Railways: Heritage Sector

Lord Faulkner of Worcester Excerpts

Tuesday 1st February 2011 Grand Committee

Asked By

[Lord Faulkner of Worcester]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what contribution the railway heritage sector makes to education, tourism and the regional economy.

[Lord Faulkner of Worcester]

My Lords, I am grateful for the opportunity to draw attention to the importance of heritage railways in Britain and I thank all noble Lords who have put their names down to speak in this short debate. I declare an unpaid interest as president-elect of the Heritage Railway Association, a volunteer body that brings together the heritage railways in the United Kingdom and Eire. I have also recently been appointed by the Prime Minister to the board of trustees of the National Museum of Science and Industry and shall be serving on the advisory board of the National Railway Museum.

The heritage railway movement covers over 111 working heritage railways and tramways, as well as 60 steam museum sites. Indeed, laid end to end, our heritage railways would stretch for some 500 miles, reaching from King’s Cross to Dalwhinnie in the Highlands of Scotland. There are over 399 stations on these lines—more than on the Underground network—and there is a fleet of around 800 preserved steam locomotives.

Apart from the preserved lines, steam is still alive and well and earning money on the national network, too, with many steam excursion trains being run each year, as well as regular services on the West Highland line, the Cambrian coast line and between York and Scarborough. I pay particular tribute to the work of the specialist team at Network Rail as well as the train operators who co-operate to make this possible. As a number of noble Lords may be aware, in the past few years a brand new A3 steam locomotive called “Tornado” has been built by volunteers to the original LNER design. That is in revenue service as well.

I should also mention the value of the work of the Railway Heritage Committee in designating historic railway artefacts and directing their disposal, when no longer required on the main line, to heritage railways or museums. This approach has been actively supported by Network Rail, the train operating companies and the rolling stock leasing companies. As a result of their working harmoniously together, people can see and appreciate many of these historic pieces of equipment in daily use.

The status and role of the Railway Heritage Committee is about to change as a result of the Government’s decision to include it in the Public Bodies Bill. I shall not anticipate the debate that we are due to have in Committee on that Bill, other than to say that we are very close indeed to agreeing a way forward that would provide for the statutory powers and duties of the committee to be transferred to the Science Museum.

Your Lordships may ask why all this matters. The main answer is that heritage railways give a huge boost to the local economies of the areas that they serve and that we lead Europe and America in the development and presentation of our heritage railways. They are a source of inward tourism as well. To underline the point, the Heritage Railway Association took the lead in establishing a federation of heritage railways across Europe, called FEDECRAIL. Our expertise is keenly sought by other members, particularly in eastern Europe. Those members also look with envy at the statutory powers exercised by the Railway Heritage Committee and wish that they had something similar in their countries.

The value to tourism is enormous. The National Railway Museum attracts almost a million visitors annually, more than any other museum in England outside London. Heritage railways attract more support than almost any other part of the heritage sector, with the exception of the National Trust. While historic ships, aircraft and classic cars have their adherents, no other transport mode attracts anything like this level of interest, with direct benefit to the tourist economy.

This has been confirmed in independent studies undertaken for a number of lines, notably the West Somerset, Severn Valley and Welsh Highland railways. I think that we may hear something about the Welsh Highland Railway from the noble Lord, Lord Wigley. The West Somerset study was undertaken by Manchester Metropolitan University and indicated a value of £1.90 to the local economy from every £1 of fare income to the railway. This means that the value of the railway is at least £4 million to the local economy. I say “at least” because this excludes the considerable spend by volunteers on accommodation, food, fuel, restaurants and so on. These are significant sums of money. Each year, 6.7 million people are carried on heritage railways, whose earnings in 2009 amounted to £81 million. Not only does this point to a value of over £150 million a year to the economy, but it is a figure that is growing year by year as lines are extended.

The other major economic benefit of heritage railways is in employment. Altogether almost 2,000 people work in the sector, some part-time, and often in areas of high unemployment—heritage railways frequently provide high-quality engineering jobs in areas where little alternative skilled work is available.

Then there are the health benefits of providing easy access for walking, as well as the environmental benefits of car-free access to the countryside. While most railways offer a steam-train ride as their main attraction, an increasing number also fulfil a useful transport role. The Swanage Railway, for example, provides a park-and-ride service to reduce congestion on the A351 through the picturesque village of Corfe Castle. The Welsh Highland Railway provides sustainable transport to sensitive areas in the Snowdonia National Park, particularly the village of Beddgelert. Also, what better way is there to visit the Brontë Parsonage Museum at Haworth than by the Keighley and Worth Valley Railway?

We may add to this the benefits to education that are offered by many railways, with their information packs for schools linked to the curriculum, as well as visits to depots and signal boxes. The range of subjects covered by the railway is wide-ranging: history, of course, as well as geography, economics, social history and politics. Indeed, there is almost no area of life in Britain that is not touched by the railway. It was Benjamin Disraeli—or the Earl of Beaconsfield, as perhaps we should call him in your Lordships’ House—who, writing in his novel Sybil in 1845, correctly predicted that,

“the railways will do as much for mankind as the monasteries did”.

None of the achievements of today’s heritage railway movement would be possible without the support of volunteers, of whom more than 17,632 are recorded in the returns made annually to the Office of Rail Regulation, quite apart from those who help in other ways such as fundraising. The range of activities that they undertake is astonishing, from safety-critical work such as driving trains or signalling, to developing specialist skills for locomotive restoration, to straightforward labouring to keep the railways in good shape and safe for passengers.

What better example—and I address this point to the Government particularly—of the big society at work could there be than a heritage railway, with volunteers working alongside paid staff, bringing a boost to the local economy and a range of societal benefits without recourse to the taxpayer? The level of volunteer input means that heritage railways run without subsidy and raise their own capital. A number have also been successful in securing Heritage Lottery Fund grants.

Some people find it hard to understand why there is such a high level of interest in railways and railway heritage among British people—an interest increasingly shared by many overseas visitors. Go to any bookstall and you will see a huge range of magazines and periodicals devoted to this subject. I have seen a total of 16 magazines about railways or model railways in my travels and I understand that these have a combined circulation of around 360,000. When we add in the electronic magazines and the fact that magazines are handed on to friends, we have a regular railway readership of about a million.

My theory is that this interest—I hesitate to call it an obsession—reflects genuine pride in the fact that railways were a British invention and the source of a dominant export industry for over a century. They contributed enormously to the 19th-century Industrial Revolution. They transformed people’s lives, making it possible for them to live in the countryside and travel into towns and cities to work. They were responsible for creating most of Britain’s seaside resorts and enabled working people to go on holiday.

Even today, the influence of Britain’s railways worldwide cannot be overstated. Railways have been regulated and given special powers by government throughout history and their significance in people’s lives, whether or not they are regular users, means that they have a very high profile and raise strong views.

Many railway staff are proud of the industry’s heritage, which plays some part in their motivation. It is perhaps for all these reasons that from 1947 onwards the Government have considered it necessary to legislate to protect Britain’s railway heritage, which has been actively supported by the industry, from the days of the British Transport Commission to today’s rail companies. I hope that when replying to this debate the noble Earl the Minister will acknowledge this uniquely British success story and confirm that the Government will continue to encourage its progress and development.