Accounting's Motive Power – the Vision and Reality for Management Accounting on the Nationalised Railways to 1959

Abstract A financial crisis had engulfed the UK's nationalised railways by 1960. This, and the subsequent retrenchment identified with Dr Beeching, has obscured determined and coherent earlier attempts to install modern methods of management accounting on the nationalised railways in the 1940s and 1950s. This paper sets out the attempted development of these techniques which were sponsored by the highest level of railway management and the defeat of these attempts in practice by the railways' organisational structure and culture. The conclusion is reached that, to be effective, new administrative techniques have to operate in compatible organisational and power structures.