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"What if" scenario- what does BR without Beeching look like?

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coppercapped

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I think it would be big headed of me to claim credit for inventing the concept of "accountability to passengers" after 180 years of passenger railways. It would be a pretty bad indictment of the industry if it had taken 180 years.

For avoidance of doubt, I mean the process by which the interests of railway passengers are represented during closure proceedings.
Railway passengers were represented in the hearings taken by the local Transport Users Consultative Committee if objections were received when a closure proposal was posted. It is disingenuous to suggest no regard was taken.

Even at the time not all closures were contested - I read somewhere (Gourvish? but I haven’t time to look up the reference) that of some 700 station closure proposals, some 500 were uncontested.

The TUCCs made ‘recommendations’, neither they nor the CTCC could ‘rule against’ anything, the final decision always rested with the Minister. The Minister had to make a judgement to balance the needs of the passengers affected by the closure proposal, the number of passengers, the costs involved - both operational and in terms of foreseeable capital expenditure - in maintaining a service, and so on.

Because a train service has existed in the past - there is no God-given right that it should continue to be supplied in the future. Taxpayers also have interests - and they might well not include railways, especially the huge majority of the population who never use a train. At some point a judgement has to be made on how much money the state is prepared to spend on each passenger on a lightly used railway - and justify to the wider electorate. Much as some regret it, there is a limit to the state's generosity.

It would have been a more consistent, albeit still a pretty dire scenario had the plan been carried out as planned. RN Hardy in his book suggests that Beeching always thought that routes such as Liverpool - Southport would have been saved, however, I'm not so sure, given that the option of support wasn't really looked at in the report (from what I recall), and as far as I'm aware.
It was.
The first Beeching report clearly states on page 20 that the pattern of life in the larger cities (Glasgow, Edinburgh, Newcastle, Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds, Birmingham and Cardiff - with London being treated as a special case) would be unthinkable without railways but that is no reason why the services should be supplied below cost. In 1961 the suburban services as a whole earned £39.8 million of which London alone made up £33 million. London services nearly covered their costs, the implication being that the other services lost some £25 million - on an income of £6.8 million!

On page 22 the Report states:
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.

So Beeching himself suggest the use of Cost-Benefit analysis for such cases but at the time, 1963, the methods for such analyses were still being developed.
 
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yorksrob

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Railway passengers were represented in the hearings taken by the local Transport Users Consultative Committee if objections were received when a closure proposal was posted. It is disingenuous to suggest no regard was taken.

Even at the time not all closures were contested - I read somewhere (Gourvish? but I haven’t time to look up the reference) that of some 700 station closure proposals, some 500 were uncontested.

The TUCCs made ‘recommendations’, neither they nor the CTCC could ‘rule against’ anything, the final decision always rested with the Minister. The Minister had to make a judgement to balance the needs of the passengers affected by the closure proposal, the number of passengers, the costs involved - both operational and in terms of foreseeable capital expenditure - in maintaining a service, and so on.

Because a train service has existed in the past - there is no God-given right that it should continue to be supplied in the future. Taxpayers also have interests - and they might well not include railways, especially the huge majority of the population who never use a train. At some point a judgement has to be made on how much money the state is prepared to spend on each passenger on a lightly used railway - and justify to the wider electorate. Much as some regret it, there is a limit to the state's generosity.

As you say, TUCC's didn't even bother with cases that didn't raise a decent number of objections, so that suggests to me that even more notice should have been taken of their findings. And as for the general taxpayer, they already had the Government, DfT and BRB weighing in on their side in such cases, so they were well catered for already. As a taxpayer, I'd far rather the balance of power were in favour of a statutory body, rather than a single minister, who might turn out to be a bit of a Thatcherite caricature such as Nicholas Ridley.

It was.
The first Beeching report clearly states on page 20 that the pattern of life in the larger cities (Glasgow, Edinburgh, Newcastle, Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds, Birmingham and Cardiff - with London being treated as a special case) would be unthinkable without railways but that is no reason why the services should be supplied below cost. In 1961 the suburban services as a whole earned £39.8 million of which London alone made up £33 million. London services nearly covered their costs, the implication being that the other services lost some £25 million - on an income of £6.8 million!

On page 22 the Report states:


The Report goes on to say:


So Beeching himself suggest the use of Cost-Benefit analysis for such cases but at the time, 1963, the methods for such analyses were still being developed.

Well, we can perhaps cut him some slack on the urban routes in that case, given they mostly seem to have survived into the PTE era. According to the table "Revenue and assessed costs by main traffics for British Railways", the suburban services together earned £39.8m revenue and together had £40.3m direct costs, which seems as good a reason to me for not axing them.

That aside, had his ideas been taken to their conclusion, we would have been left with a far more moth-eaten and less useful railway than the one we have today, so I regard his philosophy as being rather flawed.

I'm currently looking at a section of the map "Passenger traffic station receipts" from the report, which shows stations with <£5000 receipts as red dots, £5,000 - £25,000 as blue dots and £25k and over as green dots.

What is striking is that a lot of the closed lines in Sussex, such as Shoreham - Horsham and Polegate - Eridge, have more blue dots than many of our surviving commuter lines such as Ashford - Maidstone East and Paddock Wood - Maidstone.

This suggests that Kent did reasonably well out of the process, whereas Sussex was hard done by. I suspect that I have more to be thankful for, for the wonderful Kent electrification scheme than I ever imagined, as there certainly seemed to be a preference for picking off diesel routes.
 
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coppercapped

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As you say, TUCC's didn't even bother with cases that didn't raise a decent number of objections,

No, again you are wilfully missing the point. The TUCCs could ONLY consider cases where representations had been made. The clue is in the name TRANSPORT USERS. If an objection had been raised against a proposed closure they had to consider it, if no objection had been raised then they took no action. They were not able, nor were their predecessors in the 1920s and 1930s able, to act on their own initiative.

