Reversing Beeching ???

[The Stationmaster]

Freight traffic went into ever quickening decline after the 1955 ASLEF strike when a lot of freight traffic was lost never to return.  This led to a vicious declining spiral as costs were cut to meet reduced traffic levels which often affected things like transit times which led to further decline and more rationalisation because there wasn't money available to modernise.  Concentration schemes for freight smalls and zoming schemes had been around from the 1930s - as mentioned in two posts above and the 1930s also saw the first serious round of station closures - mainly intermediate stations - a pattern which began again in the 1950s but then accompanied by branch line closures.

 

A lot of freight traffic never stood a chance against road competition especially with the railway remaining a common carrier and not even having the freedom to price itself out of unremunerative freight traffic and concentrate on the money making flows for heavy industry.  Fortunately C Licence road haulage restrictions also remained in place for many years finally going in the mid 1960s when that change helped to stick a further knife into the freight smalls business which was already hopelessly uneconomic and also didn't help the cost base of freight train operating overall.  Some of the problems were in BR's own hands - for example freight and parcels cartage zones in London weren't properly reorganised until the early 1960s but until then you could see lorries from several different BR Regions collecting traffic from one premises or making deliveries to it with much the same happening for parcels traffic.

 

The GWR's South Lambeth depot has recently been mentioned in another thread - sited in Battersea in the heart of Southern territory .  When i started on the WR London Division in 1966 it was still firmly under WR control in use both as a steel terminal and as the base depot for some of the specialised Divisional freight cartage vehicles but way across London from other WR depots let alone the larger freight depots elsewhere in the Division.

[Phil Traxson]

Whilst we are talking about road transport being "door to door" most of the modern day smalls traffic isn't. Its collected by a small vehicle, taken to a sorting depot, sorted by destination, placed into a larger lorry and taken to a distribution centre nearer its destination then sorted onto a smaller vehicle for final delivery. The only thing that has changed is that the transport between centres is now by large, fuel/ton/mile inefficient lorries rather than railway trains. Now there is talk of convoying lorries on motorways with the leading driver doing the driving. Taking it a step further we have dedicated lorry lanes with a reinforced surface to prevent the grooving we already get in the surface and we have, effectively, trains on rubber tyres on a plateway. The circle is then almost complete, lets reinvent the wheel, or change it to a steel one on rails in the interest of fuel efficiency!!

[mdvle]

2 hours ago, rogerzilla said:

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.

 

Without saying your examples are correct or not, the point remains that government demanded the subsidies be reduced (or, put another way, BR had to reduce its losses).

 

If no cuts were to be made, where else from the government was the money going to come from?  Higher taxes, or what else would get cut instead?

 

Sometimes the best thing is to make the cuts simply so the organization survives to even have the problem of restoring stuff 50 years later.

Edited November 25, 2019 by mdvle

[4901]

Why did Beeching and BR sell the tracks?   Seems shortsighted to have not mothballed them or leased the land on a leasehold basis with the right to repossess.     

 

 

[corneliuslundie]

I remember being told, though whether it was true I know not, that in Ireland tracks had to be kept for 13 years after a closure in case it was decided to re-open. Was that true?

Jonathan

[TheQ]

4 minutes ago, corneliuslundie said:

I remember being told, though whether it was true I know not, that in Ireland tracks had to be kept for 13 years after a closure in case it was decided to re-open. Was that true?

Jonathan

I've no Idea if it was true, but with the bribery going on between builders and previous Irish parties in government I'm sure they found ways round it..

[Fat Controller]

5 hours ago, 4901 said:

Why did Beeching and BR sell the tracks?   Seems shortsighted to have not mothballed them or leased the land on a leasehold basis with the right to repossess.     

 

 

Because they needed the money?  'Mothballing' only works for short periods before you have to put in place proper systems for maintenance; look what happened to the Leamside line.

[jim.snowdon]

6 hours ago, 4901 said:

Why did Beeching and BR sell the tracks?   Seems shortsighted to have not mothballed them or leased the land on a leasehold basis with the right to repossess.     

 

 

A lot of what Beeching did was to remove dead wood from the railway, lines inherited from the unfettered competition of the mid- to late-1800s and which had little real purpose post-Grouping other than to provide unnecessary duplication and cost. That much was an exercise that really ought to have been done long before even BR. Why sell the alignments? Well why not, it removed the liabilities for maintenance and there was never going to be a case for hanging on to the land "just in case". Politicians have dive difficulty seeing five years ahead, let alone fifty. As it is, I doubt that the amount that could usefully be reinstated is only a fraction of that which was closed post-Beeching.

 

Jim

[jim.snowdon]

12 hours ago, rogerzilla said:

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.

