A different route for British Railways?

[Greenback]

Judging by the loadings on SV - Pontardulais , and the oft quoted Carmarthen to Aberystwyth line , I very much doubt it they could ever survived. The "Bont" local was often a single carriage train , with census returns (verified by research at the National Archives in Kew) , as less than double figures , hence early cutting back - even in the early 1950' - we all know about the Carmarthen line.

I wasn't talking so much about the local trains, although from what I've seen of old timetables the service was too irregular and infrequent to be of that much use anyway. I was thinking along the lines of the Llanelli - Pontardulais section being closed and the Bont to Swansea line being retained. That does leave the problem of Swansea Victoria, it's just that I've always been puzzled by the strange diversion to Llanelli, simply to access High Street station.

It's difficult for me to try and understand the reasoning behind some of the decisions that were made before I was even born. Some are more obvious, such as the Swansea - Treherbert route, where the decline of the coal industry must have had a massive impact. After all, the reason these lines were built in the first place was coal traffic from the valleys to the coast.

 

[Greenback]

The fact was that reducing costs required capital investment, which really could not be justified. On the Taunton to Barnstaple line, for most of the middle section half a dozen passengers was common in the early 1960s. It had fully depreciated 1920s 43xx steam locos and 1940s Hawksworth coaches. And yes, they did get some investment late in the day (probably in Fiennes' era at Paddington). 2-car dmus arrived. Two thirds of the passing loops and associated signalboxes were ripped out in a substantial operation for the civils. Must have cost a lot to do. At the end, still half a dozen passengers per train. Stupidly, the Class 118 dmus (51302 etc) were built without gangway connections, the centre trailers were parked somewhere but still the guard could not get through to collect fares so the stations all still needed to be staffed. With two power cars, each with two underfloor engines, there must have been some trains which had more diesel engines than passengers. It would actually have been practical to lock all the doors except the one car with the guard's compartment, the passengers would still have fitted and fares then be collected on board. It would even have been cheaper to run the trains for free, the station staff likely alone cost more than the total takings.

Maybe this particular route is not the best example of how costs could have been reduced. I'm not saying that every line could have been saved, and the unsuitable DMU's used between Taunton and Barnstaple were more of a hindrance than a help by the looks of things.

As much as some may not have liked it, stripping down to a basic railway saved some lines from closure in the years after Beeching, so I don't believe that doing the same thing a few years earlier would not have been effective had the mindset and financial analysis been a little different to what they were in 1963. Again, not all the lines that closed deserved to remain open, but I'm convinced that some deserved to survive. Maybe some that stayed should have closed instead?

 

[Taunton]

I suspect that there was some departmental jockeying in the Taunton-Barnstaple example that led to the civil engineering expenditure on simplifying the station structures but not the staffing. The WR at the time had a certain style of simplifying the infrastructure which led to complete demolition to ground level of everything not required (platforms, signalboxes, points, signals, etc), and spreading copious amounts of new ballast everywhere. They did the same on the old LSWR lines in the West Country. Just one running line and the old main building and a single platform remained. The single line signalling was all adapted to suit, but in the old way - new tokens were cast for the revised single line sections. I've got a couple of the old ones here now!

The timetables were never adapted when the diesels came along, and trains waited for three or four minutes at every station to keep to time. I think the principal thing the station staff now did was to turn off the oil lamps out after the last train - some of the remote stations had no electricity to the end.

 

[Meerkat]

You only have to look on a map at some of the ‘shouldn’t have been closed’ rural lines to see that even if public transport was deemed essential the answer was to subsidise buses, and improve the roads if necessary to speed them up. Buses go through the middle of places, some of the stations are miles away.
I do agree that more effort should have been made to leave some closed lines clear of development, and leave space to reopen stations or requadruple (the blocking developments are often pretty low value)

 

[leytongabriel]

Major towns and communities cut off from the rail network. Swathes of the country left dependent on the car and poor quality bus services. Of course he went too far.

There's also a good number of cases where decisions to close or not to close were made on the basis of dodgy figures, deliberate running down and the presence or absence of marginal constituencies. None of which are good reflections of a coherent transport policy.