Introduction
To anybody who can remember the number of railway vehicles on the roads, prior to National Carriers appearance, their
presence was so much part of the everyday scene that it was never questioned. Yet how did the railways come to operate
a road vehicle fleet.
The original railways had very little thought of doing more than to build and operate the actual railway as defined in
their charters and these charters rarely made provision for operating road feeder services. One or two charters and
stage coach operators were bought off by contracts giving the exclusive road transport rights from certain stations
on the proposed line, the railways receiving in return no opposition when their bill went before Parliament. These
contracts usually had no time limit and some only ceased when the whole of transport was nationalised.
Early Road Services
The first manifestation of railway road transport seems to have come about as an attempt to counteract the activities
of transport contractors such as Pickfords and Carter Patterson who were making a lucrative business out of using the
railways facilities. In 'brief if you wished to consign goods from A to B then you had to make a contract with every
individual railway en route between A and B for the transport of those goods. The transport contractors had regular
contracts with all railways and their own men to transship the goods at change points and also a collection and delivery
service. This instead of making two or three contracts to get your goods from A to B you could make one contract with a
contractor and enjoy also a door to door services. Since the contractors used railway bulk transport rates small lot
consignees could even enjoy a cheaper overall rate. The railways could have sensibly retaliated by becoming booking
agents for each other but they preferred to defer such an obvious and sensible step until it was forced upon them many
years later. They did, however, start their own delivery and collection service either with their own staff and vehicles
or with subcontractors. Thus railway road services were born probably illegally, i.e. operated by companies not
authorised to operate them, but unchallenged because no body was strong enough to challenge them. Some of the later
railways incorporated road vehicle operation in their charter and some road services were authorised in retrospect but
it would take a lot of research and a good legal eagle to know which was which at grouping.
First Mechanical Services
Initially services were either horse or manpowered but the major railways sampled early mechanised transport in a way
that suggests that they had an eye as to their future potential. If it had not been for the 1st World War then I feel
that the railways would have absorbed and integrated road transport as it developed. Unfortunately, the War intervened
and caused three things to happen simultaneously or virtually so. First it financially crippled the railways so that
they had no reserves to invest in extended road services post war, it proved the reliability of mechanical road vehicles
and provided them cheaply as W.D. surplus, and finally provided a large number of men trained and practised in the
skills of driving and maintaining these vehicles. Thus at the moment of the railways greatest weakness the road
transport industry got its start.
The railways did expand rapidly their mechanised fleets of vehicles and in 1929 they had a Bill passed through
Parliament authorising the LMS to operate independent as opposed to feeder road services. This Bill was passed with
much opposition from the road transport lobby but did act as a pilot Bill for another Bill within the year which
granted similar powers to the other railways.
Bus Service
The main manifestation of this Act was that the LMS started operating stage bus services mainly in North Wales and
around the Clyde estuary. Some of these services were operated by LMS vehicles and thereby LMS subsidiaries and then
by the LMS again. Eventually they were all taken over by bus operators in which the LMS had a substantial share
holding. There were also LMS operated freight equivalents to bus services. A lorry would travel along a given route
on certain days of the week and collect and deliver goods to all points on that route. This was always in rural
areas and must have been a most useful service in the thirties.
Road Transport Competition
The LMS did much to both improve the efficiency and exploit the potential of its road services but they were always
operated at a loss. This was a matter of policy, an attempt to retain railway customers. The idea being that if they
under cut their rivals on delivery and collection services then road transport con-tractors would not have the chance
to undercut the railways rate for the whole journey. No doubt this policy had some effect if only in delaying the
inroads made into rail traffic by road transport.
The railways provided several services in an effort to combat the road transport competition which would not have been
possible if they had not had their own road vehicles. The most important of these was to provide railway staffed
warehouse facilities and a delivery service to a ten mile radius of these warehouses. The warehouses could be anything
from a full multi-storey traditional warehouse to a grounded van body. All the company using these facilities had to do
was provide a salesman who handed a copy of his orders to the railways staff who arranged delivery from the stocks that
were held in the railway warehouse. Other services were the provision of mobile mechanical loading plant when such
things were unusual, and undertaking the complete transport arrangements for such things as agricultural shows and
livestock markets. The LMS were not short of ideas and schemes to attract fresh business in the thirties and most of
these schemes involved road transport. Perhaps one of the more amusing was the provision of a Rolls Royce publicity van
which toured the country advertising the delights of various holiday resorts.
Further Reading
H.N. Twells, LMS Miscellany. OPC 1982 ISBN 0 860931 72 2
H.N. Twells and T.W. Bourne, A Pictorial Record of LMS Road Vehicles. OPC 1983 ISBN 0 86093 174 9