Part of the problem is that the railway changed considerably with the adoption of high speed trains. The issue is not so much the speed itself but the increase in the spread of speeds between the fastest and slowest trains and its effect on the numbers a theoretical train paths needed for different types of train. 

 

Jim

[The Stationmaster]

52 minutes ago, jim.snowdon said:

Part of the problem is that the railway changed considerably with the adoption of high speed trains. The issue is not so much the speed itself but the increase in the spread of speeds between the fastest and slowest trains and its effect on the numbers a theoretical train paths needed for different types of train. 

 

Jim

An excellent, albeit extreme, example of this is one I used in a paper I presented in the early 1990s at an IMechE symposium about the running of heavy freight trains.   Using a Class 59 hauled 4,000 ton stone train as the example - in order to have a margin to run the 17 miles from Westbury to Woodborough loop without delaying a following HST (now IET of course) the Class 59 must leave Westbury before the HST/IET leaves Taunton (48 miles from Westbury).  If that stone train were to leave Westbury after the HST/IET has left Taunton the passenger train would be checked following it and would lose time.

 

Speed differentials can be a major killer of line capacity and trains stopping intermediately,  particularly trains stopping frequently intermediately tend nowadays to have an even worse impact than many freight trains as the latter will be running non-stop at speeds between 60 and 75 mph which gives them higher average speeds than frequently stopping passenger trains.  There is also another factor coming increasingly into play and that is energy use/wastage - many freight can run quite fast but with trailing loads of, say, 1,500 - 2,000 tons they take a bit of time and use a lot of energy to get up to maximum speed.  if they get caught behind stopping passenger trains they will then use even more energy due to the resultant pattern of braking and subsequent acceleration each time the passenger train stops.  

 

The real answer, as the standard UIC calculation fiche has long demonstrated and advocated, is that routes with trains of widely varying performance need additional infrastructure to handle it efficiently when traffic reaches particular densities or mixes of speed/stopping profiles.  Traditionally BR didn't follow the UIC pattern but in many respects it didn't have to but with increasing emphasis on reinstated or additional stopping trains it will eventually be recognised (I hope) that the stretches of railway concerned will only work reliably if additional running lines are provided to separate out the trains which differ most widely from overall average speeds in order to remove the greatest consumers of line capacity, as has happened, for example in Germany.  A good UK example - removing/reducing the extreme at the opposite end of the scale - is HS2.

[caradoc]

14 hours ago, rogerzilla said:

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.

 

The station for Wantage wasn't actually in Wantage of course, which no doubt hastened its closure. Passengers from Wantage would have had to drive, or be driven, to the station anyway. They would get a far better train service from Didcot and given the monstrous car park there now, I would imagine that people from the surrounding area, not only Wantage but places like Farringdon and Abingdon, join the train there.

 

[lmsforever]

Reinstate the tramway from Swanage went through last year traffic was awful and roads atrocious.

[Pacific231G]

56 minutes ago, lmsforever said:

Reinstate the tramway from Swanage went through last year traffic was awful and roads atrocious.

What tramway? There was a horse/human tramway on the front for moving fish between the pier and the fish market and there were some clay tramways running across Purbeck from mine/quarries to various wharves but the only public railway to Swanage was the branch from Wareham- now very thoroughly preserved. The catch with that has always been that the actual junction isn't at Wareham so trains for Swanage have to use the main line for a couple of miles. That's now fine for specals but not for regular heritage services. If that wasn't so the Heritage railway could connect with the main line as do a number of them including the Watercress, the Wallingford and, more recently,  the Chinnor and Princes Risborough. What scope there might be for preserved railways to run regular public as well as "heritage"services could be interesting. I knew the state of the roads around Purbeck only too well when I lived in Hampshire and would have thought there was scope for a Tire-Bouchon type service as there is on the St. Ives line. Whether a heritage railway trying to run a daily public service as well would end up doing both badly is a moot point.

[lmsforever]

Just realised I should have said Wantage    definitely  not Swanage although  perhaps the quay line could become a metro line ? 

[rogerzilla]

It's true that Wantage Road was a long way from Wantage BUT it's very near the newer suburb of Grove, which has appeared since closure.

 

The platforms are still there - look out for them as you pass Uffington White Horse in the distance!

[Nearholmer]

I can't quickly find a figure for the population of Wantage when the station closed, but its c11000 now, and has grown very significantly in the past 15-20 years, so I'd guess c5000. Which isn't exactly a lot, and it was a market town serving a rural hinterland, not a commuting centre then, so I'd bet that the station closed because barely anyone used it. Like many stations, it probably did OK financially as a combined goods/passenger facility in its heyday, but gradually came to make a loss as the goods ebbed away and the residual passenger traffic couldn't pay the wages of the (probably too many) staff.

 

Travel patterns have changed massively since Beeching honed his axe, the biggest change being that we travel a lot more/further than then, and that seems to get forgotten when "it should never have closed" discussions are going on.

