Reversing Beeching

[Zomboid]

Without Beeching we wouldn't have such a thriving preservation scene, too...

 

In reality a lot of the routes would probably have closed either way, the reality of railways being good at some things and not at others wasn't affected by the report with his name on it. Some routes closed as a result which probably shouldn't have, and there are probably other routes which are only still open now because of the outcry if they were proposed to be closed (which may not be the case if there hadn't been so much done in one person's name).

[The Stationmaster]

1 hour ago, Colin_McLeod said:

Dare I risk suggesting that part of the reason for growth in rail passenger traffic is down to the investments made by and the marketing carried out by the private companies.

And Robert Adley MP and his crucial amendment to the privatisation legislation.

[melmerby]

17 minutes ago, Zomboid said:

Without Beeching we wouldn't have such a thriving preservation scene, too...

 

In reality a lot of the routes would probably have closed either way, the reality of railways being good at some things and not at others wasn't affected by the report with his name on it. Some routes closed as a result which probably shouldn't have, and there are probably other routes which are only still open now because of the outcry if they were proposed to be closed (which may not be the case if there hadn't been so much done in one person's name).

The less profitable lines had been closing, bit by bit, for years before Dr B came on the scene, he was just tasked with the job of doing a more thorough look into what was worth keeping and what was not.

Unfortunately he was given a flawed remit, leading to some silly anomalies such as removing branch lines which on their own were loss making but fed mainlines which weren't.

As a result removing the branches then made the mainlines less viable .

[The Stationmaster]

13 hours ago, The Johnster said:

Irony just leaves me flat, mate.  O, no, hang on, that's ironing...

 

Each mark of mark 2 made an early appearance on the WR, with air conditioned mk2D stock for the Bristol and South Wales trains in 1971 or 2.  Sets of 9 coaches, from the Paddington end 2 FO, mk1 RMB, 5 SO, and a mk1 BG at the country end, all on B4 100mph bogies hauled by class 47s in South Wales, mix of 47s and 50s on the Bristols, most of which extended to Weston Super Mare.  No BFOs or BFKs were allocated to the WR.  Again, motorway competition from the M4 was the driving force, the Severn Bridge having opened in 1969.  The M5 was still being extended past Bristol during this period.

 

The Hymeks and Warships were unable to work air braked stock, and while the Westerns could, they could not work ETH or Airco stock.  They were used on vacuum and air braked freight work all across the region though, and found work on such West of England trains as were still steam heated

Yes, all successive versions of Mk2s appeared on the WR and the Bristol and South Wales routes went over to aircon stock more or less from the time of its arrival for many trains.  There was no real problem with the 1000s because although ETH conversion had been found to be too difficult and expensive the locos were needed for expanding freight traffic particularly the Mendips stone which increased dramatically in both tonnage and number of trains in the early to middle part of the 1970s.

 

The arrival of HSTs in 1976 made a noticeable difference to journey times and that, as well as their comfort and amenities, undoubtedly caused business to develop especially longer distance (than theThames Valley) commuting as well as business and leisure travel.

[The Stationmaster]

57 minutes ago, Fenman said:

 

That seems a bit unfair to Beeching: railway managers had been happily closing branchlines and cross-country routes long before Beeching came on the scene (the longest was some 180-odd miles of the old M&GN cross-country route, from the Midlands to East Anglia, back in 1959); and railway managers long after Beeching had gone were slashing routes that he had never proposed to axe (the saintly Gerry Fiennes was one of those who made a good career out of closing lines that Beeching had not recommended for closure). Some of Beeching's core themes have withstood the test of time - that the railways are brilliant and economical movers of bulk goods and large numbers of people, whereas they are pretty poor economically at transporting smalls from every village or hamlet, and moving empty carriages through sparsely-populated countryside. InterCity, trunk routes, trainload freight, MGR, the end of the steam-era British Railways and the launch of the modern British Rail (at least, that was the vision) - he deserves credit for supporting all those, even if by no means all of them were his own babies.

