The Nation's Railway: The Golden Age of British Rail Timeshift

For most of us, the glory days of the railways

tend to mean one thing -

the distant age of steam...

..the record-breaking express trains,

the silver service,

the glamour,

the romance.

We can get misty-eyed when we think of steam.

But those nostalgic puffs of smoke

have clouded out some less romantic realities.

Very, very grimy.

Looked as if they were going to break down any second. And sometimes did.

You used to sit on the seats and you'd sink into the seats.

As you get older, you think,

"Well, maybe that wasn't quite so comfortable."

If you put your head out of the window,

you would get a piece of grit in your eye,

which had come out of the top of the chimney of the locomotive.

And had come whizzing down the side of the train.

Keep your eye still.

There it is.

Yet there was another golden age.

One less well-known.

When the nationalised British Railways

replaced steam with modern engines,

a new railway was born.

It perked things up for passengers.

It not only provided more comfortable, faster travel.

But it also said something about the railways.

It said - this is a modern way to travel.

It made ground-breaking technological advances.

We were doing things on a daily basis that had never been done before.

Anywhere in the world.

And British Rail became a world leader.

Outside of Japan, it was the most frequent and reliable

high-speed line in the Western world.

Shortly after nationalisation, a film unit had been established

to capture the optimism of the nation's railway.

With the departure of steam, its film-makers came into their own,

promoting the new age of the train.

They made films which were seen by a wide public

and enjoyed by a wide public.

And were of a high-quality and were respected and well-regarded

in the film world.

These films document how British Rail

left Victorian engineering behind

to give us our first generation of high-speed trains.

They even show us how to drive one.

I'm experiencing wheel slip.

I'm correcting it.

I'm back to normal running.

Everything's OK.

The modern railway had a lot to be optimistic about.

The glory days of steam were over.

And the golden age of British Rail had just begun.

The mid '60s marked a turning point

for Britain's nationalised railway.

After years of preparation and planning,

British Rail was launching a new service

between London and Manchester.

For the first time, a clean, fast train with all the mod-cons,

would depart at the same times every hour.

They branded this new fast service, InterCity.

It was Birmingham for breakfast. Liverpool by 10.

A quick run down from Manchester and now we're off again.

There's a festival in Edinburgh.

A conference in Crewe.

A matinee at Stratford...

InterCity promised high-speed trains at regular intervals.

The first service between London and Manchester

slashed an entire hour off journey times.

There's an important match this afternoon, 100 miles from here.

So take a seat on the midday train

and be in time for the start of the game.

Good morning.

The hub for all these innovations

was the modern, sleek, new Euston Station,

which was completed in 1968.

When I first visited the new Euston,

I was so pleased to see a brilliant

train describer.

Split up very clearly with...lit panels.

Arrivals, departures. You knew exactly where to go.

And then beyond the board were the platforms.

Numbered, logically.

No problem with dark corridors.

You could go exactly to the train you wanted to go to.

I wonder if there's a little man in there, turning it over.

It's a big space.

Lovely clean space.

Bags of room to, to take pictures of people.

Actually, all the way round the perimeter,

is a walkway looking down on Euston. And there's some fantastic...

Particularly when there's a big crowd.

It's very impressive.

The InterCity service would be key to British Rail's future success.

The newly-electrified West Coast main line

would symbolise how railways of the future would operate.

Out of the melting pot came a brand-new electric railway.

Using a 25,000-volt supply, straight from the National Grid.

Where traffic was heavy, the system promised great economies.

And it had great possibilities for technical development.

The London to Midlands electrification scheme

was almost a totemic project for British Rail.

And was seen by management

as their means of dragging...the railway into the 20th...

or 21st century, even.

It did result in a massive increase in passenger numbers.

Passengers in Preston, Crewe, Stafford

doubled in an eight-month period.

Still a little further than the pioneering stage

in the early '50s,

the decision to install it was as far-sighted

as some of the great decisions of 100 years before.

And it took it until 1974 for full plans to be realised.

And link up Glasgow to the rest of the West Coast mainline.

Resulting in one of the best high-speed railways

in the Western world.

The new electrified line carried state-of-the-art trains

propelling passengers at unprecedented speed.

And with many of the trappings of a first-class service,

but at an accessible price.

It did 100mph.

I remember flashing past the M1 at Watford Gap,

with all the other traffic slowly moving along.

Cars really couldn't do much more than 70mph in those days.

With this bright blue electric locomotive hauling us in front

and getting to Manchester in not much more than two hours.

It's not a lot less than that today, actually.

