioned. Boring."

Making their way across Europe,

three pretty girls decorate our scene.

A whole new world of travel.

According to British Rail's publicity films,

the 1970s were going to be a sophisticated,

cosmopolitan era on the railways across Europe.

A new generation of high-speed train was being built.

At last, some of the lost glamour of the '30s might come back.

Today, the scene in a high-speed train is changed out of recognition.

Staring out of the corridor window

is no longer the high spot of a journey.

For whatever your mood,

all the right things are around to rest or exhilarate you.

In other countries, money was being poured into electrification

and fast new expresses.

But in Britain, budgets were tighter.

What was really irritating

about being on the board of British Rail

is that the people

would constantly tell you

how wonderful the bullet train was,

with no telling you about how much it cost, how much it was subsidised,

how much the government was so behind it, how it had taken years

and years and years to develop,

and how they constantly improved it.

While British Rail was pursuing its own prestige projects,

the APT tilting train, behind the scenes,

a cheaper, less romantic idea was brewing.

A high-speed diesel train which could travel at 125mph.

The high-speed train team was headed by Terry Miller,

a lifelong railway engineer.

Terry Miller went to British Railways' board

and said, "Would you like a 125 mph train,

"and you could deliver your prototype in 22 months?"

The race was on between two teams, both working within British Rail.

There was fierce rivalry between the EPT tilting train project,

based at BR research,

and Miller's engineering team.

The conventional engineers,

who were extremely upset, not to say, furious, about all this,

what we now call 'dissing'

from the Advanced Passenger Train people at BR research.

They said, "Well, we can go fast as well."

So, the rivalry was huge. And they came back from one meeting

and the engineering director said,

"They can do 150?

"We'll show them!"

It was creative tension.

The tilting train could run at 150mph,

but it was still being tested.

Suddenly, its rival, the more conventional high speed train,

was going to be more than a stopgap.

Hey, Lady! Forget all that!

Meet the swinging, mixing, mincing,

-slicing, shredding, Kenwood Chef!

-Ooh!

In the early 1970s, one of Britain's leading designers was called in.

Kenneth Grange was at the cutting-edge of industrial design.

He supplied to look for products which became household names.

By now, the conventional high-speed train was almost ready,

five years ahead of its rival, the tilting train.

But it needed some finishing touches.

At first, Grange was asked to sort out the paintwork on the cab,

but he gave the train a whole new look.

It was just a paint job.

But decently paid, and very agreeable.

It was a nice enough job to get. But the train wasn't very beautiful.

That's sure. But I had time enough to play games,

and I chose myself to have a crack at a new shape of train.

The high-speed train was about to get its most distinctive look.

The futuristic nosecone at the front and back.

On the table here, I've got two models,

and they are pretty much examples

of where the job started, and we ended.

There's a flat area here,

and it was just big enough to take quite a small piece of glass,

because they had a succession of accidents

-more than accidents, rather wilful -

of small boys hanging house bricks over bridges and smashing the glass.

So the new train would have to have armour-plated glass.

Without telling British Rail, Grange used

sophisticated aerodynamic testing

for the first time in the design of a train

The whole point was that we virtually exchanged

the simple, smooth curvature here, for a much better rake here,

so we could get more air flowing over the top,

relative to this one.

We used to hire space in the wind tunnel down at Imperial College,

and gradually, with the technicians down there,

we'd gradually, gradually improved the shape, aerodynamically.

And so when the day came to show them my new delivery of the model,

I took my own design along as well.

And it's a pretty extraordinary tale on reflection,

that they were, you know, broadminded enough

and open-minded enough

to take some note of what I was saying.

But if the high-speed train doesn't get off to its high-speed launch

as the timetables proudly announce,

then the whole impact of the service will be lost.

Kenneth Grange's prototype was a one-man cab

with a small central window.

But trouble broke out with the drivers union, ASLEF.

For a year, they refused to test the new train.

This proposal was put before our annual conference in June.

The delegates attending the annual conference,

who are actual train drivers,

people who are driving trains day in, day out, said,

"Not on your life."

The unions came back and had changed their mind, or some cause,

whatever it was, and were insisting upon two men.

Which threw us into a real dilemma,

because this single glass size was very difficult to resolve.

You couldn't have two men looking out of the one little window.

To only have one driver in there,

there are instances where you need an inspector on there,

you need room for training,

you need a seat for somebody who is perhaps piloting

or conducting a driver who's on a particular route

that he hasn't been on before.

