Beeching closures

[6Gman]

Moderator note: Split from https://www.railforums.co.uk/thread...ural-lines-instead.185921/page-4#post-4104340

St Davids has never been rail connected and hasn't suffered a Beeching closure. You don't miss what you have never had.

Since it's over 50 years since the Beeching closures what proportion of the population are "missing" what they used to have ?

 

[Railwaysceptic]

Since it's over 50 years since the Beeching closures what proportion of the population are "missing" what they used to have ?

I'm old enough to have lived through the Beeching period and I remember it well. I also remember lines which are now closed but frankly I don't miss them. The line closures I do regret were not done by Dr. Beeching but were done long after he had gone.

 

[yorksrob]

I'm old enough to have lived through the Beeching period and I remember it well. I also remember lines which are now closed but frankly I don't miss them. The line closures I do regret were not done by Dr. Beeching but were done long after he had gone.

Most of them were on his list though. Dr B was instrumental in forming the policy.

 

[RT4038]

Most of them were on his list though. Dr B was instrumental in forming the policy.

There is already a line being rebuilt (Bicester-Bletchley) and look at the cost and time taken for this. Used as a yardstick, I wouldn't hold out much hope for the Tavistocks of this country!

 

[Killingworth]

There is already a line being rebuilt (Bicester-Bletchley) and look at the cost and time taken for this. Used as a yardstick, I wouldn't hold out much hope for the Tavistocks of this country!

The Borders railway at 30 miles was the longest line opened for 100 years. It can be done.

It's taking an age but passenger trains should run again towards Ashington and Blyth within 5-10 years.

 

[yorksrob]

As always, wrong. The closing of little used stations and branch lines began in the 1920s and that process was accelerated in the 1950s, long before Dr. Beeching took command of British Railways. Example No 1: The Midland & Great Northern Joint Railway. Example No 2: On the Welsh Marches Line between Hereford and Ludlow; Moreton-on-Lugg, Dinmore, Ford Bridge, Berrington & Eye, Woofferton, all closed in the 1950s.

After Dr. Beeching was sacked, lines which he had decided to keep open were closed. Example No 3: the Varsity Line, now called East West Rail.

No, Dr Beeching was on the Stedeford Committee which developed Marples' policy on route closures as the primary way of reducing losses.

The Dr then instilled this ethos of cutting route milage at all costs in his management teams who stayed on through the sixties at least.

True, lines were closed before on an individual basis, but pre-Beeching, there wasn't an idealogical drive to reduce overall route milage.

Learn some history.

 

[Xenophon PCDGS]

Learn some history.

There were quite a number of railway station and line closures in the 1930s.

 

[yorksrob]

There were quite a number of railway station and line closures in the 1930s.

Indeed, and this I do not dispute. Merely that they were done on an individual basis, rather than a matter of national/company policy.

 

[Railwaysceptic]

No, Dr Beeching was on the Stedeford Committee which developed Marples' policy on route closures as the primary way of reducing losses.

The Dr then instilled this ethos of cutting route milage at all costs in his management teams who stayed on through the sixties at least.

True, lines were closed before on an individual basis, but pre-Beeching, there wasn't an idealogical drive to reduce overall route milage.

Learn some history.

I know the history better than you. Your assertion that Dr. Beeching "instilled this ethos of cutting route mil(e)age at all costs in his management teams" is clearly wrong because we still have today many basket case routes losing money hand over fist. Equally, the fact that we still have
minimally used stations like Dent and Shippea Hill shows quite clearly that Dr. Beeching was not obsessive or ideologically-driven about closing down loss making activities. Dr. Beeching's views about surplus railway routes was not based on ideology.

 

[tbtc]

I'm not convinced that you're much poorer due to the support provided to the Whitby branch than for any other public service you may or may not use.

That line is supported because many people use it (as would many more, if they could physically fit onto the train).

I thought that the passenger numbers showed that the current loadings on the Whitby branch aren't enough to half fill a 142?