Why should they, if nobody had objected?

And if nobody had objected to a proposed closure - then the service was not necessary at all.
 

coppercapped

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Well, we can perhaps cut him some slack on the urban routes in that case

No, I suggest that it's you who had better understand what has happened and why. This has been public knowledge for, ooh, all of 55 years and you still haven't understood what was written.
 

yorksrob

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No, I suggest that it's you who had better understand what has happened and why. This has been public knowledge for, ooh, all of 55 years and you still haven't understood what was written.

No, it is you who needs to understand the depth of policy failure that was perpetrated by all sides for ten years, and the damage it has done to the country, rather than toeing the establishment line.

When you excuse and apologise for the mistakes of the past, you make it more likely that similar mistakes will be made in the future.
 
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yorksrob

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No, again you are wilfully missing the point. The TUCCs could ONLY consider cases where representations had been made. The clue is in the name TRANSPORT USERS. If an objection had been raised against a proposed closure they had to consider it, if no objection had been raised then they took no action. They were not able, nor were their predecessors in the 1920s and 1930s able, to act on their own initiative.

Why should they, if nobody had objected?

And if nobody had objected to a proposed closure - then the service was not necessary at all.

You concentrate on an incidental detail and completely ignore the real point, which is that as TUCC's were sparingly deployed, and only where genuine objections from the travelling public were recieved, which means that their objections should have been taken seriously by the Government.

I don't even know what point you're attempting to make, or what relevance it has to anything at all.
 

coppercapped

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No, it is you who needs to understand the depth of policy failure that was perpetrated by all sides for ten years, and the damage it has done to the country, rather than toeing the establishment line.

When you excuse and apologise for the mistakes of the past, you make it more likely that similar mistakes will be made in the future.
What I find interesting is that you, together with many others posting on this Forum and elsewhere, are fixated on Beeching and his first report. It is as if the closures which occurred earlier in the history of the nationalised railways never happened. At least there is nobody who attracts the opprobrium which is uniquely Beeching’s. Maybe it’s difficult to get emotive over the Branch Lines Committee?

Over 3,000 miles of railways were closed between Nationalisation in 1947 and the 1962 Transport Act. Almost the entire route mileage of the Midland and Great Northern Joint Railway closed in 1959 - 180 miles of it, but it is scarcely mentioned in these debates. Is it because most posters here are too young to remember the time ‘BB’ - Before Beeching?

You write “When you excuse and apologise for the mistakes of the past, you make it more likely that similar mistakes will be made in the future” you are exactly right. The point you miss is that by not studying the whole, by being selective with the era or a particular aspect, one can come to very misleading conclusions. One has to understand the reasons for, and the aims of, the 1962 Transport Act, and why, in turn, there were subsequent Transport and Railway Acts.

The immediate cause of the 1962 Act lay 15 years earlier when the disastrous nationalisation of much of British industry was done without any strategic direction from the Government, no thought whatsoever about the effects of the changes would have on the services or products these industries supplied to their customers or even the way in which the world was changing. None of the enabling Acts gave any indication of what the Government wanted from the particular business, be it Cable and Wireless or Docks and Harbours. Industry was nationalised only because it was ‘policy’ - specifically to fulfil Clause IV of the Labour Party’s constitution - not because it made social, commercial or economic sense.

I understand “the depth of policy failure that was perpetrated by all sides for ten years, and the damage it has done to the country,..” very well - the policy failure was not that of Marples and Beeching but of Attlee, Morrison and Alfred Barnes. The structure they imposed on the railways was, using today’s phrase, ‘not fit for purpose’. As a direct result of their actions by the mid 1950s the railways’ financial position was deteriorating so rapidly only drastic action was possible.

Historically, and taken as a whole, the railways had always been cash positive - as they were private companies they had to be. Even the 1947 nationalisation assumed there would be no call on the public purse and the railways would cover their own costs so it was entirely reasonable to assume the railways could once more return a profit. In 1961 Dr. Beeching was appointed chairman by the same government that six years earlier had given the railways £1,200 million to spend to get back to profitability. All that had subsequently happened was that the operating deficit had increased year-on-year to say nothing about the increasing interest paid on the sums lent to cover the holes. By 1961 there were capital liabilities of £1,600 million - £34,000 million in today’s money.[1]

Whoever was in charge at the time would have found themselves in the same position as the men who went into the river to clear the weeds and found themselves surrounded by crocodiles. The damage was done 15 years earlier.

The 1963 closure programme was then mostly implemented by the next Government which was in power from 1964 to 1970. The railways got off lightly in that only about one third of the network was closed. You will argue that the ‘Beeching closures’ did not reduce the losses. True, but how much larger would the deficit have been if costs had not been reduced as they were? I maintain that Britain, in the sense of the well being of all of its taxpayers, has been the winner.


[1] Network Rail’s current debt is just over £50 billion - which it has taken 16 years (2002 to 2018) to amass at an average rate of £3.125 billion per year. The BTC’s debt of £34 billion took just 9 years (1952 to 1961) to build up at an average of £3.78 billion per year. NR had its credit card taken away a couple of years ago. BR had half its debt moved to a 'suspense' account on which no interest was paid, a quarter was written off and the BRB started life with only a quarter of the BTC's liabilities. Yet by 1968, in the next Transport Act, there was yet another capital write off. The rate of cost reductions fell after Beeching returned to ICI, the next Chairman was a career railwaymen who lasted two years and the next one tried to get freight subsidised.
 
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yorksrob

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What I find interesting is that you, together with many others posting on this Forum and elsewhere, are fixated on Beeching and his first report. It is as if the closures which occurred earlier in the history of the nationalised railways never happened. At least there is nobody who attracts the opprobrium which is uniquely Beeching’s. Maybe it’s difficult to get emotive over the Branch Lines Committee?