It would have been farcical to have had

just a central sitting seat in a HST.

So Kenneth Grange redesigned the cab with a bigger window.

He also decided to remove the pair of buffers at the front.

These sets of accidents

all eventually worked to my favour, frankly.

The loss of the buffers was a key change in the geometry of the train.

And that, in turn, led to the style we've got now.

The train's unique trademark had been created.

Its front cab.

As it were, stylistic origins of the design,

I think, don't owe much to other vehicles.

They might have owed something to racing cars,

which were not nearly as ugly as they are today.

They were much sleeker and, in a way,

looked like a cartoonist's drawing of a fast car.

I think that was perhaps some starting point.

But because of another 1970s social phenomenon,

football hooligans,

part of Grange's design didn't make it into the train.

He made seats for the passenger compartment using netting,

developed for the United States Space Program.

But the seats weren't tough enough for match day trains.

Didn't take much wit to see that a net chair

would be an absolute gift to them, you know?

Strip in and, bing! You'd have no seat at all.

Not just with just holes in it, you'd have no seat at all.

So it was stillborn, the net seat.

Most people thought the prototype train

was a rather ugly-looking brute.

But the final version that Kenneth Grange produced

was absolutely magnificent.

What had been created was an ultramodern train

with two power cabs, one at each end.

That meant a faster ride powered by two engines.

The stopgap had turned from an ugly duckling into a swan.

I think, of everything I've done, that probably is number one.

So I'm very proud of it, yes. More than fairly, you can tell!

With a new look and two drivers in the cab,

the high-speed train went into service.

I tell you, this is a family business!

Wherever I go, I find this a family business!

Peter Parker saw his chance to promote a new image of the railways.

He been handed an exciting product.

Now, it needed to be sold.

In the late 1970s,

a brash businessman was trying to conquer the world of advertising.

Peter Marsh had a gift for publicity, sometimes about himself.

In an industry of extrovert characters,

he was one of the most colourful of the lot.

# Sirrah, load chunky carpets

# Sirrah, get off me barra!

# Sirrah, load chunky carpets,

# Sirrah, load, buy 'em! #

Marsh was the front man for a thriving agency,

Allen, Brady and Marsh.

They used Hollywood star, Orson Welles to sell sherry.

They advertised everything from chewing gum to cleaning products.

Now Marsh was chasing one of the biggest prizes of all.

The British Rail advertising account.

We're really looking at one very specific ingredient here,

and one of the most important ingredients, which is personality.

OK, well I better leave you. Have a good trip.

Marsh had been an actor, and he knew Parker loved theatre.

The ad man saw an opportunity.

He invited Parker to his office.

The British Rail chairman was about to get a surprise.

I invited Peter to lunch,

and when he arrived, at reception

I'd got this terrible old tart of a receptionist.

She was like, "Yeah? What's your name?

"Peter...sorry?

"Marsh? Hello...yeah,

"Just sit down."

Really terribly difficult.

They were just sat in a waiting room,

rather than being met by the directors or whatever,

which they might have expected.

He's sitting there, obviously, not being very pleased.

"You see that door over there? Over your left shoulder?

"Don't you know your left from your right? Over there.

"Go and sit there.

"Mr Marsh'll come and see you."

And this waiting room was scruffy, dirty.

There were smelly, unemptied ashtrays.

Dirty floor, unkempt.

It is sort of sprouting penicillin!

These stale coffee cups and teacups

and plastic receptacles.

They sat there like this 15, 20 minutes,

wondering what was going on.

And Peter's sitting there fuming. And I time it perfectly,

I walk up, "Hello, Peter. Sorry to keep you waiting.

"What I've been trying to demonstrate to you

"in these surroundings

"and in the indifference of our receptionist there,

"is the experience your customers

"have of you, British Rail, every day."

"And it is my job and intention, to show you

"how we will overcome that problem. Shall we go and have lunch?"

There was my blue Rolls-Royce at the door, and off we went.

-TANNOY:

-The train on Platform 4...

This is the new Inter-City 125.

And as you can see, a pretty futuristic-looking train.

So are the performance figures.

As the name implies, the top speed is 125 miles per hour.

By now the high-speed train had a new name - the Inter-City 125.

It was Europe's fastest regular rail service.

And at last, British Rail was starting to get

some positive coverage on TV.

Rail travel was never like this when I was a trainspotter.

All carriages fully air-conditioned throughout,

and linked with automatic doors.