If there's one journey that's so busy that passengers can't fit onto the train (the late one from Whitby back to Middlesbrough?) then by all means strengthen it but that just shows that the other journeys have even lower passenger numbers on average.

The new stations fund was an excellent example of what can be achieved when funding is set aside for the specific purpose of linking settlements to the railway. We just need a "new lines fund" to make sure that places such as Wisbech and Tavistock aren't left behind.

So you don't think Ripon is a suitable candidate for funds. OK then. Let that proposal compete on its merits against the other reopening proposals for a new lines fund. There are plenty of good proposals out there, but never anyone prepared to cough up the money.

It's telling that you realise that re-opening old lines will have such a poor business case that the only way they can compete is against other re-openings...

It also shows that, for you, re-opening old lines is an end in itself, rather than wanting the best improvements (whether that means improving existing lines, new stations on current routes, re-opening old alignments or building a brand new line like HS2)

There shouldn't be any realistic reason why WY Metro style wooden halts couldn't be built for those settlements, with a path to the nearest road.

Construction standards have changed a lot since the '80s

No - what I’m saying is that in building new railways, of which I have done a few, the difference in cost between a twin track high speed railway, and a twin track “regular” railway, is surprising little.

All the pre-construction costs are essentially the same: feasibility, development, consents, design, land purchase - it doesn’t matter what sort of railway you build, these are to all intents and purposes identical on a per mile, like for like basis. This can represent between a quarter and a third of total costs.

Within construction, many of the costs are the same - site compounds, project management, drainage, utilities, highways, traffic management, earthworks, over bridges, environmental mitigation. This is another quarter of the costs or so.

More of the construction costs have, frankly, small increments for high speed - under bridges, formation, track (essentially a little more ballast), electrification (if provided, obvs), signalling.

At the end of construction, testing, commissioning, entry into service an demobilisation is no different for high speed rather than regulars railways. This is about 10% of costs.

All told, around 70% of the costs are the same, and the remaining 30% have an extra 10-30% for high speed. So about 10% difference overall.

This is very interesting and important stuff, from someone who has had plenty of experience of getting these things done. Shame it'll go over the heads of some...

There is already a line being rebuilt (Bicester-Bletchley) and look at the cost and time taken for this. Used as a yardstick, I wouldn't hold out much hope for the Tavistocks of this country!

True - the various problems with East-West (and the Borders line etc) should be sobering for those desperate to re-open any old line.

And the East-West line ought to be high up the list, given the popularity of Oxford/ Milton Keynes, the way it links other lines together etc

True, but they are building that more or less as a mainline.

One would hope that there was scope for some savings for a single line route with minimal signalling.

Well, @Bald Rick 's comment above is enlightening on such things - you'd still be doing the land purchase, the project management etc, there'd only be marginally lower staff costs

Also, I'd imagine some people suggesting a single line re-opening (because they are desperate for any re-opening) would then complain about how short sighted a single line was, and how it'd have been cheaper to build it as double track (rather than potentially have to do so in a couple of decades time), like the Borders line (which can cope fine with a half hourly service, and passenger numbers aren't justifying much more than that any time soon)

I know the history better than you. Your assertion that Dr. Beeching "instilled this ethos of cutting route mil(e)age at all costs in his management teams" is clearly wrong because we still have today many basket case routes losing money hand over fist. Equally, the fact that we still have
minimally used stations like Dent and Shippea Hill shows quite clearly that Dr. Beeching was not obsessive or ideologically-driven about closing down loss making activities. Dr. Beeching's views about surplus railway routes was not based on ideology.

Good point - for all that Beeching is portrayed as a zealot on here, there are a number of lines that still have pathetic levels of passengers even after numbers nationwide have doubled over the past generation - I think that he made most of the big calls right (and, whilst he could have spared a handful of lines, he could certainly have gone a lot tougher on others)

 

[Dr Hoo]

No, Dr Beeching was on the Stedeford Committee which developed Marples' policy on route closures as the primary way of reducing losses.

The Dr then instilled this ethos of cutting route milage at all costs in his management teams who stayed on through the sixties at least.