The new, fast, streamlined InterCity services

were a far cry from the worn-out system Britain had inherited

after the Second World War.

And the railways. What have we got there?

Operated for more than 100 years without a break.

Feeding a war machine for six weary years

without adequate renewals and repairs

that left them as tired as the rest of us.

A wonderful but complicated heritage

that could do with a bit of sorting out.

The railways were in a desperate state.

They had been heavily used in the war

and required a large amount of investment.

It was felt that only the state

would be able to carry that out.

In 1947, by Act of Parliament,

Britain set up the British Transport Commission.

Its task - to make all transport work as one.

The Transport Act was revolutionary.

The existing railway companies would be nationalised.

This new venture was called British Railways.

Like many nationalised industries,

it established a film unit - British Transport Films.

And one of the thoughts they had was that,

if they've got all this work to do,

how are we going to communicate it?

One of the people that was a shining light in all that was Edgar Anstey.

Now, he worked with John Grierson in the '20s and the '30s.

So he was a very, very experienced director/producer.

Nothing left BTF without his approval.

Broadly speaking, they were focused on three main patterns of activity.

The first was to promote the use of the transport network initially

and latterly just...just, um, British Rail

to its customers, the general public.

And hence why so many travelogues were made

about various locations around the UK.

My doctor once said to me,

"There's nothing wrong with you that

"a blow on the coast won't cure."

And I was never quite certain whether he meant

the great open spaces of Blackpool Sands,

where a man can be close to nature.

Or the challenge to adventure of the great trackless wastes of Southport.

Secondly, the use of film for internal communication purposes.

In other words, to update staff on new technology,

changes in working practices, training issues, etc.

You need a good sense of speed and timing to work this efficiently.

Modernisation in railways means looking at all the old jobs

and seeing where modern engineering and science can be brought in,

to give them a new look.

And thirdly, to communicate both to the general public

and to the staff, a general sense

of the momentum of investment in and development of British Railways,

particularly on the technological side.

British Transport Films' initial task

was to explain to the public how a disparate and disconnected railway

could be integrated into a unified transport network.

The film was simply called Transport.

It explained that, prior to the war,

Britain's railways were operated by four major companies.

The Southern, London and North Eastern,

Great Western and London, Midland and Scottish Railways.

'And big and powerful, the railways have moved on into other fields.

'Docks, steamships, hotels.'

British Rail inherited an awful lot.

There were hotels.

There were ships that ran across to Ireland and across to France.

They inherited several hundred thousand horses, for example.

So it was a huge enterprise.

Schemes are made for people,

not people for schemes.

We like things that way round.

And that way takes time.

The film has a very sober series of points to put forward to the public.

And it's made in a classical,

almost a wartime documentary film style.

But it also got a sort of softer edge to it as well.

Particularly in the use of various voice-overs,

which were often quite quirky.

You wouldn't think the little boards, like this,

could upset all that, would you?

And thereby hangs another

part of the tale.

And that sort of slight edge of eccentricity

is often to be found later in British Transport films.

The films were made to a very high technical standard.

Some even achieved a cinema release,

although many more were likely to be seen at the village hall,

rather than the picture house.

Stemming right back to the 1930s, British documentary

always made great use of what we call the nontheatrical market.

This was where women's institutes, engineering clubs, user groups

had their own screenings as part of regular meetings.

And we had a fleet of vans with projectors and projectionists.

Any organisation could write to us.

I mean, if they wanted a film shown,

if they didn't have their own projector, we would supply one.

When I was at school, they had access

to the British Transport Library, I suppose.

I mean, there was everything, from the railways, changing points.

There was one on the motorway, on the M1, and stuff like that.

So it was quite varied for those films.

Produced to promote the railway,

it's not surprising these films tended to have

a rose-tinted view of train travel.

What they show us now is that in the 1950s,

British Railways was still somewhat stuck in the past.

As the rest of Europe electrified their main lines,

we were still investing in steam locomotion.

Well, basically, the 1950s railway

was very similar to the 1890s railway.

The engines had got bigger, the trains had got bigger.

They went a bit faster.

But it was, basically, still operated in exactly the same manner.

Today, steam billows with nostalgic value.

But for commuters then, the experience was very different.

There always seemed to be a layer of dust on everything -

on the seats, on the windows, that you could barely see out of.

These, er...very noisy and very dirty steam engines,

that seemed to be attached to the front of them.

I think I was sort of vaguely repelled by them.

You used to sit on the seats

and you'd sink into the seats.

They were very bouncy seats.

Urm...which, as children,

that was great for us.

