Has anyone else had the misfortune to read this? I had a long flight on Saturday and it popped up on my Facebook feed just as I was boarding and so didn't do any due diligence on it...
It's full of obvious errors (he twice says that the Deltics were replaced on the ECML by electric traction). But worse is his juvenile approach to Beeching. I realise this is a subject that inflames passions, but an historian surely needs to look at both sides of the argument even if he ultimately comes down on a particular side. He writes as if pretty much all the closures were unjustified, whereas I think most people would acknowledge that some lines should never have been built, let alone retained into the era of car and bus transport. He also uses the trivial argument that "BR was still making a loss after Beeching so it didn't work" which ignores the non-trivial point that a smaller loss is (usually) preferable to a bigger one.
I'm still working through it slowly but the Tanya Jackson book is so much better written and researched and its pro-railway attitude is balanced with an acknowledgement that rail isn't the answer to every transport question.
It's full of obvious errors (he twice says that the Deltics were replaced on the ECML by electric traction). But worse is his juvenile approach to Beeching. I realise this is a subject that inflames passions, but an historian surely needs to look at both sides of the argument even if he ultimately comes down on a particular side. He writes as if pretty much all the closures were unjustified, whereas I think most people would acknowledge that some lines should never have been built, let alone retained into the era of car and bus transport. He also uses the trivial argument that "BR was still making a loss after Beeching so it didn't work" which ignores the non-trivial point that a smaller loss is (usually) preferable to a bigger one.
I'm still working through it slowly but the Tanya Jackson book is so much better written and researched and its pro-railway attitude is balanced with an acknowledgement that rail isn't the answer to every transport question.
