Reversing Beeching

[phil-b259]

50 minutes ago, Zomboid said:

What about Leamington Spa? There will always be winners and losers in this game.

 

I wonder what kind of service Coventry would justify if it wasn't a calling point for all Euston to Birmingham trains. Much of the traffic on those trains seems to be end to end.

 

Simply based on the size of the 'splodge' on the map, Coventry is significantly larger and this generates far more train trips than Leamington Spa regardless of service levels.

 

Back in the 1930s (when both the LMS and GWR were in competition and both routes saw frequent express services I would still wager Coventry was larger than Leamington.

 

Of course had the Leamington route been upgraded and the Coventry link been downgraded in the 60s things might be a bit different - but lets be honest, given Coventry's bigger size that was never a realistic proposition

Edited May 16, 2019 by phil-b259

[Zomboid]

Leamington was just to illustrate the winners and losers. I imagine one of the reasons (perhaps not a major one) why the WCML was chosen in preference to the GWR route was because Coventry is bigger than Leamington and Banbury.

[melmerby]

1 hour ago, Zomboid said:

 

I wonder what kind of service Coventry would justify if it wasn't a calling point for all Euston to Birmingham trains. Much of the traffic on those trains seems to be end to end.

There always seems to be a fair few people getting on & off the London- Birmingham trains at Coventry

7.6million passengers entry/exits per year in 2018 (about 2.7m at Leamington & 2.5m for Rugby)

The much larger Milton Keynes station, with more train services is 6.8m

[Joseph_Pestell]

11 hours ago, caradoc said:

 

When the ex-GWR route was downgraded and partly singled the then expensively resignalled and electrified WCML (part of the justification for which was focusing traffic and therefore investment on one line) had adequate capacity for existing and foreseeable needs.

 

 

Agreed. But your phrasing illustrates so well the UK Govt approach to infrastructure - do the absolute minimum necessary now. Given that the aim of most governments is to have an expanding economy, it is foreseeable that more capacity will be needed.

[The Johnster]

The mistake the long term forward planners made back in the Beeching era was that road usage would increase at the expense of rail for both passenger and freight.  They were dead right of course, it did, but they completely failed to see that it would increase to the extent that traffic congestion, journey times, rising fuel costs, pollution in urban areas, and parking costs would become problematic to the extent that there would ever be the very considerable increase in rail passenger traffic that there has been since about 1980; infrastructure investment has failed hopelessly to keep up with this, and getting about by road is not much faster now than it was before the motorways were built.

 

The Post Office made a similar error when most businesses became computerised in the 80s and 90s.  Foreseeing a drop in demand for paper mail because of the new methods, and that email would replace personal correspondence, they cut investment and were caught out when traffic increased by about 50% in less than a decade, because the computers generated more paper mail than they replaced.  All those transactions required a paper back up with a signature, and the computers meant there were a lot more of them; also the computers generated sales literature, junk mail, on a monumental scale.  Easily foreseen with 20/20 hindsight...

 

They still haven't devised a mechanised system for packets or handwritten addresses, so it's a waste of time putting postcodes on those; they have to be manually sorted.

 

Drifting a bit, but it's an illustration that long term forward planning isn't as easy as it looks, and rail planning has to be long term.  This doesn't sit well with the get rich quick short termist investment culture prevalent in the UK; people want returns for themselves, not their kids.

[Mike Storey]

3 hours ago, The Johnster said:

The mistake the long term forward planners made back in the Beeching era was that road usage would increase at the expense of rail for both passenger and freight.  They were dead right of course, it did, but they completely failed to see that it would increase to the extent that traffic congestion, journey times, rising fuel costs, pollution in urban areas, and parking costs would become problematic to the extent that there would ever be the very considerable increase in rail passenger traffic that there has been since about 1980; infrastructure investment has failed hopelessly to keep up with this, and getting about by road is not much faster now than it was before the motorways were built.

 

 

 

You are completely right over the long term, of course (although long term passenger growth across UK rail did not actually occur until the mid-1990's onwards. There was a blip of growth in the late 1980's, primarily commuting, but this did a sharp reverse after Black Wednesday).

