Pre-beeching density of railways

[D854_Tiger]

The Beeching Reportassessment of passenger numbers, certainly on our part of the world, were done by station staff (where there were any of course) plus ticket sales information was readily available for all stations which would at least show originating passenger numbers although the Beeching Report was criticised simply for using originating passenger numbers without taking account of their destination (i.e. mainly the matter of branch lines feeding main lines).

 

Ultimately the flaw with Beeching was that the smaller network that resulted still lost the same amount of money.

[Mike Storey]

Ultimately the flaw with Beeching was that the smaller network that resulted still lost the same amount of money.

 

I agree the strategy was flawed, in that it presumed a restoration of profitability primarily as a result of its actions. It did not sufficiently make the connection between economic activity and transport demand, let alone correctly calculated the financial benefit of feeder lines, very possibly deliberately. But what we must acknowledge was that it was a child of its generation - there was relatively little public outcry, as cars and motorways were part of the "white heat of technology" changes to Britain that most people saw as the future in those days - although Labour pledged to halt the cuts, and then didn't once it saw the books.

 

However, it did stem the downward spiral of rapidly increasing losses until the effects of both the 1968 Transport Act (thanks to an enlightened Mrs Castle, who had previously not actually shown much interest in social subsidy) and the several innovative (for the UK at least) introductions of Freightliners, Merry-go-Rounds and electrification, Deltics, then HST and sectorisation, and all that kind of technological advancement and better business management and marketing thing, started a fight back.

 

Many lines that closed were basket cases from the day they opened, but what is most frustrating is that politics played a greater part on what remained, rather than a proper strategic assessment by an independent commission (Beeching and the BRB were never independent of their political masters. The strongly supported allegation that Marples was also a crook, did not help.) Even such a body may have made, in those days, some regrettable decisions, given the lack of foresight in fast changing times.

 

I would strongly suggest that those people advocating a return to full public ownership, ensure that they understand what happened between 1947 and 1993-ish. "It will be different this time" is an ancient quotation, back to Samuel Johnson, or even Aristotle, I believe, relating to a combination of naivety and politics which begat the Law of Unintended Consequences. That law applied viciously to John Major's vision - he actually created the very first opportunity for the railways to be protected legally, and improved due to contractual obligations, not due to the "innovation and entrepreneurialism" that his couple of O Levels predicted. The withdrawal of Network Rail back into the status of a nationalised industry, is already seeing the government using that status to start to radically slow rail investment, whilst blaming NR (admittedly with some justification on enhancements costs at the moment, but without acknowledging the 35% efficiency savings they have managed to deliver over the past two Control Periods). Thank goodness a very free-market leaning government currently does not have the parliamentary security to start making actual cuts, to "save" money, or we would really be in the excrement.

 

I see Virgin have now taken a major financial stake in these Californian "pod" thingies with a proposed alternative to HS3, and a 12 minute journey time from Liverpool to Hull, or similar. Brunel may have some advice about that, but I doubt the current SofS would have the capacity to listen. May whomsoever you believe in, save us from politicians and people with straggly beards.

[The Johnster]

I may be a cynic, but I rather suspect that Brunel's advice to Richard Branson would be along the lines of 'make sure you only lose other people's money'...

 

Richard Branson.  What did you expect when they put a prick under a balloon.

[71000]

I may be a cynic, but I rather suspect that Brunel's advice to Richard Branson would be along the lines of 'make sure you only lose other people's money'...

 

Richard Branson.  What did you expect when they put a prick under a balloon.

The Johnster,

At least Branson had the sense to employ someone who not only understood railways, but also the civil servants. Namely "Chris Green" ex BRB Director.

 

Franchising you need to know is a Civil Service sermantics term for Rent. So in reality the only proper railway company left in Britain today is the Romney Hythe and Dymchurch Railway. Which owns and maintains its own track, structures, and rolling stock. Promotes and operates its services etc.

