Ah, the usual mixture of conspiracy theory, straw man arguments (nobody is saying that *nobody* used trains, just that insufficient numbers used them to even claim much of a "social" angle) and carefully forgetting the bigger picture of 1960s Britain.
Look at the boom in motorways (e.g. the graph at the bottom of this page -
http://www.ukmotorwayarchive.org.uk/en/openings/index.cfm) - look at the number of railway lines closed each year over the previous decades - look at how small the actual drop in passengers was compared to the "30% of mileage, 55% of stations" planned to close - look at the way that British Rail kept closing lines even into the 1980s.
For all the complaints about Beeching butchering the network, the number of routes "unfairly" closed seem pretty marginal at best - there's been a handful of re-openings but I can't see anything
unreasonable on the list. Some mildly grey areas, sure, but it's at the margins of "if this had been kept open then it might be
useful today" rather than "if this had been kept open then it'd be profitable and incredibly busy".
The car was the future - rail had been built to solve nineteenth century problems but was outdated for the second half of the twentieth century - freight had dried up into a few core flows - passenger numbers weren't going to be sufficient to pay for driver/ fireman/ conductor - often the Victorian infrastructure needed investing in to keep it going - so to keep lines open we might have needed to reinforce crumbling embankments, invest in brand new diesel trains to replace steam - keeping lines going wasn't cost-free - it would have required capital investment at a time when BR were trying to save money.
If there hadn't been a Beeching (
someone would have produced a fairly similar report - it wasn't just one man in a bad mood, closing lines on a whim because he was fed up of visiting faded seaside towns on a wet February afternoon) then the Government wouldn't have been prepared to invest in the railway - it'd have been left to wither away, closing hundreds of miles each year with no end in sight. Beeching gave the railway a starting point on the way back - of course passenger numbers continued to fall (unavoidable when you close half the stations!) but it cut out most of the "worst" lines and allowed the railway to focus more on the kind of simple bulk flows that it does best (both passenger and freight). Either accept the need for some serious "pruning" or just let the railway become unwieldy - something needed to be done, if you wanted a healthy railway.
(as an aside, whilst the amount of token "parliamentary" services seem ridiculous nowadays, imagine the amount of parliamentary services you'd have had if we'd kept thousands of miles of unviable routes!)