But, as you get older, you think,

"Well, maybe that wasn't quite so comfortable."

You know, you could hang out the window,

which you're not allowed to do any more.

If you put your head out of the window,

the chances were that you would get a piece of grit in your eye,

which had come out of the top of the chimney of the locomotive

and had come whizzing down the side of the train.

And those bits of grit were very difficult to get out.

Some stations even had nurses on hand to help.

-Four minutes now.

-You were out on the platforms looking at trains?

-Yeah, yeah.

-All right, now just

keep your eye still.

There it is.

Cor.

-All right, now?

-All right. Thank you, sister.

But it wasn't just the dirt and the noise

that caused irritation to passengers.

It was unwise to sit in the carriage next to the engine.

Because if you were going on a long trip,

the locomotive didn't want to stop at a water tower to get water.

So a device had been invented, known as a water trough.

Now, if the driver had instructed the firemen to drop the scoop

underneath the tender,

as the train went along, the water rushed into the scoop,

up into a dome on the tender.

But, as soon as the tender was full,

all the water came spurting out

and in through the open windows of the carriages,

if anybody had been foolish enough to leave them open.

In 1955, engineers were commissioned to design

a new generation of locomotives

with engines powered by diesel and electric.

The age of steam was coming to an end.

One of the first of the new diesel trains

would be for first-class passengers only.

A luxury service designed to bring

glamour back to the tracks.

It was called the Blue Pullman.

The Blue Pullmans were very striking

because they were a totally different shape

from anything that had gone before.

It was so modern.

With newly designed cutlery, glass, porcelain.

It was very luxurious.

The driver was told to wear a white coat

and a white hat, rather like a Wall's ice cream man.

The Blue Pullman was aimed at business travellers.

Revenue from premium ticket prices

would go to fund improvements elsewhere in the rail system.

As far as the Blue Pullman's concerned,

I was never rich enough to travel on it.

It used to overtake my bus as I was coming home from school.

And most nights I would tend to see it quite a lot,

actually, the Blue Pullman.

You got the impression, looking through the windows,

that everybody was dining on tablecloths.

All looking very comfortable. It looked extremely swish.

People let out a whoop in the train

when it was discovered that we were doing between 85 and 90mph.

It was the kind of thing you expected, certainly at the time,

of an airline.

And that was the idea of it, was to provide an alternative

to the growing domestic air market

and also to people who wanted to drive.

For most people, everyday rail travel was a world apart

from the Blue Pullman experience.

In 1961, a film was produced which more accurately depicted

the state of the network.

Called Terminus, it shows a day in the life

of London's busiest station - Waterloo.

It was directed by John Schlesinger.

And he would go on to become a well-known...

feature film-maker, associated with the British new wave.

And that sort of comes across in the film.

-Keep your money locked away.

-I will, yes.

-You know what can happen.

Bye-bye.

THEY EXCHANGE FAREWELLS

Terminus was a high watermark for British Transport Films.

It won a lot of awards from...

people who had never really particularly admired

British Transport Films before.

Because British Transport Films, although very well-regarded,

they were certainly never particularly fashionable.

And Terminus feels like a much more contemporary

statement about the 1960s.

THEY EXCHANGE FAREWELLS

Terminus was unique.

Not only because it captured the day-to-day running

of a big London station

but also the changing face of British society.

There are various little shots of a train of immigrants arriving.

This was when the first wave of immigration started coming in

in the late '50s.

And showing all these people coming in,

all dressed up smart to look smart for this new country and, oh, dear,

they probably got disillusioned fairly quickly.

# Jamaica

# Jamaica mine

# Jamaica mine. #

For many, rail travel was not a pleasant experience.

With dilapidated stations and ageing trains,

passenger numbers were down.

Car ownership was also on the increase.

The railways were under serious threat.

Drastic change was needed

and fast.

The man brought in to do the job

was former ICI director Dr Richard Beeching.

In Reshaping British Railways,

Beeching addressed the nation with his landmark report

into the industry.

When Dr Beeching was going to present his report,

we did a film version of it.

And I was with him and the rest of the crew

in the railways board boardroom.

But what about all this modernisation?

Can't we have the branch lines as well?

Can't you attract enough traffic to them to make them pay?

But, unfortunately, we can't.

Because the traffic is not there and so many people have motorcars.

The good doctor, Dr Beeching, had said to the railway men...

He said, "Find out what you do best and concentrate on that."

Which effectively meant...

commuter traffic.

Long-distance express passenger services.

And heavy full-load freight trains.

But don't try and do everything,

which the railway had been trying to do before.