 

John Major originally said: The Government will privatise British Railways and it will be back to the good old days of the GWR, LMS, LNER, SR. At that moment I knew that was precisely what we would NOT get.

 

Instead they hacked BR up into (initially) 128 seperate Franchises. Now if you understand that the BRB had basically 10 Directors on roughly salaries of £1Million per year. (Total cost £10 Million). You then divide BR into 128 units and as a rough guide we will assume that each of these units had 10 Directors each on £1 Million a year. The cost of running the railways has just risen to £1,280 Million (£1.28 Billion), before you move a solitary train.

 

In BR's last full accounting year it cost the tax payer approx £780 Million to operate the whole network using 93,000 staff. Or less than the cost of the new Franchhised system, just for its Directors !  Was BR hacked up to improve efficiency ? Of course not, it was NOT intended to improve efficiency, it was intended to use the Railway network as another Job creation scheme. How many workers are now on the railways today ? Approx 475,000, and they only do about 80% of what BR did, as some chunks of BR such as Casey Jones burger bars, Transmark and the BR Railway College at Derby were sold off totally.

 

The Civil Servants you must understand are charged with running the country on a daily basis. So it is the Civil Servants who dream up these ideas, in the same way that they injected large numbers of "Administrators" into the National Health organisation, just to create jobs. The bottom line problem is therefore the growing population, and finding work for the increasing numbers. So Franchising as they like to call it, introduces Private money in addition to what the Government still has to put in, to supposedly offset the cost of the increased numbers of jobs. Efficiency bedeviled !       

       

 

The Duke 71000

[davepen]

 

Returning to the question posted by Deonyi yesterday, "Is there any BR pre-Beeching map of the entire network anywhere?" and the Handbook of Stations, etc.

 

The RCH 'Official' Railway Maps were those prepared and published for the Railway Clearing House (1842 - 1963), which not only show the pre-or-post grouping railway companies, but also the major industrial railways feeding into the network.  All the district and junction RCH maps have the distances between stations and depots marked in miles and chains, so that the clerks could work out rates and charges

 

My ancestors used to be coal wholesalers in Cardiff, they had their own wagons before they disappeared with war time pooling and then nationalisation. One of my great uncles roles was tracking down wagons to get them returned to the mines.  After the war, and nationalisation, with no legacy need to use the railway, they started to hire road trucks instead, although there was a move to supplying the many steel companies in south wales with refractory bricks.  The offices were in the coal exchange down the docks.  I remember visiting as kid, and thinking as a coal exchange the exchange floor had cleaned up no end!  Of course no coal went into the "exchange". The offices remained open after the exchange closed, finally closing in the 80s.

 

Anyway from them I have a 1926 RCH official map of England and Wales.  This is a cloth bound map, and folds out like a modern OS-Map.  The big four are shown in red, blue, green and yellow (GWR).  Brown is used for the various joint committee lines.  I also have a 1913 map of the south wales coalfield, showing in much more details the lines and mines. So as suggested these maps do exist.  I've also seen a ledger based on the printed GWR station ledger which had been used to note the rates to supply stations from various collieries.

 

Various google image searches will show various studies, some from the railway historians, some from the social policy academics, and I have seen one showing the "gap" with the closure of the old "Manchester and Milford" between Aberystwyth and Carmarthen and the now going campaign (trawslinkcymru) to restore/build a west coast of wales railway line.  This being different in scope to the Gwili Valley Railway. 

 

Interesting to think that my late Grampa could now catch a train from the "new" Fairwater station outside his old house and get to his office on the re-opened Bute Town rather than drive down Cathedral Rd to the docks.  The past is a different country!

[The Johnster]

The Johnster,

At least Branson had the sense to employ someone who not only understood railways, but also the civil servants. Namely "Chris Green" ex BRB Director.

 

Franchising you need to know is a Civil Service sermantics term for Rent. So in reality the only proper railway company left in Britain today is the Romney Hythe and Dymchurch Railway. Which owns and maintains its own track, structures, and rolling stock. Promotes and operates its services etc.