Over 3,000 miles of railways were closed between Nationalisation in 1947 and the 1962 Transport Act. Almost the entire route mileage of the Midland and Great Northern Joint Railway closed in 1959 - 180 miles of it, but it is scarcely mentioned in these debates. Is it because most posters here are too young to remember the time ‘BB’ - Before Beeching?

You write “When you excuse and apologise for the mistakes of the past, you make it more likely that similar mistakes will be made in the future” you are exactly right. The point you miss is that by not studying the whole, by being selective with the era or a particular aspect, one can come to very misleading conclusions. One has to understand the reasons for, and the aims of, the 1962 Transport Act, and why, in turn, there were subsequent Transport and Railway Acts.

The immediate cause of the 1962 Act lay 15 years earlier when the disastrous nationalisation of much of British industry was done without any strategic direction from the Government, no thought whatsoever about the effects of the changes would have on the services or products these industries supplied to their customers or even the way in which the world was changing. None of the enabling Acts gave any indication of what the Government wanted from the particular business, be it Cable and Wireless or Docks and Harbours. Industry was nationalised only because it was ‘policy’ - specifically to fulfil Clause IV of the Labour Party’s constitution - not because it made social, commercial or economic sense.

I understand “the depth of policy failure that was perpetrated by all sides for ten years, and the damage it has done to the country,..” very well - the policy failure was not that of Marples and Beeching but of Attlee, Morrison and Alfred Barnes. The structure they imposed on the railways was, using today’s phrase, ‘not fit for purpose’. As a direct result of their actions by the mid 1950s the railways’ financial position was deteriorating so rapidly only drastic action was possible.

Historically, and taken as a whole, the railways had always been cash positive - as they were private companies they had to be. Even the 1947 nationalisation assumed there would be no call on the public purse and the railways would cover their own costs so it was entirely reasonable to assume the railways could once more return a profit. In 1961 Dr. Beeching was appointed chairman by the same government that six years earlier had given the railways £1,200 million to spend to get back to profitability. All that had subsequently happened was that the operating deficit had increased year-on-year to say nothing about the increasing interest paid on the sums lent to cover the holes. By 1961 there were capital liabilities of £1,600 million - £34,000 million in today’s money.[1]

Whoever was in charge at the time would have found themselves in the same position as the men who went into the river to clear the weeds and found themselves surrounded by crocodiles. The damage was done 15 years earlier.

The 1963 closure programme was then mostly implemented by the next Government which was in power from 1964 to 1970. The railways got off lightly in that only about one third of the network was closed. You will argue that the ‘Beeching closures’ did not reduce the losses. True, but how much larger would the deficit have been if costs had not been reduced as they were? I maintain that Britain, in the sense of the well being of all of its taxpayers, has been the winner.


[1] Network Rail’s current debt is just over £50 billion - which it has taken 16 years (2002 to 2018) to amass at an average rate of £3.125 billion per year. The BTC’s debt of £34 billion took just 9 years (1952 to 1961) to build up at an average of £3.78 billion per year. NR had its credit card taken away a couple of years ago. BR had half its debt moved to a 'suspense' account on which no interest was paid, a quarter was written off and the BRB started life with only a quarter of the BTC's liabilities. Yet by 1968, in the next Transport Act, there was yet another capital write off.

You make some interesting points. And you will note that I'm careful to consider the closure programme as a whole, rather than just the Beeching era.

The point that closures took place before Beeching and that they don't tend to be decried to the same extent, is I suspect, because they were part of a process to genuinely weed out hopeless lines to the middle of nowhere with a distinct lack of passengers or freight, which was fairly closely focused on the needs (or lack of) of the local communities affected. I don't think I've ever heard anyone on here seriously suggest that the closure of the Meon valley, or the Hythe (Kent) routes have caused a great hardship to those communities and shouldn't have happened.

The difference with Beeching (and after) was that the closures were perpetuated with a view to achieving a mythical profitable network, with a very real drive to reduce route mileage, often with scant thought for local, or indeed network needs. It's only at this stage that we get the spectacle of busy routes being run down or diverted (with the possible exception of the M&GNR), often leaving sizeable towns and settlements isolated from the network and disadvantaged. If you read on this forum (or any other context) about a lamented closure or reopening suggestion, you can guarantee that it will be a Beeching or post Beeching closure, because these are the ones (at least some of them) that caused the damage. I find it ironic that the pre-amble to the first report talks about re-shaping the railway to better meet the needs of the nation, when it's this period which seems to have coincided with the least consideration for the actual needs of communities. This ultimately resulted in the mindset whereby it became desireable to sacrifice communities such as Swanage and Oswestry for what a local manager thought of as the "greater good", even though, in the case of Swanage for example, it probably made money.

You note the various debts and write-offs built up by BR during the 1960's, yet these are hardly surprising given that BR was running a number of socially necessary routes with no mechanism for them to be subsidised. The Stedeford committee and Beeching would have made a far better job of reshaping the railway to the needs of the nation if they'd have given more consideration to how and to what extent socially necessary services should be supported, as well as what constituted a socially necessary service, rather than trying to chase an ideologically pure railway only doing what the railway "does best" without all the messy social and political requirements of it that exist in the real world. In the same way, Beeching's second report on developing trunk routes seems all rather detached from the messy reality that the best route in the world will need to shut for odd occasions, and secondary routes tend to have settlements along them that need serving.