I can remember the 125 when it first began, going on it,

and being absolutely carried away by the speed, and the comfort.

And I suppose in this, the brand new era of high-speed rail travel,

it just had to come...

the high-speed loo.

We went roaring along the track.

It was the smoothest ride, I'd ever seen.

Any train worth travelling on has got to have a decent bar and buffet,

and in British Rail terms this is the last word.

They don't come any better than this.

They looked very glamorous, but it was the people's train.

But as if that's not enough,

for the very first time in British Rail history,

you can now enjoy the delights of British Rail pizza.

But most important of all, comfortable seating

and absolutely nothing has been left to chance there.

Believe it or not,

all the seats on this train are ergonomically designed.

This is 222 Marylebone Road.

It used to be British Rail's corporate headquarters,

now it's a luxury hotel.

Thank you very much!

And this is where ad man Peter Marsh made his final pitch to Peter Parker

for the biggest opportunity of his career -

the British Rail advertising account.

When we pitched for the account with Peter, there,

we had decided a presenter was the most economic way

of presenting a multitude of information available to you.

Also, because we'd have to make a lot of commercials,

we wanted the production costs to be very low.

It was make-or-break.

Six agencies, including Marsh's biggest rival

Saatchi & Saatchi,

were in the running.

Marsh had to follow his waiting room stunt with a spectacular presentation.

But he was about to play his trump card.

Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to Top of the Pops! Ooh!

Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, welcome indeed to Jim'll Fix it!

Jimmy Saville was at the peak of his fame,

and he'd already shown his interest in the new high-speed trains.

-I'm really jealous of you. Was it good?

-Yes.

-Really smashing?

-Yes.

-Wow!

Mr Driver, sir. What can I say? What a thrill for this young lad.

We auditioned for presenters.

The way you test them on the target market -

you have what we call a candidate statement.

SCREAMING FANS

Marsh's research has produced candidate statements

from possible presenters, including Jimmy Saville and Terry Wogan

saying they believed in British Rail.

Members of the public were asked for their reaction.

When we got to Jimmy Saville...

The candidate statement was the same for everybody;

I believe in an integrated, publicly owned rail service

that gives customer value,

is intent on modernisation and will present real value to the customer.

Everybody endorsed that with Jimmy Saville.

Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Top of the Pops!

At first Peter Parker wasn't sure about Marsh's choice of presenter.

He asked for more market research.

I think he saw him as a disc jockey, popular with young people and such like.

And perhaps didn't realise how popular he was.

Peter Parker then brought up the presenter, Jimmy Saville.

He said, "Peter, are you quite sure about this man?"

And I said, "We're a bit like a doctor, Peter.

"We don't have to love our patients, to give them the correct advice."

And what shall we have now? Should we have the number one? We should have the number one.

Because of the robustness of the results

we cannot do other than recommend him without any reservation.

British Rail said, "Would you like to come and talk to us

about your experiences on trains and such like?"

Obviously, there are some I can't tell you about,

which are a pride and joy to me...

Jimmy did claim to travel something like...

20-odd thousand miles a year by train.

As well as in his Rolls-Royce.

I walked from John o'Groats to Land's End

and I've got news for you.

After anything like that, a train of any sort, shape or size

and any speed is a thing of joy and pleasure to me.

The decision was made.

Marsh's agency was hired.

The railways were going to be rebranded

and Peter Marsh was celebrating what was said to be

the biggest account move in British advertising history.

Business men and business ladies, you don't need me to tell you

that a long drive before a long meeting is a bit of a strain.

So why not do what I do? Take the train.

Soon the first advertisements were broadcast. It was a simple formula.

A celebrity presenter and lots of shots of the brand new 125.

I travel about 39,000 rail miles a year on business.

Much more comfortable and less worrying than driving,

I get to meetings relaxed and on time because...

-WOMAN SINGS:

-# This is the age... #

JIMMY SAVILLE: Of the train!

It was tremendously successful. Tremendously successful.

Well, I think it was a combination of using Jimmy Saville,

who was clearly extremely popular

right across the class structure of the country, and age structure as well.

Don't you deserve half price too? ALL: Yeah!

It used modern images of the railway.

The high-speed train would feature somewhere in most of the adverts.

Even is it was just rushing by at the end.

I didn't like him very much.

But I don't have to. I found him...

When he delivered his work, he was brilliant.

There's no place like London for doing your Christmas shopping.

I will put up with anything.

Because when you're a professional

you have to deal with people

you wouldn't choose to go to the opera with.