 

Beeching was a talented public service leader: he went on to transform the English courts system - taking another vital national institution stuck in an earlier period and successfully modernising it (he abolished the old assizes and gave us Crown and High Courts, with a streamlined appeals procedure - all still successfully in service today).

 

Was everything he did completely successful? Absolutely not (and a lot of what he did do was half-arsed because of the limitations of the time - work-study systems and accounting systems which were inadequate to the complexity of the task meant that some stations and branches were closed which certainly should not have been, some of which have subsequently re-opened). But, frankly, which of us can look back at our working lives confident that we were 100% successful at all times, that we never made any crap decisions based on inadequate or just plain wrong information, even though we were doing the best we could?

 

Paul 

I think you will find that on the WR more branchline and secondary route passenger services were withdrawn, and passenger stations closed, in the decade (especially the final five years of that decade) before Beeching's report was published than wen t after its publication.  But completely outwith Beeching's report there was a massive simplification of infrastructure on remaining branches and secondary routes which as a result of dieselisation and the arrival of DMUs and that continued throughout the 1960s on the Western.

[JohnR]

1 hour ago, Colin_McLeod said:

Dare I risk suggesting that part of the reason for growth in rail passenger traffic is down to the investments made by and the marketing carried out by the private companies.

 

I think that might be over-egging their contribution. There is a strong correlation, dating back to about 1970 between rail passenger numbers and economic growth. Economic recessions have caused the numbers to drop (partly because commuting in the London & SE region is so strong), and growth has caused them to rise. The continuous growth in passenger travel since privatisation (1995) has coincided with a period of continuous growth.

 

The only exception to this was the recession of 2008-9 and its aftermath, when it continued to grow despite the economic figures. However, the correlation has returned now, with relatively flat economic growth since 2016 and passenger numbers broadly flat too. 

[Mike Storey]

1 hour ago, Colin_McLeod said:

Dare I risk suggesting that part of the reason for growth in rail passenger traffic is down to the investments made by and the marketing carried out by the private companies.

 

No risk - they must inevitably share some of the credit, but there is no (as yet) agreed, dominant reason for the staggering growth of the last 25 years. For example, the fastest growing route in the mid-1990's, was the WCML, which had not yet been "privatised".

 

I would offer that marketing, in terms of image, was the primary effect of privatisation. It became "cool" to use the train, in a way that BR had struggled with. That is despite the same old jokes being transferred from BR sandwiches to (name your least favourite TOC here) and also despite reliability and overcrowding becoming major issues, let alone prices. There is scant evidence that TOCs were any better at running trains or stations, other than perhaps customer service attitudes from some of them, than were BR in its Sector days. Most of their "investments" have been part of their franchise obligations, or state supported, with relatively minor amounts of voluntary capital expenditure, on things like car parks and self-service ticketing, which gave them a decent, quick return.

 

The hypothesis of many (as typified by the apparent majority consensus to re-nationalise the railways) is that such growth would have happened, and would have been better managed, by a state-owned enterprise. The evidence is just not there, either way, just theory. Comparison with the railways of other countries offers little, as their circumstances, economies and adoption of competition, were all so very different. My belief, without any proof whatsoever, is that the complex web of contractual obligations and enforcement by a Regulator, independent of government, has ensured that investment was undertaken when it might not otherwise have been done, both by the private sector and by government. My supporting evidence is the desperate way in which the current, and previous, government has sought to dilute the financial powers of the ORR and the ability of the industry to decide what it needs, for itself. Instead, it has put more and more decisions into the hands of its ministers and civil servants - we all have our opinions about how that has turned out.....

 

Beeching may have stopped the rot, but it was Bob Reid (1), as CEO then Chairman, who really began to transform British railways' fortunes.

