Reversing Beeching ???

[Kallaroonian]

OK so I keep up to date with UK news but nowadays I live in Australia so I might be a bit behind the curve here; you might all be aware of this topic already.

 

but I came across this 

 

https://amp-theguardian-com.cdn.ampproject.org/c/s/amp.theguardian.com/business/2019/oct/06/without-the-beeching-report-there-might-not-have-been-brexit

 

Wow. I think.

[Aire Head]

Im not really sure what the discussion is here and all this topic seems like to do is cause a load of frothing about brexit

[woodenhead]

It assumes that if the trains had continued then the brain drain to cities wouldn't have happened and the villages would not have felt so isolated.

 

They were isolated even when the railways existed, many lines only went close to the supposed towns they served.

 

The services on those lines was sparse back in the 60s and probably would still be today - as you extend away from the mainline the numbers wishing to travel always dwindles - look at it like a human body and it's veins - the further from the main trunk the smaller the veins become.

 

When we joined the EEC (Remembering the UK chose not to enter the EEC in 1957 when it was formed as it did not suit the UK's ambitions) there was already mistrust and that has never left.  Without getting into politics, our membership of the EEC/EU has always been strained and nothing has changed.

[jonny777]

From reading the Guardian (I still have it delivered) I get the current impression that in order to get any opinion piece published in the paper at present, the writer has to mention Brexit - however tenuous the link. 

[whart57]

I'm not sure which will be more contentious on here, Beeching or Brexit

 

I read that piece by Larry Elliott at lunchtime in the print version. It strikes me that he is stretching a point rather a long way here, and he also takes the rather nostalgic view of Beeching that many in Britain do. He seems to forget that most of the lines closed by Beeching had infrequent services, were slow and had stations some distance from the communities they were supposed to serve. The real failure was failure to provide a good national bus network, and to let the bus network that existed shrivel away

Edited October 7, 2019 by whart57

[whart57]

17 minutes ago, woodenhead said:

Without getting into politics, our membership of the EEC/EU has always been strained and nothing has changed.

 

Only for some, which is why the debate is so divisive. Wouldn't it be nice to go back to when "Europe" was number eight or nine on people's concerns at election times.

[mdvle]

Then how does he explain that the same problem - that the "modern economy" jobs are all in the big cities and small towns are dying - is happening in almost every western/advanced nation?

 

Whether Beeching was good/bad is irrelevant to the problem the modern world is facing.

[Nearholmer]

I’m not sure who Larry Elliot is, but he is way off-beam in that article, way of-beam. It contains so many illogicalities that I don’t know where to start ....... except with the idea that Beeching made the journey from reading to Watford a tedious fag. It was always a tedious fag by train.

 

I’m a railway enthusiast, a fairly frequent guardian reader, and a person who finds the idea that we should cut ourselves adrift from Europe deeply depressing, but the last item that I would cite in favour of any of my tastes or tendencies is that one!

 

PS: Larry Elliot is economics editor of the Guardian, I checked that fact. Which is what he clearly needs to do more often.

Edited October 7, 2019 by Nearholmer

[Dunsignalling]

15 minutes ago, Nearholmer said:

I’m not sure who Larry Elliot is, but he is way off-beam in that article, way of-beam. It contains so many illogicalities that I don’t know where to start ....... except with the idea that Beeching made the journey from reading to Watford a tedious fag. It was always a tedious fag by train.

 

I’m a railway enthusiast, a fairly frequent guardian reader, and a person who finds the idea that we should cut ourselves adrift from Europe deeply depressing, but the last item that I would cite in favour of any of my tastes or tendencies is that one!

 

PS: Larry Elliot is economics editor of the Guardian, I checked that fact. Which is what he clearly needs to do more often.

A journey from somewhere few want to be to somewhere almost nobody wants to go, so I'd think the longer it took, the better.....

