Railways. A word guaranteed to elicit anything but a neutral response from your typical Brit.
For a nation which first gave the world the gift of the railway almost 200 years ago now, we appear to have done a pretty shambolic job of actually running them ourselves. Just look at the recent curtailing of HS2 beyond the West Midlands, with some wags dubbing it “the Acton to Aston shuttle”. The Elizabeth Line – which finally opened over four years late, plus £3 billion over budget – has recently seen the biggest rise in cancellations in the UK, as well as having stranded passengers in the dark for four hours, after a loss of power caused chaos on the route.
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Rail services across the whole country have been crippled by a series of widespread strikes during the last two years. The industry’s regulator – the Office of Rail and Road – has said in its latest quarterly statistics report that “journeys across Britain’s rail network are still neither punctual nor reliable”. The National Audit Office has opened an investigation into the economic and strategic case for the £5 billion East West Rail project, which is set to reopen a rail link between Oxford and Cambridge, after being closed back in the 1960s. On top of all this, rail fares in 2024 could face an average increase of 8%.
With things seeming to have gone so far off track, you could hardly be blamed for thinking fondly about what we used to have, before the failed experiment which was privatisation. Indeed, the current push is towards setting up a centralised guiding body to oversee the rail network, going by the name Great British Railways, harking back to the bygone days of the publicly-owned British Rail. Having a relatively short life of 49 years, after being around from 1948 to 1997, BR was a butt of jokes about the British Rail sandwich, as well as most of its train services being seen as dirty, late and overcrowded. Now, thanks to the many benefits of privatisation, we have a rail network where train services are seen as being dirty, late and overcrowded. Plus ça change.
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Yet, thanks to rose tinted spectacles, those perceived failings of state-run British Rail are now largely forgotten, and there looks to be a growing fondness for what we once had but lost along the way. Perhaps one of the best reminders of the way things were comes in the form of the BFI’s DVD collection of British Transport Films, which compiled productions made by the production unit which was set up in 1949 to chronicle the nationalised railway, and extol its many virtues against a rising onslaught from both road and air travel. Documentary films and shorts were made for over 35 years by BTF, before it became defunct in the 1980s. Upon privatisation in the mid-1990s, the films were acquired by the BFI.
This latest and final release in the BFI’s series of DVDs – Life on the Line – gathers together 14 of BTF’s films, covering a period between 1969 and 1986. Brits do have a real sense of nostalgia for the bygone age of rail travel – hence the huge popularity of heritage railways, formed of lines and routes predominantly closed during the infamous Beeching cuts of the 1960s – and the BFI’s releases really do tap into that. The films veer between straightforward travelogues, educational shorts, and promotional pieces used to talk up aspects of the UK’s rail network. There is a real quaintness to some of them, bringing to mind the parody of style as seen in Robert Popper and Peter Serafinowicz’s video Markets of Britain, a short film by Lee Titt.
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Some of the shorts – Who’s In Charge?, Robbie (Overhead Lines), and the titular Life on the Line – are more along the ‘cautionary tale’ style, showing the various dangers of being on or around the railways, and they bring to mind the public information films as featured in the likes of the Scarred For Life books, live shows and podcast. While Jimmy Savile and Gary Glitter were rather unfortunately featured in adverts for BR in the ‘70s and ‘80s, BTF chose somewhat more wisely with the celebs used for some of its productions, with two of the shorts here being presented by Keith Chegwin and Peter Purves. The latter in particular is a comforting presence, and delivers a mixture of gravitas and warmth, familiar to those viewers who grew up watching him on the likes of Blue Peter and Kick Start.
Purves is our genial host for Round Trip to Glasgow, taking us on board the Advanced Passenger Train, which was once promised as the high speed tilting train of the future – it was to be a future deferred until the early 2000s, as Virgin Trains would eventually deliver us the promised tilting service with their Pendolinos, some 20 years later. Yet another vision of a lost future comes with 1986’s Channel Tunnel: Tomorrow’s Way, which tantalises viewers with the prospect of a regular direct train service between regions of the UK and mainland Europe. A familiar face – here as a harassed businessman – is actor Michael Keating, familiar to the fans of Blake’s 7 as Vila Restal. All things considered, he would probably be best travelling by the Liberator’s teleport.
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There is a certain wistful melancholy in watching all the BTF productions and realising exactly what we have lost: not just the notion of regional Eurostar services to the Continent, but also in private compartments, dining cars, and an integrated rail service which also had interests in hotels, hovercraft and ferry service, all under the famous BR ‘double arrow’. Yes, it might be a case of the grass always seeming greener, but for those old enough to remember British Rail, there were more positives in hindsight than perhaps seemed at the time, and it has to be said that – during an era of ‘managed decline’ for the most part – BR did a pretty incredible job with less public subsidy than the privatised railway received.
British Transport Films Volume 15: Life on the Line is quite the glorious portal back to a time still within living memory, allowing one to enjoy that period which will for some forever be ‘the Age of the Train’. Let this two-disc DVD set about the train take the strain, and be a transport of delight.
British Transport Films Volume 15: Life on the Line is out now on DVD from the BFI.
