Dr Beeching

[westerhamstation]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2013/mar/17/rail-freight-britain-beeching-reputation

A interesting article.

[Ian J.]

This quote from the article kind of sums up what ultimately was the unforgivable sin, but AIUI it wasn't directly Beeching but successive governments that pushed for any money they could get from BRB that forced the land sales:

 

Despite Beeching's freight success, most will still agree with sentiments expressed at the CBT's London event by Lord (Richard Faulkner), co-author of Holding the Line, who raged against the selling off of railway land that for ever fragmented the network: "That remains the main Beeching legacy, for which I can't forgive him."

[pointstaken]

One can expect  those with rose-tinted blinkers to descend on this thread en masse.

 

Dennis

[Oldddudders]

This quote from the article kind of sums up what ultimately was the unforgivable sin, but AIUI it wasn't directly Beeching but successive governments that pushed for any money they could get from BRB that forced the land sales:

Many years after Beeching had moved on, there was still a formal consultation mechanism within the industry to ensure that any function/business/sector that had a future use for a parcel of land could say so when sale was being proposed. While that didn't guarantee their need being over-riding, the idea was right. In the era, what possible reason was there for keeping hold of closed lines and sidings etc, when commercial and social needs were offering to put them to new use. Certain parts of the freight business were very good at using this mechanism, it has to be said, because they often seemed to have a potential customer who just might need a new facility right there. Most such "needs" never fructified, of course.

 

Many of Beeching's decisions were spot-on - and the relative health of the vibrant railway we have today is largely down to the cull of unused routes and facilities he oversaw. Do not confuse sentiment with commercial viability. No other industry can afford to do so, why should the railway?

[Welly]

I am currently reading the re-print of that report "The Reshaping of British Railways" ( ISBN 9780007511969 ) So far the report made clear that prior railway accounting practices have made it very difficult for management to discern actual costs/revenue.

[Ohmisterporter]

Did the railway have to pay rates on land that it was not using? We have the ironic situation that the railways paid business rates that were spent building roads to take business away from the railways. 

[Silver Sidelines]

My father was also an accountant with ICI at the time of Beeching and I seem to recall his relief when Beeching moved on.

 

Ray

[Derekl]

The crux of the "Guardian" story was that Beeching had forecast the freight railway as having a future based on heavy haulage of decent length trains point-to-point, mine to power station, docks to road distribution points, and so on, as opposed to the wagon-load traffic from wayside station to marshaling yard, re-formation into full train length to next marshaling yard, and trip distribution thereafter.

 

He thus foresaw the development of rail freight as it is developing now (it is said).

 

I do not see that he can be fairly credited. The ill-fated British Railways modernisation plan (which pre-dated Beeching) identified bulk freight movement as a potential growth area, although was perhaps wanting in implementation. The plan also resulted in the construction of the large marshaling yards to facilitate wagon-load traffic, but by the time of the Beeching report, it must have been evident that this was not very cost effective.

 

Perhaps the worst of his accountant led contributions (suggesting the old adage - "knowing the cost of everything, but the value of nothing") was his use of a week long survey of traffic to determine the viability of lines, this after he discovered (as noted above) that the inherited British Railways accounting system was spectacularly deficient in identifying cost and income.

[paulbb]

Yes a lot of Dr B's ideas on freight were farsighted for their time but his views on route duplication now looks short sighted-many key routes were lost. Manchester in particular lost 2 of its 3 routes to London in 1968 as a result of his 'part 2 approach' to route rationalisation . Freight and passenger companies could do with that capacity now

Also many of the 'regrettable' closures were made by politicians- Barbara Castle signed the death warrant for the Waverley route, as it did not have the same number of what are called 'marginal constituencies' as did the Central Wales line, which survived.

[The Stationmaster]

This quote from the article kind of sums up what ultimately was the unforgivable sin, but AIUI it wasn't directly Beeching but successive governments that pushed for any money they could get from BRB that forced the land sales:

 

Well no actually.  The money which BR got from land sales was used to finance investment - in fact at one time it was one of the few sources of infrastructure investment money available to the Board for things other than the headline grabbing 'big schemes'.  Admittedly that saved the Govt giving BR money but that wasn't quite the same thing as BR also having to handover cash from sales of land etc.  My local station got a new building - a proper brick built one of quite good quality - in the 1980s and that was financed solely by the sale of part of the site to commercial developers.

 

 

Incidentally a lot of the freight proposals for the future in the Beeching Report weren't his original ideas but came from people within the industry - what his report did was give them prominence in a cogent manner which helped secure investment.

[Ian J.]

I'll have to admit my understanding of the sell off of land was wrong for the most part. Sorry about that.