Travel off-peak weekdays or any time most weekends,

and you pay much less than the ordinary fare.

The ads might have been simple, but they were carefully put together.

You'll be amazed how many are doing

their Christmas shopping in London. Why not join us, because...

-WOMAN: #

-This is the age...

JIMMY SAVILLE: Of the train!

We researched it.

And the emotional impact was enormous.

And it stuck in people's minds like a burr under the saddle.

# This is the age...of the train #

# This is the age... Of the train #

Something like that. But it never seemed to go any further than that.

It just was... # This is the age...of the train #

# This...# Dear me! I need a bit of water. Cut that.

And it used to be spoken too, sometimes. By Jimmy Saville.

This is the age. Of the train.

And the train would rush by.

# This is the age...of the train #

Speaking as a faithful, hard-working considerate husband, I say...

Quickly, the slogan was part of everyday life.

-But I'd have to go to work by train.

-It'd be quicker! After all, this is the age of the train.

I'm not concerned about the AGE of the train.

I don't care how OLD it is, just will it be running?

LAUGHTER

They were deliberately kept simple because that's all you need.

And people respond to messages, they don't respond to padding.

He's got a smart suit on and he's got this enthusiasm as he addresses

the camera, cos he certainly believes in what he's saying.

With this railcard, senior citizens get half-price travel.

We were very conscious that when he's on Top of the Pops,

he deliberately cultivates a very zany image,

not only in the clothes that he wears,

and also that "Urh-urh-urh!" that he used to do, but also in his hair.

Which sometimes looks awful.

Er, but we very, very meticulously briefed him on the wardrobe,

and approved the wardrobe

and also on the hairstyle.

You saw the slight problem on the motorway gantry.

You get the hair blown about.

But it's very long. It's a bit distracting.

So why not do what I do? Take the train!

For once, everyone agreed British Rail had got it right.

In the early 1980s,

the Age of the train was one of the best-known ad campaigns in Britain.

But some people on the railways weren't convinced.

Don't ask me to sing that. The thing is, I remember it.

"This is the age of the train."

It was, the adverts were good enough,

but I don't think they delivered much for the railway.

At the peak of the advertising campaign's success, Peter Parker

used Jimmy Savile to help launch a new rail card for wheelchair users.

Despite the initial doubts, the two men had established a good

working relationship, even when things didn't go to plan.

Today, this train couldn't take the strain.

I think we're in.

What do you do when a larger-than-usual wheelchair

won't go through the standard sliding door?

Take out another seat and try again.

We will learn from this, things will go wrong a bit,

we will learn from that, and I see us building from this.

In the end, Peter Parker was so pleased with what Jimmy Savile

had done that he gave him a gold pass.

It meant he could travel anywhere first-class all over the system.

Let the train take you on your business trips, because...

# This is the age... #

Of the train.

The fact that we remember the advertisements, those around

at the time remember them clearly, suggest they were powerful.

How about this then?

London in 58 minutes,

London to Derby in 1 hour, 57 minutes.

London to Sheffield, 2 hours, 29 minutes.

That is how late some of the trains are.

We had that slogan at the time, "this is the age of the train",

and we used to get all of the time ribbed, 40 years old,

50 years old, the age of the train being this decrepit thing.

But don't take my word for it,

let my good friend here tell you for himself.

The InterCity 125 was a big hit with passengers,

but they still weren't sure about one thing - the food.

I wouldn't have caught this train, except I had

the presence of mind to eat a British Rail pie,

and I soon caught up with it!

Can you get onto them and say that those must go in, even if

it is at the expense of three, four and five.

Prue Leith, who made her name in the restaurant business,

was recruited by Peter Parker on to the British Rail board.

He asked her to tackle a long-standing problem,

the much maligned on-board catering.

"Dear Sir, all the way up to Glasgow,

"all they had in the buffet was a plastic knife

"and one individual beetroot pie.

"I couldn't even cut it. Yours, Arthur Fingus."

That is ridiculous, nonsense.

Here is the knife, and here is the pie. Look at that.

Everybody talks about curly sandwiches, and he said to me

when he hired me, he said, "If nothing else,

"get the curl out of the sandwiches."

In fact, it was never curly sandwiches that were the problem, it was soggy sandwiches.

I remember arguing with the caterers at the time, saying,

"Why can't we have more interesting sandwiches?"

They said, "This is Britain's most popular sandwich."

I would say, "Of course it is, it is the only sandwich."