True, lines were closed before on an individual basis, but pre-Beeching, there wasn't an idealogical drive to reduce overall route milage.

Learn some history.

I know that we have been here many times before in various threads but Dr B certainly didn't espouse the idea of reducing route mileage "at all costs". He identified for the first time which third of the then-surviving network was still only generating 1-2% of passenger and freight traffic; a proportion that was set to fall even further given (then-current) social trends in car ownership, rural depopulation, decline of coal as a domestic fuel, holidays abroad, etc.
Dr B and Marples also appreciated that investment capital was extremely scarce and it made sense to apply it to the busiest routes. This often had the benefit of allowing duplicate routes dating back to nineteenth century competition or railway politics to be rationalised.
The Reshaping Report set out a range of expected annual financial improvement from passenger line and station closures of £29-31million at contemporary prices.
The Report's other recommendations for freight, workshops, etc. were expected to produce the bulk of the annual improvement at £86-116million.
(It is interesting to note that no benefits were claimed for many of Dr B's other longer term achievements such as electrification of the Bournemouth and Glasgow-Gourock lines, the proper definition of an Inter City product, the creation of a major research capability at Derby and the corporate identity.)
What was that about learning some history?

 

[Killingworth]

I know the history better than you. Your assertion that Dr. Beeching "instilled this ethos of cutting route mil(e)age at all costs in his management teams" is clearly wrong because we still have today many basket case routes losing money hand over fist. Equally, the fact that we still have
minimally used stations like Dent and Shippea Hill shows quite clearly that Dr. Beeching was not obsessive or ideologically-driven about closing down loss making activities. Dr. Beeching's views about surplus railway routes was not based on ideology.

I suspect the 1963 Beeching report is cited a lot more often than it's fully read, and the 1982 Serpel Report often gets overlooked altogether. It was about that time that the pendulum stopped swinging towards cut backs, but it was quite a few more years before the momentum started gathering in the other direction towards privatisation in the 1990s.

 

[yorksrob]

I know the history better than you. Your assertion that Dr. Beeching "instilled this ethos of cutting route mil(e)age at all costs in his management teams" is clearly wrong because we still have today many basket case routes losing money hand over fist. Equally, the fact that we still have
minimally used stations like Dent and Shippea Hill shows quite clearly that Dr. Beeching was not obsessive or ideologically-driven about closing down loss making activities. Dr. Beeching's views about surplus railway routes was not based on ideology.

No, the reason that we still have socially necessary railways such as the Settle & Carlisle line, was that ordinary people pointed out that Beeching's philosophy was a disaster, and that even employees of British Rail felt that the route deserved to be judged on its own obvious merits.

Beeching would have destroyed many of the railways that we use today, given half the chance.

Again I say, look at history.

 

[yorksrob]

I know that we have been here many times before in various threads but Dr B certainly didn't espouse the idea of reducing route mileage "at all costs". He identified for the first time which third of the then-surviving network was still only generating 1-2% of passenger and freight traffic; a proportion that was set to fall even further given (then-current) social trends in car ownership, rural depopulation, decline of coal as a domestic fuel, holidays abroad, etc.
Dr B and Marples also appreciated that investment capital was extremely scarce and it made sense to apply it to the busiest routes. This often had the benefit of allowing duplicate routes dating back to nineteenth century competition or railway politics to be rationalised.
The Reshaping Report set out a range of expected annual financial improvement from passenger line and station closures of £29-31million at contemporary prices.
The Reports other recommendations for freight, workshops, etc. were expected to produce the bulk of the annual improvement at £86-116million.
(It is interesting to note that no benefits were claimed for many of Dr B's other longer term achievements such as electrification of the Bournemouth and Glasgow-Gourock lines, the proper definition of an Inter City product, the creation of a major research capability at Derby and the corporate identity.)
What was that about learning some history?

You choose the moth-eaten Bournemouth line electrification scheme, which would have been done so much better, and more comprehensively completed without the penny pinching of the Beeching/Marples regime.