 

John Major originally said: The Government will privatise British Railways and it will be back to the good old days of the GWR, LMS, LNER, SR. At that moment I knew that was precisely what we would NOT get.

 

Instead they hacked BR up into (initially) 128 seperate Franchises. Now if you understand that the BRB had basically 10 Directors on roughly salaries of £1Million per year. (Total cost £10 Million). You then divide BR into 128 units and as a rough guide we will assume that each of these units had 10 Directors each on £1 Million a year. The cost of running the railways has just risen to £1,280 Million (£1.28 Billion), before you move a solitary train.

 

In BR's last full accounting year it cost the tax payer approx £780 Million to operate the whole network using 93,000 staff. Or less than the cost of the new Franchhised system, just for its Directors !  Was BR hacked up to improve efficiency ? Of course not, it was NOT intended to improve efficiency, it was intended to use the Railway network as another Job creation scheme. How many workers are now on the railways today ? Approx 475,000, and they only do about 80% of what BR did, as some chunks of BR such as Casey Jones burger bars, Transmark and the BR Railway College at Derby were sold off totally.

 

The Civil Servants you must understand are charged with running the country on a daily basis. So it is the Civil Servants who dream up these ideas, in the same way that they injected large numbers of "Administrators" into the National Health organisation, just to create jobs. The bottom line problem is therefore the growing population, and finding work for the increasing numbers. So Franchising as they like to call it, introduces Private money in addition to what the Government still has to put in, to supposedly offset the cost of the increased numbers of jobs. Efficiency bedeviled !       

       

 

The Duke 71000

 

 

 

Good points Duke.  The theory behind the late 20th century privatisations was monetarism, and a belief that wealth could be generated by creating market activity where there was none before (such as between NR, the TOCs, and the stock leasing companies).  Given that, while it might be argued that if any new wealth is created in this way, it is as a result of an equivalane increased cost to each component of this false and illusory 'market', the whole concept is a bit wobbly, but it is a confidence trick (so is currency), by which I mean a trick about confidence, and as long as the smoke and mirrors do their stuff at the company AGM the system doesn't collapse.

 

Good point about independent companies as well, I'd never thought about the inestimable RH&DR in this sense, but the company is I am afraid unique only in England and Scotland; the Ffestiniog is still run by the original company from the 1830s (though with the support of a Society and it's members.  It owns it's own trackbed, infrastructure, stock, and premises, is responsible for it's own marketing, and while it runs to a Light Railway Order nowadays, was reconstructed and signalled to main line standards when steam locos were introduced in 1863.  It was never closed, declared bankrupt, or wound up, though was 'out of use' between 1946 and 1953 and published no timetable in that period.  I have an idea that for a short period in the late 1960s it was the only railway in the UK that ran licensed buffet cars behind steam locomotives; in the days of Sunday closing in the area these were popular as alcohol could be served while the train was in motion on Sundays!

Edited October 14, 2017 by The Johnster

[Mike Storey]

The Johnster,

At least Branson had the sense to employ someone who not only understood railways, but also the civil servants. Namely "Chris Green" ex BRB Director.

 

Franchising you need to know is a Civil Service sermantics term for Rent. So in reality the only proper railway company left in Britain today is the Romney Hythe and Dymchurch Railway. Which owns and maintains its own track, structures, and rolling stock. Promotes and operates its services etc.

 

John Major originally said: The Government will privatise British Railways and it will be back to the good old days of the GWR, LMS, LNER, SR. At that moment I knew that was precisely what we would NOT get.

 

Instead they hacked BR up into (initially) 128 seperate Franchises. Now if you understand that the BRB had basically 10 Directors on roughly salaries of £1Million per year. (Total cost £10 Million). You then divide BR into 128 units and as a rough guide we will assume that each of these units had 10 Directors each on £1 Million a year. The cost of running the railways has just risen to £1,280 Million (£1.28 Billion), before you move a solitary train.