 

It still seems to me though that sales of land that weren't part of a route, and sales of the routes themselves are kind of two different things. Losing an unused goods yard is one thing, but losing the actual route of a line is another thing entirely.

[Bernard Lamb]

Also many of the 'regrettable' closures were made by politicians- Barbara Castle signed the death warrant for the Waverley route, as it did not have the same number of what are called 'marginal constituencies' as did the Central Wales line, which survived.

It was Richard Marsh actually.

I will not repeat the full story here but suggest you read the book on the Waverley by David Spaven. It contains the full history of the closure based on documents at Kew that had previously not been published.

Central Wales line is not my direct area of interest but while working with David on the book it did get mentioned. I believe that Harold Wilson had a personal involvement in the process.

Bernard

[John_Hughes]

It was Richard Marsh actually.

I will not repeat the full story here but suggest you read the book on the Waverley by David Spaven. It contains the full history of the closure based on documents at Kew that had previously not been published.

Central Wales line is not my direct area of interest but while working with David on the book it did get mentioned. I believe that Harold Wilson had a personal involvement in the process.

Bernard

 

Apparently it was actually George Thomas - later Viscount Tonypandy - who warned of the Central Wales' relationship with marginal constituencies.

 

Any discussion of Beeching, I think, has to bear in mind who gave him his job and what the sub-text was; the man responsible was Ernest Marples, a deeply corrupt politician who was apparently named in an unpublished section of the Denning Report as a regular user of prostitutes, and who certainly finally skipped the country just ahead of the Revenue and spent his final years in Monaco; his real interests were in road-building, connected to the family firm of Marples Ridgway.

 

Was Beeching anything other than Marples' sock-puppet? Frankly I doubt it - which is not to deny that some of what he did was necessary, some was foolish, and some would have happened anyway.

[RhBBob]

. Do not confuse sentiment with commercial viability. No other industry can afford to do so, why should the railway?

 

Point taken, Ian, but here in the County for which the GNR was brought into being ( along with somewhere called Yorkshire), the sight of so many HGVs travelling along narrow broken roads is ridiculous.  Lincolnshire is the largest producer of potatoes, wheat, poultry and cereals - plus second place for sugar beet - and all this could easily travel by rail. 

 

The irony of so many railway lines passing within a few yards of supermarket car-parks is not lost on anyone queuing at the level crossing for the inevitable two-car DMU with few passengers.

[IWCR]

It  would  be  interesting  to  revisit  the  Beeching  reports  information  and  conclusions.

Undoubtedly  much  of  the  closures  were  inevitable  however  the  cost  mechanisms  for  selecting  specific  lines  for  shutting  were  flawed.   Stations  and  lines  were examined  and  the  revenue  from  each  accounted  for,  costs  were  assesed  from  network  renewal  costs  for  track  and  rolling  stock  and  allocated  on  a  mileage  basis.

This  unduly  skewed  figures  for  many  lines,  minor  routes  normally  used  track  materials  and  rolling  stock  cascaded  from  the  main  lines  hence  were  cheaper  than  the  national  route  mile  average  for  costs.  Income  could  be  concealed,  for  example  I  have  seen  figures  for  specific  stations  within  a  resort  area,  three  times  as  many  tickets  were  collected  than  sold  yet  the  line  was  not  credited  for  this  income,  only  the  issuing  station.

Assumptions  were  made  that  closing  a  feeder  line  would  not  result  in  loosing  most  of  the business  from/to  it,  that  most  passengers  would  drive or  bus  to  their  new  railhead;  few did.

The  way  the  accounting  was  carried  out  tended  to  maximise  returns  from  the  main  lines  and  minimise  the  feeder / destination  routes.  The  resulting  closures  did  not  fully  produce  the  expected  savings  and  lost  more  revenue  than  intended.

Even  allowing  for  this  much  of  the  Beeching  closures  would  have  still  happened;  but  some  of  the  lines  I  am  sure  were  actually  generating  a  profit.  Even  a  basic  revenue  cost  sharing  such  as  allocating  half  of  ticket  revenue  to  each  of  the  originating  station  and  the  destination  would  make  big  differences  to  the  figures  for  some  routes. 

 

Pete

[Thos]

I am currently reading 'The Railways of England' by WM Acworth.  While written well before Beeching (it is the 1899 edition), he makes the point when contrasting UK and UK freight that although large wagons appear better, even a 7-ton wagon was rarely more than half filled, and frequently only a quarter filled.  He also contrasts the French situation where a wagon from Paris to Calais would normally take from Monday to Friday, whereas a merchant could buy stock in London and take the train to Bradford, and his goods would be waiting for him the next morning.  For all the colossal amount of freight handled at the time, it seems to have moved well.