Beeching/Marples were the idiots who made the Bournemouth Line Electrification scheme silver standard when it should have been gold.

 

[RT4038]

Dr B and Marples also appreciated that investment capital was extremely scarce and it made sense to apply it to the busiest routes.

This is simply not understood, and/or not believed by some posters. Some of these also believe that Dr B and Marples could/should somehow have 'swung' the spending priorities of the Government at that time towards retaining the obsolete railway network against the other pressing needs, including the expansion of the motorway system. Quite absurd.

 

[yorksrob]

This is simply not understood, and/or not believed by some posters. Some of these also believe that Dr B and Marples could/should somehow have 'swung' the spending priorities of the Government at that time towards retaining the obsolete railway network against the other pressing needs, including the expansion of the motorway system. Quite absurd.

how was it a social railway was enshrined in legislation in 1967, yet was supposedly impossible five years before ?

 

[Adsy125]

You choose the moth-eaten Bournemouth line electrification scheme, which would have been done so much better, and more comprehensively completed without the penny pinching of the Beeching/Marples regime.

Beeching/Marples were the idiots who made the Bournemouth Line Electrification scheme silver standard when it should have been gold.

Source?

 

[Dr Hoo]

how was it a social railway was enshrined in legislation in 1967, yet was supposedly impossible five years before ?

Largely because (although some people will never admit it) Ernest Marples and Dr Beeching had done a lot of the spadework in advocating the use of social cost-benefit analysis and urban transport integration (even proposing the possibility of subsidy) in addressing transport problems. As I have explained before, the 'gold standard' Victoria Line sprang from Marples' acceptance of this approach; the Buchanan 'Traffic in Towns" report had been commissioned and published; and the preliminary Conurbation Studies (which led on to the establishment of the Passenger Transport Executives) had been undertaken. It was just a pity that the change in government in 1964 broke the momentum in policy development with a few more years of closures of many hundreds of miles of route and hundreds of stations (including some not even proposed in the Reshaping Report) before actually changing much more. The 25kV and third rail electrification teams that had been been built up were allowed to disperse in the absence of further schemes...
Need I go on?

 

[Railwaysceptic]

No, the reason that we still have socially necessary railways such as the Settle & Carlisle line, was that ordinary people pointed out that Beeching's philosophy was a disaster, and that even employees of British Rail felt that the route deserved to be judged on its own obvious merits.

Beeching would have destroyed many of the railways that we use today, given half the chance.

Again I say, look at history.

Increasingly it is apparent that you are the one who needs to brush up on history and, more to the point, view history not through the prism of your own prejudices but with an open mind.

 

[yorksrob]

Source?

Source - me.

You only have to look at the Kent electrification scheme to see how the Southern Region would have done the scheme properly, given the resources.

 

[yorksrob]

Increasingly it is apparent that you are the one who needs to brush up on history and, more to the point, view history not through the prism of your own prejudices but with an open mind.

Waffle.

Do you dispute the fact that it was BR policy at the time to run down and close regional routes such as the S&C, and that the fact that so many survived was down to the action of the public and a few enlightened BR managers, in the face of company policy ?

I'd like to see your historical evidence to the contrary.

 

[yorksrob]

Largely because (although some people will never admit it) Ernest Marples and Dr Beeching had done a lot of the spadework in advocating the use of social cost-benefit analysis and urban transport integration (even proposing the possibility of subsidy) in addressing transport problems. As I have explained before, the 'gold standard' Victoria Line sprang from Marples' acceptance of this approach; the Buchanan 'Traffic in Towns" report had been commissioned and published; and the preliminary Conurbation Studies (which led on to the establishment of the Passenger Transport Executives) had been undertaken. It was just a pity that the change in government in 1964 broke the momentum in policy development with a few more years of closures of many hundreds of miles of route and hundreds of stations (including some not even proposed in the Reshaping Report) before actually changing much more. The 25kV and third rail electrification teams that had been been built up were allowed to disperse in the absence of further schemes...
Need I go on?

But they didn't exttend that cost-benefit approach to the railway in the regions.