 

In BR's last full accounting year it cost the tax payer approx £780 Million to operate the whole network using 93,000 staff. Or less than the cost of the new Franchhised system, just for its Directors !  Was BR hacked up to improve efficiency ? Of course not, it was NOT intended to improve efficiency, it was intended to use the Railway network as another Job creation scheme. How many workers are now on the railways today ? Approx 475,000, and they only do about 80% of what BR did, as some chunks of BR such as Casey Jones burger bars, Transmark and the BR Railway College at Derby were sold off totally.

 

The Civil Servants you must understand are charged with running the country on a daily basis. So it is the Civil Servants who dream up these ideas, in the same way that they injected large numbers of "Administrators" into the National Health organisation, just to create jobs. The bottom line problem is therefore the growing population, and finding work for the increasing numbers. So Franchising as they like to call it, introduces Private money in addition to what the Government still has to put in, to supposedly offset the cost of the increased numbers of jobs. Efficiency bedeviled !       

       

 

The Duke 71000

 

I regret to state that your numbers are, not only completely fictitious, but absurd, and your argument or proposition, is a complete fabrication and so beyond any sane argument, that it is hard to know where to start. You do your argument no favours by using such tripe.

 

Just by example, the last BRB Chairman;s salary (John Welsby) did not exceed £300,000, and no-one else on the BRB exceeded that. I know because I has access to that info at the time. So a bald statement that each BRB director earned £1 million is complete and utter tripe.

 

You then assume every director of every subsequent company (and your assertions about the number of franchises are utter rollocks by the way) also earned that figure, which I also know to be not only completely wrong, but so way off the truth, that your entire post can be discounted as a complete invention. Current employment figures within the UK rail industry associated with what would have been done by BR as of 1992, are between 105,000 and 115,000, nothing like your number, and they are dealing with around double the number of passengers and services now than in 1992, not the 80% rubbish you claim.

 

I will simply ask where you got your numbers from, so that those who clearly share your opinion, know how to defend their belief? (Or, more likely, can know when they should avoid it.)

[The Stationmaster]

The Johnster,

At least Branson had the sense to employ someone who not only understood railways, but also the civil servants. Namely "Chris Green" ex BRB Director.

 

Franchising you need to know is a Civil Service sermantics term for Rent. So in reality the only proper railway company left in Britain today is the Romney Hythe and Dymchurch Railway. Which owns and maintains its own track, structures, and rolling stock. Promotes and operates its services etc.

 

John Major originally said: The Government will privatise British Railways and it will be back to the good old days of the GWR, LMS, LNER, SR. At that moment I knew that was precisely what we would NOT get.

 

Instead they hacked BR up into (initially) 128 seperate Franchises. Now if you understand that the BRB had basically 10 Directors on roughly salaries of £1Million per year. (Total cost £10 Million). You then divide BR into 128 units and as a rough guide we will assume that each of these units had 10 Directors each on £1 Million a year. The cost of running the railways has just risen to £1,280 Million (£1.28 Billion), before you move a solitary train.

 

In BR's last full accounting year it cost the tax payer approx £780 Million to operate the whole network using 93,000 staff. Or less than the cost of the new Franchhised system, just for its Directors !  Was BR hacked up to improve efficiency ? Of course not, it was NOT intended to improve efficiency, it was intended to use the Railway network as another Job creation scheme. How many workers are now on the railways today ? Approx 475,000, and they only do about 80% of what BR did, as some chunks of BR such as Casey Jones burger bars, Transmark and the BR Railway College at Derby were sold off totally.

 

The Civil Servants you must understand are charged with running the country on a daily basis. So it is the Civil Servants who dream up these ideas, in the same way that they injected large numbers of "Administrators" into the National Health organisation, just to create jobs. The bottom line problem is therefore the growing population, and finding work for the increasing numbers. So Franchising as they like to call it, introduces Private money in addition to what the Government still has to put in, to supposedly offset the cost of the increased numbers of jobs. Efficiency bedeviled !       

