Reversing Beeching ???

[caradoc]

17 hours ago, Bernard Lamb said:

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

 

Could that not simply be because those locations did not, and do, generate sufficient traffic to justify either retention of their railways in the 1960s, or construction of motorways since ?

 

[The Johnster]

Everybody focusses on the most visible result of Beeching's cuts, the abandoned branch lines which leave poorly road connected villages isolated and dependent on car ownership, which is inevitable I suppose, especially as these are the places where campaigns opposing closure were most vociferous and remembered.  But the axe fell as well on smaller main line stations served by parliamentaries and their goods yards, the likes of Little Bytham, which disappeared in their hundreds in a very short period leaving only non stopping trains and block freights whizzing through places with no service at all.  The passengers had to travel by their own means to the nearest main line big town and the general merchandise goods and coal had to come by road as the depots were concentrated in hubs, which raised the cost of living in such places considerably.  The motorways seldom helped as these sort of places were between the junctions as much as they were between stations.

 

In the London commuter belt and to some extent those of the other larger cities this trend was bucked as far as passenger traffic was concerned, but goods yards disappeared overnight to be replaced by car parks for the commuters.  Goods sheds often survived as small business premises but were lost as freight distribution centres.  The social impact on such villages was considerable as those who could not afford cars and could not be served adequately by buses moved into the town leaving their pretty cottages to be sold off as weekend homes for incomers who worked in the city and made little contribution to village life financially or socially, and drove local house prices up further, especially in places not too far from the new motorways!  Local shops were replaced by big supermarkets in the nearest towns, fed by huge distribution centres and lorries on the new motorways, post offices struggled, and pubs closed in droves or re-invented themselves as posh restaurant or steakhouses.  Admittedly this was and is a trend that had been going on for a very long time before Dr Dick put his foot in, but his efforts were very effective in increasing it in a very short time, little more than a decade after 1963, that such communities had major problems coping with.

[Pacific231G]

53 minutes ago, The Johnster said:

Everybody focusses on the most visible result of Beeching's cuts, the abandoned branch lines which leave poorly road connected villages isolated and dependent on car ownership, which is inevitable I suppose, especially as these are the places where campaigns opposing closure were most vociferous and remembered.  But the axe fell as well on smaller main line stations served by parliamentaries and their goods yards, the likes of Little Bytham, which disappeared in their hundreds in a very short period leaving only non stopping trains and block freights whizzing through places with no service at all.  The passengers had to travel by their own means to the nearest main line big town and the general merchandise goods and coal had to come by road as the depots were concentrated in hubs, which raised the cost of living in such places considerably.  The motorways seldom helped as these sort of places were between the junctions as much as they were between stations.

 

In the London commuter belt and to some extent those of the other larger cities this trend was bucked as far as passenger traffic was concerned, but goods yards disappeared overnight to be replaced by car parks for the commuters.  Goods sheds often survived as small business premises but were lost as freight distribution centres.  The social impact on such villages was considerable as those who could not afford cars and could not be served adequately by buses moved into the town leaving their pretty cottages to be sold off as weekend homes for incomers who worked in the city and made little contribution to village life financially or socially, and drove local house prices up further, especially in places not too far from the new motorways!  Local shops were replaced by big supermarkets in the nearest towns, fed by huge distribution centres and lorries on the new motorways, post offices struggled, and pubs closed in droves or re-invented themselves as posh restaurant or steakhouses.  Admittedly this was and is a trend that had been going on for a very long time before Dr Dick put his foot in, but his efforts were very effective in increasing it in a very short time, little more than a decade after 1963, that such communities had major problems coping with.

One of the things that surprised me was that the loss of passenger numbers in the years leading up to Beeching had not been all that high and certainly not a collapse. There is though a fairly well known rule of thumb that if you replace a train with a bus you lose about two thirds of the passengers who either go by car instead or simply stop making that journey. I'm not sure why this is but it may have something to do with the apparent certainty of the railway; going to the station to catch a train is very different from standing at a bus stop hoping the bus will show up.