Do you honestly believe that had Beeching/Marples stayed in power in 1964, they would have changed their approach to the regional railway ?

 

[coppercapped]

No, Dr Beeching was on the Stedeford Committee which developed Marples' policy on route closures as the primary way of reducing losses.

The Dr then instilled this ethos of cutting route milage at all costs in his management teams who stayed on through the sixties at least.

True, lines were closed before on an individual basis, but pre-Beeching, there wasn't an idealogical drive to reduce overall route milage.

Learn some history.

Oh, for heaven's sake, not again?

You bang on about this every few months and seem incapable of understanding what other people - who know history a lot better than you do - tell you what happened and the reasons why these things happened.

To make it clear at the start - THERE WAS NO CONSPIRACY.

The railway's profitability had been sliding since the early 1950s. This was worrying for the Government as the dividend (of 3%) on the Government stock which had been issued to the shareholders of the Big 4 on their nationalisation was intended to be paid by the profits made by the British Transport Commission. By 1953 these profits had ceased to exist and the burden of these payments then fell on the taxpayer.

The long serving seasoned railwaymen convinced the Government of the day that if the railways were dieselised and electrified and some modern marshalling yards were built then the railways would return to a stable financial position. In 1955 the Churchill and Eden governments approved the expenditure of £1,200 million on the Modernisation Plan - about £40 billion in today's money.

There was little or no effect on the overall financial position - by 1960 losses had grown to around £100 million per year, about £4 billion in today's money which is roughly equivalent to the grants and payments made by the DfT to today's railway industry. These losses showed no signs of slowing - and the amount of money paid to service the increasing debt was also inexorably increasing.

So the long serving and seasoned railwaymen were given a new boss from private industry who understood cost analysis.

Had the modernisation plan spent the money sensibly, Beeching would be (un)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 71000 'Duke of Gloucester' showed, they couldn't even build a pointless vanity project steam locomotive without f&*^@$g it up.

Edit: added last clause to the final sentence of para. 4 for clarity.

 

[Railwaysceptic]

Waffle.

Do you dispute the fact that it was BR policy at the time to run down and close regional routes such as the S&C, and that the fact that so many survived was down to the action of the public and a few enlightened BR managers, in the face of company policy ?

I'd like to see your historical evidence to the contrary.

Ah! An attempt at obfuscation!

I have never denied that closing little-used lines and stations were part of Dr. Beeching's strategy. What I have denied is your false assertion that this was some new and wicked policy introduced by Dr. Beeching for ideological reasons and never seen before. I also deny your - sometimes implied, sometimes openly declared - contention that closures were the whole of his strategy. Unlike you, I pay great attention to the positive changes he introduced.

As for regional routes, once again you are ignoring the facts. Dr. Beeching identified that the railway routes fell into three main types: those which were pointless and should be closed; those which were profitable and should receive investment; and those about which a decision should be delayed because they fell into neither of the other two categories. This last group included such erstwhile main lines as Basingstoke to Exeter and Newcastle to Edinburgh. It also included the Settle to Carlisle Line. Dr. Beeching did not close these lines - they still exist!

After Dr. Beeching returned to I.C.I. in mid 1965 and Barbara Castle became Minister of Transport, the overall policy regarding railway provision and public subsidy continued to evolve. One of your more frequent mistakes is that you insist that there was no such evolution and that the entire process throughout the 1960s was one continuing conspiracy to damage the railway system in this country.

 

[coppercapped]

Ah! An attempt at obfuscation!

I have never denied that closing little-used lines and stations were part of Dr. Beeching's strategy. What I have denied is your false assertion that this was some new and wicked policy introduced by Dr. Beeching for ideological reasons and never seen before. I also deny your - sometimes implied, sometimes openly declared - contention that closures were the whole of his strategy. Unlike you, I pay great attention to the positive changes he introduced.

