coppercapped
Established Member
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.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.
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 was.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.
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.