Deep down, all the political establishment fell for the myth of chasing the profitable core railway, which was a distraction when our politicians and civil servants should have been considering social need and some public funding of the railways much earlier on. For all its flaws, some of Beeching's statistical analysis could have been quite useful if used properly, rather than as a means to justify cutting as much route mileage as possible. Take the map detailing stations which generated revenue of <£5k, £5k - £25k and above £25k. How much more useful that map would have been if someone had thought "this line has all stations generating less than £5k, so we should perhaps consider closing it, whereas this other line over here has three intermediate stations with revenue £5 - £25k, and it also provides an additional route to this coastal town which generates over £25k, so perhaps we should look at ways of reducing costs to bring the price down". Or perhaps someone might have thought "This branch leads to a station with £5k - £25k, however it is a coastal resort, so perhaps we need to further consider how much incoming traffic it generates, or how much closure will damage the resorts tourist industry".

I will agree with you in so far as we are lucky to have the railway to the extent that we do. However, I believe that Britain has been the loser in that the railway network is a lot smaller than it ought to be, and that is because the drive to reduce route mileage was the prime generator for a lot of closures during the 60's and early 70's, rather than a consideration of whether the route was necessary.

I will ask you one question - do you think the railway network would be in better shape today if Dr Beeching and BR hadn't parted ways in 1965 ? I don't think it would because we would have a smaller network that is a lot less useful than the one we have today.

Finally I will caution that history is full of events that happened as a result of, or because of other events. It doesn't automatically follow that the resultant event was the correct or best response to the first event.
 

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I think that you would need to justify this claim with or without hindsight. Not saying I disagree ....but on the face of it Woodhead doesn't look like a solution to any problem that we currently have as far as I can see.

Or at least not one that couldn't also be solved by maximising train lengths on the Hope Valley.
 

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Tramway conversion would have need huge capital conversions , the BTC etc had already lost a huge sum of money from the ill fated Modernisation Plan , so more cash was not in the thinking of the Governments of the time ...(alas)

And the modern tramway concept wasn't there yet.

However, it is now, and I do genuinely wonder if converting some branches to operate under a (potentially battery powered) light rail concept would provide further savings in the long term.
 

Bookd

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And the modern tramway concept wasn't there yet.

However, it is now, and I do genuinely wonder if converting some branches to operate under a (potentially battery powered) light rail concept would provide further savings in the long term.
These points are very interesting - the old BR was losing huge amounts of money and something had to be done. With the benefit of hindsight the country would perhaps be better off now if some closed stations and diversionary routes had been spared, but at the time they would have seemed to be money down the drain.
As an enthusiast I wish to support the railway but there is a caution in present times; I have seen on another thread that whilst Northern rail passengers are suffering from strikes only about 5 per cent of journeys are made by rail, and it is reported that the budget will.involve new road investment. This may involve a further movement from rail, both to the disadvantage of the staff and those passengers who use rail.
I recall a film of the Queen's jubilee and how things have changed since her coronation; there was,an interview with an old man taken back to the site of his station on the Somerset and Dorset line where he had been a porter. Although long closed the platform was still there and he could pick out the area of the garden of which they were proud - it won awards.
When asked about passengers he said that they were not much problem - maybe 3,or 4 a week.
 
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yorksrob

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These points are very interesting - the old BR was losing huge amounts of money and something had to be done. With the benefit of hindsight the country would perhaps be better off now if some closed stations and diversionary routes had been spared, but at the time they would have seemed to be money down the drain.
As an enthusiast I wish to support the railway but there is a caution in present times; I have seen on another thread that whilst Northern rail passengers are suffering from strikes only about 5 per cent of journeys are made by rail, and it is reported that the budget will.involve new road investment. This may involve a further movement from rail, both

The current situation certainly doesn't bode well. That said, on the plus side, a lot of our rural railways are fairly frugally run on a day to day basis. Take the Whitby branch for example, which is staffed by precisely 1 driver and 1 guard.
 

Gareth Marston

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The current situation certainly doesn't bode well. That said, on the plus side, a lot of our rural railways are fairly frugally run on a day to day basis. Take the Whitby branch for example, which is staffed by precisely 1 driver and 1 guard.

Having worked for the successor of the TUCC the RPC in the early 2000's I was genuine expecting another go at a line closure programme after they were abolished in their then format in 2005. We wouldn't toe the party line from the SRA's Marsham Street bunker and they knew and hated it. We were almost openly hostile with each other. There would have been no rubber stamping of any closure attempts whatever they were planning they got abolished themselves shortly afterwards and it got canned. But I certainly saw parts of 2005 Railway Act as smoothing the way for line closures.
 

yorksrob

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Having worked for the successor of the TUCC the RPC in the early 2000's I was genuine expecting another go at a line closure programme after they were abolished in their then format in 2005. We wouldn't toe the party line from the SRA's Marsham Street bunker and they knew and hated it. We were almost openly hostile with each other. There would have been no rubber stamping of any closure attempts whatever they were planning they got abolished themselves shortly afterwards and it got canned. But I certainly saw parts of 2005 Railway Act as smoothing the way for line closures.

To be honest, that doesn't entirely surprise me with New Labour. It's good to know that there were/are still people being vigilant against Whitehall !
 

pt_mad

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This may have already been mentioned but there's a Video Interview of Dr Beeching on YouTube discussing the closures years later. He was asked any closures he'd like to have seen in hindsight.

Shockingly he said the East Coast Mainline North of Newcastle and/or Berwick, and said that two routes from London to Scotland wernt necessarily needed.
 

yorksrob

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This may have already been mentioned but there's a Video Interview of Dr Beeching on YouTube discussing the closures years later. He was asked any closures he'd like to have seen in hindsight.

Shockingly he said the East Coast Mainline North of Newcastle and/or Berwick, and said that two routes from London to Scotland wernt necessarily needed.

That sounds interesting. Please can you post a link.
 

pt_mad

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Afaik it's in one of those somewhere. Without WiFi I can't go though and find the exact part. I think it's during the first interview (hindsight).