 

But one has to look at this from the contemporary perspective. I well remember having to stand up at public meetings to defend a decision made by BR to reduce most of the route between Peterborough and Huntingdon, to double track from quadruple (or to triple for a shorter distance), and introduce SIMBIDs (simplified bi-directional signalling) which, as we now know, was never used in anger for various reasons. The decision had been made when all common wisdom, at the time, was that rail was in long term decline, subsidies had to be cut and the primary job of railway managers was to seek economies, despite the introduction of HST etc. But I was having to defend the work, which had only recently been done (due to the time lag between decision and getting it implemented on the ground), at a time when passenger growth was clearly re-occurring on that part of the ECML and appeared to be sustained, with overcrowding and robbing Peter to pay Paul the only solution open. Business Sector management had just arrived and a new focus on attracting business rather than accepting it was going to fade away, had emerged. It was a very difficult period of adjustment. (It took another 30 years for most of it to be re-instated).

 

A more strategic approach was certainly needed, but I doubt that anyone expected growth in the way it has happened - it was certainly not an expectation at privatisation. But what it has told us is that we need a strategic approach now. 

 

[Chime Whistle Books]

On 17/05/2019 at 13:55, The Johnster said:

The mistake the long term forward planners made back in the Beeching era was that road usage would increase at the expense of rail for both passenger and freight.  They were dead right of course, it did, but they completely failed to see that it would increase to the extent that traffic congestion, journey times, rising fuel costs, pollution in urban areas, and parking costs would become problematic to the extent that there would ever be the very considerable increase in rail passenger traffic that there has been since about 1980; infrastructure investment has failed hopelessly to keep up with this, and getting about by road is not much faster now than it was before the motorways were built.

 

The Post Office made a similar error when most businesses became computerised in the 80s and 90s.  Foreseeing a drop in demand for paper mail because of the new methods, and that email would replace personal correspondence, they cut investment and were caught out when traffic increased by about 50% in less than a decade, because the computers generated more paper mail than they replaced.  All those transactions required a paper back up with a signature, and the computers meant there were a lot more of them; also the computers generated sales literature, junk mail, on a monumental scale.  Easily foreseen with 20/20 hindsight...

 

They still haven't devised a mechanised system for packets or handwritten addresses, so it's a waste of time putting postcodes on those; they have to be manually sorted.

 

Drifting a bit, but it's an illustration that long term forward planning isn't as easy as it looks, and rail planning has to be long term.  This doesn't sit well with the get rich quick short termist investment culture prevalent in the UK; people want returns for themselves, not their kids.

A few years ago I read that BR,rather naively, believed that investing in diesels during the 1960s would tempt people back out of their cars and onto the railway. It may have had limited success, but it's very hard to put the genie of car ownership back in the bottle, even more so when Beeching cut off large swathes of the country from the rail network, leaving little alternative. Buses have their place, but are nowhere near as successful as trains and trams for promoting modal shift from cars.

[Edwin_m]

56 minutes ago, Chime Whistle Books said:

A few years ago I read that BR,rather naively, believed that investing in diesels during the 1960s would tempt people back out of their cars and onto the railway. It may have had limited success, but it's very hard to put the genie of car ownership back in the bottle, even more so when Beeching cut off large swathes of the country from the rail network, leaving little alternative. Buses have their place, but are nowhere near as successful as trains and trams for promoting modal shift from cars.

The first-generation DMUs were practically all delivered before Beeching and BR did a lot of promotion of how they were more comfortable and often faster and more frequent than their steam-hauled predecessors - something of a surprise to those who only remember their later days when they were pretty run down and expectations of comfort had increased.  So the cost and ridership figures used to justify closures must have been based (with a few exceptions) on DMU operation, and you are probably right to say that dieselisation didn't save those routes although more would probably have gone if it hadn't happened.  However Beeching generally failed to consider the scope for infrastructure cost savings that DMU operation and reducing freight traffic could have facilitated, which were only achieved on the surviving routes in the decade or two after. 

 

Buses have been successful at providing rail or tram feeders in countries such as Germany and Switzerland where car ownership is higher than here.  The key is to integrate the times and fares are integrated - to the extent that every arriving train or tram has several buses waiting just across the platform which depart a minute or two later and return after 12 or 27min to meet the next rail service. 

 

I believe the mistake we made in Britain was to treat the buses and trains as separate entities each trying to offer a comprehensive service, rather than as part of a public transport network where each did what is was best at.  This has been so, with limited local exceptions, even when they were owned by the same private companies or managed by the same arm of government. 