Fundamental to Beeching's plan was the introduction of fast,

regular routes between the major cities.

He described these services as InterCity, and the name stuck.

So, on the passenger side, the proposal is to go for development

and improvement in the InterCity services.

It is believed that they will come to be recognised

as easily the best form of transport

to be used between our great centres of population and business.

So, then, they... The director said,

"That's it, we're done, we're finished."

And he says, "Oh, well, back to hostilities."

And walked off.

Ah, I think he knew what was going to happen.

The result was a reduction in the railway network by about a third,

the closure of over 2,000 stations

and the loss of tens of thousands of jobs.

All this brought instant notoriety to Beeching.

Seen as the axe man of the rail system,

he became a target for satirists.

# Oh, Mr Porter, what shall I do?

# They've taken away your station, though your uniform is new

# I'll have to get to London the best way I can see

# Oh, Mr Porter, what a tired chap...

# I'll be. # APPLAUSE

But nothing could stop the ongoing modernisation

of the railway network.

Despite even Beeching's opposition,

the electrification of the West Coast Mainline continued.

What does this electrification scheme really mean to Britain?

Obviously, it's going to be a showpiece.

Not only, I hope, of the railways.

But also a showpiece of what we mean

when we talk about the modernisation of Britain.

This is modernisation.

A modern railway required modern stations.

And the jewel in the crown of the modernisation programme,

would be Euston.

The average visitor turning up at Euston Station

would have been presented with a pretty amazing sight.

Passing through the Doric arch,

you'd proceed into the great hall, which was something akin to

having the Parthenon as the booking hall for your railway station.

The problem being it wasn't fit for purpose to facilitate

a modern high-speed rail service.

It was difficult to know where a train was coming into,

or where it was leaving from because it was a series of passageways

that were poorly lit and the signage could have been better.

The Doric arch at Euston had a fairly dramatic fall from grace.

It was demolished and much of the stonework, actually,

ended up in a canal in East London.

The poor state of Euston Station wasn't the Railway's only problem.

The network was made up of several regions,

each with its own colour schemes and branding.

It was confusing for passengers

and caused difficulties when it came to marketing British Railways.

Various experimental liveries, some of them bizarre.

And some which were nicknamed plum and spilt milk.

You typically have a nine or ten-coach train.

It would be a variety of colours.

Some red and cream, some may be brown and cream cos, at one stage,

the railways were allowed to go back to their pre-nationalisation colours.

And the Western region had done that with some alacrity.

To remain competitive,

British Railways needed to ditch its make-do-and-mend image

and present a modern, easy-to-understand identity.

It hired the Design Research Unit,

famed for their work on the Festival of Britain,

to co-ordinate a new corporate look.

This was really British Rail's attempt to present a unified face

to the travelling public

and something that would allow itself to be marketed

much in the same way as you would soap flakes or...or fizzy drinks.

So this was one of the largest, if not THE largest,

corporate branding exercises that had been seen in Britain.

They produced a manual which covered everything.

From the style of a letterhead, to the uniforms of the staff.

The new uniform did create a bit of a stir

and was widely slated in the press as being too German.

They also designed its brand logo - the double arrow.

British Rail was in the forefront of modern design.

Its little logo that goes like this

and, very difficult to reproduce from your head, actually.

It's so clever.

That was remarkably successful way of saying,

"This is the railway, come onto it."

Alongside the work of the Design Research Unit,

new signage was commissioned from Margaret Calvert,

known for Britain's now iconic road signs.

In a sense, they were starting from scratch.

And they really believed in -

let this be the best for Britain.

And in modernism.

Margaret's design for the road system

produced the Transport Alphabet.

The rail system would require a different approach.

I felt that transposed designs specifically to be read at speed.

Whereas I felt you could be using a more compact typeface...

in a pedestrian situation.

She came up with a more pared-down font.

We needed it to look low-key,

so that it stood out from the commercial signs,

which were far more flamboyant.

And so, we wanted that difference.

Because we felt people would then believe in it.

So it's quite ordinary.

And I quite like the word ordinary

cos people think nobody designed it cos it's ordinary.

In 1965, British Railways unveiled its new identity.

Its signs, its uniform and its logo were all on show.

It also shortened its name, from British Railways to British Rail.

Three years later, in 1968, the new Euston Station was opened.

To some extent, Euston and Birmingham New Street

were an answer to airline terminals.

You know, I think that's the reason why Euston had virtually no seating

for any passengers, because they were seen as a kind of throughput.

Just to go through in the same way that you go through

an airline terminal.