They said, "No, no, it is the most popular sandwich,

"because it has Britain's most popular bread,

"which is Mother's Pride, Britain's most popular cheese,

"Kraft Cheese Slice, and Britain's most popular butter, Anchor Butter."

Some passengers liked the food.

When people were moaning about British Rail sandwiches,

I can remember when they would make the sandwiches fresh,

and a fresh cheese and tomato sandwich,

the cheese was not the best,

but it was adequate, fresh tomato was all right.

I thought the food on British Rail was actually better than it is now.

I think the lovely thing about travelling on a train,

frankly even a train that went much slower than the 125,

was you would be able to go to the dining car,

sit down and have a very good meal indeed, wonderful waiters

who enjoyed it, and it was all very pally, nice and luxurious.

On the railways, catering was like industrial relations.

Trying to keep everyone happy was a problem without easy answers.

LAUGHTER

I never thought we got British Rail food right on the trains,

I think we did much better on the stations.

From then on, I was always credited with uncurling

the British Rail sandwich, but I didn't really do that.

But we did get decent boxes for them.

I would just like to remember some words of St Francis of Assisi,

which I think are particularly apt at the moment,

where there is discord, may we bring harmony.

At Westminster, the times were changing.

Peter Marsh was asked for an ad man's assessment

of the new prime minister.

He gave a cautious verdict.

We know there is a degree of male chauvinism in this country,

a bit of misogynism or whatever that is,

so I think one would have to look very carefully and say,

how do you present her as a person so she does not put off too many men?

When Margaret Thatcher came on the scene, I was delighted,

but she had a deep loathing of British Rail.

(You can knock on the door.)

KNOCKS

HE GASPS

Hello, welcome. Come in.

I think successive chairmen of British Rail would have had

trouble with that administration.

Come on, Jimmy, nice to see you. Wonderful. Right.

They were very anti-railway,

I don't think if Peter Parker had made the Earth flat, it wouldn't

have been a success as far as the Thatcher administration is concerned.

I think it was a bit to do with Denis,

who was a wonderful man, that nationalisation to them

was death of private enterprise, industry and drive.

To her critics,

the new prime minister seemed more comfortable in a tank than a train.

For Peter Parker, she was a problem. He had been appointed by Labour.

Worse still,

Mrs Thatcher appeared to dislike travelling on the railways.

According to reports, the Prime Minister has a particular

dislike of British Rail. It is known she goes by car.

She goes by air.

She also, perhaps appropriately, is not adverse to the odd trip by Chieftain tank.

But never ever, we are told, does she travel by train.

I suspect she has another form of public transport,

as she flits across the sky at night on her personal broomstick.

LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE

-OK, well done.

-Public transport was not high on the government's agenda.

The Transport Minister, Norman Fowler,

was the man in the middle between British Rail and Mrs Thatcher.

I think she was a sceptic as far as the railways were concerned,

it was not top of her list of pops.

Mrs Thatcher probably thought trains were bad news, I'm not sure

why I say that, but she thought lots of things were bad news.

We had one dramatically awful lunch in opposition when I shadowed

the Transport Minister, we went to lunch with Peter and his board.

Someone made the great mistake of saying to Margaret Thatcher

over lunch, "there is only one thing wrong

"with British Rail, Mrs Thatcher,

"and that is we don't have enough money."

This absolutely sent her vertical, and she lectured them

solidly about public spending, I think for the next 30 minutes.

Peter Parker and Mrs Thatcher would never be soulmates,

but he needed to make sure they could work together.

Peter was one of these people who do live on the pinko,

left-o side-o of the party-o.

He was the sort of man that you could disagree with his politics,

you could not disagree with his application of his philosophy of life.

Parker persuaded Mrs Thatcher to help name

a train in memory of her friend and colleague Airey Neave,

but that didn't necessarily mean she was a fan of the railways.

To name a locomotive after Airey Neave is a wonderful idea.

She wasn't a great lover of the railways, but as in all these things,

she was fairly pragmatic when it came to policy-making,

so she came from a very sceptic side of the argument about railways,

but it didn't nevertheless have this dramatic effect on policy.

Most of Britain might be falling in love with the 125s,

but the prime minister told British Rail she disliked the open-plan carriages.

Generally speaking, this was very popular with the public,

particularly women, because they felt safer in an open environment

than enclosed compartments, but Mrs Thatcher thought the loss of privacy

was important, which was one of the reasons she didn't travel by train.

