The RCTS: then and now

摘要

IT IS impossible to underestimate the industrial and socio-economic importance of the'Big Four' companies in the 1920s and 1930s. Apart from being some of the largest stock market-listed companies, they were huge employers, as well as being multi-faceted concerns. Like all private companies they were not immune from the industrial conflicts and downturns in the economy, and needed to be prudent with capital expenditure when profits were low or marginal, and in the more careful language of the pre-war years the Railway Observer (RO) ensured its readership was fully informed of developments.