 

We are now possibly on the other side of the "car hump", so that we have acquired the travel habit through two generations of near-universal motoring, but have got sick of the congestion and general unpleasantness that goes with it, so need/want access to train travel in a way that we didn't during the 70s, 80s, and 90s. Added to which the combination of driving to the station and higher train speeds have made viable commuting from places that were "out of range" in the 1960s, or even later.

 

As an instance, I do not remember there being a whopping great car park, and lots of commuting at Didcot in the early 1970s; it seemed to be a local station for a modest town, with most people arriving by foot, bus, and bike from within three or four miles. The station was very quiet during the day. But now Didcot is a hub for a large area, people driving in from small towns and villages 10 or more miles away, which have themselves sprouted lots of new housing, and the station is steadily busy virtually all day.

 

I'm rambling here, so to put it in short: there was probably no great need for a station at Wantage Road fifty years ago; now there probably is, but it would be an operational nightmare to provide one! Which is true of a couple of places on the WCML too.

 

 

 

 

Edited November 25, 2019 by Nearholmer

[Andy Kirkham]

11 hours ago, The Stationmaster said:

An excellent, albeit extreme, example of this is one I used in a paper I presented in the early 1990s at an IMechE symposium about the running of heavy freight trains.   Using a Class 59 hauled 4,000 ton stone train as the example - in order to have a margin to run the 17 miles from Westbury to Woodborough loop without delaying a following HST (now IET of course) the Class 59 must leave Westbury before the HST/IET leaves Taunton (48 miles from Westbury).  If that stone train were to leave Westbury after the HST/IET has left Taunton the passenger train would be checked following it and would lose time.

 

I used to commute between Swindon and Bristol and it was always the case that if a stone train passed westwards through the station and I caught the following HST, we would always come to a stand for a minute or two just before Chippenham, waiting for the stone train to turn left at Thingley Junction.

Edited November 25, 2019 by Andy Kirkham

[John M]

On 25/11/2019 at 21:42, corneliuslundie said:

I remember being told, though whether it was true I know not, that in Ireland tracks had to be kept for 13 years after a closure in case it was decided to re-open. Was that true?

Jonathan

The Irish national transport company CIE was required (by EU directive) to retain line for a minimum of 10 years after closure. The requirement applied to lines closed since the mid 1970s although a number of feeder branchlines were abandoned at the end of the 10 year period, the majority of disused lines remain in CIE ownership for potential re-opening or conversion to cycleways.  Sections of the disused Cork-Youghal line and Limerick-Sligo route have been re-opened, but there are doubts about the complete re-opening of both lines.

 

Although there is no Irish equivalent of the UK requirement to give County Councils 1st refusal to purchase disused/abandoned railway lines, the Department of Transport , Councils and local lobby groups appear to have developed a partnership approach to maintain disused rail corridors in public ownership. Historically(up to 1975) CIE abandoned lines as soon as practicable after closure and disposed of the trackbed to adjoining landowners (usually) farmers for a minimum sum in order to discharge the railways liabilities, one of the oddities of the current situation is that CIE does not receive a specific Government payment to cover the costs of retaining disused lines.

 

 

 

[DY444]

On 25/11/2019 at 03:46, 4901 said:

Why did Beeching and BR sell the tracks?   Seems shortsighted to have not mothballed them or leased the land on a leasehold basis with the right to repossess.     

 

 

 

It is only short sighted with the benefit of hindsight (if you see what I mean).  At the time rail was thought to have no real future except for selected bulk freight flows, Inter City between the larger towns and cities, and commuting into London.  Road and air were believed to be the future.  Virtually nobody foresaw what we have now and even if they had they would not have been considered credible.

 

With the benefit of hindsight what can we say was clearly a mistake?  Everybody will have an opinion but I would say my list largely consists of through routes with diversionary potential or routes which would have provided more capacity or both.  I would therefore include the SR route from Exeter to Plymouth, Waverley, GC main line, singling of Salisbury to Exeter, Oxford to Cambridge and Woodhead (much later of course).  On the flip side BR did waste plenty of money on the short lived hump yards and the myriad of unreliable early diesel types amongst other things. 

 

There are also more recent decisions which are having a major impact, arguably the most egregious of which is the decision to provide only 4 platforms for the MML side of St.Pancras.  There was, and is, no excuse for that.  It was a dreadful decision and like those taken 50 years ago will cost a fortune to alter.

Edited November 30, 2019 by DY444

[Fenman]

On 25/11/2019 at 10:24, jim.snowdon said:

A lot of what Beeching did was to remove dead wood from the railway, lines inherited from the unfettered competition of the mid- to late-1800s and which had little real purpose post-Grouping other than to provide unnecessary duplication and cost. That much was an exercise that really ought to have been done long before even BR.