Under the Thatcher regime,

Peter Parker was riding on the success of the 125.

What is more, its long-delayed rival, the APT tilting train,

was finally about to enter service.

He had colleagues who thought high-speed trains

were costing too much money.

The point seems to be that investment is in fancy things like APTs

and high-speed trains, and all the gloss is not initiated

by the sheer inevitability of rotting assets.

And ageing fleets.

In all the nationalised industries,

there were fears of possible privatisation.

Parker still couldn't be sure about the future of the railways.

It was the early 1980s, a boom time, at least for some.

There was a new kind of commuter.

People who could afford to travel more than 100 miles to work,

that was good news for the InterCity 125.

There was no question that the 125

also produced an out-of-town commuter.

If you can get from A to B that much faster, it reduces commuting time,

and people might have to live in fairly remote rural areas.

A price for a season ticket is worth it, provided the trains are fast.

People in Peterborough, Grantham, Bristol, Birmingham,

they came into London, commuting.

It was easy to do. It still is.

30 years ago, the BBC filmed advertising executive

Barry Smith, who commuted every day from Bristol to London.

On the new 125s, the journey took around an hour and a half.

Now then, gentlemen. What can I get for you this morning?

-The usual please, Brian.

-Poached eggs, well-done bacon.

-Crispy bacon.

-Crispy bacon, very good, sir.

-The same for me, Brian.

-Very good, sir.

Now, Barry is back with two friends who used to travel with him.

It was a serious bonus, because that cut the journey time in those days

by half an hour, which was a considerable time.

Breakfast is always pleasing.

We've got some mushrooms, potatoes, tomatoes coming round for you now.

The British Rail breakfast was absolutely wonderful,

the staff were wonderful serving it, and we got to know them all,

we could have kippers, which were my favourite breakfast most of the time,

bacon and egg, it was well cooked, and it was absolutely excellent.

In Mrs Thatcher's Britain, there was money to be made.

Some passengers were living the dream.

A world you can work in.

Even at speeds like this, you're not tied to your seat.

For Barry and his friends, business was good.

They travelled first class at a cost of more than £5,000 per year.

If you're going to embark on doing this kind of journey,

ridiculous journey as some people used to say,

you might as well make the most of it.

On InterCity 125, you are in a world where you are looked after

in real comfort while someone else drives.

You arrive fresh, feeling businesslike,

all of which proves that for anyone going places in today's

business world, this is the age of the train.

The earliest I can make it is seven o'clock tonight.

I don't get back from London until half past six.

I think at the time, the phone, from memory, was the brick,

unlike the modern day BlackBerry.

You wouldn't spend a great deal of time on the phone

because it wouldn't last that long.

To me, being able to live in the West Country

and enjoy the slow lifestyle of Bristol and surrounding area,

and then going to London every day, was the ideal opportunity.

In the 1980s, about 80 Bristol-to-London commuters

went on the train every day.

I think you got little bunches of people that gathered

together like we did, and there wasn't just the three of us,

there were other people came and went and joined our party,

it was a party on the way home quite a lot.

Fridays, we would probably bring a bottle of champagne along

and have Buck's Fizz.

It is Friday today, by the way, and I see no Buck's Fizz!

For the first time since the 1940s,

a feeling of confidence was back on the railways.

To celebrate the 125, British Rail even commissioned an overture.

CLASSICAL MUSIC PLAYS

A special film was made and released as a support feature in cinemas.

The InterCity 125 had made it onto the big screen.

I think the great thing about the 125 is it was just right

for this country.

We have distances of up to 200 miles, basically, except for Glasgow

and Edinburgh, which are 300 or 400 miles.

But for most cities of this country, 125 mph is not bad.

That still does work very well.

Peter Snow has got a model railway track in his attic.

He says it's for his family.

He has got a special new train for his collection.

I am very excited that we have managed to find on the internet

a 125 set, an InterCity 125.

They are actually quite rare to get hold of.

We have here, let's try it, the 125.

Let's hope it works.

InterCity 125, from 1976, the triumph of British Rail. Will it run?

Yes, it is running, hooray!

There she is.

Looking as lovely as she looked all those 30-odd years ago. Look at that.

It was a way of getting very quickly from London to the North,

and... Hello, what's happened here?

We have a crisis, I see what's happened.

It has for some reason come right off the line. Hang on.

A derailment has occurred!

Fortunately, it's only a model railway, so it doesn't really matter too much.