       

 

The Duke 71000

 

I could but laugh at your first sentence.  As it happened Chris Green carried out some work for someone else (he worked for various people in a consultancy role) and having duly set out on a particular task after a long chat with myself and various others he returned about a month later to submit his proposals.  However before he submitted them he came into my office to run through them with me to make sure that what he was submitting was actually feasible.  He handed me a copy of his proposals and I handed home a sealed envelope so he obviously asked me what the envelope contained to which I replied 'it's a copy of what you have just handed to me but I wrote it a couple of weeks ago'.  So  he opened the envelope and compared it with the document that he'd handed to me; both were a list of train times from departure point and arrival time at destination, the only difference between them was that one of the trains on his list showed a time 30 minutes different from the equivalent train on my list.

 

Another way of looking at this, and I claim no particular miracles of perception or the ability t read another person's mind, is the need to understand that the railway industry contained a lot more than a few known indiividuals who knew exactly what we were at.  Which was perhaps confirmed by the fact that after Chris Green had submitted his report to my Managing Director it was passed to me to comment on our ability to actually operate what he'd recommended.  (I replied that while it was all perfectly feasible the retiming of one train by 30 minutes would save a complete traincrew thus reducing the operating cost by over £100,000 p.a.).  

[Chimer]

Ah, consultants - borrow your watch (knowledge) then charge you to tell you the time ........

[Mike Storey]

Ah, consultants - borrow your watch (knowledge) then charge you to tell you the time ........

 

Careful. That's what Mike (the SM), I and several others on here spent part of the last few years of our working lives doing, whether as bought in consultancy or temporarily employed on a particular task....... I used to make that joke all the time, when I had always been an employee, but when "they" decide they don't want to keep you anymore, due to age or the end of your project, or reorganisation, or whatever (in my case, I needed to cease a full time job for domestic reasons), it is amazing what "they" will pay to pick your brains a few more times later.

 

In Mike's case above, Chris Green was also a long time professional railwayman, and had the good sense to consult another long-time professional who had more skill in a particular field, before he submitted his recommendations. You could call that cheating and taking money under false pretences, or you could call it good sense. Many consultants did have the arrogance to submit their proposals without even checking they might work. But then again, many were employed because the people employing them should have known how to do what they were supposed to be doing, but didn't, or, perhaps most common, did know what they were doing, but would not be believed by those higher up the food chain, unless they had commissioned an "independent" to prove it.

[Old Gringo]

Often my first choice for checking routes and locations on the old network and previously recommended by others on the Forum, British Railways Pre-Grouping Atlas and Gazetteer, published by Ian Allan, had two similar volumes with which to compare the situation pre-and-post the immediate effects of the Beeching Report.

 

British Railways Sectional Maps, published by Ian Allan (1952), is a paperback book based on the Official Railway Clearing House maps and shows the position of the railway network at Nationalisation in December 1947. The scale of the maps is 7.5 miles to the Inch [ii] and the pages are overlaid with a grid of 10 mile squares.

 

The dark green cover has 'Royal Scot' No. 6133, "The Green Howards" (in LMS black livery with British Railways lettered in full on the tender) and two pages of the North of Scotland were missing from the print run!  This paperback was reprinted by Ian Allan in 1981 and this edition has all the pages included, plus a very bright cover of yellow, red and green horizontal bands: ISBN 7110-1156-7 (£2.95 in 1981).

 

The Sectional Maps of British Railways, was also republished by Ian Allan in 1967. However, this version was comb-bound using cheap white plastic binding; and uses the Pre-Grouping Atlas map layout, but with a scale of 8 miles to the inch, again overlaid with a ten-mile grid.  Each page shows the railways of the area all displayed in the Six B.R. regional colours, with all the closed lines shown in yellow - "portraying the situation as existing in the Spring of 1966".  The cover has a posterized view of an Electric locomotive No.3097 on service IM91.