All rights and credits to the embedded videos goes to YouTube and the creator and publisher
 

yorksrob

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Afaik it's in one of those somewhere. Without WiFi I can't go though and find the exact part. I think it's during the first interview (hindsight).

All rights and credits to the embedded videos goes to YouTube and the creator and publisher

Thanks. I'll have a look when I get a chance.
 

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Contrary to much opinion since, Beeching never aimed at being "profitable". That was not his brief. "Breaking even, taking one year with another" was the phrase. Gerry Fiennes uses it laconically.

Beeching's Australian Chief Economist, Stewart Joy, kept much in the reports (including all the positive stuff) in line. Being a good Aussie, whatever nonsenses he found that got edited out of the reports he put in his own companion book to Fiennes' classic, published around the same time when he went back home. "The Train that Ran Away". Worth reading. He found all sorts of internal fiddles in the figures offered by local offices. An early "essential user" morning passenger service from Dunbar to Edinburgh was booked as having 100 passengers. However, 95 of them were railwaymen travelling to work on free passes. He also queried why on routes where there were "essential users" cheap day tickets were being offered, and indeed the norm, instead of the standard rate per mile. The reply was that if normal full fares were charged the "essential users" would desert to the parallel bus service ...
 

pt_mad

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Found it.

13:20 says there are two routes to Birmingham, one of which could be closed, and the East Coast Mainline North of Newcastle could be closed without any real hardship to anywhere except Berwick.
 

coppercapped

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You make some interesting points. And you will note that I'm careful to consider the closure programme as a whole, rather than just the Beeching era.

The point that closures took place before Beeching and that they don't tend to be decried to the same extent, is I suspect, because they were part of a process to genuinely weed out hopeless lines to the middle of nowhere with a distinct lack of passengers or freight, which was fairly closely focused on the needs (or lack of) of the local communities affected. I don't think I've ever heard anyone on here seriously suggest that the closure of the Meon valley, or the Hythe (Kent) routes have caused a great hardship to those communities and shouldn't have happened.

The difference with Beeching (and after) was that the closures were perpetuated with a view to achieving a mythical profitable network, with a very real drive to reduce route mileage, often with scant thought for local, or indeed network needs. It's only at this stage that we get the spectacle of busy routes being run down or diverted (with the possible exception of the M&GNR), often leaving sizeable towns and settlements isolated from the network and disadvantaged. If you read on this forum (or any other context) about a lamented closure or reopening suggestion, you can guarantee that it will be a Beeching or post Beeching closure, because these are the ones (at least some of them) that caused the damage. I find it ironic that the pre-amble to the first report talks about re-shaping the railway to better meet the needs of the nation, when it's this period which seems to have coincided with the least consideration for the actual needs of communities. This ultimately resulted in the mindset whereby it became desireable to sacrifice communities such as Swanage and Oswestry for what a local manager thought of as the "greater good", even though, in the case of Swanage for example, it probably made money.

You note the various debts and write-offs built up by BR during the 1960's, yet these are hardly surprising given that BR was running a number of socially necessary routes with no mechanism for them to be subsidised. The Stedeford committee and Beeching would have made a far better job of reshaping the railway to the needs of the nation if they'd have given more consideration to how and to what extent socially necessary services should be supported, as well as what constituted a socially necessary service, rather than trying to chase an ideologically pure railway only doing what the railway "does best" without all the messy social and political requirements of it that exist in the real world. In the same way, Beeching's second report on developing trunk routes seems all rather detached from the messy reality that the best route in the world will need to shut for odd occasions, and secondary routes tend to have settlements along them that need serving.

Deep down, all the political establishment fell for the myth of chasing the profitable core railway, which was a distraction when our politicians and civil servants should have been considering social need and some public funding of the railways much earlier on. For all its flaws, some of Beeching's statistical analysis could have been quite useful if used properly, rather than as a means to justify cutting as much route mileage as possible. Take the map detailing stations which generated revenue of <£5k, £5k - £25k and above £25k. How much more useful that map would have been if someone had thought "this line has all stations generating less than £5k, so we should perhaps consider closing it, whereas this other line over here has three intermediate stations with revenue £5 - £25k, and it also provides an additional route to this coastal town which generates over £25k, so perhaps we should look at ways of reducing costs to bring the price down". Or perhaps someone might have thought "This branch leads to a station with £5k - £25k, however it is a coastal resort, so perhaps we need to further consider how much incoming traffic it generates, or how much closure will damage the resorts tourist industry".

I will agree with you in so far as we are lucky to have the railway to the extent that we do. However, I believe that Britain has been the loser in that the railway network is a lot smaller than it ought to be, and that is because the drive to reduce route mileage was the prime generator for a lot of closures during the 60's and early 70's, rather than a consideration of whether the route was necessary.

I will ask you one question - do you think the railway network would be in better shape today if Dr Beeching and BR hadn't parted ways in 1965 ? I don't think it would because we would have a smaller network that is a lot less useful than the one we have today.

Finally I will caution that history is full of events that happened as a result of, or because of other events. It doesn't automatically follow that the resultant event was the correct or best response to the first event.
You still haven’t accepted the consequences of the serious financial situation the railways found themselves in at the time. As I wrote in an earlier post the railways' debt was increasing by nearly £4 billion each year (in modern money terms) and the rate of indebtedness was accelerating.

This had never happened before - the railways had bumbled along being just about profitable from their conception until the early 1950s. 125 years of financial stability.

Then suddenly, over a period of about five years all hell broke loose. Nobody had any experience on how to get such a serious financial position under control but it was clear that the Government was not prepared to pour limitless amounts of money into a hole. Especially not after approving the Modernisation Plan of five years earlier which was supposed to have returned the railways to a state of equilibrium. The "investments" made as part of the Plan showed no sign of making any sort of return. Indeed, losses had increased by a factor of about six in less than ten years.