Of course that made the replacement bus services unprofitable as well so anyone who can't drive can be practically housebound in many rural communites.

 

Large hypermarkets with centralised distribution came long after Beeching and do depend on the motorway and dual carriageway network that really didn't exist then. I agree that the abandonment of local goods depots- not just in small communities- and wagonload freigh was a lesser known aspect of the Reshaping but in many ways just as important. The increasing dominance of road haulage, using infrastructure supplied by the tax payer as a public good, also killed off most coastal shipping.  

[The Stationmaster]

Don't confuse the mass closures prior to Beeching with the Beeching Report closures.   Little Bytham for example closed in 1959 and the WR in particular had been slashing branch lines and intermediate stations in a rather incontinent manner prior to the arrival of the Good Doctor.  In fact many railway folk saw the arrival of Beeching as introducing an element of common sense and rationality instead of the seemingly scorched earth style slashing which had proceeded his arrival.

 

21 hours ago, Pacific231G said:

One of the things that surprised me was that the loss of passenger numbers in the years leading up to Beeching had not been all that high and certainly not a collapse. There is though a fairly well known rule of thumb that if you replace a train with a bus you lose about two thirds of the passengers who either go by car instead or simply stop making that journey. I'm not sure why this is but it may have something to do with the apparent certainty of the railway; going to the station to catch a train is very different from standing at a bus stop hoping the bus will show up.

Of course that made the replacement bus services unprofitable as well so anyone who can't drive can be practically housebound in many rural communites.

 

Large hypermarkets with centralised distribution came long after Beeching and do depend on the motorway and dual carriageway network that really didn't exist then. I agree that the abandonment of local goods depots- not just in small communities- and wagonload freigh was a lesser known aspect of the Reshaping but in many ways just as important. The increasing dominance of road haulage, using infrastructure supplied by the tax payer as a public good, also killed off most coastal shipping.  

Don't forget that what Beeching did was actually look to see where the passengers were.  While there has long been debate about this and alleged fiddling of figures or cutting off the feed in from branch lines the Report did at least look at actual usage.

 

There has long been debate about the figures with alleged fiddling to make up closure cases but I continue to have my doubts about this.  I know that on my local branch where in my school days I was a regular visitor and knew many of the staff quite well the figures were actually taken by the staff at teh station counting the passengers.  If there was any sort of fiddling it was probably more likely local station staff in some places 'adding a few' rather than people in offices compiling the report 'knocking a few off'.  And revenue numbers spoke for themselves  because they existed in black & white for every day of the year at just about every station and some halts.

[caradoc]

As Stationmaster says, closing intermediate stations was not confined to or started by the Beeching era; For example, the Scottish Region closed no fewer than 20 intermediate stops on the Inverness-Wick route (some of which have subsequently re-opened). This was in June 1960, so nothing to do with poor old Dr Beeching (which is how I shall refer to him from now on).

 

[TheQ]

1 hour ago, The Stationmaster said:

Don't confuse the mass closures prior to Beeching with the Beeching Report closures.   Little Bytham for example closed in 1959 and the WR in particular had been slashing branch lines and intermediate stations in a rather incontinent manner prior to the arrival of the Good Doctor.  In fact many railway folk saw the arrival of Beeching as introducing an element of common sense and rationality instead of the seemingly scorched earth style slashing which had proceeded his arrival.

 

Don't forget that what Beeching did was actually look to see where the passengers were.  While there has long been debate about this and alleged fiddling of figures or cutting off the feed in from branch lines the Report did at least look at actual usage.

 

There has long been debate about the figures with alleged fiddling to make up closure cases but I continue to have my doubts about this.  I know that on my local branch where in my school days I was a regular visitor and knew many of the staff quite well the figures were actually taken by the staff at teh station counting the passengers.  If there was any sort of fiddling it was probably more likely local station staff in some places 'adding a few' rather than people in offices compiling the report 'knocking a few off'.  And revenue numbers spoke for themselves  because they existed in black & white for every day of the year at just about every station and some halts.