 

The 1967 book is therefore a direct comparison of the railways of 1922 to those of 1966 and when used in conjunction with a copy of map 9A (shown in Apollo's post 42) the immediate effects of the Beeching Report can be seen. 

 

Of course the route casualties begun by the Beeching Report didn't stop in 1967!

 

 

many editions produced from 1958

[ii] matching the original RCH scale of the folding maps.

[The Johnster]

1969 seems to have been the turning point, the year the Minehead, Ilfracombe, and IIRC Waverley routes succumbed.  After that there was a bit of a sea change in public opinion, which meant that opposition to closures was more vociferous, better organised and informed, and more effective, which was not long in being translated into a political reticence to be associated with closures.  There is a famous story concerning George Thomas, Secretatry of State for Wales at the time (later Lord Tonypandy), reacting to a proposal to close the Central Wales line by saying to Harold Wilson (in his somewhat effete Valleys voice) 'but, Prime Minister, it runs through five marginal constituencies'...

 

Beeching had long gone by then, but his spirit lingered in corridors of railway power for a long time.  The trouble was that much of the infrastructure could not be justified on any economic basis, and a lot of closure would have been essential even had Beeching never been involved, but his ruthless pruning in the name of bean counting made the situation far worse and left a cultural legacy on BR in which one could not thrive in management unless one had proved one's worth as a slasher and burner.  Those brave souls who managed to preserve some of the railway and keep their careers had to do so with circumspection and low animal cunning.

 

The mid 70s saw the simultaneous introduction of the HST and the first major traffic problems that ended the nation's love affair with motorways, even souring relations with the beloved car, and the tendency has been to re-open or even build new railways since then.

 

The Central Wales, which is and has for many years been an economic basket case, continues to serve it's forgotten fastnesses, the Waverley is not as dead as we thought it was, and even Aberystwyth-Carmarthen is talked about.  Never thought I'd see the day!

[Andy Kirkham]

1969 seems to have been the turning point, the year the Minehead, Ilfracombe, and IIRC Waverley routes succumbed.  After that there was a bit of a sea change in public opinion, which meant that opposition to closures was more vociferous, better organised and informed, and more effective, which was not long in being translated into a political reticence to be associated with closures.  There is a famous story concerning George Thomas, Secretatry of State for Wales at the time (later Lord Tonypandy), reacting to a proposal to close the Central Wales line by saying to Harold Wilson (in his somewhat effete Valleys voice) 'but, Prime Minister, it runs through five marginal constituencies'...

 

I think it was just a bit later than that: Ilfracombe was 1970 , Minehead, Okehampton and Kingswear 1971

 

Ticket from the last day of the Minehead Branch, January 2 1971 by Andy Kirkham, on Flickr

 

Souvenirs of Okehampton and Kingswear, 1971 by Andy Kirkham, on Flickr

[keefer]

Perth-Edinburgh direct (via Glenfarg etc) was closed in 1969, officially because of 'better value for money' in concentrating services via Stirling instead.

 

What they didn't say officially was that closing the line allowed the trackbed through Glenfarg to be used for the new M90 motorway - saving an estimated £500,000 (in 1969) by not having to blast another cutting through the area

[Old Gringo]

 

When replying to Theheretic in post 4 of this topic, Peter (Crewelisle) said in post 16,

 

"To complement  The British Railways Pre-Grouping Atlas and Gazetteer,  my son bought me Ian Allan's, 'Railway Atlas - Then & Now' -  which is a copy of the  'British Railways Pre-Grouping Atlas and Gazetteer' in A4 size.  On each pair of pages the left hand one shows the pre-grouping lines as at 1st January 1923 and the right hand one shows existing lines as at 1st January 2015 together with the lines that have been closed. 

"Unfortunately it is in black & white, but an excellent reference document when used in conjunction with its predecessor to identify which company operated each line".

 

Thank you very much for recommending this book, Peter.

