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Shapps to reverse Beeching cuts

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yorksrob

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Should have made clear that I was quoting from 'Transport Statistics Great Britain 1965-1975' (which includes various historical time series-es). I still don't consider that a 9% drop in rail usage over a period as short as five years when many services had just benefited from their 'best chance' upgrade ever (steam to diesel/electric) can reasonably be described as "stable"

The figures quoted by @Killingworth are from the ORR, so I'm happy to stick with them on this occasion.

I note that the figures quoted by yourself are passenger km, suggesting a decline in distances travelled. This suggests that the development of the IC offer should have taken more precedence than the closure programme.
 
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Dr Hoo

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The figures quoted by @Killingworth are from the ORR, so I'm happy to stick with them on this occasion.
Any apparent difference can be explained by the distinction between passenger journeys and passenger kilometres. At the risk of stating the obvious, it is the latter that actually translates into revenue.
The ORR didn't exist prior to 1994 (and didn't take on its statistical reporting role until after the demise of the Strategic Rail Authority) so their figures for the 1950s and 60s will have been drawn from the same Government Statistical Service database as the ones that I quoted.
 

yorksrob

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Any apparent difference can be explained by the distinction between passenger journeys and passenger kilometres. At the risk of stating the obvious, it is the latter that actually translates into revenue.
The ORR didn't exist prior to 1994 (and didn't take on its statistical reporting role until after the demise of the Strategic Rail Authority) so their figures for the 1950s and 60s will have been drawn from the same Government Statistical Service database as the ones that I quoted.

And where was the decline in passenger travel successfully reversed during the period ? Kent and the WCML, suggesting that a policy of electrification should have been pursued. However, the Doctor was a sceptic of electrification, preferring the ineffectual (in terms of cutting losses) cul-de-sac or reducing as much network as possible.
 

JBuchananGB

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The rot started well before Beeching. In Southport the Cheshire Lines closed in 1952. Simply couldn’t compete with the motor bus and car. The good doctor proposed to close the line to Liverpool, but was somehow prevented, and now operates the most punctual service in the country. Beeching didn’t propose to close the line to Manchester, but BR did shortly after, and that was refused by government.
 

coppercapped

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Like 3141 I was also around long before the 'Beeching Plan’; I well remember the publishing of the Modernisation Plan, its subsequent ‘Re-appraisal’ and the lead up to the ‘Reshaping of British Railways’.

Had the railways been competently run after the end of the Second World War, Beeching (and the whole process) would never have happened. The fundamental issue was that costs were increasing at a rate faster than the management could increase receipts or cut costs.

In this context it should be pointed out that between 1947 and 1968 there was NEVER any assumption that the railways were to operate as a ‘public service’ subsidised by the State. Anyone thinking that is either misguided or misinformed. The 1947 Transport Act required that the British Transport Commission cover its costs ‘taking one year with another’ and that Herbert Morrison, no less, is quoted as saying that subsidising businesses is not good for the management. (If you don’t know who Herbert Morrison was, then look him up!)

Of course there was already a programme of line closures under way when Beeching arrived, but it wasn't enough. The whole point was not to close lines for the sake of it, but to make real savings in running costs. Had the programme been sufficient, Beeching wouldn't have had to get involved.

From the 1920s onwards, increasing income from passengers was always going to be difficult given the growth in the number of motor vehicles in the country. This growth, by the way, was also occurring in all other countries in western Europe as well as North America, Australia, New Zealand, and Japan. As a result roads were being built. I wonder what people would have expected to have happened if, instead of Mr. Marples, Mr. Squeaky Kleane MP had been Transport Minister? Why would the outcome have been any different to what did happen?

And if one thinks the relationship between Marples and road building interests was cosy, just think about BR and North British Locomotives...

In 1961 Dr. Beeching was appointed chairman of the newly set-up British Railways Board by the same government that 6 years earlier had given the railways £1,200 million to spend to get back to profitability. All that had subsequently happened was that the operating deficit had increased year-on-year to say nothing about the increasing interest paid on the sums borrowed to cover the holes.