There was definately BR had arangements made to reduce numbers. Although pre Beeching,  for instance, they changed which trains stopped at which station  at Cheltenham, to so through passengers could no longer just get off one train and get on the next to use the old MSWJR line,  but had to get across town to another station by which time it had gone.

Edited October 9, 2019 by TheQ

[dibber25]

On 08/10/2019 at 10:23, Pandora said:

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.

Can't even begin to agree with you regarding Beeching. A visionary, he was not. A tool of government given an uneviable task at a time when the emphasis was on the wonderful new, empty motorways he cewrtainly was. Fed with distorted traffic figures deliberately taken at the wrong times. If he'd merely scrapped a load of little-used carriages, no one would even have noticed. He had to be SEEN to do something and there was no better way than by 'pruning' the system. The trouble with pruning is that it is very difficult to know when to stop. Thus, the more deeply you got into the programme of cuts, the more contentious they became. Lop the easier branches first and eventually it becomes difficult to stop, hence the loss of lines in the early 1970s that weren't even in the Beeching Report. Beeching was like 'Mac the knife' in the coal industry and other political appointees over the years who have the unpleasant task of carrying out whatever 'pruning' the goverment deems necessary. I live in a Beeching closed station. The station, piggery, goods yard and three quarters of a mile of trackbed were sold to the incumbent SM (who was out of a job) for £750 in 1968. Today they have in excess of £3million worth of property on them - thanks to Beeching and inflation.

[D9020 Nimbus]

Remember the second phase of the Beeching report, which proposed, for example, that Newcastle would be at the end of a single-track freight branch from York? This and other idiocies were avoided when he was sacked. If anybody sorted the railways out it was Barbara Castle, who accepted that you could never cut your way to profitability, and that some services were socially necessary and should be subsidised. She also created the PTEs which still survive today though they no longer operate buses directly.

She was a rare example of a top-rank politician being in charge of transport—more recently, most Transport Secretaries have been in the job for very little time, been wholly incompetent, or both.

One of the biggest scandals of the Beeching era was the involvement of Ernest Marples—owner of a motorway contractor—in railway closures.

[Nearholmer]

Oddly enough, I was about to suggest Barbara Castle for beatification, when you beat me to it.

 

Beeching could only see through the lens of the profitability model, whether because that was his remit or because he  was incapable of seeing things another way; she was positioned to see more broadly, could see more broadly, and managed to carry others with her.

 

 

Edited October 9, 2019 by Nearholmer

[whart57]

And then of course there is the story of the Welsh line that was spared when it was pointed out to Harold Wilson that it ran through four marginal constituencies

[caradoc]

2 hours ago, Nearholmer said:

Oddly enough, I was about to suggest Barbara Castle for beatification, when you beat me to it.

 

Beeching could only see through the lens of the profitability model, whether because that was his remit or because he  was incapable of seeing things another way; she was positioned to see more broadly, could see more broadly, and managed to carry others with her.

 

 

 

But she still closed the entire Waverley route !

 

[Bernard Lamb]

1 hour ago, caradoc said:

 

But she still closed the entire Waverley route !

 

Actually it was Richard Marsh.

Although Barbara Castle would have done so if she had not been moved on shortly before the final announcement.

All in the book by David Spaven, after yours truly waded through various parliamentary sub committee meeting minutes to find it.

The critical factor behind Beeching was that  governments of both colours, over a long period, held the belief that cheap motor fuel would be available for the foreseeable future and that there would continue to be a decline in the need for rail travel.

I have read Beeching in the original hand written pencil version. An interesting document as to how he actually worked. I did post the first and last pages on here many years ago. The last page does not actually name any lines for closure. It just has four or five horizontal lines across the page. He set out the criteria and BR management completed it. 

Bernard

[Fat Controller]

4 hours ago, whart57 said:

And then of course there is the story of the Welsh line that was spared when it was pointed out to Harold Wilson that it ran through four marginal constituencies

The Central Wales line, now marketed as the Heart of Wales line.