The point about all the line and station closures from the early 1950s onwards was not to close lines for the sake of it, but to make real savings in operating costs. There was never any intention of trying to find a ‘profitable core’ - this seems to be a concept which you have invented - in the first instance the intention was simply to stabilise the situation. The legal requirement on the BRB as written in the 1962 Transport Act was:
18.—(1) Each of the Boards shall so conduct their business as to secure that their revenue is not less than sufficient for making provision for the meeting of charges properly chargeable to revenue, taking one year with another.
This is almost identical to the text in the 1947 Act. Neither Act makes any mention that the railways should be ‘profitable’ - indeed later sections of the 1962 Act allow the BRB to borrow from the Government for improvement works. For reasons which have been endlessly discussed there were no management accounts at all which would have helped identify the traffics which were the sources of the losses or revenues until the traffic surveys carried out in 1961.

Your suggestion for working out which lines could be made to cover their costs would only have been possible after 1961 when detailed data were available. But it is also pie in the sky. It assumes the data were updated regularly - and in the days before computers were generally used this was very difficult - and also assumes that enough sufficiently skilled staff were available to do the calculations. The railways had only ever employed a few such people at headquarters. Even if it could be shown that a line might cover its costs, the rate of increase in the overall deficit was such that it would mean that a year or two later the line would once again be in the red.

The increasing losses in the 1950s had nothing to do with running ‘socially necessary routes’, which anyway is a misnomer as the concept didn’t even exist then. The losses had all to do with the decline in profitable freight traffics which meant that branch line and secondary passenger services could no longer be cross subsidised.

The argument that passenger train service withdrawals pre-Beeching - whether they were referred to on here or not - were somehow less significant to the individuals affected than post-Beeching withdrawals is, frankly, hypocritical. The only difference is that pre-Beeching almost nobody used these services and only a few more used the trains removed after 1962. Don’t forget that in 1961 one third of the route mileage carried only 1% of the passenger-miles. Fiddling around the edges would not have changed that.

And, yes, I do think the railway would have been in a better shape - for some value of ‘better shape’ - today if Beeching had stayed longer. If you look at the Annual Reports for the years following it is clear that the pressure on operating costs was not kept up. Later Chairmen showed that costs could be reduced, and revenue increased, on a network which was essentially fixed in length, but the immediate successors to Beeching did not do this. So, yes, if the pressure had been kept up and the finances stabilised earlier a slightly larger system may have survived - which is what I think you mean by ‘better shape’. Think Bletchley - Oxford and Bletchley - Cambridge: this was not proposed for closure in the first Beeching Report, but if costs had been squeezed and the service speeded up it might have survived.
 
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Taunton

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The whole concept of what an individual part of the whole "cost" is also an imponderable, a problem not just confined to railway accounting, but to all transport networks. Stewart Joy again took Edinburgh as an example. A rural line into there was allocated a very substantial amount of cost for "it's share" of the expense of Edinburgh Waverley station. In fact the amount alone pushed the line from profit to loss. It was suggested that this cost should be ignored for that line. But where should it go? It was suggested only to the profitable lines. But other lines into Edinburgh were in the same position. If this was applied to all the only remaining route was the ECML. If that had all the major station costs allocated to it, then IT would now show a loss.

If you get a ticket from say Shotts to London, changing at Edinburgh, how much of that gets attributed to each service? It might even be that the fare is the same as that from Edinburgh to London. Do you proportionalise it by mileage? By time? By the number of trains involved? This ignores that a lot of the costs are, as in the Edinburgh case, terminal costs. The expense of running booking offices is only incurred at the start of the journey, wherever that may be. Etc etc for everything else.
 

yorksrob

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You still haven’t accepted the consequences of the serious financial situation the railways found themselves in at the time. As I wrote in an earlier post the railways' debt was increasing by well over £3 billion each year (in modern money terms) and the rate of indebtedness was accelerating.

This had never happened before - the railways had bumbled along being just about profitable from their conception until the early 1950s. 125 years of financial stability.

Then suddenly, over a period of about five years all hell broke loose. Nobody had any experience on how to get such a serious financial position under control but it was clear that the Government was not prepared to pour limitless amounts of money into a hole. Especially not after approving the Modernisation Plan of five years earlier which was supposed to have returned the railways to a state of equilibrium. The "investments" made as part of the Plan showed no sign of making any sort of return. Indeed, losses had increased by a factor of about six in less than ten years.

I simply don't see why the financial situation the railway was in, made it impossible for someone to come up with, and cost the basic railway in 1962, rather than 1966/67. If anything, such an invention should have made it easier to make savings.

Don't get me wrong, Beeching was undoubtedly on the right track with regard to getting rid of wagon freight and rationalising carriages that were only used once a year etc, but there should have been more thought for passenger needs than simply whether the line made a "profit" (however one calculates profitability of a railway). There should have been more thought given to this by Government and Whitehall as a whole. Ultimately perhaps the buck should stop with Mr MacMillan, for thinking about the railway as though he were still a railway magnate, rather than as part of a Government providing a service to the public.

There's another aspect of this in that it was a political decision that the railway had to cover its costs, unlike for example the army or the schools. Arguably the Stedeford committee would have been the ideal opportunity to start considering whether there should be some public funding of the railway and in what circumstances.

The point about all the line and station closures from the early 1950s onwards was not to close lines for the sake of it, but to make real savings in operating costs. There was never any intention of trying to find a ‘profitable core’ - this seems to be a concept which you have invented - in the first instance the intention was simply to stabilise the situation. The legal requirement on the BRB as written in the 1962 Transport Act was:

This is almost identical to the text in the 1947 Act. Neither Act makes any mention that the railways should be ‘profitable’ - indeed later sections of the 1962 Act allow the BRB to borrow from the Government for improvement works. For reasons which have been endlessly discussed there were no management accounts at all which would have helped identify the traffics which were the sources of the losses or revenues until the traffic surveys carried out in 1961.