The 125, I was in one the other day,

that guy took me into the guard's van,

and I sat there watching, the needle was at 120, 125, 127 occasionally.

I gather it cuts off above 127. We were flashing along.

About 10 years ago, I put it all together.

This is the loft of our house. It is all rather lovely. It keeps me going.

All the grandchildren love it, and even some of the children,

the 30-year-olds quite enjoy coming up here.

To be honest, I did it mainly for myself.

I mustn't pretend I was doing it entirely for the grandchildren.

In the early 1980s, British Rail had never been so popular.

One set of engineers had been watching the 125's success

with interest, the team working

on the rival Advanced Passenger Train project.

They had a frustrating wait because of technical problems,

but now they were ready to go.

'At Central Station in Glasgow this morning, before 7.'

At long last, the space-age APT tilting train was

going into service, after 13 years' work and a cost of £37 million.

Now the InterCity 125 had a challenger,

and the newcomer could run at 155 mph.

The coffee stays level, but the coaches tilt

inwards on the curves by as much as nine degrees, allowing the APT

to take bends up to 40% faster than conventional trains.

There is no discomfort at all, if anything, it improves the ride.

I have been very impressed, I think it has been a very good ride,

very comfortable, altogether,

I think this is one of Britain's great technological achievements.

It was too revolutionary for its own good.

The lightweight construction was right,

but then it started to get a bit too clever.

The tilting train's third run from Glasgow was a very public outing.

It was a trip packed with journalists and cameramen.

Do you think you are going to make it to London today?

-Of course we are.

-'The guards seemed to be confident, anyway.

'We slid out of Glasgow on time at 7.

'After only 8 minutes, the lights flickered and dimmed,

'and APT coasted to a shameful halt.'

If it weren't so serious, it would be funny.

They took a whole party of journalists

and trainspotters up to Glasgow and put us on this new train,

and of course, they got absolutely terrible press.

'The train got through the Borders,

'the scene of her last breakdown, but there was more trouble at Preston.

'The changeover guard didn't seem to be at all familiar

'with the expensive new technology.'

How does this work?

Extraordinarily difficult, and whenever there was a problem,

everybody, media-wise, leapt on the bandwagon.

'At Crewe, the quintessential railway town, APT decided enough was enough.'

It is now 11:15, the time we were due to arrive at Euston.

Here we are at Crewe, 158 miles from London.

We have been told because of adverse weather conditions down the line,

the Advanced Passenger Train will be terminating its journey right here.

Its real problem, I think, was that the tilt was too good.

I remember feeling I was having my breakfast in the gutter,

that the train seemed to tilt an extraordinary degree,

it was like being in an aeroplane coming into land

on a very tight incline.

Certainly, a lot of people felt queasy.

I didn't, as it happens, I travelled OK,

but a lot of people did feel queasy,

and it was an unusual sight to see journalists turning down a free meal.

One particular journalist was very poorly coming back, but it didn't

have a lot to do with the train, it had a lot to do with the fact

that he stayed in the bars

of the St Enoch Hotel till about 4 in the morning.

The canard was on the press trip from London to Glasgow, all the press

had been boozed up the night before, and that is what made them sick.

I hadn't.

I felt fine until it got daylight,

and then started to feel queasy, and a lot of us did.

For the once-glamorous tilting train, it was a fatal blow.

The train was taken out of service

and became an attraction at a heritage centre in Crewe.

For the foreseeable future,

the InterCity 125 was the only high-speed train in town.

The BR policy is you cannot ever possibly drop your guard.

You have to be always watching.

We were perhaps too anxious to get this feather in our cap.

In business, it is always clever if you can be second,

that's the first thing.

It is always better to be in the second wave hitting the beach.

Almost immediately, Peter Parker was at the centre of another crisis.

In 1982, the railways were shut down during a strike

about flexible work rotas.

This battle had been coming for a long time.

Mrs Thatcher was watching, and Parker was determined to win,

despite the cost.

The Wednesday board will be reviewing the following week,

but the damage is formidable now, on the commercial and financial side.

We knew that in order to make progress with these long-term plans

for the railway,

it needed substantial improvements in productivity.

That became a big hurdle.

I've already sent a letter to your office by hand.

Sir Peter, for God's sake, can you look me in the eye?

That's the truth, I can look you in the eye and say

with honesty, you wasn't there, your man brought it.

The trade unions were very powerful,

they had six or seven years of a Labour government

during the '70s and they had acquired an awful lot

of power through the beer and sandwiches route at Number 10.