Euston was only one of many stations that were completely revamped.

Some were designed to encourage the motorist back onto the railway.

At Pudsey, on the eastern region,

they have evolved the idea of a car park with a station attached.

It's situated at the converging point of several main roads

and a ring road.

And is in fact a station for motorists.

Others aimed to make InterCity travel more pleasurable

and become places to dine and have a drink.

Not many people think of stations as places to relax in.

Now some in Britain begin to qualify

as meeting and resting places

like those of a few continental cities.

The tourist restaurant Birmingham New Street,

from its carpeted floor to its ceiling alcoves over each table,

is modern in design and layout.

The result is an imaginative change from a forbidding tradition.

The tables have been arranged alongside a series of passageways

from which the waitresses serve and along which they may be summoned

by a coloured light system.

A change from cricked necks and tortured faces.

There was a burgeoning social movement of increased freedom,

social mobility.

Society was opening up and, I suppose, British Rail

really just tuned into that and it provided the necessary

social mobility in terms of a high-speed electrified railway

for kids, essentially, to travel between Manchester, Liverpool, London

and to actually get involved in that exploring culture

that was happening at the time.

The new British Rail would be clean, fast and easy to use.

The smoke and soot of steam soon becoming a quaint novelty.

In 1968, Evening Star - the last steam locomotive

built by British Railways - made its final journey.

Two years later British Transport Films,

with a little help from rail enthusiast and poet John Betjeman,

were on hand to wave steam off.

Why are we all so excited by steam?

A boy's young passion An old man's dream

Steam, steam, beautiful steam

We won't be so sorry To part with the lorry

As now when we're parting with steam

Quick, out with the old vest pocket Kodak

On with your long focus lens.

Despite the nostalgia, many passengers were glad

to see the back of steam.

There had to be a last steam engine

and Evening Star was the last steam engine.

Now we could all move on and look forward

to what was coming in the future.

It was very much moving from the old system to modernity.

And modernity in those days was everything.

A lot less nostalgia.

The end of steam was dramatically captured in British Transport Films'

Plumb-Loco...

..which shows locomotives being cut up, melted down

and remade into wires.

Luckily, Evening Star escaped this fate

and now resides in the National Railway Museum at York.

British Rail had moved on.

Although it continued to lose money,

its passenger numbers were increasing.

And with even faster trains on its network, the future looked bright.

From the late '60s through into the '70s,

British Rail can certainly claim to have created

some of the best railways in Europe.

When the West Coast Main Line was fully electrified to Glasgow,

outside of Japan it was the most frequent and reliable high-speed line

in the Western world.

In reality, if the railways were going to compete

with road and air travel, not only did they need to be much faster,

they also needed to be at the forefront of technology.

For British Rail, the 1970s would be a decade characterised

by the development of two hi tech trains.

One would make British Rail more popular than ever.

The other would promise to revolutionise

the entire future of rail travel.

We started to hear about a train

that would tilt.

And this would enable it to go

on the West Coast Main Line

at far higher speeds.

As British Rail was competing against cars and planes,

it looked to those industries for inspiration and new ideas -

much to the surprise of dyed-in-the-wool railwaymen.

The APT or Advanced Passenger Train would be built by engineers

recruited from aviation and the motor industry.

I am an aeronautical engineer.

Well, I worked on Blue Steel, which was the deterrent...

for the Vulcan.

Like a cruise missile.

I was highly qualified

because I knew nothing at all about the subject.

British Transport Films captured in detail the development of the APT -

a train that could run at 155mph on existing track.

A train that could take curves up to 50% faster than present-day trains,

a requirement that called for new studies of wheel on rail behaviour.

A train that would always give passengers a comfortable ride,

especially when running through curves at high speed.

All design requirements for an Advanced Passenger Train.

So could one go faster on existing track?

And the answer was if you tilted the coach,

then you could get the passenger to feel

as if he was more or less on a straight track.

Just like a motorcyclist banking around the curve, really.

APT pulled British Rail's rail technology

out of the 1960s and pushed it into the 1980s in one fell swoop.

-VOICEOVER:

-Analysis, mathematics, electronics...

In order to build the APT, British Rail set up

a new experimental facility in Derby.

Soon, a new Advanced Projects laboratory

was taking shape at Derby.

Here, there would be some of the most powerful test rigs

and accurate measuring instruments

available to any railway in the world.

Derby, famed for its technical advances,

became the centre of rail research.

Derby Tech was a series of buildings with...

just oscilloscopes and computers

and they were all doing something new.

We were doing things on a daily basis

that had never been done before anywhere in the world.