Had the modernisation plan spent the billion quid they had (about fifty billion in today's terms - about half of the possible HS2 outcome) sensibly, Beeching might be vaguely remembered as a former senior manager in ICI. The only reason that he's got the reputation he has is because BR's own management screwed things up so royally and let him in. As ‘Duke of Gloucester’ showed, they couldn't even build a pointless vanity project steam locomotive without messing it up.

The closure programme was then mostly implemented by the next Government which was in power from 1964 to 1970. The railways got off lightly in that only about one third of the network was closed. In view of the costs avoided by not having to maintain and operate thousands of miles of little used railways over the last 70 years, I would maintain that the British taxpayer has been the beneficiary.

But times and circumstances change out of all recognition over three quarters of a century. Today’s problems and issues require contemporary solutions - just winding the clock back will not solve anything.
 
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Dr Hoo

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[In response to yorksrob's point...]

We have had plenty of 'historical' discussions about Beeching and electrification in previous threads.

In the context of THIS thread there was no prospect whatsoever of electrification 'saving' lines like Fleetwood or Ashington back in the 1960s. (As eloquently explained by coppercapped above.)

There is, nevertheless, an irony that having 'saved' the core network by his vision in the 1960s Beeching did make it possible for routes to places like Blackpool and Newcastle to be electrified decades later. Both of the potential re-openings mentioned would NOW be branches from electric networks that might well be worth electrifying (as has happened with re-opened lines like Larkhall, Cannock and (to come) Aberdare).
 

3141

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Although if the regions were already closing unnecessary routes, it begs the question as to why a national policy to massage figures and push through closures was necessary.

The route closure programme strikes me as one of those policies which may have had some merit in the correct circumstances, but was allowed to go on and on in the face of all evidence, way beyond any justifiable extent.

You've misrepresented what I said in #284. I said "BR massaged the figures to justify some closures". You've turned that into "a national policy to massage figures and push through closures". Could it have been deliberate?

The sort of thing I was referring to was a case involving two lines in Hampshire (from memory they were Alresford to Winchester and Andover to Romsey) BR put them together in the proposal to close them, and said they were losing a large amount annually. But most of the losses came from just one of the routes. That's what I meant by massaging - not inventing a national policy to support how you like to view the events of nearly 60 years ago.

A national plan based on statistical evidence to try to make BR profitable was better than piecemeal closures, and as others have pointed out Beeching also paid a lot of attention to freight, where at the time it was expected that profits could be made.

This is why I find the narrative that the trains were all empty, highly disingenuous.

Nobody has said that ALL the trains were empty on the routes that were closed. "Disingenuous" is what your approach looks like.
 

yorksrob

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You've misrepresented what I said in #284. I said "BR massaged the figures to justify some closures". You've turned that into "a national policy to massage figures and push through closures". Could it have been deliberate?

The sort of thing I was referring to was a case involving two lines in Hampshire (from memory they were Alresford to Winchester and Andover to Romsey) BR put them together in the proposal to close them, and said they were losing a large amount annually. But most of the losses came from just one of the routes. That's what I meant by massaging - not inventing a national policy to support how you like to view the events of nearly 60 years ago.

A national plan based on statistical evidence to try to make BR profitable was better than piecemeal closures, and as others have pointed out Beeching also paid a lot of attention to freight, where at the time it was expected that profits could be made.



Nobody has said that ALL the trains were empty on the routes that were closed. "Disingenuous" is what your approach looks like.

Of course it was a national policy. The rot starts at the top in any organisation through the ethos it promotes and the practices it tolerates. The fact that local managers felt that such a course of action was desirable, or even acceptable was due to the route milage cuts at all costs ethos/belief developed during the Beeching era.

Putting the passenger figures of two routes together to massage costs isn't so far from discounting large numbers of passengers in the hope that they might use a different route - a method espoused in the Reshaping report itself.
 

edwin_m

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Like 3141 I was also around long before the 'Beeching Plan’; I well remember the publishing of the Modernisation Plan, its subsequent ‘Re-appraisal’ and the lead up to the ‘Reshaping of British Railways’.