As for regional routes, once again you are ignoring the facts. Dr. Beeching identified that the railway routes fell into three main types: those which were pointless and should be closed; those which were profitable and should receive investment; and those about which a decision should be delayed because they fell into neither of the other two categories. This last group included such erstwhile main lines as Basingstoke to Exeter and Newcastle to Edinburgh. It also included the Settle to Carlisle Line. Dr. Beeching did not close these lines - they still exist!

After Dr. Beeching returned to I.C.I. in mid 1965 and Barbara Castle became Minister of Transport, the overall policy regarding railway provision and public subsidy continued to evolve. One of your more frequent mistakes is that you insist that there was no such evolution and that the entire process throughout the 1960s was one continuing conspiracy to damage the railway system in this country.

I agree with all that you have written, but I would point out in the interests of accuracy for our younger readers(!) that Tom Fraser was Labour's Minister of Transport for about a year before Barbara Castle was appointed. This does not affect the main thrust of your argument.

 

[yorksrob]

Oh, for heaven's sake, not again?

You bang on about this every few months and seem incapable of understanding what other people - who know history a lot better than you do - tell you what happened and the reasons why these things happened.

To make it clear at the start - THERE WAS NO CONSPIRACY.

The railway's profitability had been sliding since the early 1950s. This was worrying for the Government as the dividend (of 3%) on the Government stock which had been issued to the shareholders of the Big 4 on their nationalisation was intended to be paid by the profits made by the British Transport Commission. By 1953 these profits had ceased to exist and the burden of these payments then fell on the taxpayer.

The long serving seasoned railwaymen convinced the Government of the day that if the railways were dieselised and electrified and some modern marshalling yards were built then the railways would return to a stable financial position. In 1955 the Churchill and Eden governments approved the expenditure of £1,200 million on the Modernisation Plan - about £40 billion in today's money.

There was little or no effect on the overall financial position - by 1960 losses had grown to around £100 million per year, about £4 billion in today's money which is roughly equivalent to the grants and payments made by the DfT to today's railway industry. These losses showed no signs of slowing - and the amount of money paid to service the increasing debt was also inexorably increasing.

So the long serving and seasoned railwaymen were given a new boss from private industry who understood cost analysis.

Had the modernisation plan spent the money sensibly, Beeching would be (un)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 71000 'Duke of Gloucester' showed, they couldn't even build a pointless vanity project steam locomotive without f&*^@$g it up.

Edit: added last clause to the final sentence of para. 4 for clarity.

Beeching was appointed (after having helped to formulate the national policy on route closures) because the railway was losing money.

The vast majority of things the Modernisation plan money was spent on (electrification of main lines and dieselification of secondary routes) helped to reduce costs from what they would have been, and equipped the passenger service for the next forty years.

That said, even if you'd been personally put in charge of Modernisation plan spending, it probably still wouldn't have reduced the rise in personal motoring, nor would it have got the common carrier obligation repealed, so the railway would have probably still have been in deficit.

You use the colourful language with the word 'conspiracy'. I prefer to use the term 'national policy', to describe the re-shaping of the network. It was still poorly conceived.

Ah! An attempt at obfuscation!

I have never denied that closing little-used lines and stations were part of Dr. Beeching's strategy. What I have denied is your false assertion that this was some new and wicked policy introduced by Dr. Beeching for ideological reasons and never seen before. I also deny your - sometimes implied, sometimes openly declared - contention that closures were the whole of his strategy. Unlike you, I pay great attention to the positive changes he introduced.

As for regional routes, once again you are ignoring the facts. Dr. Beeching identified that the railway routes fell into three main types: those which were pointless and should be closed; those which were profitable and should receive investment; and those about which a decision should be delayed because they fell into neither of the other two categories. This last group included such erstwhile main lines as Basingstoke to Exeter and Newcastle to Edinburgh. It also included the Settle to Carlisle Line. Dr. Beeching did not close these lines - they still exist!

After Dr. Beeching returned to I.C.I. in mid 1965 and Barbara Castle became Minister of Transport, the overall policy regarding railway provision and public subsidy continued to evolve. One of your more frequent mistakes is that you insist that there was no such evolution and that the entire process throughout the 1960s was one continuing conspiracy to damage the railway system in this country.