 

[Mike Storey]

13 minutes ago, JohnR said:

 

I think that might be over-egging their contribution. There is a strong correlation, dating back to about 1970 between rail passenger numbers and economic growth. Economic recessions have caused the numbers to drop (partly because commuting in the London & SE region is so strong), and growth has caused them to rise. The continuous growth in passenger travel since privatisation (1995) has coincided with a period of continuous growth.

 

The only exception to this was the recession of 2008-9 and its aftermath, when it continued to grow despite the economic figures. However, the correlation has returned now, with relatively flat economic growth since 2016 and passenger numbers broadly flat too. 

 

Agreed, there was a very close correlation, up until the early 1990's (which I had to follow religiously, in composing investment cases), but the GDP model never explained the unprecedented extent of the growth seen since 1995, just the trend. The jury is still out on the "recent return" to the model, as there are several other key factors that have affected demand over the past two years, not least prolonged industrial action on certain routes and severe disruption over extended periods across much of the network, for reasons we all know. I would offer that we will only really know if that correlation has truly returned after a decent period of relative stability.

 

 

[Edwin_m]

1 hour ago, Mike Storey said:

 

Agreed, there was a very close correlation, up until the early 1990's (which I had to follow religiously, in composing investment cases), but the GDP model never explained the unprecedented extent of the growth seen since 1995, just the trend. The jury is still out on the "recent return" to the model, as there are several other key factors that have affected demand over the past two years, not least prolonged industrial action on certain routes and severe disruption over extended periods across much of the network, for reasons we all know. I would offer that we will only really know if that correlation has truly returned after a decent period of relative stability.

 

 

Other possible reasons for extra rail passengers in the mid-1990s:

• "Fuel duty escalator" applied by the government at the time, until cancelled in the face of protests at the turn of the century.
• Crackdown on tax perks for company cars, making a much more level playing field for business travellers to choose the train instead. 
• Some beginnings of environmental concerns.
• Road expansion more or less stopped. 

[dibber25]

One thing which seems never to be taken into account in any calculations of so-called 'growth' is the growth in population. Even without computer models of population growth, it should have been clear that the UK population was going to grow at an ever-increasing rate. The more people there are, the more train passengers there will be but Beeching and BR - under the direction of Marples - was obliged to assume that all that population growth would be catered for by road transport (and over longer distances, by air). But, of course, the rot didn't stop with Beeching and once he started 'pruning', BR was tempted to a bit more here, a bit more there. One can only imagine the tussle between GWR and Chiltern for High Wycombe-Maidenhead traffic or the development of resorts such as Ilfracombe and Seaton if they were still rail-connected. St.Ives, Looe and Falmouth traffic figures give a clue. Sadly, hindsight is a lot easier than foresight - especially blinkered foresight. (CJL)

[The Johnster]

Agree with almost all of these last few posts; Bob Reid was the boss who turned the tide, best boss BR ever had and it was when I was on the railway...  

 

Hindsight is always 20/20, foresight isn't ever 20/20, which is why I made the point that long term forward planning is not as easy as it looks.  Easy now to forget and dismiss the general zeitgeist of the early 60s.  My father, a fairly intelligent sort of bloke (certainly more so than me), predicted the closure of all railways with the possible exception of some the London commuter network and the Underground for their trackbeds to be converted to high speed roads, 2 lane mostly but on which lorries could be easily overtaken when a gap in the oncoming presented itself.  Even when I was 10 years old I thought the traffic levels would make this a bad idea, but many people thought like dad did, and I had no concept of how much road use would actually increase over the next 2 decades.  

 

A few years later, 1966/7, my older sister was married and living in Selby, Yorkshire; you can guess how much a railway-minded teenager imprisoned in steamless South Wales by limited pocket money liked that arrangement.  We would drive up to visit two or three times a year, at a time when each journey revealed more motorway construction and main road improvement.  The key to this journey from Cardiff was the then new M50 'Ross Spur', now almost a 'Heritage Motorway' and the ever expanding improvements to the A40, M5, and A1(M).  Each successive journey took less time despite the road works as more fast road became available.  Dad had a big old Riley 2.6 which could sit at 100mph all day on the new motorways and dual carriageways, with not much to get in the way...

