How Britain’s railways prepared for nuclear war

Abstract

As a nationalised industry during the Cold War, Britain’s railways were required to undertake civil defence work to prepare for a future conflict. Civil engineers that engaged with civil defence work were required to understand the destructive capacity of first atomic and later hydrogen weapons as well as the threats of nuclear fallout and radiation so that they could design and build structures capable of withstanding them. At first, these civil engineers objected as the work was beyond their expertise. But from 1952 onwards, each region of Britain’s railways, led by their civil engineering departments, began to build infrastructure and train their staff to prepare for the continued functioning of the railways following a nuclear attack. The central focus of railway civil defence changed as the bomb threat itself evolved, but its central purpose was always more focused on repair work and the assistance of military operations over civilian evacuations. However, shackled to guidance and limited available funding from the UK’s Ministry of Transport and the Home Office, planning was frequently delayed or scaled back. By the mid-1960s, alongside most other British civil defence programmes, the planning was abandoned and government funding withdrawn. But despite the myriad of setbacks and funding disappointments, those that undertook the railways’ civil defence planning and training during the early Cold War saw the value in their work and hoped to contribute to a national effort to survive and rebuild should the worst ever occur.

Keywords

• civil defence
• civil engineering
• cold war
• infrastructure history
• nationalisation
• nuclear war