And I have never denied that railway companies actively pruned and managed the network before the appointment of Beeching. This was done on a line by line basis.

The policy which Beeching formed (well before he became Chairman of BR) started with the premise that the railway needed to be smaller and a top-down approach was imposed across the railway to achieve this. This was comparatively new.

If you've read my posts on other threads regarding this topic, you can't have read them very well, because I frequently cite the social railway and other reforms introduced by Castle as key improvements in railway policy (albeit too little, too late but better than nothing). My point is that Marples and Fraser certainly had to be gotten out of the way to achieve this. They would not have embarked on such a policy themselves.

I also suspect that Beeching had to be gotten out of the way as well. Whilst he, theoretically could have taken orders from the Minister to manage a social railway, I suspect that he had too much personally invested in the closure programme. My feeling is that he wouldn't have been overly anxious for the development of basic social railways etc to have been a success. His comments in the 1980's about the GW route to Birmingham and the ECML North of Newcastle bear me out on this - The social railway was a long established part of transport policy by this time, yet he was still talking about closing main lines.

 

[Killingworth]

May I cite a comedy film of 1953 in evidence that branch line closures were already common at that time. The Titfield Thunderbolt showed how public opposition was enlisted to keep a branch line open. Watching how trains to Titfield finished, long before Beeching and Marples, may make a more interesting and amusing use of time than repeating the same arguments we've heard many times before.

When I read Beeching, and cast my mind back to how things were at that time, it seems very reasonable. Reading it without referencing Serpell and all other changes since, both inside the rail industry and without, will ignore how positions have been altered as time has passed.

As one brought up steeped in the North Eastern heritage I recall the horror felt when it was suggested the ECML should be truncated at Newcastle. That wasn't Beeching. That was when a line got drawn in the sand, but it was some time before rail use recovered to start justifying any major improvements.

 

[coppercapped]

B
SNIP all the bits which repeat your world picture...

If you've read my posts on other threads regarding this topic, you can't have read them very well, because I frequently cite the social railway and other reforms introduced by Castle as key improvements in railway policy (albeit too little, too late but better than nothing). My point is that Marples and Fraser certainly had to be gotten out of the way to achieve this. They would not have embarked on such a policy themselves.

I also suspect that Beeching had to be gotten out of the way as well. Whilst he, theoretically could have taken orders from the Minister to manage a social railway, I suspect that he had too much personally invested in the closure programme. My feeling is that he wouldn't have been overly anxious for the development of basic social railways etc to have been a success. His comments in the 1980's about the GW route to Birmingham and the ECML North of Newcastle bear me out on this - The social railway was a long established part of transport policy by this time, yet he was still talking about closing main lines.

Rather than suggesting that I and other have not read your posts with understanding, I suggest that we have because of the number of people who have tried to point you in the direction of understanding. Until now without success.

The suggestions that you make in that part of your post which I have not cut show that it is you who has not done the reading.

Page 22 of 'The Reshaping of British Railways' report states, in connection with suburban rail services in Glasgow, Edinburgh, Newcastle, Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds, Birmingham and Cardiff - with London being treated as a special case, that:

No city other than London is nearly so predominantly dependent upon suburban train services. All of them are served by public road transport which carries a high proportion of the total daily flow, and the movement and parking of private transport is still sufficiently free to make it a possible alternative to rail. Also none of these services is loaded as heavily as many London services.

As in the case of London, fares on these services feeding other cities are low, sometimes very low, and none of them pays its way. There is no possibility of a solution being found, however, merely by increasing or reducing fares. Increases in fares on rail services alone would drive traffic to available alternative modes of travel and yield little increase in revenue, if any.

The Report goes on to say:

The right solution is most likely to be found by 'Total Social Benefit Studies' of the kind now being explored by the Ministry of Transport and British Railways jointly. In cases of the type under consideration it may be cheaper to subsidise the railways than to bear the other cost burdens which will arise if they are closed.