 

John

[jonny777]

I suppose the clever way might have been to get a train to Acton Main Line, walk up the road to Willesden Junction and get a Watford service from there?

[Nearholmer]

Clever, but not necessarily quick or dry.

 

possible a really convoluted journey could have been made via Uxbridge?

Edited October 7, 2019 by Nearholmer

[Kallaroonian]

I was more focussed on the Beeching side of it.

 

Click through to the link the bloke involved made. That is more pertinent.

 

Here it is 

 

http://www.ukpol.co.uk/andrew-adonis-2019-speech-to-the-ippr-on-reversing-beeching/

[John-Miles]

As a regular Guardian reader, I long ago came to the opinion that Larry Elliot is a bit of a plonker.

Edited October 7, 2019 by John-Miles

[Nearholmer]

The Andrew Adonis piece is a lot better.

[woodenhead]

Just now, Nearholmer said:

The Andrew Adonis piece is a lot better.

And not about Brexit apart from the simple well known fact - if we weren't spending so much on Brexit then there would be more money available for investment like rail.

[Bernard Lamb]

Now if he had written Watford to Slough it would have made a lot more sense.

What a surprise that some of the locations that Beeching selected to loose their railways are also badly served by motorways.

Bernard

[jonny777]

What I always failed to understand is why they closed the Oxford - Cambridge through route and the Wolverton to Newport Pagnell branch, when the outline planning for Milton Keynes must have been well under way? 

 

Did no government departments ever talk to each other? 

[caradoc]

Poor old Dr Beeching, not only does he get blamed for every railway closure ever, now he is responsible for Brexit as well - I almost feel sorry for him !

 

There has been a huge amount of mince talked about Brexit, on both sides of the argument, but this takes the biscuit.

 

[F-UnitMad]

2 hours ago, Bernard Lamb said:

 

What a surprise that some of the locations that Beeching selected to loose their railways are also badly served by motorways.

Bernard

Especially as he was appointed by Ernest Marples, then Minister for Transport, who just happened to have vested interests in road construction... 

Edited October 7, 2019 by F-UnitMad

[Fat Controller]

1 hour ago, jonny777 said:

What I always failed to understand is why they closed the Oxford - Cambridge through route and the Wolverton to Newport Pagnell branch, when the outline planning for Milton Keynes must have been well under way? 

 

Did no government departments ever talk to each other? 

I think you may have answered your own question...

[Dava]

I read the Adonis piece and agree with quite a lot of it. Loss of rail and key industries cut the legs from under a whole bunch of places. There are others where loss of their main industry is now all too likely.

 

But does rail restoration work? Look at the East Midlands. The Robin Hood line north from Nottingham through the Ashfields, Mansfield, Creswell to Worksop was restored over 20 years ago. Have these places turned round? The loss of coal and related industries and textiles has never been addressed. A Sports Direct warehouse and nursing homes only go so far.  

 

These 'left behind' places need a reason for being and only partly have found it. The rail link helps mobility to study and work elsewhere. It doesn't necessarily encourage people to go, live, work and invest there. Rail links are necessary, not sufficient in themselves. The 'Ivanhoe' Leicester-Burton line needs reopening, but same applies.

 

What Coalville arguably needs is the Worthington branch to Melbourne, alongside East Midlands Airport reopening as a commuter route for workers there. 

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivanhoe_line

[whart57]

What's often overlooked with Beeching is that the lines primarily built to carry passengers got off pretty lightly, it was the lines built for freight and which carried passengers almost as an afterthought that were axed. Lorries had already cut into their traffic in a big way.

 

In urban areas Beeching was also working with the flow that had closed Britain's city tram networks, the last one - Sheffield - had closed just two years before Beeching got to work. If there was a failing there though it was in not looking abroad. In Germany, the Netherlands and Sweden, the modernisation and expansion of tram networks and/or the re-purposing of urban branchlines to become suburban metros was already underway. In Britain that wouldn't start for another quarter century, an opportunity lost.