We have never, by the way, had 7 to 9 rosters put before us

until the 22nd January.

Why'd you think that was?

The strike was about so-called flexible rostering,

the number of hours a train driver could work during a shift.

What British Rail wanted to do was to have more flexibility

in the length of time a driver would work, within the maximum amount.

Obviously,

the unions wanted more money for that, they were against it.

To be blathering on in this detail,

when all of this could be tidied up by an independent tribunal.

It was the worst possible situation you could get,

because it ended up with both sides arguing with each other

and almost slagging each other off in a television studio live.

The last thing you should ever do is get involved in negotiating

industrial problems live on television.

But Parker got his victory. After two weeks, the strike was abandoned.

Mrs Thatcher's government was impressed.

The privatisation of the whole of British Rail,

which simply wasn't on the agenda at the moment.

What we wanted to do was run the railways as efficiently

and effectively as we possibly could.

Far 'away across Europe, another train and another girl.

'Or rather, a boy and a girl.'

With the strike behind him, Peter Parker could return

to his dreams of a new high-speed rail link to Europe.

He had the backing of Norman Fowler and indeed, support

for a Channel Tunnel had already come from an unexpected source.

I wasn't that confident when I went to see

Margaret at number 10 about this project, to be perfectly frank.

I didn't think I would have her on my side, but I then explained

to her that what I was proposing was not that the Treasury should

put billions of pounds into it, but it should be privately financed.

Basically, her reply to that was, if it is privately financed,

I don't see anything against it.

There had been a stroke of luck.

A summit meeting between Mrs Thatcher, a Eurosceptic,

and the new French president, Francois Mitterrand, a lifelong socialist.

HE SPEAKS FRENCH

They found it hard to agree on anything.

I would like to say that we have had excellent talks

between the president and myself.

The one thing we could agree upon,

because everyone of these meetings needs a communique at the end.

The only thing we could agree on was the Channel Tunnel.

Actually, Margaret was rather grateful for the Channel Tunnel at that point.

It's a project that bears the Prime Minister's personal imprint.

A massive, privately funded venture, high-tech yet driven

by an entrepreneurial vision that might have impressed Brunel.

it is very unfashionable to say,

but the Thatcher years were really good for the railways.

At the French end of the new inter-capital rail link,

President Mitterrand unveiled a plaque in Paris's Gare du Nord,

and set out aboard the new high-speed Eurostar passenger train.

Under Margaret Thatcher, we saw the railways advance more, British Rail

advance more than it had done in the previous two decades.

Margaret Thatcher was an astonishing woman, because she started the Channel Tunnel.

It wasn't a government operation, it was all privately run,

privately financed, but she was the one who got it going.

Good luck to her for doing that.

Trains aren't thought to be all that popular with the Prime Minister.

Perhaps surprisingly,

Mrs Thatcher helped establish a new era of high-speed trains.

British Rail was only privatised after she left Downing Street,

when John Major was prime minister.

Here we are, caught so much in the short term and the chaos,

ragged railway.

Peter Parker left British Rail in 1983,

after seeing off calls for drastic cuts.

British Rail was back on track.

He died in 2002.

WHISTLE BLOWS

But his legacy lives on.

This is still the age of the high-speed train.

A new fast service is planned between London and Birmingham.

40 years on, the 125 isn't just history,

it is still a mainstay of the railways.

It will be for many years to come.

I like to know that it is coming from way down the track.

The lights, the thing gradually turns into a form, and so on.

Then I look to see how clean it is.

Because that's mine, and they can't escape the fact that I own it.

We owe it to the 125 for rescuing British Rail from near destruction,

really, near collapse in the early '70s and mid-'70s.

I think if it hadn't been for the 125, we would be in terrible trouble.

I think it is a train whose time is still coming.

It was originally a stopgap, with perhaps a 30-year life, but it has

been re-engineered with new engines, the coaches have been modernised.

The scale of the improvement in rail passengers over

the last 10-15 years has been extraordinary, and I think

a lot of that is due to the 125 catching the public imagination.

More than 80 of the trains are still in service.

Rail engineers now say the InterCity 125 is capable of running

until 2035.

If I'd been asked to guess how long it'd last,

I would never have guessed as long as it has.

I'm thrilled to bits it is still out there, holding its own,

and it'll see a few more deliveries and a few more owners, I expect.

I only regret not having one,

I've got most of everything else I did, but I don't have a train.

Getting hold of a train is a bit tricky!

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