Beeching was quite happy to embrace such concepts as 'Total Social Benefit Studies' and at the time Marples was the Minister of Transport. So to suggest that these concepts would not have been pursued by the people responsible for starting them simply shows ignorance. To suggest that such Cost-Benefit studies would not have been extended to other business areas other than travel in the great cities once the methods of analysis had been better developed is a mighty leap in the dark.

 

[yorksrob]

Rather than suggesting that I and other have not read your posts with understanding, I suggest that we have because of the number of people who have tried to point you in the direction of understanding. Until now without success.

The suggestions that you make in that part of your post which I have not cut show that it is you who has not done the reading.

Page 22 of 'The Reshaping of British Railways' report states, in connection with suburban rail services in Glasgow, Edinburgh, Newcastle, Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds, Birmingham and Cardiff - with London being treated as a special case, that:

The Report goes on to say:

Beeching was quite happy to embrace such concepts as 'Total Social Benefit Studies' and at the time Marples was the Minister of Transport. So to suggest that these concepts would not have been pursued by the people responsible for starting them simply shows ignorance. To suggest that such Cost-Benefit studies would not have been extended to other business areas other than travel in the great cities once the methods of analysis had been better developed is a mighty leap in the dark.

You clearly haven't read my previous posts on this topic properly because if you had, you would know full well that I mention the reforms made by Castle on many occasions. In many instances, where posters have cited her record with reference to the amount of route mileage closed during her tenure, I have pointed out that without her reforms around the social railway and PTE's, we might have ended up with a lot less railway than we have now, so don't worry yourself about what I have and haven't read.

Beeching and Marples believed in a railway doing what they felt the railway did best - long distance intercity transport and urban mass transport. You have stated this yourself often enough, yet you don't seem to want to accept that this vision did not encompass railways in rural and semi-rural areas, and that no amount of cost-benefit study would have changed that.

Do you not find it a coincidence that in his second report, the Dr should cite the ECML North of Newcastle and the GW mainline to Birmingham as not selected for development (although these weren't up for automatic closure), then pop up in a television interview twenty years later, and just happen to suggest that those routes might, after all, be suitable candidates for closure ? As I mentioned in my previous post, this was around 1982, so he didn't have the excuse that socially necessary railways hadn't been subsidised before. The socially necessary railway had been around for well over a decade by then. He just didn't believe in a large passenger network of the type that we have now. He would have made it a lot smaller and I think that you should accept that.

I must admit, I find it a little galling that I'm being told to by some on here to "re-learn history", simply for pointing out that the Dr played an active role in developing the policy of "reshaping Britain's Railway" (i.e. through large scale route closures) as part of the Stedeford committee, before he became the Chairman. I would have thought that this was a matter pf public record.

 

[RT4038]

Beeching and Marples believed in a railway doing what they felt the railway did best - long distance intercity transport and urban mass transport. You have stated this yourself often enough, yet you don't seem to want to accept that this vision did not encompass railways in rural and semi-rural areas, and that no amount of cost-benefit study would have changed that.

On the contrary, Beeching and Marples did have a vision for railways in rural and semi-rural areas - that there wouldn't be any, as they could not possibly come anywhere close to paying for themselves.

Railway management before Beeching had already been closing substantial route mileage (for exactly the same reason as Beeching did) - M&GN, M&SWJ, Mid Wales lines to Brecon, DN&S, Stainmore (and there were many more) - Beeching merely codified this process and sped things up. It is clear the way Railway Management were thinking - the S&D and GC lines had already been prepared for closure before Beeching. I cannot believe that this was just an ad-hoc policy.

I don't think there is any mystery as to why the 'social railway' wasn't thought of until the bulk of the closures had taken place - it was simply unaffordable for the country to retain all that railway network. If it was, then Beeching would not have been appointed in the first place. The concept of the 'social railway' did not come in until 1967, but this did not prevent closures of the Waverley line, Ilfracombe, Minehead, Swanage, East Lincolnshire and others, of which the Government at the time did not feel it could financially support.

If the circumstances of the time were replicated again today, the same results would occur.