Is it time to stop blaming Beeching?

[MyRule1]

In the September ModelRail Chris Leigh writes "[that Crumlin Viaduct] was closed by Beeching" and in the same issue an article about a model of Bournemouth West starts "Beeching may have erased some of our railways".

 

Perhaps it is time to stop using this shorthand for a process that started well before Beeching was British Railways Chairman and continued well after he left.  The truth is that Beeching did not close any passenger railways.  Politicians of all parties that were in power in the 1960's, 70's etc.. closed passenger railways.  Beeching gave his name to the report that suggested cuts and significant investment. Yes the Beeching reforms of the freight network did mean some freight only lines closed but in the case of passenger lines there was a procedure that was followed and signed off by the Minister at the time.

 

Yes - "Beeching" is convenient shorthand for this process but surely "Minster of Transport cuts" would be better?

[phil-b259]

23 minutes ago, MyRule1 said:

In the September ModelRail Chris Leigh writes "[that Crumlin Viaduct] was closed by Beeching" and in the same issue an article about a model of Bournemouth West starts "Beeching may have erased some of our railways".

 

Perhaps it is time to stop using this shorthand for a process that started well before Beeching was British Railways Chairman and continued well after he left.  The truth is that Beeching did not close any passenger railways.  Politicians of all parties that were in power in the 1960's, 70's etc.. closed passenger railways.  Beeching gave his name to the report that suggested cuts and significant investment. Yes the Beeching reforms of the freight network did mean some freight only lines closed but in the case of passenger lines there was a procedure that was followed and signed off by the Minister at the time.

 

Yes - "Beeching" is convenient shorthand for this process but surely "Minster of Transport cuts" would be better?

 

Of course it would - but that would be to acknowledge that Government minsters screwed up! Far better to try and dump the blame onto others and pretend at best it was just a case of ministers being poorly advised or 'events on the ground moving faster than anticipated' as a certain Mr Raab seems to be claiming at pressent......

[Bomag]

1 hour ago, MyRule1 said:

In the September ModelRail Chris Leigh writes "[that Crumlin Viaduct] was closed by Beeching" and in the same issue an article about a model of Bournemouth West starts "Beeching may have erased some of our railways".

 

Perhaps it is time to stop using this shorthand for a process that started well before Beeching was British Railways Chairman and continued well after he left.  The truth is that Beeching did not close any passenger railways.  Politicians of all parties that were in power in the 1960's, 70's etc.. closed passenger railways.  Beeching gave his name to the report that suggested cuts and significant investment. Yes the Beeching reforms of the freight network did mean some freight only lines closed but in the case of passenger lines there was a procedure that was followed and signed off by the Minister at the time.

 

Yes - "Beeching" is convenient shorthand for this process but surely "Minster of Transport cuts" would be better?

 

Beeching was responsible for the specification of the report which was used to justify the majority of closures. He is fully accountable for this.  He, and to a degree the board, would have known the lack of statistical reliability of the data, with it being collected with a bias to provide the assumed outcome. The result was that the contribution of secondary lines to traffic on the wider network was underestimated; closing the lines resulted in lost traffic which the report assumed would be retained. It also completely ignored the network reliability impact of closures - e.g. the benefit of having a second route to Plymouth when a HGV gets wedged under a bridge.

 

The majority of singles lines branch lines that closed, would still have closed - the number of secondary routes closed, particularly double track ones, would been reduced if technology had been used to reduce manpower costs. 

[Nearholmer]

Hmmm ......... these things are best seen from a bit of distance, and if one looks at railways not as emblems of a past golden age that was actually not all that golden for many of the people living through it, but as both means of transport and businesses, a few things become apparent:

 

- even as early as the 1910s, it was pretty clear that some bits of the railway network in Britain couldn't generate enough income to cover the cost of medium-to-long-term renewal of infrastructure, and some could barely cover their operating costs, even at that stage. In short, the free-for-all of the Victorian era had created too much railway (knowledgable people said as much when the GC London Extension was being built, for instance);

 

- because not enough income was being generated to either fund or justify infrastructure upgrades, large swathes of railway away from the core mainline network effectively ossified, got stuck for all intents and purposes in about 1900, while at the same time road transport gradually got better. There was a negative spiral already starting to turn in the 1920s, and it just turned faster as hard economic times and war-time, went by;

 

- post-WW2 the negative spiral was spinning very fast. The huge "spend to save" investment that was really needed simply couldn't be afforded from public spending, and probably could never have been packaged attractively enough to raise capital on the markets if the railways hadn't been nationalised, so the only option at the broad level was to supress wages, which hacked-off the staff, and led to strikes, which drove more traffic off onto the roads.