Semantics. The railway could cover its costs on a year by year basis or make an additional penny and be in profit. Either way it was impossible, without considering whether some parts should be supported.

Your suggestion for working out which lines could be made to cover their costs would only have been possible after 1961 when detailed data were available. But it is also pie in the sky. It assumes the data were updated regularly - and in the days before computers were generally used this was very difficult - and also assumes that enough sufficiently skilled staff were available to do the calculations. The railways had only ever employed a few such people at headquarters. Even if it could be shown that a line might cover its costs, the rate of increase in the overall deficit was such that it would mean that a year or two later the line would once again be in the red.

Sorry but what you have written makes no sense. We're talking about the statistics Dr Beeching himself came up with, and so long as one understood their limitations, they had the potential to be very useful. But you're saying that they didn't have the people with the skills to interpret them, so what was the point of coming up with them in the first place ?

Secondly, if the costs and revenues of a route were understood to the extent that it was known to cover its costs, how does it follow that an increase in the overall deficit would "mean that a year or two later the line would once again be in the red". Surely whether the line went into "the red" would depend on the characteristics of its revenue and costs, not the overall deficit. If you're saying that the data was effectively useless because it would be out of date in two years, what on earth was the point in collecting it ? I don't actually think that such data was necessarily useless - there would be no reason to assume that the characteristics of a lines costs and revenues would vary so wildly over two years.

The increasing losses in the 1950s had nothing to do with running ‘socially necessary routes’, which anyway is a misnomer as the concept didn’t even exist then. The losses had all to do with the decline in profitable freight traffics which meant that branch line and secondary passenger services could no longer be cross subsidised.

Just because nobody had defined a socially necessary route, doesn't mean that they didn't exist. There would have undoubtedly been routes that weren't profitable at the farebox but which were very important for the wellbeing of the local community. This is an area where the wider establishment of the time was to blame. Where was the profitable freight traffic going ? To the roads. Why ? because road freight was being subsidised. We should recognise that this was wrong and part of the reason why such a damaging closure programme took place.

The argument that passenger train service withdrawals pre-Beeching - whether they were referred to on here or not - were somehow less significant to the individuals affected than post-Beeching withdrawals is, frankly, hypocritical. The only difference is that pre-Beeching almost nobody used these services and only a few more used the trains removed after 1962. Don’t forget that in 1961 one third of the route mileage carried only 1% of the passenger-miles. Fiddling around the edges would not have changed that.

I don't think you can say that "almost nobody" used services such as Seaton Junction to Seaton or Uckfield - Lewes. They had stations which generated between £5k and £25k revenue, and that's without taking into account incoming or through traffic. I don't think I can concede that "almost nobody" used those routes any more than we can say that about our own unprofitable lines such as Whitby or the Cumbrian Coast. We know from our own time that there's a difference between not being profitable and one not carrying anyone,

My point is about how and why routes were selected for closure. Take the York - Beverley worked example. There is the explicit expectation that through traffic would travel via Selby and that it should be excluded from the route's revenue calculation. I don't think that would have been the case before hand - the route would have been examined on its own merits.

And, yes, I do think the railway would have been in a better shape - for some value of ‘better shape’ - today if Beeching had stayed longer. If you look at the Annual Reports for the years following it is clear that the pressure on operating costs was not kept up. Later Chairmen showed that costs could be reduced, and revenue increased, on a network which was essentially fixed in length, but the immediate successors to Beeching did not do this. So, yes, if the pressure had been kept up and the finances stabilised earlier a slightly larger system may have survived - which is what I think you mean by ‘better shape’. Think Bletchley - Oxford and Bletchley - Cambridge: this was not proposed for closure in the first Beeching Report, but if costs had been squeezed and the service speeded up it might have survived.

Hmm, I'm not at all convinced. The pre-amble to the second report states that not selecting routes for development didn't necessarily mean closure, yet in the interview posted above, he's adamant that he wanted to carry out his full programme of rationalising trunk routes, and that this would have involved closure of routes such as Marylebone to Aynho and Newcastle to Edinburgh. There may have been some logic at the time, but we would have been worse off now.
 
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RLBH

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There's another aspect of this in that it was a political decision that the railway had to cover its costs, unlike for example the army or the schools.
The railway had always covered its costs. It was what railways did, and had done for over a century.

The political decision that had to be made was that the railway didn't have to cover its costs. And without evidence that it couldn't cover its costs, that was a battle that nobody thought needed fighting.
 

yorksrob

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The railway had always covered its costs. It was what railways did, and had done for over a century.

The political decision that had to be made was that the railway didn't have to cover its costs. And without evidence that it couldn't cover its costs, that was a battle that nobody thought needed fighting.

Would not debt increasing by £3 billion a year (in today's money) provide evidence that it couldn't cover its costs ?
 

RLBH

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Would not debt increasing by £3 billion a year (in today's money) provide evidence that it couldn't cover its costs ?
No, it only proved that it wasn't covering its costs and had been until recently.

To prove that it couldn't cover its costs, it was necessary to get rid of anything that was generating costs but not adding value. That, basically, is what Beeching did.

It's the same position as having a heart-to-heart with a financial advisor. If you're having to borrow money to make loan payments - which is what BR was doing - it doesn't go down well if you're insisting that you have to drive a brand new Mercedes and need two spare bedrooms for the one weekend a year that your sister's family come to stay.
 