Some of the work, just in my own particular field,

incredibly boring to a non-technical person,

was discovering how dirt works in hydraulic oil.

I mean, people think, "Is that really important?"

Actually, yes, it is.

Although the Advanced Passenger Train

captured the nation's imagination,

its development was taking longer than expected.

Having initially been overlooked, BR engineering now brought their own

high-speed offer to the table called the HST or High Speed Train.

The HST was conceived as a low risk

alternative to APT,

employing conventional technology

but with a maximum speed of 125mph.

The HST was developed by

the Chief Mechanical & Electrical Engineers Department.

They called themselves the real railway whereas we,

in the Advanced Projects Division, were seen as those upstarts

from the motor industry and the aviation industry.

To say there was not a lot of love lost between us

was a very true statement.

If they wanted some information from us, we were pretty loath to give it

and vice versa.

1972 saw the launch of the experimental APT

and the prototype HST trains.

This represented a high watermark for British Rail.

The HST quickly broke the record for the fastest diesel train

in the world.

In the earlier days,

the train had actually run to 143mph.

The High Speed Train and Advanced Passenger Train

were part of an age of great British engineering.

Britain was at the cutting edge and it was building the future.

The poster boy of this dynamism was a super sonic jet - Concorde.

The Advanced Passenger Train for many people was the Concorde

of the railways.

If you were into motorcars, you aspired to a Jaguar E-Type.

If you were into aircraft, you aspired to Concorde.

If you were into railways, it was the Advanced Passenger Train.

On one occasion, one of the production Concordes

was doing its flight trials from RAF Fairford,

which wasn't very far away.

And early one morning, one of the prototype took off,

turned round and flew over the top of us.

I wish I'd taken a photograph of that

because it was so symptomatic of what British technology

was doing at the time.

Not everyone was happy with the two prototype trains.

Soon after they were launched, both projects hit the buffers.

Built like an aeroplane and able to cruise at over 150mph,

the super train was shown off for the first time some five months ago.

Since then, it hasn't moved from the sidings at Derby.

ASLEF men have refused to drive it because their union says

British Rail won't agree to a higher pay for drivers.

We had put the driver seat in the middle of the cab.

ASLEF objected to this because they were insisting

on two drivers in every train.

So they blacked the train.

The HST also had a single driver seat and it too was boycotted.

It was more than just seats that were causing problems.

During the mid '70s, spiralling inflation led to a period

of nationwide industrial unrest that affected many industries.

The railways were no exception

and services suffered.

The drivers' union was trying to get better terms for its men

and they saw the High Speed Train, the Advanced Passenger Train

as suitable weapons to use in their argument.

So, no, "We're not going to take them in Passenger Service."

British Rail's reputation was badly damaged.

Public confidence in the railways was reaching an all-time low.

-This is bad though, innit?

-'Tis bad. I'll do their job any day.

How long are you going to wait for your train?

Oh, as soon as we can get one.

It wasn't just strikes that were denting British Rail's image.

Modernisation of the system wasn't as widespread

as the management had once hoped.

Depending on where you lived in Britain dictated how you viewed

the nation's railways.

If you were in the big cities, you tended to be able to take advantage

of a new, high-speed railway.

However, if you were living in one of the farther-flung parts

of the country, where investment hadn't really caught up,

you could be forgiven for thinking

the railways were still selling you short.

People didn't know what was wanted from the railway,

what they wanted from the railway.

Successive governments didn't seem to know what they wanted.

BR did not have a good reputation.

The expression lame duck was frequently used for that

and a lot of nationalised industries...

In 1976, British Rail appointed a new chairman - Peter Parker.

He was considered popular with railwaymen and the unions.

He also had a head for public relations.

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 them?

-Worth every penny.

THEY LAUGH

Parker needed to improve BR's tarnished image.

He turned to another Peter, advertising guru Peter Marsh,

for ideas for some BR PR.

Marsh gave Parker a British Rail style welcome.

They were put into a waiting room, told to wait.

The room was dirty, ashtrays hadn't been emptied.

And in the end, Peter Marsh came in and told them, well,

that he was very sorry about this and the state of the waiting room...

"But I just wanted to remind you of the conditions

"that many of your passengers have to travel in every day."

The waiting rooms were one thing but on the long list

of passenger complaints, the most infamous was British Rail catering.

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

even if it's at the expense of three, four and five.

Parker asked restaurateur Prue Leith to join the BR board to sort it out.

We talked about curly sandwiches,

British Rail sandwiches were never curly

because they were not left out in the open -

they were soggy, they were wrapped up in plastic wrap.