Had the railways been competently run after the end of the Second World War, Beeching (and the whole process) would never have happened. The fundamental issue was that costs were increasing at a rate faster than the management could increase receipts or cut costs.

In this context it should be pointed out that between 1947 and 1968 there was NEVER any assumption that the railways were to operate as a ‘public service’ subsidised by the State. Anyone thinking that is either misguided or misinformed. The 1947 Transport Act required that the British Transport Commission cover its costs ‘taking one year with another’ and that Herbert Morrison, no less, is quoted as saying that subsidising businesses is not good for the management. (If you don’t know who Herbert Morrison was, then look him up!)

Of course there was already a programme of line closures under way when Beeching arrived, but it wasn't enough. The whole point was not to close lines for the sake of it, but to make real savings in running costs. Had the programme been sufficient, Beeching wouldn't have had to get involved.

From the 1920s onwards, increasing income from passengers was always going to be difficult given the growth in the number of motor vehicles in the country. This growth, by the way, was also occurring in all other countries in western Europe as well as North America, Australia, New Zealand, and Japan. As a result roads were being built. I wonder what people would have expected to have happened if, instead of Mr. Marples, Mr. Squeaky Kleane MP had been Transport Minister? Why would the outcome have been any different to what did happen?

And if one thinks the relationship between Marples and road building interests was cosy, just think about BR and North British Locomotives...

In 1961 Dr. Beeching was appointed chairman of the newly set-up British Railways Board by the same government that 6 years earlier had given the railways £1,200 million to spend to get back to profitability. All that had subsequently happened was that the operating deficit had increased year-on-year to say nothing about the increasing interest paid on the sums borrowed to cover the holes.

Had the modernisation plan spent the billion quid they had (about fifty billion in today's terms - about half of the possible HS2 outcome) sensibly, Beeching might be vaguely remembered as a former senior manager in ICI. The only reason that he's got the reputation he has is because BR's own management screwed things up so royally and let him in. As ‘Duke of Gloucester’ showed, they couldn't even build a pointless vanity project steam locomotive without messing it up.

The closure programme was then mostly implemented by the next Government which was in power from 1964 to 1970. The railways got off lightly in that only about one third of the network was closed. In view of the costs avoided by not having to maintain and operate thousands of miles of little used railways over the last 70 years, I would maintain that the British taxpayer has been the beneficiary.

But times and circumstances change out of all recognition over three quarters of a century. Today’s problems and issues require contemporary solutions - just winding the clock back will not solve anything.
I think it was inevitable that the railways would have ceased to be financially profitable, and the Modernisation Plan and Beeching did no more than shift the date by a few years either way. In an era when the government-funded road network was largely empty, it was quicker and cheaper for most people and goods to travel by road, so the railway lost revenue while its fixed costs stayed fairly constant. Not to forget that wage rates for comparable jobs were rising fast at the same time.

Today hardly any railway anywhere in the world survives without some form of government subsidy. High speed lines may cover their operating costs but aren't expected to repay their capital. The benefit of the railways accrues to the economy in general by allowing people to travel without unsustainable increases in road use.

Let's not forget that Shapps's £500m for "reversing Beeching" is accompanied by 50 times that much for roads.
 

yorksrob

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Of course the modernisation plan was used as an excuse by the Government at the day to pursue its ill conceived policy. Yet the core of it - modernisation of the fleet, in terms of diesel, but especially electric, was basically the right thing. Glasgow, West Coast, Kent and alsi diesels on trans-pennine and in Hampshire for example, did drive passenger and revenue growth. The real stinker of the plan was the programme forced upon it by central government - the pick up wagon trade. But Governments don't like to blame their own failure, preferring to project it onto someone else. Who paid in this process ? The poor passenger.

So the modernisation plan was half the cost of HS2 in todays terms. And for that you got a route and branch transformation of the passenger experience, not just on one or two routes but across vast swathes of the country. Not bad going really.
 

lord rathmore

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Like 3141 I was also around long before the 'Beeching Plan’; I well remember the publishing of the Modernisation Plan, its subsequent ‘Re-appraisal’ and the lead up to the ‘Reshaping of British Railways’.