 

- brave attempts were made, with what capital could be spared, to do the necessary (the diesel railcar programme; selective electrification; attempts to rationalise goods operations etc), but the spiral was turning so fast that everything was "too little too late".

 

- the railway goods network was inextricably linked with an industrial and commercial base that itself was under-invested and going through similar de-Victorianisation agonies to the railways, and with the distribution of coal as a fuel, at a time when fuel-use patterns were fast changing.

 

- SOMETHING had to be done!!!

 

The something turned out to be the Modernisation Plan and "Beeching Cuts", and when one looks at what they attempted to achieve between c1960 and c1980, to transform a widely still-Edwardian railway into a modern one, it is no wonder a few more eggs got broken than the omelette really needed - some lines that probably oughtn't to have been shut were shut.

 

But, a heck of a lot of what got shut was grossly under-used, wouldn't realistically have attracted more traffic in the foreseeable future, and couldn't have realistically been rationalised down to a level that matched the traffic on offer at the time while becoming attractive in comparison with road transport, so was frankly "ripe for pruning". Even the routes that have since been re-opened, or are in the process of being reopened, almost certainly wouldn't have been viable c1970 - they have become viable since due to changed circumstances. And nobody on earth (well maybe a few green futurologists) foresaw then that the liberating affects of personal road transport would morph over a few decades into the self-strangling and resource-gobbling monster that they have.

 

So, my personal take is that the something Beeching-like was "a necessary evil" given the circumstances as they were c1960, but ..........

 

Would it have been better if governments had spotted sooner the likelihood that a road-dominated, private car dominated, transport system had the potential to go sour on us all? Certainly it would, and it is pretty clear that some other countries (Germany and Netherlands for instance) struck a better road/rail, private/public transport balance than we did.

 

Have UK governments got the plot now? Personally, I don't think so, and I think that the bnggers muddle that passes for a 'bus "system" outside of London and possibly a few other conurbations is almost a greater demonstration of inepptitude than is the railway system .......... sort-out the 'bus system, and get it to relate properly to the rail system, so that each plays to its inherent strengths, and reign-back on doing things that further encourage car use, and we might be getting somewhere.

 

Certainly we ought to "get over it" as regards the "Beeching Cuts", stop crying into our beer about that chapter in railway history, and focus instead on the future of transport (and not just railways, which are irrelevant, and could never be made relevant, to the daily lives of a large proportion of the population).

 

 

 

 

Edited September 3, 2021 by Nearholmer

[Rivercider]

Clearly there were many branch lines that were an economic basket case, as described above, and would have closed anyway. Where things could and should have been done better is where passenger services were withdrawn over lines that remained largely or entirely open for freight traffic. A bit of joined up thinking ought to have led to a better outcome.

On the WR those that immediately spring to mind are to Aberdare,  Portishead, and yes I will add in the former SR route via Okehampton.

 

cheers

[Pandora]

The  work written in parallel to the Dr Beeching Report is the Stedeford Report by  Sir Ivan Stedeford.

Beeching and Stedeford held conflicting  opinions,  Stedeford was not published until  many years after Beeching

Does anyone have either a copy of, or,  a link to the contents of the Stedeford Report?

It may be an interesting study for the purpose  of comparison of the thinking of two powerful minds tackling the same problem.

 

postscript

according to Hansard,  officially, the Report does not exist;

https://hansard.parliament.uk/Commons/1989-11-27/debates/05edf432-9b1e-4f63-95ac-a91d95b11df5/StedefordReport

Is there an unofficial copy of the report?

The background to the Railway issue:

Hansard:

https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1960/oct/26/british-railways

Edited September 4, 2021 by Pandora

[Chris M]

Beeching was brought in to do a job. He wasn't a railwayman, he was a businessman. He put his name to the report which was to decimate the railways so it is fair to say that many things were closed by Beeching. He got paid very well for doing this. I can see no reason for not saying Beeching was responsible for the closures. Yes he may have just been doing what he was told to do and many of the closures may well have been inevitable, but Beeching was the man in charge when all these closures  were pushed through.

 

It has to be said that the railways were in a bad state back then . Maybe we forget just how bad things were. Most years receipts were falling and the concept of the railway network being given money from the government for ever to keep it going just did not exist. The driver for the Beeching report was to stop the railways being a burden on the state. Things are very different now n almost every way. 

