This is why I get so annoyed by the "Reopen Woodhead" brigade. Although it wasn't originally on Beeching's hitlist, one of the factors behind its closure to passengers in 1970 was an inability to find a way to divert services into Sheffield Midland. There were other reasons behind it, of course, like political pressure to keep the Hope Valley open, but this was a major practical problem that couldn't be solved. If Woodhead had been the only rail route from Manchester to Sheffield, you'd have been dumped at the remote and inconvenient Victoria station, with no other onward rail connections, and it would have caused a lot of issues. If Woodhead were to re-open, you'd still have the same problem now - you'd need to provide a diversion into Midland across a densely populated and highly developed area. If it was too difficult to contemplate in the sixties, I can't see it being much easier now.
Having had a look, short of major construction work in Sheffield city centre, I think you'd have had to take trains off Woodhead at Penistone and run them via Barnsley. It would have made the journey somewhat longer, and required the expense of electrifying that section.
Agreed - I can see why Woodhead appeals to people - the single carriageway roads between two of the biggest cities in England are poor (and frequently closed in winter) but there's no space west of Hadfield and the situation at Victoria would be a real mess (given the lack of space at Midland but also the fact that Victoria is on a viaduct outside the Inner Ring Road and some distance from the nearest tram stop etc)
The problem with these kind of threads is that anything simple gets rejected ("you can't build a second platform at Dore and a couple of passing loops to accommodate freight in the Hope Valley - that'd be expensive and the Peak authorities might not give planning permission")...
... but any large project (like building a new station at Victoria, building around forty miles of double track railway, drilling a couple of new tunnels under the Pennines because the old ones are used for National Grid) seems to be easy since you don't have to consider the practicalities!
Slippery slope though.
As soon as you make it easy for the Establishment to go around closing things, it will go too far.
You can guarantee it.
If you can't accept the closure of something like Newhaven Marine (because you worry that this would lead to another Serpell) then fair enough, I'm not going to change your mind.
But if you can't accept closing a single inch of railway in 2021 then let's not pretend that you'd have accepted any closures in Beeching's day - so the complaint isn't that he closed Line X or Line Y, you'd not have accepted a single closure (even if he'd spared 99% of the lines that were in the report, you'd have still been complaining about the 1% that were left on the list)
I would argue Whitby is an example of where they got it wrong in that all its south facing routes closed and a day out by train from most places is nigh on impossible because of the need to go via Middlesbrough first
Whitby is a grey area. Population wise, there's not a lot south of there until York, whereas Nunthorpe is closer (given that you'd presumably keep the line from Middlesbrough to Nunthorpe). And there's a reasonable frequency of buses along both the A171 and A174 (which seems a reasonable benchmark for passenger demand).
So, if the argument is about "keeping the town on the map", avoiding it ending up on the List Of Towns Without A Railway" then I can see why the line that survived was the one to Teesside - if only one route to Whitby survived then I guess it'd be "regular commuters for Middlesbrough" versus "long distance leisure traffic from places further away, further south"
I don't think that there was enough demand to justify keeping more than one route to Whitby, and maybe the need to serve the school kids on the Middlesbrough route was the reason that this had to be kept open?
Living south of Whitby, as I do, I'd have liked if if it was more accessible from the York direction, but it's a long way through pretty empty countryside from anywhere, so I can see that it came down to a decision between keeping one route open, and Middlesbrough probably had more everyday/ year round demand - given the population density of the North Yorkshire Moors, I think that keeping
two lines open would have been unrealistic (whilst so may other routes were closing)
No. The country has changed enormously in nearly 60 years. Rail service provision needs to reflect that. Some reopenings will certainly happen, but only because they are more or less on the right alignment for solving a problem. We should not begin from "what can I reopen"; but instead from "what is the best solution for new and existing customers today". It's an essential mindset shift.
Agreed - the fact that the same dozen or so lines keep coming up (and that the people who suggest them never seem to think that there are other problems that exist which would require something other than re-opening old routes) is a common mindset - but it doesn't help solve twenty first century problems
That said, there are some benefits to the major cities having more than one station.
The notable one is that if one of them is out of action for any reason, the city can still be reached via the other one (See Manchester, Glasgow, Birmingham etc), whereas for somewhere like Leeds, if the station is temporarily out of action, the whole show stops.
Similarly, having a couple of terminals means not having all of the pressure from rail passengers seeking onward connections at one point on the local bus/tram network.