Had the railways been competently run after the end of the Second World War, Beeching (and the whole process) would never have happened. The fundamental issue was that costs were increasing at a rate faster than the management could increase receipts or cut costs.

In this context it should be pointed out that between 1947 and 1968 there was NEVER any assumption that the railways were to operate as a ‘public service’ subsidised by the State. Anyone thinking that is either misguided or misinformed. The 1947 Transport Act required that the British Transport Commission cover its costs ‘taking one year with another’ and that Herbert Morrison, no less, is quoted as saying that subsidising businesses is not good for the management. (If you don’t know who Herbert Morrison was, then look him up!)

Of course there was already a programme of line closures under way when Beeching arrived, but it wasn't enough. The whole point was not to close lines for the sake of it, but to make real savings in running costs. Had the programme been sufficient, Beeching wouldn't have had to get involved.

From the 1920s onwards, increasing income from passengers was always going to be difficult given the growth in the number of motor vehicles in the country. This growth, by the way, was also occurring in all other countries in western Europe as well as North America, Australia, New Zealand, and Japan. As a result roads were being built. I wonder what people would have expected to have happened if, instead of Mr. Marples, Mr. Squeaky Kleane MP had been Transport Minister? Why would the outcome have been any different to what did happen?

And if one thinks the relationship between Marples and road building interests was cosy, just think about BR and North British Locomotives...

In 1961 Dr. Beeching was appointed chairman of the newly set-up British Railways Board by the same government that 6 years earlier had given the railways £1,200 million to spend to get back to profitability. All that had subsequently happened was that the operating deficit had increased year-on-year to say nothing about the increasing interest paid on the sums borrowed to cover the holes.

Had the modernisation plan spent the billion quid they had (about fifty billion in today's terms - about half of the possible HS2 outcome) sensibly, Beeching might be vaguely remembered as a former senior manager in ICI. The only reason that he's got the reputation he has is because BR's own management screwed things up so royally and let him in. As ‘Duke of Gloucester’ showed, they couldn't even build a pointless vanity project steam locomotive without messing it up.

The closure programme was then mostly implemented by the next Government which was in power from 1964 to 1970. The railways got off lightly in that only about one third of the network was closed. In view of the costs avoided by not having to maintain and operate thousands of miles of little used railways over the last 70 years, I would maintain that the British taxpayer has been the beneficiary.

But times and circumstances change out of all recognition over three quarters of a century. Today’s problems and issues require contemporary solutions - just winding the clock back will not solve anything.
I've often wondered about the BR/North British relationship you mention. Why were they allowed to supply defective diesels in such numbers? All NB shunters and mainline diesels were very poor and all were withdrawn early.
 

3141

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Of course it was a national policy. The rot starts at the top in any organisation through the ethos it promotes and the practices it tolerates. The fact that local managers felt that such a course of action was desirable, or even acceptable was due to the route milage cuts at all costs ethos/belief developed during the Beeching era.

Putting the passenger figures of two routes together to massage costs isn't so far from discounting large numbers of passengers in the hope that they might use a different route - a method espoused in the Reshaping report itself.

Thank you for your reply.
 

tbtc

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Ah, the usual mixture of conspiracy theory, straw man arguments (nobody is saying that *nobody* used trains, just that insufficient numbers used them to even claim much of a "social" angle) and carefully forgetting the bigger picture of 1960s Britain.

Look at the boom in motorways (e.g. the graph at the bottom of this page - http://www.ukmotorwayarchive.org.uk/en/openings/index.cfm) - look at the number of railway lines closed each year over the previous decades - look at how small the actual drop in passengers was compared to the "30% of mileage, 55% of stations" planned to close - look at the way that British Rail kept closing lines even into the 1980s.

For all the complaints about Beeching butchering the network, the number of routes "unfairly" closed seem pretty marginal at best - there's been a handful of re-openings but I can't see anything unreasonable on the list. Some mildly grey areas, sure, but it's at the margins of "if this had been kept open then it might be useful today" rather than "if this had been kept open then it'd be profitable and incredibly busy".