[DY444]

I think it probably is.  You could accuse him and the Wilson government of not having a sufficiently widely scoped vision of the future but that would be harsh in the context of the time.  The early 60s were all about roads, there were plans to carve motorways right through London suburbia and create concentric orbital motorways as in many US cities.  Their mistake was to underestimate both population growth and the economics around car affordability changing so profoundly ultimately resulting in substantial congestion and excessive pollution.  Add in new aircraft types and package holidays opening up foreign holidays to the masses and none of the major airports (except Gatwick) having convenient rail access and you have a roadmap (ha ha) to continued rail decline.

 

You could argue there was one missed moment to glimpse the future.  Around 1966/7 when the swinging sixties was getting well into its stride, London was the cultural capital of the world, and the public mood was briefly at an optimistic level, the sparks effect from the WCML electrification in particular, and from the Bournemouth electrification, was becoming very apparent with a substantial increase in ridership ("build it and they will come").  A government with vision perhaps ought to have noted that and paused for thought.  Instead the government of the day pressed ahead with most of Beeching, added some more of its own and prevaricated over more electrification for another 4 years.  History doesn't really record it as a missed opportunity to stand back and have another look but imo it was.

 

As an aside the "white elephant, vanity project" anti-HS2 blarters are doing exactly the same thing that the Government did in the 1960s; ie assuming rail has reached the limit of its contribution to transport and no more is required.  Those in power in the 60s, although lacking vision, did at least have history on their side.  The current mob do not and thus have no excuse for their banal parrot-like utterances.

Edited September 4, 2021 by DY444

[Nearholmer]

Anyone who thinks this was a uniquely British, or a uniquely Beeching thing (even if it is fair that his name remains associated with it), would do well to compare the railway maps of Germany, France, Ireland, and a host of other countries dating from, say, 1939 and 1969. They all show hefty pruning.

 

The Irish case is interesting, because their ‘Beeching’ was Todd Andrews, who attracted a lot of flak at the time from the TUs, but managed overall to retain the very high esteem that he was held in because of other public service roles that he filled - he isn’t the same hate figure as Beeching, despite shutting probably a greater, or as great, a proportion of the network.

 

Maybe us Britishers are especially sentimental about barely-used rural railways.

[D826]

Beeching provided an excuse for much of the pruning that happened.  Some of it was needed, but much was short sighted.

 

Road congestion will get worse in this country and building more road capacity generally is like treating obesity by buying a bigger belt.  

 

I suspect that transport patterns in the UK will change more when the pain of road travel means people look to, or are forced to consider alternatives.  

 

I've been wondering if the appalling congestion on the M5 to the South west might resuscitate the dearth of railfreight west of Exeter, well west of Bristol...

 

That the routes closed, and land sold/lost as a consequence of Beeching, could have played some part in that I have no doubt.  Witness the resurgence of Okehampton to Crediton  - if the route had gone or been lifted I doubt it would have happened.

 

I have been idly wondering how many people stuck on the M4/M5 would have happily paid to stick their motor on a flat wagon outside Reading or such place for a modern iteration of Motorrail.  (I'd happily pay a few hundred quid , and sit in a Mark 1 too, preferably hauled by D1015). 

 

Sadly I suspect the loss of railway land and space will do more to limit innovation and railfreight resurgence as part of Britain's 21st century transport policy.  (I won't use the word integrated when describing transport policy as it is anything but).

 

The post covid railway needs to offer comfort, convenience and flexibility, it also needs to integrate with other public transport modes and active travel.  (Cycle storage on the 800s* is pathetic).

 

Matt W

 

*IET things, not the products of Swindon and Glasgow.

[Kris]

Beeching gets the blame for far too many of ills of the railway. He made decisions based on the political will of the time and the without the benefit of hindsight . When we look back it is very easy to say why wasn't line x, y, or z kept open look at the size of the town now. These towns were not that size 50 years ago and their expansion could not have been reasonable foreseen. 

Beeching also gets blamed for many lines closed before or after him. 

[Nearholmer]

17 minutes ago, D826 said:

suspect that transport patterns in the UK will change more when the pain of road travel means people look to, or are forced to consider alternatives.  

Thoroughly agree, and with your obesity point.

 

The ‘trick’ must surely be to stop making car travel easier or more attractive, and entirely shift the focus towards other modes: bus, cycling, walking, rail.

 

Bus particularly is an ‘open goal’, in that the basic routes (roads!) exist, and relatively small bus-prioritisation schemes could quickly swap the balance of convenience between car and bus. But right now subsidised bus routes are being further cut, because usage has collapsed during Covid, and the way bus services are presented to the potential user is an anarchic mess, so that many people barely even know they exist in some places.

