Dr Hoo
Established Member
It was ironic that rejection of The Development of the Major Railway Trunk Routes by Fraser effectively led to an extended period of non-development of any routes. Most obviously the electrification capability built up on both the WCML and Bournemouth schemes was allowed to dissipate. Closures continued on a large scale (even including some not proposed in the Reshaping Report). The hoped-for momentum of a new liner train (intermodal) network was allowed to stall by hiving it off from BR to a new, road-dominated National Freight Corporation. The new PTEs, as established, were allowed to focus heavily on buses to the neglect of surviving suburban rail services in many areas. Surplus Track Capacity Grants were at last introduced (which might have been useful a few years earlier for schemes such as singling lines like Market Weighton) but as most of those kind of lines had been shut completely ended up being applied to secondary main lines such as Salisbury-Exeter and Oxford-Worcester.What does not "selected for development" mean, if not managed decline.
The Network for Development was principally focussed on freight potential anyway (and was heavily influenced by government ambitions for up to 4% compound economic growth per annum that never came remotely near to being realised).
Little of this sad saga can fairly be blamed on Dr B.
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