[Pandora]

Beeching identified, that of the BR carriage fleet, 50% were required for seasonal traffic such as holiday periods and saw little use outside those periods, in the early sixties, a rapid rise in car ownership decimated the  requirement,  the seasonal trains altered from  near-full to near-empty , this information came from  senior railway official known to me, his job was in the traffic department.  I think this account illustrates the validity of Beeching, who I consider to be a visionary, not an axeman, no political party in government would tackle the hot potato of the railway finances until it reached a crisis,  that  crisis came about when  the suppression of  car ownership ceased in the early sixties. Beeching was a Visionary, not an Axeman.

Edited October 8, 2019 by Pandora

[The Stationmaster]

Reading to Watford is a pretty daft example to say the very least as the most sensible routes are no different today from what they were before Beeching arrived.   The best way if you wish to avoid going into Paddington is Reading - Ealing Broadway - North Acton (oddly shown on Google Maps as a National Rail station!!) - walk to Willesden Jcn - Watford.  But I am pretty sure Reading - Paddington - Queens Park - Watford would be quicker; that was certainly the route I used to take off the GWML for spotting at Watford Jcn.

[Pacific231G]

15 hours ago, jonny777 said:

What I always failed to understand is why they closed the Oxford - Cambridge through route and the Wolverton to Newport Pagnell branch, when the outline planning for Milton Keynes must have been well under way? 

 

Did no government departments ever talk to each other? 

Oxford to Cambridge wasn't even on Beeching's list of proposed closures. I did use that route once to get to the Norfolk Broads and with slow smelly DMUs it was one of the most unpleasant railway journeys I've ever made.  With fast modern trains and the almost city of Milton Keynes half way it would be a very useful route now

 

I agree about Reading to Watford being a bad example as I doubt if the best route has changed since the 1930s. Google currently gives Reading to Paddington- Bakerloo to Harrow and Wealdstone- train to Watford Jcn. total journey time about an hour and twenty minutes. About a quarter of an hour shorter by car but only if the M25 and the roads round Watford are behaving (which is a fairly large if)  North Acton (Central Line) to Willesden Jcn. is not a pleasant walk - I've done it a few times- but can't think why it would ever be preferable to going into Paddington. 

 

I did a fairly detailed review of the Beeching Report as my non-engineering "liberal studues" course at college in the mid 1960s and was rather taken in by the apparent logioc of his analysis but I'm far less convinced now.

 

I think a real weakness of Beeching was that he was charged to look at the economics of the railways in isolation and, on top of that, did so on  a very narrow accounting basis. For example, If you put an asset valuation on the oldish coaches used only for summer Saturday specials they'd be a huge burden and you'd be daft to build new coaches just for that. However, if they'd already been amortised  when they were in regular service and had a near zero scrap value then the only costs of cascading them down would be maintenance and storage. I doubt if those particular services would have been economic for long but Beeching made them look like a far larger drain than they probably were.  Similarly, a lot of the supposed savings from line closures were illusory as Beeching assumed a full proportionate cost  instead of their marginal costs to the whole network. If you're the PW department maintaining say eighty miles of double track main line and forty miles of single track branch lines, closing all of those branch lines will probably save you some costs but  it won't be anything like the twenty percent the track length would imply.

A wider weakness was that no valuation was put on the overall economic value of the railway. For example, if closing the Swanage or Ilfracombe branches saved BR some money what was the cost of that to the towns in terms of lost income from visitors? 

Far more important was probably the economics of commuter traffic. For BR, services that peaked twice a day and were very quiet the rest of the time were unprofitable   with trains spending most of their time either running almost empty or in the sidings. Beeching called for many of them to simply be closed. However, for the cities they served they were hugely valuable. Fortunately a lot of the closures that Beeching called for never actually happened and lines such as the Liverpool commuter routes and the North London Line have remained open)

 

Edited October 8, 2019 by Pacific231G