[Chime Whistle Books]

49 minutes ago, Edwin_m said:

The first-generation DMUs were practically all delivered before Beeching and BR did a lot of promotion of how they were more comfortable and often faster and more frequent than their steam-hauled predecessors - something of a surprise to those who only remember their later days when they were pretty run down and expectations of comfort had increased.  So the cost and ridership figures used to justify closures must have been based (with a few exceptions) on DMU operation, and you are probably right to say that dieselisation didn't save those routes although more would probably have gone if it hadn't happened.  However Beeching generally failed to consider the scope for infrastructure cost savings that DMU operation and reducing freight traffic could have facilitated, which were only achieved on the surviving routes in the decade or two after. 

 

Buses have been successful at providing rail or tram feeders in countries such as Germany and Switzerland where car ownership is higher than here.  The key is to integrate the times and fares are integrated - to the extent that every arriving train or tram has several buses waiting just across the platform which depart a minute or two later and return after 12 or 27min to meet the next rail service. 

 

I believe the mistake we made in Britain was to treat the buses and trains as separate entities each trying to offer a comprehensive service, rather than as part of a public transport network where each did what is was best at.  This has been so, with limited local exceptions, even when they were owned by the same private companies or managed by the same arm of government. 

Yes,the DMUs did a great job in saving many a rural branch from the axe, rather like the class 142s did two decades later! It's also worth noting that some of the figures were manipulated in terms of carrying out passenger surveys on 'holiday branches' during the winter season etc. In addition, the promised repalcement buses only lasted a very short time in some cases, once it was realised that they suffered from the same problem as the trains, namely a lack of passengers to make he services financially viable.

[The Johnster]

BR proved themselves ultimately right in the concept that fast frequent services could tempt people back out of their cars, but not until the (diesel) HSTs cut journey times at the same time that fuel prices and motorway congestion were beginning to bite.  The railway saw itself as competing with motorways , and concentrated on improving timings and standards of comfort with air conditioning and better seats.  The motorways were losing their edge and becoming stressful; rail advertising still promotes happy passengers relaxing, chatting, drinking coffee, reading papers, watching the scenery fly past...

 

All this happened post Beeching.  A sea change was the Arab-Israeli War in 1967, which is getting towards the end of what I think of as the Beeching era, and which caused a panic by closing the Suez Canal and exposing how dependent cheap oil supplies were on it; little has happened in the Middle East since to re-assure anybody concerned by this, though the canal is back in business.  The fuel shortages and petrol rationing of the 70s meant that a single person in a car was paying nearly as much for his long, speed restricted, congested, delayed, and stressful journey as he could for a comfy seat on a fast train.

 

All of which benefitted traffic on the main lines which had never really been under threat from Beeching and his acolytes.  What Beeching closed were branches, and, to a much larger but now mostly forgotten extent, local stations on main lines, which were replaced by inadequate bus services and forced people into their cars whether they wanted to be there or not.  The short termism of this has been demonstrated by the number of main line local stations not served by expresses that have re-opened over the last 2 or 3 decades; they should never have been closed in the first place, of course.

 

Dmus were an established feature well before Beeching, the first major impact of the modernisation plan.  They were very popular indeed when they were introduced, providing local services that were promoted as superior to the steam hauled stock they replaced.  They were seldom faster, whatever the marketing people wanted you to think, but they were a lot cleaner, brighter, and generally pleasant than the antiquated and filthy compartment museum pieces they superceded, and were easier to keep clean.  People liked the open saloon seating and being able to see out the front or rear.  They often came with, or shortly enough after to be associated with, improved service regular interval timetables as well.  They were well promoted and much better than the local bus, but in the late 50s car ownership was the aspiration for ordinary people, and it was becoming increasingly affordable.  

 

They were said to be capable of defraying their running costs with anything more than half a dozen passengers aboard, but this was seldom achieved if the cost of staffing stations on their routes was taken into account, one of the reasons Beeching targeted such stations.  By the 70s, increasing maintenance and fuel costs had rendered many of the economies they had been intended to effect unachievable, and there was no money in the pot to replace them, so we had to struggle on with them and hope the public were fooled by the new seats and lighting of the refurbished sets.  By this time they were fundamentally as unfit for purpose as the antediluvian steam stock they'd replaced, just as filthy and smelly, and often incapable of timing the services.  Nobody liked them any more.