 

Usually, I like to be able to look at a book before parting with any money (!) and after reading your comments, I decided to look out for a copy of 'Railway Atlas - Then & Now', by Paul Smith and Keith Turner, first published by Ian Allan in 2012.  And sure enough, one appeared in my local branch of Waterstones, a new, second edition (2015) reprinted in 2016. ISBN 978-7110-3833-2.  The 90 pages of maps and 30 pages of notes are case-bound in the now fashionable glazed boards, however, with a title on the cover that gives no clue to the area covered by the maps!

 

I'm often disappointed with many of the latest offerings cascading onto the current bookshop's shelves. However, the title and binding gripe aside, the 76 pages of maps covering England, Wales, Scotland, the Channel Islands and the Isle of Man, are very good and all reproduced to a consistent scale of 6.7 miles to One inch, with the grid added (10 miles).  With the addition of some larger scale maps for London, Liverpool & Manchester, North Midlands, West Riding, South Wales and Glasgow and District, plus a 1923 and a 2015 Gazetteer, IMO this is the most accurate, handy-sized reference to the current network.

 

And as Peter suggested,  "when used in conjunction with its predecessor" it is an excellent reference to British Railways - both then (1923) and now, with items like the Glenfarg route, mentioned by Keefer in post 64, clearly shown as the route of the M90 (Map 33A).

 

Such is progress!

 

All the best,

John.

[Old Gringo]

As it has been a day for quiet reflection, although of a much more serious kind than the railway networks, it's maybe time to add another fairly recent book that contains information relevant to the title and to the question posed by the OP:

 

 'Dr Beeching's Axe 50 YEARS ON', by Julian Holland is a Paperback book of 192 pages, first published in 2013 by David & Charles, ISBN 13: 978-1-4463-0267-5.

 

The strap-line to the title says, 'Illustrated Memories of Britain's Lost Railways' and after a concise introduction, the book takes sections of the Map 9A (shown in Apollo's post 42) and compares 'Casualties (Closures) to Survivors' in a regional survey; England (SW, SE, Eastern, Central and North), Wales and Scotland - complete with a closure date and a brief description of many of the closed lines.

 

I found this book a rather sad album of pictures from areas of the U.K. mainland left without access to the remaining railway system.  Also it's a pertinent reminder of the many thousands of railway employees who lost their jobs, through a decision to weld our country's transport policy to the tail-pipe of the internal combustion engine, rather than seek alternative policies less reliant on oil.

 

And if you think that's an over idealistic thought for the Swinging Sixties, imagine what some of those spotty teenagers were thinking then?  After discovering Sir Edward Watkin's earlier proposals for the Channel Tunnel we eagerly read about the infant Shinkansen in our brand-new copies of 'Modern Railways'.  Two long thin countries on opposite sides of the Globe with different approaches in the 1960s to transport solutions for their future populations - and obviously with politicians having completely different agendas and personal aspirations.  But I suppose we get what we deserve from the System.

 

Hang on a minute, remember that Shinkansen?  50 years later, let's try HS2?

 

 

Several references can be found in Railway Scrapbook, by Ernest Veale, Railway Publications, 1962 and many others since.

 

Postscript: The Chunnel proposal was revived briefly in 1960s; with a '00 scale' model displayed at one end of a corridor in the Ministry of Transport.  At the same time in the same corridor of power, Barbara Castle signed the closure papers for the Great Central in 1966.  Compare HS2 to Watkin's vision of over a Century ago and see where the Japanese probably got the idea for the Shinkansen.

[caradoc]

Perth-Edinburgh direct (via Glenfarg etc) was closed in 1969, officially because of 'better value for money' in concentrating services via Stirling instead.

 

What they didn't say officially was that closing the line allowed the trackbed through Glenfarg to be used for the new M90 motorway - saving an estimated £500,000 (in 1969) by not having to blast another cutting through the area

 

Which, it could be argued, was in the overall scheme of things was the correct decision; Saving the taxpayer money while, as you say an alternative rail route exists via Stirling, and between Fife and Perth via the Ladybank/Hilton Jc line. This latter had no passenger services for a while but they were subsequently re-introduced, initially on a limited basis but nowadays there is an hourly service between Edinburgh and Perth via Fife.