...and yet when HS2 proposes to build stations right next to existing stations (e.g. the entrance to Curzon Street is going to be at the entrance to Moor Street) or expanding the envelope of existing stations (e.g. an HS2 alignment that arrives into Leeds directly from the south, so that it's right at the current Leeds station but the tracks won't integrate with existing lines at Leeds), there's uproar from enthusiasts at the idea that everything won't all be part of the one existing station
How often is New Street closed and services are diverted to Moor Street/ Snow Hill though? How often is Glasgow Central closed and services diverted to Queen Street? How many spare paths would you keep at a second station in Leeds just in case all of the services at the existing station have to be diverted there? It's a bit like the "diversionary resilience" excuse for re-opening an old line - it sounds nice in theory but it seems an incredibly expensive way of providing a capacity, when we don't use diversions even when there is an alternative route.
You've ignored the key point which is that most notable settlements today will have had a station at some point in the past.
Off the top of my head, taking a sizeable town that isn't on the railway network, Tavistock - if you wanted to link it to the railway network, you're most likely to want to link it to the nearest major poulation centre, which is Plymouth. It's no coincidence that that is where the railway went previously.
And, again, the top problem on your list is Tavistock - all problems seem to coincidently involve small towns that used to have stations on closed lines. Meanwhile, suburban Milton Keynes grows by the size of Tavistock fairly regularly but no enthusiasts seem worried about serving all of the new houses there.
I think this thread is aimed at people like me. Rail enthusiasm is like Brexit, its based on feeling and emotion rather than rational, empirical arguments. That's just how people are-I'm definetely of the former category. Rail enthusiasm is a past-time and most people aren't interested in the business case of reopening routes, why would they be? The world is simple, it literally boils down to "more track is always a good thing". Wishing otherwise would be asking people to actually think about the technicalities of the railway, which most people won't do because rail enthusiasm is for pleasure.
I get annoyed when I think about all the secondary routes closed by Beeching. It would be great to have a choice of two routes to say, London to Manchester, Birmingham or Glasgow. I know the argument against reopening Matlock to Buxton for through Manchester to London traffic has been done to death, but I still want it to happen. Because when it did exist, the railways looked and felt more interesting. HS2's capacity arguments just leave me cold-I don't really care. Railways are a highly romantic subject-even non-enthusiasts realise that, so it's natural people will pine for things that may very well should not.
I appreciate the honesty - I've no problem with people who have the emotional attachment to old lines - there must be millions of people in the country who have that sentimentality, based on the Government's regular "Build Beeching Back Better" press releases - even amongst people who are far too young to have used these lines - maybe someone cleverer than me will put together a thesis on why the Brits have these lightly used railways that few people actually used at the time and significant numbers of those people remain alive - there can't be many people of working age in 2021 who remember using these lines .
I don't know if other countries have the same fixation with closed routes - obviously there will be fewer such lines in countries that built their railways properly (and didn't have a mess of competing lines built by nineteenth century entrepreneurs that needed trimming) - but it does feel peculiarly British.
I'm just getting a bit bored when people keep bringing back the same dozen or so lines as the solution to all of the major problems (as far as they are concerned) - sentimentality is fine but let's not spend hundreds of millions of pounds of the rail budget on such projects - the pre-Covid railway was struggling with capacity/ bottlenecks/ passengers crammed onto busy trains/ lack of electrification/ flat junctions/ weekend staffing... worrying about rural villages is really far down my list of priorities.
Whenever there's a discussion of the rights and wrongs of Beeching (or of "the most-missed closed railways") I always think of one close to me that was a pre-Beeching closure, namely the Holmfirth branch. In 1961 it's understandable that the powers that be thought that the private motor car was the future, so the railway closed without much fanfare. The real mistake of the 1960s was in not protecting the alignments of those railways, should they be required in the future. Then again If you'd objected to closing Holmfirth on the basis that there'd be severe congestion on the A616 in forty years, you'd have been laughed at.
Sounds nice in theory but how long would you preserve the alignments? Should we still preserve all of the lines that were closed a hundred years ago?
Would that include freight lines too? Given that a number of them were built to serve something like a colliery that closed down - do we keep them too? Should the railway be liable for maintaining all of the intact bridges and tunnels on preserved bits of line? Would this have meant BR having to close significantly more lines, given that they didn't get the benefits of selling off alignments of closed lines (they'd have to get the money from somewhere)?
And would the same apply to canals? Should we have kept all of them fully open just in case that trade came back to?
That’s where I’d personally suggest a large housebuilding project. Hourly service to Glasgow and Edinburgh can’t be argued with.
Building tens of thousands of houses because you can't accept closing a failing station seems a little... tail wagging the dog?
If people won't use our stations then they should understand that the railway takes priority and we should organise their housing around the needs of the railway?
