ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses the question of how the Big Four railway companies, formed in 1923 under the 1921 Railways Act, and their predecessors understood and thought about responding to this threat. Despite the long shadow cast by the Great Depression of the early 1930s which so badly affected the UK's railways, from the point of view of the consumer the interwar years were generally good ones, with a steadily increasing of retail goods. Such consumption was underpinned by an increasingly sophisticated network of distribution operating at a range of geographical scales, dealing not only with finished goods going from producers to wholesalers and then retailers but also the intermediates generated by manufacturers. Before the First World War the railways had dealt with almost all of this traffic moving more than a few miles, but once the immediate post-war economic boom started, road haulage emerged as a competitor, limited at first but rapidly inflicting serious damage on railway finances.
