A funny one
I can (kind of) see the case for re-opening it now (after fifty years of significantly increased tourism/ university) but I think the closure made sense at the time
There's always the problem of what would serve a St Andrews branch - it could be a stand alone Leuchars shuttle, but on every discussion about long distance routes someone points out that "passengers don't like to change trains, it's a disincentive", yet running an Edinburgh - St Andrews train would use a path that could be used for an Edinburgh - Dundee (Aberdeen) train, so that's quite an Opportunity Cost to consider
(dare I say it) The Waverley Route in 1969
Seems odd to have closed the entire thing, rather than maintaining a branch to stations in Midlothian (but then I guess the path of the line carefully snaked it's way through the countryside without being much use for the town centres of Dalkeith etc, so may have been of only limited benefit
In terms of dubious closures I've wondered about Penrith-Keswick
I suppose one issue with this is, what would run on such a branch nowadays?
The unnelectrified Windermere branch gets a single Sprinter every hour, with limited extensions through to Manchester, but that's a lot busier (and closer to Manchester) than a Keswick branch would be, so guess it'd be a quieter version of that?
Anyway - a pet one of mine , - Brynamman East - Swansea St Thomas - (Swansea Vale, Midland and LMS) - 1950 - hugely profitable in the glory years before the sky fell in after WW1 , (more passengers than the entire Midland suburban service into St Pancras and Moorgate) , but dead really after that. Worked by a 3F tank and a 2 car push pull set. Not even hourly by 1948.
Closure proposed on the basis of something like 20 new passenger coaches needed and a similar raft of "new" steam engines. Nodded through with no consultation and with full support from the 3 local bus operators - which had snatched the traffic. An easy case , - but a bit devious in hamming up the railway resource case. Not that the bus windfall lasted much beyond say 1964 or so. (when the freight service went in any case as industry had by then gone)
Really interesting example (nice to hear of one I'd not known of before)
Although there was a lot of criticism of BR for carrying out its traffic surveys in what could be seen as a quiet period, it had one (possibly unintended) advantage. If they had carried out the survey in a busy period, they would have had quite a number of lines that would appear profitable (or at least worth retaining) on the figures produced, but were really basket cases. As it was beginning to become clear that the car was starting to eat into the number of passenger journeys, you had a situation where lines that appeared profitable when surveyed had a chance of remaining so for a number of years.
Good point - if some of the lines that survived are still so quiet to barely justify a minibus in 2019, despite year-on-year of passenger growth, imagine how much worse some of the ones that actually closed would have been - it only takes one basket case for your opponents to try to portray everything as being that weak - a "runt" line would have required large annual subsidies as well as allowing anti-railway people to keep focussing on it as an example of how railways will never be viable
So what? How did closing very minor branch lines generate more motorway building contracts for Ernest Marples?
And how many motorways were built to 'replace' lines that had minimal traffic?
Good points - the conspiracy theory stuff about Marples must be a comfort for some people, allowing them to believe that everything would have survived if it wasn't for just one bad actor, but it doesn't stack up as an argument
The main positive (longer distance) thrusts of the Re-shaping Report were, of course, Inter City passenger and Freightliner that, err, were both intended to and did have the effect of reducing traffic on motorways.
Yes, Beeching also structured the MerryGoRound system for coal traffic in HAA wagons from pits to power stations, and 55 years on the operation's still on-going., I wonder how many lorries that's kept off Britain's roads?
Cheerz. Steve.
Agreed on both the above points - Beeching did a lot more good than harm - something that he doesn't get enough credit for