I am not a sentimentalist unlike, perhaps, many here and I try to look at things in a dispassionate fashion. I don't really care if you could once get the train to Little Snoddling via the Pines Express over the S&D. I do care if it was right to shut that line.
Was there an alternative? Costs seem to have been very high and receipts low on many of these lines. Surely they had to go if the railways were to survive? Surely we were long overdue a rationalisation of the often complex and duplicated railway system bequeathed to us by the early railway booms?
That said - Did too many lines go and did lines go that, perhaps, shouldn't have? Of course. Does it look like underhand tactics were used to facilitate closure? Certainly. Would the data used to justify closure stand up to scrutiny? Perhaps not in every case. However, we have to be very careful not to look back using what we know now. We have to look at the case with what was known then.
Railways were old hat, the car was king and car ownership and new motorways were changing the way people lived, worked and moved about. There were 6m+ cars in private ownership in the early 1960’s so why go on a dirty, slow, old (steam?) train when you could zoom there in your own Mini or Cortina filled with cheap petrol. Lorries (free of the common carrier rules) were taking juicy freight contracts from the railways just as bus services took passengers. Decisions based on demographics of 1960’s Britain cannot be compared with Britain of the 21st century. Too often we see people complain that a line was closed in the 60’s which would be useful today based on what we know today. They didn’t know then what we know now and they can’t be criticised for that!
There were thousands of carriages used only a couple of times a year for summer holiday traffic and freight was hugely unprofitable with wagons laying idle for days in private yards and utilisation of the rest low. 50% of the route mileage produced just 1% of receipts and it was clear the railway ( as it was) couldn't compete but we still had the pickup freight trundeling up a remote branch line every day. Part of the change was the introduction of long distance freightliner services and block trainloads over wagon load services. Part of the modernisation was the focus on long distance commuter routes and fast intercity travel – all things we take for granted today.
Money was leeching out of the aged railways at an alarming rate (£140m per year) and modernisation and increased efficiency was needed badly. Did Beeching not just make the decisions that anyone in his position would have had to take? Was there little choice, really, than to cut away the deadwood and save the rest? OF COURSE the cuts did inestimable damage to some communities and left many areas bereft of railway services. I do not think all possible avenues were explored to save money ( reduction of station staff, sale of station buildings, demolition of station buildings, simplification of stations, sale of goods yards, reduced level of mainteance pay trains, reduced servcies, more DMU operations, reduced track layouts and signalling etc) and I don’t think the data collected was always fair and accurate but were there, really, any alternatives? The railway could not go on pouring money away and hope to survive
