British Railway Network insanely different.

[Abdominalz]

Over a year ago, I wrote a thread entitled 'British Railways develop radically differently' in which I imagined a rather ASB scenario (being a year younger) in which British Railways are nationalised very early on in the Victorian Era (Gladstone once proposed this) but in a very different way. In my ATL as written back in early 2015, you have a national railway network built and managed by central government which crosses County Borders and links up the cities, ports, industrial areas etc and is at National Standard Gauge while on the other hand, Counties are responsible for the building, regulation and administering of lines within their own boundaries. Counties even get the right to decide the gauge of their own local lines.

So for example, if I wanted to travel from London to Skegness, I would get a National Train to 'Nottingham National' Station, then walk to the 'Local Station' and board a local County Train to the Boundary of Lincolnshire past Newark, walk across to the station on the other side and board a Lincolnshire County Train to Lincoln, and then another one to Skegness.

We all know that this TL is ASB, but the purpose of this thread is to imagine what a UK would be like in this scenario. In this scenario, everything else about Victorian Britain (with the exception of anything changing because of the railways) stays the same.

 

[The Professor]

Well it could lead to earlier sync up between rail and nonrail public transport. Which would itself impact how motorways develop in interwar Britain

 

[Reydan]

There really isn't anything that ASB about this scenario. Gladstone proposed it and it was seriously considered OTL. If it hadn't been for George Hudson leading the charge of shareholders and public opinion against him, it might have gone differently. Gladstone wasn't the first serious voice about the idea either.

The actual problem is that you can't simply say "everything else about Victorian Britain stays the same" because the railways built the Victorians. Not just in terms of towns and cities but in terms of society and culture too. The effects of early nationalisation would be to bring about government control over the network in a way that would dramatically affect the building mania sweeping the country.

Think about the network c.1844:

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At a stroke you are probably going to cut away a lot of the "superfluous" lines that built into the national system eventually. Things like the Settle and Carlisle route, the South London jumble of lines, and the Great Central Railway will all be wiped out in this timeline - these were very company dependent. There will still be a building mania for railways, but it will be more constrained and manifest in different ways. Instead of shareholders, Government and lobbyists will be the prime movers. You may also see a number of public finance crises as the financial instability and double-dealing that affected the railways OTL is carried over into the public purse. Its important to realise that very few men in government had technical experience of the railways at this point - they would still be led by the great engineers like Stephenson and Brunel. Unless these men have gone abroad in protest at the decision to nationalise.

I'm not sure I'd agree with your assessment that you'd have local branch run at county level. c.1840s county government was already being seen as old-fashioned and poorly managed - I think it would be the major cities that would increasingly hold sway over the decision making. You might end up with Manchester Town Council, for example, overseeing all routes that go in and out of Manchester (and probably having to come to some agreement with the cities at the other end of each line).

Some things won't change. The Victorian urge to centralise will still see lines converge on London as OTL, with Scotland, Wales, Ireland, Cornwall, the North West etc still being poorly provided for.

Some of the biggest changes, though, will be social and cultural. However you cut it the Government is now responsible for thousands upon thousands of employees in a boom industry and millions of miles of track, thousands of engines and rolling stock, stations, hotels, etc etc etc. That is almost unthinkable for a Government in the 1840s, remember that continental state railways grew slower and later and modeled themselves in part on the ground the British companies had broken in terms of management and staffing. This will have enormous knock-on into a Victorian society that OTL valued the hands-off approach highly. It also means that, in Empire terms, the Government will own railways abroad directly as well. A huge capital investment as the Empire grows.

How far down the food chain of the railways public control reaches determines how much changes - if Government takes over production of engines and rolling stock for example there are going to be a lot of railway towns OTL that don't get built in this timeline as London consolidates and centralises the industry. Doncaster, for instance, probably remains a tiny market town as there will be no GNR to build a new works there in the 1850s.

These are just a few ideas. I hate overuse of the butterfly effect on this forum, but in this case it is apt. The railways defined who the Victorians were.

 

[Abdominalz]

What I see happening in this scenario is Central Government building the trunk routes and there not being any duplication. The trunk routes themselves would be different, instead of a seperate East Coast Main Line, a Great Central Main line and a Midland Main line, I see one London-East Midlands Trunk route, possibly linked to the the London West Midlands trunk route further south, linking the cities of the East Midlands and Yorkshire and Newcastle, thus trains travelling from London to York and Newcastle will travel via Nottingham, and trains from Leeds perhaps via Sheffield and Derby. Thus places like Newark, Retford and Grantham will not have direct access to London, unlike in OTL.

Thus, this artificial division into National and Local Transit systems would radically alter the identity of the United Kingdom. I doubt that Central Government is going to be interested in building National lines where they don't link important cities, industrial areas and ports. Thus large areas of the Country I expect, such as Lincolnshire and Cornwall, will probably not be served by the national network. This would cause major changes in the subsequent development identity of different counties and regions.

Some Counties, perhaps Nottinghamshire, Leicestershire and Derbyshire, I see cooperating closely together for the sake of economic self interest and the aid of industrialisation. Other Counties might go for self contained railway networks, particularly larger ones. In the latter counties, the county itself will become quite a self contained socio-economic unit; perhaps local lines there would radiate from the county towns, making the latter much more important than today. Thus one's county identity would be much more important, not that its unimportant today. If the Counties neighbouring London decide not to integrate their local railway systems with London, with the only lines linking London to surrounding counties being the National lines, then this would have serious implications for the development of London's commuter belt.

In Wales, I see the government building National Lines to link Holyhead and Pembroke with England, with the latter connecting Swansea and Cardiff. I also however see the Counties of Wales deliberately choosing to cooperate together, deciding on a common Welsh Gauge that is different from that of the National Network. This would help cement a stronger Welsh National Identity and I particularly see it happening after the Treachery of the Blue Books. Mid Wales would be radically different, I don't see the National Government taking the initiative to build a line between Birmingham and Aberystwyth/Pwllheli. Instead I see, Carmarthenshire, Ceredigion, Merionethshire and Carnarvonshire cooperating on a West Coast Route with the University town of Aberystwyth as the hub. West Coast Wales would be much more remote from English influences and the demographic changes of the 1960s onwards that caused Anglicisation simply would not have happened. I even doubt there would be any seaside resorts along Cardigan Bay.