At the risk of being controversial, if we look rationally at the superceding of steam by electric and diesel in the UK, it never made economic, social or engineering sense. As a prime mover, steam cannot be beaten. Guess wot they got in atomic power stations?
The engines are simple, have bags of starting torque, speed and guts, they are low tech, run forever ( some of the engines BR scrapped had been in daily use for 60 years) and they run on coal, which as any idiot knows, exists in vast reserves under the UK and the US. As for the 'day to day maintenance' red-herring, this consists of a man who can, at 4am, a] clean out an ash-can b] use a box of matches c] use an oil can d] turn on a water faucet and e] shovel coal into a box. Then do a shift as a Fireman.
Electric traction, as we have seen above, is wonderful but shot full of complexity and compromised design, imposes vast capital cost and is inflexible, since till fully wired up you got no receipts. Diesel traction is not as good as steam [ ie a gearbox or genset/electric motor plus the prime mover = complexity = cost ], it runs on fuel supplied by [ahem] foreign persons and you could argue produces just as much pollution, especially the particulates.
So, having destroyed the whole steam culture, sent 19,000 perfectly good engines to be scrapped, put 20,000 skilled men on the scrapheap, destroyed the infrastucture and transport links to many small communities in the North and West by ripping up 4000 miles of track, guess how much was saved? A piffling £28 million. And today the Rail network still strives to come up to a 'standard' that any pre-war 'God's Wonderful Railway' man would have dismissed with utter contempt.
Alan
