Western Region

The Western Region inherited the Great Western Railway on 1 January 1948 more or less whole, and it kept the Great Western way of doing things longer than any other region kept its predecessor’s. Paddington remained the headquarters. The route to Bristol, Plymouth, and Penzance still ran behind four-cylinder Kings and Castles, and chocolate-and-cream carriages returned to the named expresses in 1956. By 1960 the region was already committed to a diesel-hydraulic fleet that no other region adopted.

Territory

The region covered the old Great Western territory: London to Bristol and the West of England, the whole of South and mid-Wales, the West Midlands lines through Worcester and Hereford, and the Birmingham route via Bicester. Boundary revisions in the 1950s transferred some lines to and from the London Midland and Southern regions, most visibly around Birmingham and in the West of England, where the former Southern lines west of Exeter passed to the Western Region in 1963.

Inherited constituents

The principal constituent was the Great Western Railway itself, which at the 1923 Grouping had absorbed the Cambrian Railways, the Barry, Taff Vale, Rhymney, and other South Wales companies, and a long list of smaller concerns. Unusually among the Big Four, the Great Western was an enlargement of an existing company rather than a new amalgamation, which is part of why its identity survived so strongly into British Railways days.

Motive power in 1960

Front-line express work was still in the hands of the Great Western four-cylinder classes: the Kings on the heaviest Paddington trains, the Castles on secondary expresses, and the Halls, Granges, and Manors on mixed-traffic duties. The 2-8-0 heavy freight classes and the ubiquitous pannier tanks handled goods and station work. The region had also begun taking delivery of the diesel-hydraulic fleet, the North British and Swindon Warships and, from 1961, the Westerns, a transmission choice unique to the Western Region among British Railways. Allocations for 1960 are recorded in the Ian Allan ABC of British Railways Locomotives, Combined Volume.

Regional livery

From 1956 the Western Region was permitted to restore chocolate-and-cream livery to the coaching stock of its principal named expresses, the only region to carry a distinct regional carriage livery in this way. Locomotive nameplates, the brass safety-valve bonnets, and the copper-capped chimneys of the Great Western classes were retained. See the chocolate-and-cream livery feature.

Beeching and after

The Western Region lost a large part of its rural mileage under the Reshaping Report. The West of England secondary routes, much of the mid-Wales network, and a dense pattern of branch lines were closed through the 1960s. What survived includes the main lines to Bristol, South Wales, and Penzance, still the backbone of the region’s successor routes today. The Beeching context is set out in the closures section.