The car was the future - rail had been built to solve nineteenth century problems but was outdated for the second half of the twentieth century - freight had dried up into a few core flows - passenger numbers weren't going to be sufficient to pay for driver/ fireman/ conductor - often the Victorian infrastructure needed investing in to keep it going - so to keep lines open we might have needed to reinforce crumbling embankments, invest in brand new diesel trains to replace steam - keeping lines going wasn't cost-free - it would have required capital investment at a time when BR were trying to save money.

If there hadn't been a Beeching (someone would have produced a fairly similar report - it wasn't just one man in a bad mood, closing lines on a whim because he was fed up of visiting faded seaside towns on a wet February afternoon) then the Government wouldn't have been prepared to invest in the railway - it'd have been left to wither away, closing hundreds of miles each year with no end in sight. Beeching gave the railway a starting point on the way back - of course passenger numbers continued to fall (unavoidable when you close half the stations!) but it cut out most of the "worst" lines and allowed the railway to focus more on the kind of simple bulk flows that it does best (both passenger and freight). Either accept the need for some serious "pruning" or just let the railway become unwieldy - something needed to be done, if you wanted a healthy railway.

(as an aside, whilst the amount of token "parliamentary" services seem ridiculous nowadays, imagine the amount of parliamentary services you'd have had if we'd kept thousands of miles of unviable routes!)
 

Meerkat

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Some mildly grey areas, sure, but it's at the margins of "if this had been kept open then it might be useful today" rather than "if this had been kept open then it'd be profitable and incredibly busy".
You could have also emphasised ‘today’.
They would have had to be kept open for 30+ years haemorrhaging cash until they maybe become viable, though not necessarily enough to cover the major upgrade they would probably have needed at some point.
 

BigCj34

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Ah, the usual mixture of conspiracy theory, straw man arguments (nobody is saying that *nobody* used trains, just that insufficient numbers used them to even claim much of a "social" angle) and carefully forgetting the bigger picture of 1960s Britain.

Look at the boom in motorways (e.g. the graph at the bottom of this page - http://www.ukmotorwayarchive.org.uk/en/openings/index.cfm) - look at the number of railway lines closed each year over the previous decades - look at how small the actual drop in passengers was compared to the "30% of mileage, 55% of stations" planned to close - look at the way that British Rail kept closing lines even into the 1980s.

For all the complaints about Beeching butchering the network, the number of routes "unfairly" closed seem pretty marginal at best - there's been a handful of re-openings but I can't see anything unreasonable on the list. Some mildly grey areas, sure, but it's at the margins of "if this had been kept open then it might be useful today" rather than "if this had been kept open then it'd be profitable and incredibly busy".

The car was the future - rail had been built to solve nineteenth century problems but was outdated for the second half of the twentieth century - freight had dried up into a few core flows - passenger numbers weren't going to be sufficient to pay for driver/ fireman/ conductor - often the Victorian infrastructure needed investing in to keep it going - so to keep lines open we might have needed to reinforce crumbling embankments, invest in brand new diesel trains to replace steam - keeping lines going wasn't cost-free - it would have required capital investment at a time when BR were trying to save money.

If there hadn't been a Beeching (someone would have produced a fairly similar report - it wasn't just one man in a bad mood, closing lines on a whim because he was fed up of visiting faded seaside towns on a wet February afternoon) then the Government wouldn't have been prepared to invest in the railway - it'd have been left to wither away, closing hundreds of miles each year with no end in sight. Beeching gave the railway a starting point on the way back - of course passenger numbers continued to fall (unavoidable when you close half the stations!) but it cut out most of the "worst" lines and allowed the railway to focus more on the kind of simple bulk flows that it does best (both passenger and freight). Either accept the need for some serious "pruning" or just let the railway become unwieldy - something needed to be done, if you wanted a healthy railway.

(as an aside, whilst the amount of token "parliamentary" services seem ridiculous nowadays, imagine the amount of parliamentary services you'd have had if we'd kept thousands of miles of unviable routes!)
I don't know if France ever had its own Beeching Axe, though certainly many lines closed in the last century, but there are large stretches of the network where there is just one service a day as the infrastructure degrades further. Who knows maybe we could've ended up like that, but without the LGV network!
 
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