ABSTRACT
On 4 January 1960 the Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Transport, Sir James Dunnett, signed a memorandum entitled ‘The Railway Problem’, informing ministers of the urgent need for a new policy on the railways. The problem which Dunnett’s title referred to was the bankruptcy of the British Transport Commission (BTC), the nationalized body which controlled British Railways (and whose other operations were utterly dwarfed by the railways), and the fact that there was no financial justification for the government’s continuing support for the BTC’s programme of railway modernization.1 The focus of contemporary questioning was the BTC and its modernization programme. The outcome of that questioning was the Beeching Report. The purpose of this chapter is to show that bankruptcy into which the BTC sank during the later 1950s was the culmination of half a century of problems facing the railway industry which had been exacerbated by post-war government policy, not least because the search for the right ideological and organizational framework in the Transport Acts of 1947 and 1953 was not sufficiently focused on the need for a practical response to the changed conditions in which the railways were now operating.