[ess1uk]

I’ll bet it will never happen 

[pH]

On 08/10/2019 at 01:52, whart57 said:

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.

 

Glasgow's system lasted almost two years longer than Sheffield's. Sheffield's closed in October 1960, Glasgow's in September 1962.

[lmsforever]

When you look back over the years at actions by governments there are many cases of bad stupid decisions on a wide range of subjects transport is one that affects all of the population.We have been subjected to so many brave new dawns that have not even got past sunrise most are used as a means to promote the policies of said administration.One of the best ideas were PTE,s these saved and expanded many services and continue now ,the lines that Beeching closed were in some cases spared by this development.The  fall from grace of both Beeching and Marples has put a cloud over their decisions  but we must not forget another attempt to shut our rail system ,  Serpel .This was a misguided attempt to just save money  and rightly thrown in the bin and forgotten. I think that a lack of foresight and a lack of foresight by BR and MP,s has held back our development which is only being corrected now.

[Fat Controller]

Serpell had been one of Beeching's acolytes, IIRC.

[Northmoor]

On 08/10/2019 at 15:01, Pacific231G said:

One of the things that surprised me was that the loss of passenger numbers in the years leading up to Beeching had not been all that high and certainly not a collapse.

 

 

I suspect freight was dropping very steeply even if passenger traffic wasn't.  When was the six-week rail strike - over the equivalent of a packet of fags a week - in the late 1950s?  Passengers probably grumbled and worked around it; I read that a lot of rail freight customers made alternative arrangements and never returned to rail (can hardly blame them, you can't simply stop production for six weeks).  So here the railways sowed the seeds of their own destruction.

 

On 09/10/2019 at 12:41, The Stationmaster said:

There has long been debate about the figures with alleged fiddling to make up closure cases but I continue to have my doubts about this.  I know that on my local branch where in my school days I was a regular visitor and knew many of the staff quite well the figures were actually taken by the staff at teh station counting the passengers.  If there was any sort of fiddling it was probably more likely local station staff in some places 'adding a few' rather than people in offices compiling the report 'knocking a few off'.  And revenue numbers spoke for themselves  because they existed in black & white for every day of the year at just about every station and some halts.

It could also be the case that staff under-reported numbers.  One of the rail unions real successes was improving redundancy terms over time, so plenty of older railwaymen might have preferred to take the money instead of staying in an ever more depressing workplace.  Making the economics of their station/line worse could have been in their interest. 

 

I have worked with such people who will do nothing to help others deliver work more efficiently, are happy to cost their employer money, hoping that they can speed the closure and to hell with those who are still trying to build their careers and have families to support and mortgages to pay.

[Northmoor]

On 09/10/2019 at 18:09, caradoc said:

 

But she still closed the entire Waverley route !

 

She closed a lot of lines which Beeching had not proposed for closure.  If you look at lines re-opened in the modern era, very few were listed in the 1963 report, they were almost all closed after 1968.

[Railpassion]

Closing many lines was never the answer. Sorting out the inefficiencies across the network would have saved more. 

Until the 80's the thirty miles of railway between Hull and Bridlington required at least 33 staff to man the crossings and boxes before a single train could move. 

Now it's 3 (excluding Hull).

 

[Nearholmer]

Some truth in that.

 

BR hadn’t found ways to shrug-off the burden of victorian infrastructure and victorian staffing levels quickly enough.

 

There were a few brave attempts, like the railcars experiments on the Buckingham branch, which came close to cracking the problem, but even there they didn’t deal with station staffing and signalling, so it failed to break even.

 

The trouble is, of course, that cutting operating costs needed investment up-front in things like track and signalling, and nobody was going to give yet more money to an outfit which seemed like a money-sink.

[corneliuslundie]

Remember also that there was a second Beeching report about development which was binned by the government.

And as for closing local goods stations and centralising deliveries by road, the GWR had been doing it since the 1930s. I can't speak for the other three companies.

