Sir Felix Pole
Member
Whatever your view on the Beeching Report - FWIW I think it was a crude and flawed analysis, but that there were clearly a fair few moribund lines that should have been closed years earlier - it was certainly a presentational disaster. Beeching was not used to the intense media scrutiny he came under and quickly became a pantomine villain with his somewhat arrogant and high-handed style. Even today, he is seemingly held responsible for every rail closure that ever happened, although as others have pointed out, it was Barbara Castle who did the real damage after his time, closing strategic main-lines such as Bere Alston / Okehampton, Matlock / Chinley, the Waverley Route and Oxford / Cambridge. Towards the end of his life, in the late Dick Hardy biography, he admitted it had been a dreadful mistake to include the depressingly long list of line closures and stations in the report, which completely overshadowed his positive proposals. It also greatly contributed to the feeling that the railways were finished in the minds of politicians and the travelling public, a sentiment that took decades to turn around.
A consumate politician and operator such as the later chairman Sir Peter Parker - who did favour some 'bustitution' incidentally - would have accentuated the positive, but also quietly accelerated the job of closing hopeless branch lines without the blaze of publicity. The Scottish Region had been doing this very effectively in the 1950s closing a lot of branch lines in the Central Lowlands, rendered redundant from the 1920s onwards by more attractive bus services, and streamlining the duplicated facilities of the pre-grouping companies. Other regions were much more lethargic - was it really necessary to have two stations in Bodmin, Cornwall right to the end in 1967, for example?
A consumate politician and operator such as the later chairman Sir Peter Parker - who did favour some 'bustitution' incidentally - would have accentuated the positive, but also quietly accelerated the job of closing hopeless branch lines without the blaze of publicity. The Scottish Region had been doing this very effectively in the 1950s closing a lot of branch lines in the Central Lowlands, rendered redundant from the 1920s onwards by more attractive bus services, and streamlining the duplicated facilities of the pre-grouping companies. Other regions were much more lethargic - was it really necessary to have two stations in Bodmin, Cornwall right to the end in 1967, for example?