[eastglosmog]

Perth-Edinburgh direct (via Glenfarg etc) was closed in 1969, officially because of 'better value for money' in concentrating services via Stirling instead.

 

What they didn't say officially was that closing the line allowed the trackbed through Glenfarg to be used for the new M90 motorway - saving an estimated £500,000 (in 1969) by not having to blast another cutting through the area

If that's what they said, then they were telling porkies.  The rock cutting for a double track railway is much smaller than required by even a 4 lane motorway - the cost saving would be peanuts.  Compare the land take and earthworks of the WCML compared to the M6 through the Lune gorge and between the WCML and the A74 over Beattock.  When Dorset County Council tried this on with the proposed Corfe Bypass and the Swanage Railway back in the early 1980s, it was pointed out to them in no uncertain terms (by myself, among others) that there would be no saving. 

[brack]

I suspect that replacing an existing railway line with a road generates less complaints/objections than ploughing a road through virgin land, so it might be cheaper in that regard.

[Crewlisle]

On a similar subject, I seem to remember reading a proposal in about 1964 to close all railway lines & convert them to roads.  They would obviously be very restrictive on loading gauge!  Can anyone else remember something like that?

 

Peter

[eastglosmog]

On a similar subject, I seem to remember reading a proposal in about 1964 to close all railway lines & convert them to roads.  They would obviously be very restrictive on loading gauge!  Can anyone else remember something like that?

 

Peter

Yes, I do remember something like that about that time.  Slight problem that a double track mainline is only 9m wide at formation level, even a single carriageway A road is 13m wide  and a 4 lane motorway 30m wide was overlooked.  When you are dealing with cuttings in sloping ground, that can make a great difference in the amount of earthwork required.

[Reorte]

Width is, I believe, part of the reason some ended up being converted to guided busways (and I hope this doesn't start an off-topic argument about their pros and cons). It was a way of converting an old railway to road transport without having to widen and without buses having to slow down to a crawl to pass safely.

[Old Gringo]

Peter (Crewelisle) asked on 14th November, in post 70; "On a similar subject, I seem to remember reading a proposal in about 1964 to close all railway lines & convert them to roads.  They would obviously be very restrictive on loading gauge!  Can anyone else remember something like that?"

 

As the 1950s drew to a close, continually harassed by the supporters of the road haulage association and influenced by the all-powerful oil companies, the Government and the Press began to portray the railways as 'old-fashioned', and a large part of the general public (probably) began to believe the hype.

 

This 'new motorway future' was fuelled by constant Press coverage and ridiculous publications like "Twilight of the Railways: what roads they'll make!" T. Lloyd, 1957, 80pages, paperback, published by Forster & Groom, London .  Followed by similar pamphlets like those of the Railway Conversion League, 1960.   

 

Of course, as eastglosmog states, in post 71, the level and drained area of the road-bed of a double-track railway is usually 30 feet / 9.2M (see the diagrams of the pre-Grouping railways in several publications and on the Web) and a single track railway considerably less.  Hence the ill-considered rhetoric of the road-propaganda had little truth, but lots of leverage, when backed by feckless politicians and sensational journalism.

 

Then Marples employed Beeching (after he had served on the Stedeford Advisory Group, 1960).

[Hroth]

The guided busway was one of the more "credible" proposals for all those outdated railways.  It all sounded rather convoluted and no different to running light rail services on an existent track.  I think that the killer idea was that the bus would run from village to village on the busway, then take to the roads to get to the centre of a village instead of collecting passengers from an inhospitable station platform, finally returning to the busway to continue its journey...

 

Despite some trials, the idea never gained traction.

[John_Hughes]

'Feckless' is putting it very mildly. Marples was deeply corrupt, and Beeching was his sock-puppet.