 

And you still had to negotiate central Brum and the Nottingham Ring Road!

 

At Strensham Services on the M5/50 junction, there used to be a covered footbridge connecting the 'up' and 'down' sides, and you would stand on this and watch the cars whizzing underneath at much higher speeds than nowadays, remarking when a Jag or Austin Healey would flash past, it's progress unimpeded in a way a modern driver can only dream of.  Even the lorries were doing 40 or 50, incredible speeds for them at that time.  This was THE FUTURE, and it was all going to be brilliant!  At Aust on the old M4, now the A48(M), a massive glass fronted restaurant gave a superb vista of the new Severn Bridge; you could almost have been in Amurriker...  Nowhere is the public's disillusion with motorways better encapsulated than the bleak collection of huts that look out over the empty car park these days.

 

UK population growth since those days has not been massive (look at China and India), but two very big changes have taken place.  Car ownership has increased exponentially and the increase has only recently slowed despite much higher running costs in real terms, and commuting has also increased as homes have moved to the edges of cities or outside them altogether.  A century ago, when 'Metroland' had not yet been built to upset that nice Mr Betjeman, this was starting and continues; building on greenfield sites has trebled the physical size of Cardiff in my lifetime and the wealthy middle classes who usually get the blame for wanting to live in the leafy suburbs are not the only culprits; to the east of the city and closer to Newport than to the centre of Cardiff, are estates of mostly public housing which taken as a single entity are the largest such by area in Europe, and they are replicated to the west of the city as well.  

 

Even in the 1960s, most people outside the London area of whatever social class lived within walking, cycling, or a short bus ride of where they worked.  This is IMHO the root of the massive increase in demand for both private and public transport and their failure to efficiently manage the massive traffic levels.  Inner cities have been gutted of residential housing and the workplaces that provided an income for those who lived in the housing, and 'redeveloped'; residential, office, and industrial facilities are on 'estates', and many of the office and industrial estates are difficult to access other than by car.  

 

If I was cynical, I'd suspect an active conspiracy between property developers, car manufacturers, the oil industry, road hauliers, corrupt local councils, and their parliamentary puppets to generate wealth for themselves by bringing this perfect storm about.  Just as well I'm not cynical, then, isn't it?

 

Future planning for housing and industrial/office development still seems to rely on separating the two by considerable distance without paying more than lip service to either the public transport, road congestion, or car parking ramifications.  When did you last see a factory open offering 500 new jobs with 500 new parking spaces on site?

 

 

Edited May 20, 2019 by The Johnster

[Edwin_m]

2 hours ago, The Johnster said:

Even in the 1960s, most people outside the London area of whatever social class lived within walking, cycling, or a short bus ride of where they worked.  This is IMHO the root of the massive increase in demand for both private and public transport and their failure to efficiently manage the massive traffic levels.  Inner cities have been gutted of residential housing and the workplaces that provided an income for those who lived in the housing, and 'redeveloped'; residential, office, and industrial facilities are on 'estates', and many of the office and industrial estates are difficult to access other than by car.  

There are two wider factors behind this as well.  Firstly the demise of the "company town" where nearly all the men walked or cycled to work at the mill/factory/pit from the surrounding houses.  And secondly the increase in couples both having paid employment, not necessarily at the same place.  These in turn were enabled by, and themselves enabled, greater car ownership as well as other labour-saving devices in the home.  The result is much more but also much more diverse commuting, which rail can only capture well where there is a lot of employment in the same place - a city centre - and there is enough of a commuter network left or lines built mainly for freight that can  be turned over to passenger use.  However, as I suggested above, I believe better integration of buses, with trains, trams and other buses through regulation would make more places viable commuting destinations by public transport. 