Plastic wrap was still quite new.

The first thing I really wanted to do, because I'm basically a cook,

is I wanted to make a decent sandwich.

And I remember everybody saying,

"But we sell more sandwiches than anybody else in the country"

and I said, "Well, I'm not surprised. That's all you sell,

"you only sell one sandwich.

"It's Mother's Pride bread, Kraft cheese slices and Anchor butter."

And they said, "Well, those are the most popular bread,

"the most popular cheese and the most popular butter,

"of course it's the best."

And I said, "Look, let's try and make other sandwiches

"and see if the public like them."

It took time but with better quality ingredients

and imaginative fillings, Prue Leith gave British Rail

sandwiches that would no longer be synonymous with poor service.

But I always resented the sandwich story because people always,

the press particularly, always talked of me as the woman

who changed British Rail sandwiches and I thought,

"Dammit all, I'm on the board of this company,

"it's an enormous company, I do more than fix the sandwiches."

But that was just hubris, I should be glad

that they remembered the sandwiches.

By 1975, industrial relations at BR were on a better footing.

Work had continued on the development of the two new trains.

Whilst the Advanced Passenger Train was still undergoing

rigorous testing, it was full steam ahead for the High Speed Train.

Working with the unions, the HST power car had been redesigned

by Kenneth Grange to accommodate two drivers.

It was rebranded the InterCity 125

and the train became an advertiser's dream.

It had a really strong brand image.

So the nose cone, which I think is one of the great industrial icons,

if you like, of the 1970s, the InterCity 125 nose cone.

British Transport Films produced a film that followed the journey

of the InterCity 125 from its prototype to Passenger Service.

With a specially composed musical score,

it was called Overture One-Two-Five.

The film-making is really underscoring and expressing

the type of corporate self image that British Rail

was maybe wanting to project.

It isn't this huge, lumbering empire, necessarily.

It's cutting edge, it's efficient, it's fast

but it's also really pleasant, it's really good at what it does.

On the inaugural passenger journey, from Paddington to Bristol,

it arrived three minutes early and was an instant hit.

And they started to be introduced between Edinburgh and King's Cross,

Paddington and Bristol and the West Country.

And the people, the passengers took to them immediately.

British Rail's new express is wooing passengers

with high-speed technology outside and in.

Automatic doors became immediately popular today.

-TANNOY:

-'Good morning, ladies and gentlemen.'

There's air conditioning, double glazing and even second class

gets wall-to-wall carpets.

And in the bar they serve draught beer,

the only train in Britain that does.

Rail officials are hoping this train will win the passengers.

My first trip on the 125 was when we went from King's Cross to York

and being the journalists that we were we'd all piled

into the buffet car because in those days

they served Whitbread Tankard in draught.

So we'd all got pints of Whitbread Tankard on the bar

and they put the brakes on to do an emergency stop at 125mph to a stop

and it did and not a drop of beer was spilled.

Well, the first time I got onto the InterCity 125, the HST,

was at Peterborough.

Being only about seven, these big beasts,

completely different to anything else that had been before

arrived in to the station and, obviously,

with the classic nose on the front it was, "Oh, this is new."

It was like going first class for us

because you'd gone with the banging doors and the bouncy seats

and you had proper seats.

It felt a lot more comfortable.

And I do remember sitting there because all of you had an armrest,

which was unusual.

And you could sit in this big, comfy chair with a table.

And it was luxurious, cool, absolutely wonderful.

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

it just had to come.

The high-speed loo.

The family story that we never let my cousin forget

is...because he was younger than us and he'd come back running

down the train shouting out to my mum,

"Auntie Marian, I've done a poo at 125mph."

And it was like, "Yeah, you didn't really want to shout that out."

BR had given Britain record-breaking high-speed trains at a price

that most could afford.

Passenger numbers rose dramatically.

On top of this, a study in 1981 by Leeds University

found that not only was it the cheapest but, after Sweden,

British Rail was the second most efficient railway in Europe.

BR was getting it right, it seemed.

The 1980s really did look like being the age of the train.

And the Advanced Passenger Train was yet to come.

What I was aware of at the time - perhaps there was an impatience

with the slow development of the APT and InterCity 125

or the High Speed Train was really only ever meant as a stopgap.

Having undergone several more years in development,

1981 saw the APT make its first trip.

And with the success of the InterCity 125,

British Rail's public image had never been better.

The Central Station in Glasgow this morning before seven.

250 passengers, mainly railway enthusiasts,

journalists board a short and experimental prototype APT,

British Rail's cut-price answer to France's new high-speed train.