 

Cars are more convenient than any form of public transport, and you don't have to mingle with people you don't know and probably don't want to.  You can set your own climate and play your own music.  They are also a lot cheaper IF the car's seats are full, but the huge majority of cars have only a driver sitting in them, an indication of (a) how seductive the dream of personal transport still is, and (b) the extent to which people do not like mixing with other people.  It is illegal and contravenes your insurance conditions if you formally charge passengers anyway.  This makes public transport only viable as an alternative in terms of cost, and sometimes journey time and comfort, but it depends on the public transport.  I have a Welsh Assembly Government bus pass and a bus stop 50 yards from my front door with a 7 minute interval service, but If I lived out in the boonies, even the urban boonies, my perception of my need for a car (which I cannot afford to run) might be different.  Public transport, bus, rail, or air, is increasingly overcrowded, unreliable, and unfit for purpose, as are roads.  

 

Some European nations seem to do it better than we do, and manage integration between transport modes better, but few have the population density that we do.  The Japanese are famously good at it, despite population density similar to ours, but have never shied away from the investment needed, as well as putting up with being squeezed onto trains by manhandling.  

 

 

[Mike Storey]

2 hours ago, The Johnster said:

BR proved themselves ultimately right in the concept that fast frequent services could tempt people back out of their cars, but not until the (diesel) HSTs cut journey times at the same time that fuel prices and motorway congestion were beginning to bite.  The railway saw itself as competing with motorways , and concentrated on improving timings and standards of comfort with air conditioning and better seats.  The motorways were losing their edge and becoming stressful; rail advertising still promotes happy passengers relaxing, chatting, drinking coffee, reading papers, watching the scenery fly past...

 

 

I quite agree with much of the rest of your post, but I suggest you are forgetting the impact of the newly electrified West Coast services, from the early 60's, progressively to 1974, which proved viable the long distance, Inter-City concept (frequent, fast and limited stop) compared to the prevailing wisdom. This investment was supported by Beeching's report (as was electrification of all the major trunk routes), and passenger numbers on the WCML doubled between the mid-60's and mid-70's.

 

HST, arriving later, was always intended as a stop-gap (and a very welcome one from BR's own engineers at Derby), in the belief that APT would work one day, and that electrification was the way ahead. But it did not quite work out that way, of course.

 

[The Johnster]

This certainly made a difference on the Birmingham, Liverpool, Manchester and eventually Glasgow trains, where the main motorway competition was before the M1 was extended North.  ETH stock on the Midland, ECML, and GW routes made a big impact as well, but it was the HST that really turned things around; the right train at the right price at exactly the right time.

[Edwin_m]

1 hour ago, The Johnster said:

This certainly made a difference on the Birmingham, Liverpool, Manchester and eventually Glasgow trains, where the main motorway competition was before the M1 was extended North.  ETH stock on the Midland, ECML, and GW routes made a big impact as well, but it was the HST that really turned things around; the right train at the right price at exactly the right time.

What stock was used on the prime GWML intercity workings just before the HSTs?  I was under the impression they didn't have air-conditioned stock because there were so many non-ETH Westerns still around.  If so HSTs would have been a bigger step change in interior ambience than on the ECML and (I think) MML which had Mk2 stock with a very similar interior and crucualy air conditioning.  100mph on the electrics in a Mk1 or early Mk2 was certainly impressive but horribly noisy if it was warm enough to need the windows open. 

 

Posted, ironically, on the day the last HST at Paddington has made it to the front page of the BBC website. 

[The Johnster]

Irony just leaves me flat, mate.  O, no, hang on, that's ironing...

 

Each mark of mark 2 made an early appearance on the WR, with air conditioned mk2D stock for the Bristol and South Wales trains in 1971 or 2.  Sets of 9 coaches, from the Paddington end 2 FO, mk1 RMB, 5 SO, and a mk1 BG at the country end, all on B4 100mph bogies hauled by class 47s in South Wales, mix of 47s and 50s on the Bristols, most of which extended to Weston Super Mare.  No BFOs or BFKs were allocated to the WR.  Again, motorway competition from the M4 was the driving force, the Severn Bridge having opened in 1969.  The M5 was still being extended past Bristol during this period.