 

The problem of Beeching vision is that there would never be that much point to point bulk freight.  Coal to power station and coal and iron to steelworks and that's about it.  What may have helped is more containerisation but again Acworth adresses that issue by stating that users preferred open wagons and tarpaulin for speed and ease of loading and unloading.

 

When Beeching was working the UK was still a manufacturing economy and noone would have forseen that future freight traffic would have been dominated by container imports from China.

 

 

Incidentally the kobo.com site lists many free railway-related books courtesy of Google - well worth a look.

[Welchester]

Any discussion of Beeching, I think, has to bear in mind who gave him his job and what the sub-text was; the man responsible was Ernest Marples, a deeply corrupt politician (...); his real interests were in road-building, connected to the family firm of Marples Ridgway.

To avoid a conflict of interest on becoming Minister of Transport, he sold his shares in the company ..... to his wife!

[34theletterbetweenB&D]

...Perhaps the worst of his accountant led contributions (suggesting the old adage - "knowing the cost of everything, but the value of nothing") was his use of a week long survey of traffic to determine the viability of lines, this after he discovered (as noted above) that the inherited British Railways accounting system was spectacularly deficient in identifying cost and income.

 The seeds of the trouble are as described here. BR was not competently managed as a business. Beeching specified data collection and acted on it. I have used this as a management training study. If one guy can come in and find out what he believes he needs to know, and the LARGE management team of long experience cannot equally swiftly produce the data and analysis  to provide a thorough and convincing rebuttal, then sorry guys, it is game over. The blame, if any attaches, is to the BR management cadre of the time...

[Oldddudders]

 The seeds of the trouble are as described here. BR was not competently managed as a business. Beeching specified data collection and acted on it. I have used this as a management training study. If one guy can come in and find out what he believes he needs to know, and the LARGE management team of long experience cannot equally swiftly produce the data and analysis  to provide a thorough and convincing rebuttal, then sorry guys, it is game over. The blame, if any attaches, is to the BR management cadre of the time...

Data analysis in those days was pretty much a manual task. So the example quoted above, of the "destinating" traffic at a seaside terminus not being recognised, would have required zillions of manhours across the huge network BR than ran. More recently, Economic Survey Officers with numeracy skills were appointed in the Regions, and computer analysis of ticket issues enabled some greater degree of understanding. But even then, for some significant flows, someone needed to attribute revenue by alternative routes, where ticket restrictions permitted. Example : a ticket from Brighton to Reading (or beyond) could be used via Redhill and Guildford, or via Clapham Junction, or via Havant & Guildford, perhaps. For the sort of data that people seem to think the management at BR should have had at their fingertips, an army of clerks would be needed to identify what % of revenue to attribute to each route - and who would have devised the algorithm to enable it? The Bright Young People of Operational Research were still some decades away.

 

Furthermore, prior to Beeching, precisely what function would this data really have served, and thus why would it have been needed, let alone the cost justified? The railway, even before 1948, had been quite good at lopping off dead branches and no-hope routes. Given that the Regions were not very different from the Big 4, and still held a lot of pre-1948 attitudes and jealousies, it's hard to imagine anyone suggesting the loss of the Great Central and similar dramatic network reductions, at which Beeching's team excelled.

[R A Watson]

For those wishing to read the original report a new facsimile edition "the reshaping of British railways" is available in hard copy only from the National Archives at £9.99 by mail order.

 

Wally

[Glorious NSE]

When Beeching was working the UK was still a manufacturing economy and noone would have forseen that future freight traffic would have been dominated by container imports from China.

 

Don't forget that the Beeching vision of Freightliner was intended as primarily a *domestic* container service, replacing wagonload traffic within the country, and not based around imports - in many ways indeed the ancestor of the Tesco (Stobart) flow referred to in the article.

 

Freightliner wasn't really about 'global' traffic until probably the late 80s, a couple of decades after Beeching.

[Glorious NSE]

Yes a lot of Dr B's ideas on freight were farsighted for their time but his views on route duplication now looks short sighted-many key routes were lost. Manchester in particular lost 2 of its 3 routes to London in 1968 as a result of his 'part 2 approach' to route rationalisation . Freight and passenger companies could do with that capacity now

 

I agree it would be very useful capacity in certain places now, but I struggle to see how anyone could have foreseen the issues of post 2000 (as they didn't really start biting until then) from circa 1960.

 

For instance passenger traffic losses bottoming out (let alone starting to slowly increase) were still a couple of decades into the future, the downward trend at Beeching had been going on for a long time (wars excepting) and would continue inexorably onwards till 1983...

[The Stationmaster]

I'll have to admit my understanding of the sell off of land was wrong for the most part. Sorry about that.

 

It still seems to me though that sales of land that weren't part of a route, and sales of the routes themselves are kind of two different things. Losing an unused goods yard is one thing, but losing the actual route of a line is another thing entirely.