 

Newer solutions such as robot-driven minibus taxis are ‘on the brink’ too.

 

It would be insane to focus wholly on rail, because it lacks ‘reach’; only a small proportion of the population live within easy walking distance of a station, and in 99% of cases it is a useless mode for a high proportion of trips - popping to the supermarket can’t be done by train (tube) outside London probably. 
 

And, we need to consider freight, about which there is a parallel thread

 

Stick up a memorial to Lost Railways, lay a wreath once a year, and move on.

[kevinlms]

2 hours ago, Chris M said:

Beeching was brought in to do a job. He wasn't a railwayman, he was a businessman. He put his name to the report which was to decimate the railways so it is fair to say that many things were closed by Beeching. He got paid very well for doing this. I can see no reason for not saying Beeching was responsible for the closures. Yes he may have just been doing what he was told to do and many of the closures may well have been inevitable, but Beeching was the man in charge when all these closures  were pushed through.

 

It has to be said that the railways were in a bad state back then . Maybe we forget just how bad things were. Most years receipts were falling and the concept of the railway network being given money from the government for ever to keep it going just did not exist. The driver for the Beeching report was to stop the railways being a burden on the state. Things are very different now n almost every way. 

Of course a government NEVER commissions a report that disagrees with its intentions. 

Have none of you learnt anything from Yes, Minister?

[kevinlms]

1 hour ago, Nearholmer said:

Anyone who thinks this was a uniquely British, or a uniquely Beeching thing (even if it is fair that his name remains associated with it), would do well to compare the railway maps of Germany, France, Ireland, and a host of other countries dating from, say, 1939 and 1969. They all show hefty pruning.

 

The Irish case is interesting, because their ‘Beeching’ was Todd Andrews, who attracted a lot of flak at the time from the TUs, but managed overall to retain the very high esteem that he was held in because of other public service roles that he filled - he isn’t the same hate figure as Beeching, despite shutting probably a greater, or as great, a proportion of the network.

 

Maybe us Britishers are especially sentimental about barely-used rural railways.

What is a key thing about the loss making branch lines, is that so many should never have been built in the first place. 

[Dagworth]

I believe the most short sighted part of the closures was the wholesale destruction of the infrastructure that followed. It would have been much better to have left it in place and kept the land as available corridors that would have allowed much easier reopening if/when needed. 
 

Andi

[jonny777]

Let's clear a few things up. The Beeching Report was nothing to do with the Wilson Government, although they broke their election promise to halt the closures. 

 

Beeching's report was published in March 1963, and Wilson did not come to power until October 1964. Harold Macmillan was PM when the report was published, although due to several scandals unconnected to this subject, plus a prostate problem, he resigned in the Autumn of 1963. 

 

It is pedantically true that Beeching didn't personally close any lines, but he did allow his report to be published in full - and that report recommended the closure of 6000 route miles, and over 2300 stations should close completely. He may have only been doing the job he was brought in to do, but that doesn't excuse the drastic, short-sighted, and (excuse the pun) tunnel vision measures he proposed. Why should the passage of time make any difference to the decisions? 

 

I think we enthusiasts are well aware that certain lines and stations had been closed prior to WW2, and many of us regard it as an insult to be told of this fact over and over again by the Beeching apologists. 

 

The big catalyst for Beeching came during the closure of the M&GN early in 1959. I think the government had expected a public outcry when the closure of an entire route was announced, but apart from a few localised objections, this outcry never materialised; which must have given the road lobby in government a great boost to their morale. 

 

If the M&GN could be closed with hardly a squeak out of local politicians, then a much more ambitious closure programme could be planned, and all it would need is a hard headed private industry leader to implement it under the guise of 'efficiency'. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[spamcan61]

21 minutes ago, kevinlms said:

What is a key thing about the loss making branch lines, is that so many should never have been built in the first place. 

Absolutely, I've lost count of the number of line histories I've read over the years where a small company struggles to build a line from nowhere in particular to nowhere at all, then sells out to a big company for peanuts. Then the line closes eventually (often pre Beeching) anyway.

[cheesysmith]

I think the mistake of the report was he was not in charge when it was implemented. He at least would have asked where the forecasted savings from the closure were. Then compare that against the cost of closure. I don't think any of the lines that closed saved as much as was predicted, and if admitted at the time, could have had a different outcome. Think of a GC London bit run as a simple 2 track railway using DMUs. But a lot of lines were shut due to regional politics.

[APOLLO]

Will the effects / aftermath of Covid bring on a similar to Beeching cull on services / lines. ? (Working from home etc).

 

Never trust politicians of any colour. 