Of course, 6.30 in December, it was pitch-black.

Because they were using the tilt system all the way out of the station

and for the next 20 or 30 miles to the south,

it was as if somebody had straightened the track out.

You couldn't tell when you were going round a curve at all.

And I was so impressed.

The guys had done a really good job

and it was just like travelling in a straight line.

And by daylight it's well past Carlisle and Penrith

over Shap Summit and down the Lune Valley.

The fast and smooth acceleration,

the revolutionary suspension, the lightweight construction,

the aerodynamic shape give little sensation of speed.

However, we got a bit further south when the sun started to come up

and we could see the horizon going up and down

as the train was tilting, going into corners and, at that point,

a lot of the people started to get quote, tilt sick, unquote.

It was significant that the great majority of the passengers

who were suffering from tilt sickness were the media representatives

who the previous night had been in a bar in the hotel

being entertained by British Rail.

So you can draw your own conclusions from that.

But the train did very, very well, that first southbound run

down to Euston was fault free.

Because it runs on conventional track, it hasn't needed

the £850 million spent by the French on their high-speed train track.

Even so, the APT has taken 13 years to get from the drawing board

to Euston Station.

And largely because only £37 million has been spent on it.

The train earned the reputation for tilt-induced nausea

but that was the least of British Rail's worries.

Two days after its initial journey, the train broke down.

The first sitting for breakfast should have been served

at 125mph with the train's tilting system smoothing out the curves

in the tracks south of Motherwell.

In the event, not a drop of tea or fruit juice was spilled

because for 40 minutes, the train didn't move.

And two days after that, it failed to reach its destination once more.

And we slid out of Glasgow on time at seven o'clock

but after only eight minutes, the lights flickered and dimmed

and APT coasted to a shameful halt.

It was put into service too quickly.

If it had been allowed to be developed by the engineers

over a reasonable timescale, it would have been more reliable.

It wasn't just the Advanced Passenger Train that was in trouble.

In 1982, British Transport Films was disbanded.

There was no longer an appetite for this type of corporate film.

These films, they're selling modernity

and they're telling a big story about investment and technology change

and a progressive move forward and yet the irony is that, you know,

they, themselves become a kind of obsolete part of the railway system

which then gets discarded in the early 1980s.

One of its final films, Round Trip To Glasgow,

was designed to hit back at the Advance Passenger Train's bad press.

It's smooth, it's quiet and an altogether delightful experience.

Everything that the developers and designers have told me

the train should do, it does appear to do

and does it exceptionally well.

I'll be in Euston a little over four hours after leaving Glasgow Central

and that's got to make this a train very much worth taking.

TRAIN HORN HOOTS

Whilst Peter Purves did his best to sell the new train,

the bad press meant passengers were less enthusiastic.

Only three trains were manufactured

and in 1984 the entire project was scrapped.

It was rather sad to see the pictures in the papers of the trains

being scrapped and there certainly was a feeling of -

why did I waste my time doing all that?

Having said that, in later years, other trains

throughout the world to this day are still using APT tilt systems.

So much of the equipment was totally new and my view would be that

there were too many new ideas in one train.

The Advanced Passenger Train never had a chance

because it never had got the support it really deserved,

particularly from the civil servants and the politicians.

Maybe because none of them had any real long-term belief

in the future of the railways.

Unlike the InterCity 125, the Advanced Passenger Train

failed to grab the public imagination.

By the 1990s, the political climate had also changed.

There was a public conception of nationalised industries

and other public bodies that these were inefficient organisations,

that's how the public seemed to see them.

Possibly that's because politicians wanted the public to see them

in that way.

In 1994, after 47 years of public ownership,

British Rail was privatised.

In many ways, the clock was being turned back.

The network would, once again, be filled by a variety

of individual rail companies, each with their own distinct

branding and liveries.

But this time, the new companies would inherit an efficient

modern railway.

BR was by far the most efficient railway in Europe.

Its services weren't necessarily the best

but it cost the British taxpayer far, far less than the equivalent

in other European countries and BR has had no recognition of that.

I think in the last ten years of British Railways,

they'd got everything right.

And it was ripe for privatisation

and I think they should be given the credit for that.

What did British Rail do?

I think British Rail, probably, its biggest success

was in preventing any more of the railway network being closed

than many people wanted to achieve.

Its greatest legacy can still be seen every day

travelling at speeds of 125mph.

If someone had told me in 1975 that this train that you're working on

will still be in front-line service in 40 years' time,

I'd have said, "Pull the other one."

But it is.