Dr Hoo

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I simply don't see why the financial situation the railway was in, made it impossible for someone to come up with, and cost the basic railway in 1962, rather than 1966/67. If anything, such an invention should have made it easier to make savings.
I think that the concept of a 'basic railway'- in terms of something which might make a route financially viable - in 1962 was rather more difficult than it might seem today.
Obviously the scope for economy and efficiency must always be kept under review but the problem in the 1960s was either that foreseeable economies were already being made or that further savings would require significantly more investment than was available. (Such investment would also compete for funds for genuine strategic improvement such as Mark II coaches, liner trains, merry-go-round, Bournemouth electrification, etc., let alone basic stuff like introducing continuously welded rail, AWS and multiple aspect signalling on main lines.)
Most obviously diesel traction (particularly DMUs) was already widespread, reducing traincrew costs through eliminating firemen and also giving many lines their first ever 'new' trains (as opposed to cascaded old stock). In many cases this had had little success in increasing revenue.
Track rationalization - most obviously singling - required significant investment in signalling and didn't take off until the 1968 Act introduced Surplus Track Capacity Grants. (That incentive produced results on many surviving secondary routes that are still regretted to this day and is in any event an entirely post-Beeching concept.)
Automation of level crossings would undoubtedly have helped but the first installation wasn't commissioned until February 1961 and didn't get final MoT/Railway Inspectorate endorsement until well into 1962. Even then, as was discovered in a number of serious accidents, the idea needed to be perfected.
'Paytrain' operation, associated with station de-staffing, was possible up to a point but even then it wasn't always as simple as it appeared. The type of portable ticket machines available were only suitable for a small range of local tickets leading to problems with the need to 're-book' at junctions or principal stations. This would jeopardize connections, inconvenience the passenger, probably increase the total fare to be paid and also lose valuable commercial information (in terms of being unable to 'link' contributory revenue to a branch). Sadly many of the Modernization Plan DMUs also lacked gangways.
Many wayside and branch line stations didn't even have electric lights and there was no potential for 'long line' public address, passenger information systems or help points in the way that we understand them in 2018.
 

yorksrob

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I think that the concept of a 'basic railway'- in terms of something which might make a route financially viable - in 1962 was rather more difficult than it might seem today.
Obviously the scope for economy and efficiency must always be kept under review but the problem in the 1960s was either that foreseeable economies were already being made or that further savings would require significantly more investment than was available. (Such investment would also compete for funds for genuine strategic improvement such as Mark II coaches, liner trains, merry-go-round, Bournemouth electrification, etc., let alone basic stuff like introducing continuously welded rail, AWS and multiple aspect signalling on main lines.)
Most obviously diesel traction (particularly DMUs) was already widespread, reducing traincrew costs through eliminating firemen and also giving many lines their first ever 'new' trains (as opposed to cascaded old stock). In many cases this had had little success in increasing revenue.
Track rationalization - most obviously singling - required significant investment in signalling and didn't take off until the 1968 Act introduced Surplus Track Capacity Grants. (That incentive produced results on many surviving secondary routes that are still regretted to this day and is in any event an entirely post-Beeching concept.)
Automation of level crossings would undoubtedly have helped but the first installation wasn't commissioned until February 1961 and didn't get final MoT/Railway Inspectorate endorsement until well into 1962. Even then, as was discovered in a number of serious accidents, the idea needed to be perfected.
'Paytrain' operation, associated with station de-staffing, was possible up to a point but even then it wasn't always as simple as it appeared. The type of portable ticket machines available were only suitable for a small range of local tickets leading to problems with the need to 're-book' at junctions or principal stations. This would jeopardize connections, inconvenience the passenger, probably increase the total fare to be paid and also lose valuable commercial information (in terms of being unable to 'link' contributory revenue to a branch). Sadly many of the Modernization Plan DMUs also lacked gangways.
Many wayside and branch line stations didn't even have electric lights and there was no potential for 'long line' public address, passenger information systems or help points in the way that we understand them in 2018.

These may have been obstacles to overcome, but the concept was proven on the East Suffolk line as early as 1966/7, so the technical capabilities weren't nearly as far off as made out.

I note with interest your point that the results of surplus track capacity grants i.e singling are "regretted to this day". This is clearly a nonsensical comment where the alternative is complete closure. Those lines closure would have clearly been regretted to this day by several magnitudes more than their singling.

The surplus track capacity grant was a genuinely innovative piece of legislation, albeit blunt. Perhaps Dr B should have called for something similar for marginal passenger routes off the back of his worked examples (which amply illustrated that BR had the expertise and knowledge to tell a marginal from a hopeless case). However, this would have required more serious thought to what sort of a passenger railway the country actually needed, rather than a basic cost calculation. That should have been considered as part of Stedeford.

The point about diesels and gangway connections is an interesting one. NSE had a similar issue with their class 207 DEMU's which were built without gangway connections, but which they wanted to use on longer Ashford -Brighton services. The solution was to install second hand gangway equipment from withdrawn TC stock. I'm sure similarly innovative wheezes could have been found to assist marginal lines in the past, if only the powers that be had been open to them.

Your point about many features of basic railway not being available at the time was because nobody had set their mind towards looking for them. They were too fixated on closure as the only solution.
 

Gareth Marston

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Track rationalization - most obviously singling - required significant investment in signalling and didn't take off until the 1968 Act introduced Surplus Track Capacity Grants. (That incentive produced results on many surviving secondary routes that are still regretted to this day and is in any event an entirely post-Beeching concept.)

The Cambrian had its track rationalization carried out in stages well before that date! Double track was cut back from CruckMeole Junction (Pontesbury branch) to Hookagate in 1960 when all the intermediate stations between Welshpool and Shrewsbury were closed. Loops were taken out at Yockleton and Middletown and the former double track from Buttington Junction to Welshpool was run as two separate single tracks one for Shrewsbury and one for Oswestry. Note that this pre dates Beechings appointment to be Chair of BRB.

The report itself earmarks the Cambrian for "Modification" this included taking out all the remaining double track sections closing many intermediate village stations and taking out numerous passing loops. All this was completed by 1967 long before the Act you refer to.
 
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