 

The Hymeks and Warships were unable to work air braked stock, and while the Westerns could, they could not work ETH or Airco stock.  They were used on vacuum and air braked freight work all across the region though, and found work on such West of England trains as were still steam heated

[Edwin_m]

33 minutes ago, The Johnster said:

Irony just leaves me flat, mate.  O, no, hang on, that's ironing...

 

Each mark of mark 2 made an early appearance on the WR, with air conditioned mk2D stock for the Bristol and South Wales trains in 1971 or 2.  Sets of 9 coaches, from the Paddington end 2 FO, mk1 RMB, 5 SO, and a mk1 BG at the country end, all on B4 100mph bogies hauled by class 47s in South Wales, mix of 47s and 50s on the Bristols, most of which extended to Weston Super Mare.  No BFOs or BFKs were allocated to the WR.  Again, motorway competition from the M4 was the driving force, the Severn Bridge having opened in 1969.  The M5 was still being extended past Bristol during this period.

 

The Hymeks and Warships were unable to work air braked stock, and while the Westerns could, they could not work ETH or Airco stock.  They were used on vacuum and air braked freight work all across the region though, and found work on such West of England trains as were still steam heated

Thanks for clearing that up.

[Arun Sharma]

10 hours ago, Chime Whistle Books said:

A few years ago I read that BR,rather naively, believed that investing in diesels during the 1960s would tempt people back out of their cars and onto the railway. It may have had limited success, but it's very hard to put the genie of car ownership back in the bottle, even more so when Beeching cut off large swathes of the country from the rail network, leaving little alternative. Buses have their place, but are nowhere near as successful as trains and trams for promoting modal shift from cars.

I agree with what you say, but I suspect the idea was to imagine that people would use their cars to drive from home [a place denuded of its rural railway] to a hub [aka Parkway-type station] and then take the main part of their journey by train. Nowadays, it beggars belief that folk in a position of responsibility for transport planning would believe that anyone would do that.

However, in the 1961-3 period, with few motorways and under-engined cars, longish distance driving was not a pleasurable experience - Anybody else remember the traffic jams at junctions off the A6 et al?

[Chime Whistle Books]

23 minutes ago, Arun Sharma said:

I agree with what you say, but I suspect the idea was to imagine that people would use their cars to drive from home [a place denuded of its rural railway] to a hub [aka Parkway-type station] and then take the main part of their journey by train. Nowadays, it beggars belief that folk in a position of responsibility for transport planning would believe that anyone would do that.

However, in the 1961-3 period, with few motorways and under-engined cars, longish distance driving was not a pleasurable experience - Anybody else remember the traffic jams at junctions off the A6 et al?

It has to be remembered that Marples had a big financial stake in road building!

[The Johnster]

To be fair to BR, they always thought that the answer was 25kv electrification on the UIC model, and to be fair they were by and large right.  The problem was that the Treasury was unwilling to stump up the ackkers to install it except in discrete and therefore less effective stages (still are), and we had to 'make do' with diesels until such time as electrification could be paid for.  Only in the UK; other countries bit the bullet and benefitted from it!

 

Part of the reason for this may lie in a cultural reluctance in the UK to trust railways with money, either private investment or taxpayers.  This is, I believe, rooted in 2 seminal events in the 19th century; the Railway Bubble of the 1840s which was overseen by the fraudulent and mendacious George Hudson (who nevertheless provided us with the central core of the current network), and the later collapse of the Overend Gurney bank, which had overinvested in railways which could not return dividends quickly enough to satisfy the creditors.  Both these events caused genuine hardship and distress for the new middle classes who had been encouraged to put their money behind the white heat of the new technology, entering the National Consciousness, and the mistrust lingers even now.  It is not difficult to portray railways as profligrate wasters of investors' or taxpayers' money capitalising on their monopoly!

 

The British seem, in consequence, culturally incapable of coming to terms with the concept that railways are profitable but only if you are willing to play the Long Game, and that some railways are never going to turn a profit but are necessary to keep other railways in business; it's a network.  The trunk and branch tree analogy is apt; cut the branches and the twigs and the tree dies because there is nowhere for the leaves to grow, but the branches and twigs cannot survive without the support and nutrition provided by the trunk.  Beeching, bean counter that he was, reckoned he could stem the losses by closing unprofitable parts (and in all fairness to him that was the exact job he was hired to do). but almost fatally damaged the whole, which was only saved by the failure of the motorway network to provide an efficient and effective transportation network in the 70s and 80s, and since, due to fuel costs and congestion.