And in some areas such as East Anglia the railways had already been pretty well deserted by passengers. I have read that in the 1950s East Anglia had the highest ratio of cars per head of population in the country. 

Beeching was given a brief and BR gave him falsified data and he did what he had to. The government didn't want a comprehensive report. Back to the "do government departments talk to each other? question.

There is plenty of evidence that BR was shedding traffic intentionally to make lines uneconomic. As has been mentioned traffic surveys were done at times known to have lower than normal traffic. It seems to me that the organisation had a death wish.

So his brief did not look at the bigger picture of the effect of his proposals on the wider economy. That would have led to a very different report.

My only complaint about the man is that he should have seen that he was being set up and refused to do the job.

Anyway, back to the current political statements. I'll believe them when I see something happen.

Jonathan

[mdvle]

3 hours ago, Northmoor said:

I suspect freight was dropping very steeply even if passenger traffic wasn't.  When was the six-week rail strike - over the equivalent of a packet of fags a week - in the late 1950s?  Passengers probably grumbled and worked around it; I read that a lot of rail freight customers made alternative arrangements and never returned to rail (can hardly blame them, you can't simply stop production for six weeks).  So here the railways sowed the seeds of their own destruction.

 

They may have hastened it, but it was going to happen anyway.  Once the road network was sufficient to make door to door via lorry possible business was no longer going to continue with a method that involved extra steps and handling (much the way ships went to containers).

 

3 hours ago, Northmoor said:

It could also be the case that staff under-reported numbers.  One of the rail unions real successes was improving redundancy terms over time, so plenty of older railwaymen might have preferred to take the money instead of staying in an ever more depressing workplace.  Making the economics of their station/line worse could have been in their interest. 

 

I have worked with such people who will do nothing to help others deliver work more efficiently, are happy to cost their employer money, hoping that they can speed the closure and to hell with those who are still trying to build their careers and have families to support and mortgages to pay.

 

Not even necessarily older workers, workers of any age can feel they "deserve" that bit of extra money.

 

Don't know how true it is but years ago a transit bus driver told me the day the operation switched over to automatic machines to collect the fare, and exact cash only (no change, this being possible because it was a flat fare) the fare revenue went up significantly and drivers grumbled amongst themselves now that they had to pay for their own coffee and snacks.

[Nearholmer]

1 hour ago, corneliuslundie said:

And as for closing local goods stations and centralising deliveries by road, the GWR had been doing it since the 1930s. I can't speak for the other three companies.

 

The SR was part-way through implementing a strategy to concentrate goods traffic onto zonal depots about thirty miles apart, with "road motors" radiating about fifteen miles from each, when WW2 got in the way. IIRC it began in the West Country, and also IIRC, they envisaged continuing to serve local stations with trains conveying coal only (or possibly coal plus full wagonloads for customers to unload themselves).

 

Very similar in concept to what eventuated in the late 1960s and even into the 1980s.

 

I guess that the railways couldn't pull out of distributing coal until the 1960s, given that everybody in every place depended upon it, because the road network wasn't capable of supporting the "coal concentration depot" model, but having coal-only trains could probably cut goods trains from daily to weekly or perhaps twice each week, and allow great simplification of wayside station facilities. 

 

Having long pondered all this, I've come round to thinking that, especially if relieved of their common carrier obligations, the managements of the Big Four, might have "cut to the chase" of railway rationalisation quicker than BR did, and thereby kept a leaner, fitter, but more extensive than post-Beeching rail system in being. Lots of mileage would have shut, just maybe not as much. But, and it is a huge but, they too would almost certainly have struggled to get hold of enough capital quickly enough, to enable them to invest to save at the rate needed, especially the LMS and LNER.

[rogerzilla]

What about the closure of intermediate stations on retained routes?  Some of them would now be hugely useful for commuters.  Wootton Bassett, Wantage etc.  The trouble is finding paths for stopping trains in between IEP flights, I suppose, even though there are relief lines for much of the GWML.

 

Then there were penny-pinching cost-saving decisions like single-tracking the Golden Valley line, recently re-doubled at significant expense.