[The Johnster]

I agree, but past experience suggests that this cannot be made to work without regulation, as private investment insists on cherry picking the big payouts (as they are duty bound to their shareholders to do), and we live in a culturally competitive society that promotes enterprise and individual effort and decries collective or centralised interference, i.e. regulatory control.  The result is that such control is often ineffective, almost by design. 

 

Meanwhile, academics propose well intentioned integrated transport networks (in South Wales we have the ‘Cardiff Metro’, and you’ve prolly got some similar plan in your area) that’ll never be implemented and which diverts attention from the lack of effort to tackle existing problems.  

 

 

 

[Mike Storey]

4 hours ago, The Johnster said:

Agree with almost all of these last few posts; Bob Reid was the boss who turned the tide, best boss BR ever had and it was when I was on the railway...  

 

Hindsight is always 20/20, foresight isn't ever 20/20, which is why I made the point that long term forward planning is not as easy as it looks.  Easy now to forget and dismiss the general zeitgeist of the early 60s.  My father, a fairly intelligent sort of bloke (certainly more so than me), predicted the closure of all railways with the possible exception of some the London commuter network and the Underground for their trackbeds to be converted to high speed roads, 2 lane mostly but on which lorries could be easily overtaken when a gap in the oncoming presented itself.  Even when I was 10 years old I thought the traffic levels would make this a bad idea, but many people thought like dad did, and I had no concept of how much road use would actually increase over the next 2 decades.  

 

A few years later, 1966/7, my older sister was married and living in Selby, Yorkshire; you can guess how much a railway-minded teenager imprisoned in steamless South Wales by limited pocket money liked that arrangement.  We would drive up to visit two or three times a year, at a time when each journey revealed more motorway construction and main road improvement.  The key to this journey from Cardiff was the then new M50 'Ross Spur', now almost a 'Heritage Motorway' and the ever expanding improvements to the A40, M5, and A1(M).  Each successive journey took less time despite the road works as more fast road became available.  Dad had a big old Riley 2.6 which could sit at 100mph all day on the new motorways and dual carriageways, with not much to get in the way...

 

And you still had to negotiate central Brum and the Nottingham Ring Road!

 

At Strensham Services on the M5/50 junction, there used to be a covered footbridge connecting the 'up' and 'down' sides, and you would stand on this and watch the cars whizzing underneath at much higher speeds than nowadays, remarking when a Jag or Austin Healey would flash past, it's progress unimpeded in a way a modern driver can only dream of.  Even the lorries were doing 40 or 50, incredible speeds for them at that time.  This was THE FUTURE, and it was all going to be brilliant!  At Aust on the old M4, now the A48(M), a massive glass fronted restaurant gave a superb vista of the new Severn Bridge; you could almost have been in Amurriker...  Nowhere is the public's disillusion with motorways better encapsulated than the bleak collection of huts that look out over the empty car park these days.

 

UK population growth since those days has not been massive (look at China and India), but two very big changes have taken place.  Car ownership has increased exponentially and the increase has only recently slowed despite much higher running costs in real terms, and commuting has also increased as homes have moved to the edges of cities or outside them altogether.  A century ago, when 'Metroland' had not yet been built to upset that nice Mr Betjeman, this was starting and continues; building on greenfield sites has trebled the physical size of Cardiff in my lifetime and the wealthy middle classes who usually get the blame for wanting to live in the leafy suburbs are not the only culprits; to the east of the city and closer to Newport than to the centre of Cardiff, are estates of mostly public housing which taken as a single entity are the largest such by area in Europe, and they are replicated to the west of the city as well.  

 

Even in the 1960s, most people outside the London area of whatever social class lived within walking, cycling, or a short bus ride of where they worked.  This is IMHO the root of the massive increase in demand for both private and public transport and their failure to efficiently manage the massive traffic levels.  Inner cities have been gutted of residential housing and the workplaces that provided an income for those who lived in the housing, and 'redeveloped'; residential, office, and industrial facilities are on 'estates', and many of the office and industrial estates are difficult to access other than by car.  