It is alas all too easy to look through the telescope of today and see something which looks very different from what was staring people in the face 20 or 30 years ago let alone 50 years ago.  In the latter time frame the sophistication of accounting methods plus computerisation allow things to be seen in a very different way as Ian has already explained. 

 

Similarly we now live in an era of railway expansion of a kind not really seen in most of our lifetimes.  Most of us on here who worked on the railway for most of our working lives lived and worked through enormous periods of change but with a considerable amount of contraction - contraction arising from people and goods ceasing to use the railway.  And the railway's coat of infrastructure and trains had to be cut to meet the new cloth, when there was money to do so.  in the 1980s, in particular, I was involved in schemes to do with pulling things up, taking off trains, cutting staff numbers and so on.  In the early 1990s I was deeply involved in developing a major new coal import terminal and improving a route to take the traffic it would generate - a massive long-term scheme; today one of the places that scheme was designed to serve (Didcot A power station) has closed, do we now rip out all the infrastructure my plans added?   There's one place on the Western where over the years, working originally for BR and latterly for a consulting company, I have devised 3 (or was it 4?) infrastructure and resignalling schemes - in 1984 it was based on a fair amount of additional singling and pulling stuff out; the most recent effort involved putting stuff in and re-doubling previously singled sections in the face of ever increasing traffic levels and train numbers.  Times change and things change with the times.

 

Incidentally overall I think the Beeching Plan rationalisation of wagonload freight was ahead of its time; just look how the same has happened - in a far more haphazard and poorly planned way - in most Western European countries since then and subsequently east of the former Iron Curtain.  Times change.

[Edwin_m]

The real shame is how (with a very few exceptions) we have been totally unable to deliver integrated transport in the UK.  In my view (on the passenger side at least) it's actually a lot about buses rather than trains. 

 

Looking at Germany or Switzerland you see how the bus does what the bus is best at, local/feeder journeys in areas where there is little traffic congestion.  The railway (and trams) do what they are best at, longer-distance journeys and bringing people into the main cities without clogging up the road network.  In many cities you rarely see a bus in the centre but at rural and suburban railway stations there are buses that meet the train and do a circuit of the local area before returning just in time to catch the next train.  All on one ticket of course!  While car ownership is higher than the UK, car use is lower as people have a genuine choice to use public transport for a wide range of journeys. 

 

That model in Britain might have allowed the geniune no-hoper branch lines to be replaced by buses which continued to form part of the public transport network and fed passengers into the main line train.  It might also have allowed trains to continue on some routes/stations where the public transport market was split between trains and buses (using simplified rail infrastructure - one idea Beeching largely ignored).  Sadly it never happened, probably because although trains and buses were theoretically under unified control it never extended down to the working level. Outside London the PTEs in the 70s probably came closest, with varying degrees of success, but bus deregulation put paid to any hopes of an integrated network. 

 

In Beeching's time the bus was close to its maximum popularity, with services that were cheaper to operate and often faster and more comfortable than the train, so seemed the natural choice for the less busy transport links.  However it wasn't realised (or was ignored) that the same technological developments would give rise to mass car ownership and without the element of integration this killed most of the rail replacement buses and a lot of the others too.  Many remaining bus routes were caught up in traffic congestion, losing more passengers and leading to a downward spiral of bus travel which still continues to some extent.  Today in rural areas a car is pratically essential unless (by little more than chance) there happens to be a decent surviving train or bus service. 

 

In Beeching's era it was quite easy to drive almost anywhere with few problems of congestion.  London has always been different, as it is too big to function without high capacity public transport.  In the last couple of decades traffic congestion has also increased around the next tier of major cities, with the greatest rail growth seen (although from a low base) on routes into cities like Cardiff, Birmingham and Manchester where fortunately suburban and regional rail links just about survived the 60s and 70s.  Now we see the same issues in slightly smaller cities such as Nottingham and Bristol, with the difference that most of their local rail networks did not survive Beeching.  These places must find the money to built tram systems or continue to rely on buses. 

[Glorious NSE]

Now we see the same issues in slightly smaller cities such as Nottingham and Bristol, with the difference that most of their local rail networks did not survive Beeching.  These places must find the money to built tram systems or continue to rely on buses. 

 

In terms of Bristol it might actually be a heavy-rail revival, and within our lifetimes! - I think the only route in the city not likely to come back into passenger use is the ex Midland main line - whilst a light rail use of the redundant bits of the former 4 track section to the North might have happenned a few years back but failed, I think in retrospect we may be thankful for that failure in time, as it will allow it to be returned to it's former 4 track status for heavy rail use!

 

I do wonder if with 2013 eyes, the Midland Metro conversion of the former GWR Birmingham-Wolverhampton route will be seen as a big mistake for example...