How Railways prepared for nuclear war

[mikejee]

This article deals with the Eastern Region of British Rail, but presumably things would be similar in the Midlands, so may be of interest

How Britain’s railways prepared for nuclear war - Science Museum Group Journal

From the late 1940s until the mid-1960s, Britain’s railways planned and prepared for a possible nuclear war. While hampered by a lack of government funding and guidance, they nonetheless endeavoured in the hope of repairing and rebuilding after nuclear Armageddon.

journal.sciencemuseum.ac.uk

 

[Ross]

Interesting article, and like all articles about civil defence it correctly identifies that this country was both utterly unprepared for the realities of nuclear war and vastly underestimated the sheer amount of nuclear bombs the Soviets intended to drop on the UK.
In my current bit of the world (Lincolnshire) there was until around 10 years ago a WW2 reinforced-concrete LNER Control building at Metheringham built in case of bombing of Lincoln. Had nuclear war happened, it would have been nicely bracketed by 500kt bombs being dropped on RAF Waddington and RAF Coningsby, so would have been utterly unusable, yet the local grapevine had it that the building was intended in the Civil Defence plans to be used had 'The Bomb' ever been dropped.

I'm not quite so sure about a PhD student's apparent inability to correctly identify "trains", "engines" and "locomotives" though; she seems to use the three terms interchangeably.