 

If I was cynical, I'd suspect an active conspiracy between property developers, car manufacturers, the oil industry, road hauliers, corrupt local councils, and their parliamentary puppets to generate wealth for themselves by bringing this perfect storm about.  Just as well I'm not cynical, then, isn't it?

 

Future planning for housing and industrial/office development still seems to rely on separating the two by considerable distance without paying more than lip service to either the public transport, road congestion, or car parking ramifications.  When did you last see a factory open offering 500 new jobs with 500 new parking spaces on site?

 

 

 

You make some excellent points, but in a demographic and socio-economic aspect, you are well out of date. Inner city living has become highly desirable once more, but is only affordable to the very affluent (bar where housing is made available to staff deemed essential to the social/health/emergency needs of the locality, at affordable rates, as has happened in several London boroughs over the last decade or so, and, I believe, elsewhere).

 

I do not know much about Cardiff, since the 1980's anyway, so I bow to your local knowledge there. But in East London, Manchester, Leeds, Edinburgh, Glasgow, and increasingly in York, Newcastle, Liverpool, Birmingham and even places like Halifax, Bradford, Chelmsford, Canterbury, Norwich and elsewhere, where city centre jobs have multiplied in the meeja, software, finance, fashion, edukashun and suchlike, the better-off commute less than they did. It is only where such new centres of employment have had to become established outside the city centre, with Cambridge being a classic case study, and of course Lunnon, on a massive scale, that commuting has changed radically. 

 

The change in my lifetime has been radical. When I started on the railways, at Victoria and Cannon Street, in London, the rich bankers and stockbrokers still wandered in from the depths of Kent and Sussex, from their manor houses and probably not mock-tudors, well after the great unwashed had arrived from the south and south east London suburbs and the Medway (where no-one really wanted to live in those days, including me, and I lived there). Much the opposite now, although the rich still have their Kentish oast houses etc, but only go there at weekends, and live in their penthouse pads in Docklands etc during the week.

 

When I was tasked Oop North for work in the 1990's, we seriously considered living in York, because it was actually cheaper than the villages outside. Not now (but then the same is true of Pickering where we ended up - I could not have afforded to go back there after just five years, such is the transformation). My daughter and son-in-law have joined the house-owners sect only recently, having become responsible parents, but still working in the NHS, and had lived in cheap flats in near-central Leeds for years. So they looked hard there for their first house, or a sizeable flat would have been ok. Unless they were prepared to live in the red-light district in Hunslet, they had to forget it. They stayed in Hebden Bridge, where until perhaps just four years ago, the locals actually lived and worked. Now, all you hear are Surrey accents and names like Quentin and Jezebel (not Chardonnay, please note), because of Media City in Salford and other such migrations north. Demographic changes are far more complex than we imagine right now. Quite how you plan for that, I know not.

 

Wot I kno, about south east Cymru, is that, apart from Cardiff itself, it has become largely a commuter dormitory for Bristol, because Bristol is now so expensive as a home, but full of new jobs from goodness knows where. I thought it would be a great place to live when I was project sponsor for the first Filton Abbey Wood enhancement scheme, and it was still (relatively) cheap, but the current Mrs Storey would not consider it - yet another opportunity lost.

 

 

So, I would suggest commuting has remained with us, not because city centre living has increasingly become undesirable, but the opposite, and price-sensitivity towards rail fares is probably much greater now because of that primary factor. 

 

[Mike Storey]

27 minutes ago, The Johnster said:

I agree, but past experience suggests that this cannot be made to work without regulation, as private investment insists on cherry picking the big payouts (as they are duty bound to their shareholders to do), and we live in a culturally competitive society that promotes enterprise and individual effort and decries collective or centralised interference, i.e. regulatory control.  The result is that such control is often ineffective, almost by design. 

