Just goes to show that the railways were not in a functional bubble , and judgement on why they failed to do something in the early 1950's , is simplistic in the extreme.
True!
I think a lot of people are unduly harsh on the measuring systems used in the Beeching era, though. It's always been true that some parts of the railway were massively profitable, and others lost absolutely horrific amounts of money, but until the 1950s, no-one knew which bits were which, and didn't need to because the railway made a profit overall. It's only when the network began to make a loss, which progressively grew bigger and bigger, that someone needed to work out where the money was going.
Beeching was regularly criticised for the crudity of his approach (infrequent surveys, over-simplistic accounting methods etc) but I think he did the best he could, given the options available, and genuinely attempted to work out what lines were potentially profitable and which ones were hopeless basket cases. He wasn't part of an anti-rail conspiracy, he was just limited by the terms of his brief, and the resources and techniques available.
Today, you can instantly pull out loads of statistics on revenue and profits from the data stored on every single transaction on the railway, but back then you couldn't do that at all, and you had to try and measure things as best you could.
Well argued points - there's a lot that could have been better in hindsight but given the knowledge/ tools available at the time I think Beeching did the best that could have been done.
We still have some basket case railways nowadays (where it'd be cheaper to put everyone in taxis), so it's not as if he removed all unprofitable lines - but as the first country with railways (who allowed private companies to build railways in fairly haphazard fashion, generally based upon Victorian freight needs) there was always going to be a reckoning once someone started looking at the "books".
Problem is, a lot of the anti-Beeching stuff gets muddled in with conspiracy theories ("he only visited our line on a wet Tuesday in February") and he gets the blame for things that happened much later (e.g. Woodhead - I'm sure if the S&C had closed in the '80s he'd have been blamed for that too!).
One indication of the decent job that he did is that there's not a lot of compelling cases for lines that shouldn't have closed - certainly some marginal decisions (as would be expected) but most of the regrets are along the lines of "this would be a useful diversionary route for a couple of weekends a year, if still open today" rather than any huge losses. One of the most referenced lines that could have stayed open was Hull -
Beverley - York, but since the Hull -
Selby - York line has only recently been upgraded to an hourly service, it's not as if spreading that demand between two routes would have meant both would be busy. If that's the level of "grey area" that we are quibbling over then I think he did a pretty good job.
Nowadays, when I've got a phone in my pocket more powerful than the technology that landed rockets on the moon, it'd be a whole different situation - LENNON etc make things much easier to calculate - but given the tools available over fifty years ago (and the fact that nobody had done something like this previously, meaning no template and precious little record keeping), I don't think we can criticise the guy.