Christian Wolmar. British Rail: A New History. London: Penguin Michael Joseph, 2022. 416 pp. ISBN 978-0-24145-620-0 $34.00 (cloth).

Abstract

The “British Rail sandwich” and the “wrong kind of snow” have always been aggravating metaphors of Britain’s nationalized railways, so it is positive to see thatWolmar’s book British Rail: A New History begins by systematically dismantling these media narratives. Wolmar’s book serves, in part, as a punch against the oftenpersistent narratives of stagnation anddecline that have dominated perceptions of rail transport in Britain. In British Rail: A New History, Wolmar argues that, despite its many imperfections, Britain’s railway in the postwar period was a responsive and forward-thinking organization, maintaining that it was a “victim of its history and of the whim of politicians who had little understanding about its achievements and, indeed, its real failings” (xv). Ultimately, Wolmar contends that British Rail’s downfall was a result not of managers but of politicians. Managers had, after a number of years in the immediate postwar period and particularly after the 1965 modernization, learned to respond to political flak and efficiently defended the organisation. By privatization in the 1990s, British Rail was operating a successful nationalized industry that was sensitive to both service quality and profit, and the process of privatization was ultimately forced upon British Rail without reason or sense. Wolmar divides his book into two sections: “British Railways” and “British Rail.” The first half examines the newly nationalized industry through postwar austerity, arguing that it suffered from an “inheritance” of materials fromWorldWar II that mademanaging the “assetheavy industry” difficult (55). Much of the first part of the book is centered around the events surrounding the twomajor plans for BritishRailways: theModernization Plan and theReshaping of British Railways. Despite the flawed “Modernization Plan,” which had undermined confidence in railwaymanagement and its abilities to deliver a modern railway, management faced an ongoing struggle against a growing deficit through rising staff costs as well as increasing competition from cars and lorries. The eventual “Reshaping of British Railways” report, known as the “Beeching Report,”was, like many of the political decisions made about Britain’s railways, ultimately a “failure to grasp the principles of railway economics” (75). The second half of the book demonstrates that the newly branded “British Rail” had a renewed outlook on its public service duties. Some of the most well-known chairpersons, in particular Peter Parker andRobert Reid, confidently reorganized and restructuredBritish Rail. Although this did not eliminate all of the problems, managers grew wise to the shift to Thatcher economics rather than resisting it. Part of the reorganization was the process of “sectorization,” which represented a form of “creative accountancy” (309) that grouped