 

Brit15

[62613]

1 hour ago, DY444 said:

I think it probably is.  You could accuse him and the Wilson government of not having a sufficiently widely scoped vision of the future but that would be harsh in the context of the time.  The early 60s were all about roads, there were plans to carve motorways right through London suburbia and create concentric orbital motorways as in many US cities.  Their mistake was to underestimate both population growth and the economics around car affordability changing so profoundly ultimately resulting in substantial congestion and excessive pollution.  Add in new aircraft types and package holidays opening up foreign holidays to the masses and none of the major airports (except Gatwick) having convenient rail access and you have a roadmap (ha ha) to continued rail decline.

 

You could argue there was one missed moment to glimpse the future.  Around 1966/7 when the swinging sixties was getting well into its stride, London was the cultural capital of the world, and the public mood was briefly at an optimistic level, the sparks effect from the WCML electrification in particular, and from the Bournemouth electrification, was becoming very apparent with a substantial increase in ridership ("build it and they will come").  A government with vision perhaps ought to have noted that and paused for thought.  Instead the government of the day pressed ahead with most of Beeching, added some more of its own and prevaricated over more electrification for another 4 years.  History doesn't really record it as a missed opportunity to stand back and have another look but imo it was.

 

As an aside the "white elephant, vanity project" anti-HS2 blarters are doing exactly the same thing that the Government did in the 1960s; ie assuming rail has reached the limit of its contribution to transport and no more is required.  Those in power in the 60s, although lacking vision, did at least have history on their side.  The current mob do not and thus have no excuse for their banal parrot-like utterances.

On your first sentence; I suspect the Tories heaved a huge sigh of relief at losing power in 1964; as Nearholmer has pointed out, the problems for UK plc were piling up, not just for the railways, but all over the place. The Wilson government pledge not to implement the Beeching Report was obviously false; any government, of any colour, would have implemented the parts which meant they didn't have to spend public money as fast, while the bits requiring investment, which are well known, were not pursued quite as vigorously.

[Tim Dubya]

39 minutes ago, Dagworth said:

I believe the most short sighted part of the closures was the wholesale destruction of the infrastructure that followed. It would have been much better to have left it in place and kept the land as available corridors that would have allowed much easier reopening if/when needed. 
 

Andi

 

Bang on Andi, I'm thinking that mothballing the infrastructure as a whole and only removing certain structures due to age and or maintenance issues would have saved money then and billions now.  These structures would inevitably have had to been rebuilt anyway, so removing them then, but retaining the 'estate' would have been the best option.

 

 

 

[Tim Dubya]

6 minutes ago, APOLLO said:

Will the effects / aftermath of Covid bring on a similar to Beeching cull on services / lines. ? (Working from home etc).

 

Never trust politicians of any colour. 

 

Brit15

 

None of us (working at a FE college) are allowed to WFH anymore, even though in most cases for support staff it made life for everyone cheaper and a damn sight easier.

So I suspect other sectors will follow suit, but speaking personally it may reduce costs for employers by downsizing their physical premises due to their staff WFH.

 

 

Edited September 4, 2021 by Tim Dubya
Coffee

[phil-b259]

24 minutes ago, cheesysmith said:

 Think of a GC London bit run as a simple 2 track railway using DMUs. But a lot of lines were shut due to regional politics.

 

There is FAR to much obsession with the GC route to London. It passed through sod all south of Rugby, had lousy conectivity with other rail routes and none of the large towns / cities it passed through were left without rail services as a result of its demise.

 

In fact the biggest losses were not long rambling lines which enthuasts get so passionate about - it was shortish branches, stubs of through lines or key links where urban growth over the years would have seen them become extremely useful feeders to main routes - examples including the likes of Bourne End - High Wycombe, Bristol - Portishead, Guildford - Cranleigh, etc 

 

If you really want to a main line railway which shouldn't have survived then the Waverly route is a much better example as its closure resulted in a huge region being deprived of rail connectivity.

Edited September 4, 2021 by phil-b259

[DLT]

1 hour ago, Kris said:

These towns were not that size 50 years ago and their expansion could not have been reasonable foreseen. 

 

I'm not sure that is strictly the case.  As I understand it, a lot of town expansion was planned, and some was already starting to happen in the late 1960s.  It was more a case of lack of joined-up thinking; one section of government not knowing what the other was doing.

[Nearholmer]

And, the accepted wisdom of the day was that private car travel would be a serious liberator, and that bus travel would always be there as an option for the car-less.
 

The first held good, was true c1960-1990, then congestion really started to bite, and the second only held until c1980.