[rodent279]

I always feel that Beeching is portrayed as the villain of the piece, but we too easily forget his support of mainline electrification, and bulk freight and containerisation.

[caradoc]

8 hours ago, Chime Whistle Books said:

It has to be remembered that Marples had a big financial stake in road building!

 

That is true but if it was not the case, would the motorways then not have been built, and branch lines and wayside stations remain open instead ? I can only speak from personal experience, but in the 60s we (parents, me and two sisters) went on holiday by train, with all the restrictions on destinations and convenience that incurred. As soon as we could afford to we got a car and never went on holiday by train again.  

[Edwin_m]

9 hours ago, Arun Sharma said:

I agree with what you say, but I suspect the idea was to imagine that people would use their cars to drive from home [a place denuded of its rural railway] to a hub [aka Parkway-type station] and then take the main part of their journey by train. Nowadays, it beggars belief that folk in a position of responsibility for transport planning would believe that anyone would do that.

However, in the 1961-3 period, with few motorways and under-engined cars, longish distance driving was not a pleasurable experience - Anybody else remember the traffic jams at junctions off the A6 et al?

And yet there are thousands of people who park at stations today, despite sometimes high charges for doing so...

[62613]

9 hours ago, Chime Whistle Books said:

It has to be remembered that Marples had a big financial stake in road building!

The motorway system was being planned in the mid-1950s. The first section of the M1 opened in 1959, didn't it? The Preston bypass certainly opened very early. That's not to say that Marples wasn't a bit dodgy.

 

[Colin_McLeod]

Dare I risk suggesting that part of the reason for growth in rail passenger traffic is down to the investments made by and the marketing carried out by the private companies.

[melmerby]

49 minutes ago, Edwin_m said:

And yet there are thousands of people who park at stations today, despite sometimes high charges for doing so...

An example of how park and ride can take off, is Whitlocks End Station on the Straford on Avon line.

Some years ago it was just a halt with an hourly service between Birmingham and Stratford and little patronage, the majority of trains terminated at Shirley, one stop closer to Birmingam and with bus connections.

Then a (free) carpark was built at Whitlock's End and Passenger numbers soared, the car park has been considerably enlarged twice and is still full, meanwhile the station is now served by three trains an hour (more during busy periods) some of which terminate before returning to Stourbridge, Kidderminster or Worcester.

There are plans to build another car park at Wythall but nothing so far.

EDIT

This has all been at the behest of the local transport authority.

Edited May 20, 2019 by melmerby

[Fenman]

8 hours ago, The Johnster said:

...

 Beeching, bean counter that he was, reckoned he could stem the losses by closing unprofitable parts (and in all fairness to him that was the exact job he was hired to do). but almost fatally damaged the whole,

...

 

That seems a bit unfair to Beeching: railway managers had been happily closing branchlines and cross-country routes long before Beeching came on the scene (the longest was some 180-odd miles of the old M&GN cross-country route, from the Midlands to East Anglia, back in 1959); and railway managers long after Beeching had gone were slashing routes that he had never proposed to axe (the saintly Gerry Fiennes was one of those who made a good career out of closing lines that Beeching had not recommended for closure). Some of Beeching's core themes have withstood the test of time - that the railways are brilliant and economical movers of bulk goods and large numbers of people, whereas they are pretty poor economically at transporting smalls from every village or hamlet, and moving empty carriages through sparsely-populated countryside. InterCity, trunk routes, trainload freight, MGR, the end of the steam-era British Railways and the launch of the modern British Rail (at least, that was the vision) - he deserves credit for supporting all those, even if by no means all of them were his own babies.

 

Beeching was a talented public service leader: he went on to transform the English courts system - taking another vital national institution stuck in an earlier period and successfully modernising it (he abolished the old assizes and gave us Crown and High Courts, with a streamlined appeals procedure - all still successfully in service today).

 

Was everything he did completely successful? Absolutely not (and a lot of what he did do was half-arsed because of the limitations of the time - work-study systems and accounting systems which were inadequate to the complexity of the task meant that some stations and branches were closed which certainly should not have been, some of which have subsequently re-opened). But, frankly, which of us can look back at our working lives confident that we were 100% successful at all times, that we never made any crap decisions based on inadequate or just plain wrong information, even though we were doing the best we could?

 

Paul