...

There’s a fascinating book from Oxford University Press (if you’re into the economics of infrastructure) which looks at the capital invested in developing the railway system through fragmented private enterprise/ competition. It demonstrates that more than a third of the capital was wasted — in that you could have achieved the same total network capacity with that much less money. 
 

Conversely, to achieve maximum theoretical efficiency in the 1950s & 60s I suppose that, as well as taking some lines out, you would need to build some new ones. That bit was politically always unlikely. 
 

Paul

[caradoc]

2 hours ago, DY444 said:

 

It is only short sighted with the benefit of hindsight (if you see what I mean).  At the time rail was thought to have no real future except for selected bulk freight flows, Inter City between the larger towns and cities, and commuting into London.  Road and air were believed to the future.  Virtually nobody foresaw what we have now and even if they had they would not have been considered credible.

 

With the benefit of hindsight what can we say was clearly a mistake?  Everybody will have an opinion but I would say my list largely consists of through routes with diversionary potential or routes which would have provided more capacity or both.  I would therefore include the SR route from Exeter to Plymouth, Waverley, GC main line, singling of Salisbury to Exeter, Oxford to Cambridge and Woodhead (much later of course).  On the flip side BR did waste plenty of money on the short lived hump yards and the myriad of unreliable early diesel types amongst other things. 

 

There are also more recent decisions which are having a major impact, arguably the most egregious of which is the decision to provide only 4 platforms for the MML side of St.Pancras.  There was, and is, no excuse for that.  It was a dreadful decision and like those taken 50 years ago will cost a fortune to alter.

 

You make some very good points DY444. I have recently seen the closure of Edinburgh Princes St and Glasgow St Enoch stations described as short-sighted, however these both occurred more than 50 years ago and the stations to which trains were diverted, Waverley and Central coped with the traffic for many years after. Admittedly both have had to receive additional capacity in recent years, but IMHO it is still better for passengers, and the railway, to concentrate facilities on fewer locations.

 

I agree absolutely regarding St Pancras; Another example would be Manchester Airport, which IIRC opened with a single island platform, but before very long had to be expanded. On the other hand, BR left room at Birmingham International for a sixth platform, on the Up side to mirror the Down side, but it has never been built !

 

[The Stationmaster]

Wantage is an interesting case - as is the development of Didcot as a commuter hub due to fast trains to Paddington and a hinterland which has seen very substantial population growth over the past three decades.  As far as wantage Paekway is concerned it was a very real possibility back in the early 1990s when it would have been served (mainly) by the putative Swindon - Peterborough service being planned by Regional Railways.  Whether that service would have been sufficiently attractive is a difficult question to answer as it would not have served commuters to London and there are seemingly plenty in the area happy to drive to Didcot in order to take the train to London.

 

But when i was developing my plans for the Avonmouth - Didcot imported coal traffic I actually built in provision for the Swindon - Peterborough service calling at Wantage Parkway on my regular pattern train graph (which also included 2 x HST per hour to both Bristol and Cardiff although they wouldn't have run in every hour).  i suspect it might not be so easy now with increased train numbers in the IET timetable although it would be easier if a 100mph multiple unit were to be used.  But the big question mark would be what route it would be part of?  Clearly it would most likely start at Swindon but I suspect Oxford would remain the most logical next point on the route simply because of lack of capacity at Didcot.  But with electrification t Oxford things would change and a Didcot reversal might make sense allowing connections to/from London.   But the real core question would still be there - would the expected level of business make the investment worthwhile?

 

But at the same time the continuing massive expansion of Didcot, particularly in this instance towards Harwell village (where most of the intermediate countryside is now under housing) might dissuade people from wishing to drive to Didcot and instead prefer battling their way out of Wantage towards Grove and 'Wantage Parkway'

[Nearholmer]

The service you mention might have had some attraction, for Swindon and Oxford commuters, but I bet not much, because of the dispersed nature of employment in those two places ......... not going to London would have had to be rectified, surely.

[Zomboid]

You'd imagine that with the loops at Wantage Road to get stopping trains out of the way, and 110mph 387s to provide the service, it would be possible to find a path of some sort amongst the IETs and various freight trains, if the will was there. I imagine though that since most people would have to drive to the new station, they are just as well served driving to Didcot. I'm not sure that people commuting to the Williams F1 factory are numerous enough to constitute a market...

[Nearholmer]

Of course, what it really needs in an environmentally conscious world, where personal car use ought to be a last resort, is a parkway station as described by Zomboid, linked to the main residential and commercial areas by some sort of easy-to-access, frequent-service, low-impact people-carrier, a tramway perhaps, paralleled by a high-quality and motor-traffic-free cycleway.

 

Just like it had in 1900, only more modern.