 

Meanwhile, academics propose well intentioned integrated transport networks (in South Wales we have the ‘Cardiff Metro’, and you’ve prolly got some similar plan in your area) that’ll never be implemented and which diverts attention from the lack of effort to tackle existing problems.  

 

 

 

 

I am not sure what you are proposing here, as regards regulation. But if that means towards industrial/commercial development zones, to allow regulated and logical planning of associated transport provision, there is no case history to show that works.

 

For the very reasons you cite - in any economy. It is definitely not working in China, probably the most planned economy in the world right now, where manufacturing is moving across China to where it can most thrive, whatever the government wants. It is incredibly evident in Spain, where they tried more carrot than stick, and built extraordinary amounts of new infrastructure (houses/roads/internet and transport links) to guide industry and commerce. But they put two fingers up high in the air, and went where they wanted to go. If you drive through Spain, you can see so many of these ghost towns. 

 

The Soviets clearly could not make it work (in fact there is some evidence to suggest it works better now, despite the chaotic legal, commercial and political situation there), and the Yanks just have not tried, on a Federal basis, but even on a State basis, there are innumerable failures, many embarrassing to the present White House incumbent. It is a very hard philosophy to accept, given what so many of us both believed and were taught, in the 60's/70's.

 

So, I would prefer to believe the Mayor of London, when he (against all Corbynista edicts) prefers to react to the needs of industry/commerce and the needs of the populace, who have decided where and for whom they want to work, in developing a transport policy that attempts to serve those needs, but more importantly, seeks to serve those needs with modal shift. Even Boris understood this. And your representatives in the Valleys ( I have been friends with the father of your key transport elected rep for some years, just as a coincidence). It is unfortunate that the Burnhams of this world have a little way to go.

 

In Beeching terms, we have at least advanced from the startling isolation of his remit from the crook Marples (I can say that, can't I Mr Moderator, cos he is deaded? If not, I will insert "alleged".....), but that was then, and we are now.

 

 

 

[andyman7]

8 hours ago, Mike Storey said:

 

No risk - they must inevitably share some of the credit, but there is no (as yet) agreed, dominant reason for the staggering growth of the last 25 years. For example, the fastest growing route in the mid-1990's, was the WCML, which had not yet been "privatised".

 

I would offer that marketing, in terms of image, was the primary effect of privatisation. It became "cool" to use the train, in a way that BR had struggled with. That is despite the same old jokes being transferred from BR sandwiches to (name your least favourite TOC here) and also despite reliability and overcrowding becoming major issues, let alone prices. There is scant evidence that TOCs were any better at running trains or stations, other than perhaps customer service attitudes from some of them, than were BR in its Sector days. Most of their "investments" have been part of their franchise obligations, or state supported, with relatively minor amounts of voluntary capital expenditure, on things like car parks and self-service ticketing, which gave them a decent, quick return.

 

The hypothesis of many (as typified by the apparent majority consensus to re-nationalise the railways) is that such growth would have happened, and would have been better managed, by a state-owned enterprise. The evidence is just not there, either way, just theory. Comparison with the railways of other countries offers little, as their circumstances, economies and adoption of competition, were all so very different. My belief, without any proof whatsoever, is that the complex web of contractual obligations and enforcement by a Regulator, independent of government, has ensured that investment was undertaken when it might not otherwise have been done, both by the private sector and by government. My supporting evidence is the desperate way in which the current, and previous, government has sought to dilute the financial powers of the ORR and the ability of the industry to decide what it needs, for itself. Instead, it has put more and more decisions into the hands of its ministers and civil servants - we all have our opinions about how that has turned out.....

 

Beeching may have stopped the rot, but it was Bob Reid (1), as CEO then Chairman, who really began to transform British railways' fortunes.

 

As someone who has been involved in the analysis side of the business from the final BR years right through the (quasi) privatised era, I absolutely concur that the revenue and ridership trends we have witnessed cannot be glibly assigned either to privatisation or to the notion that it 'would have happened anyway'.

Many of the factors have been suggested already, but a few standout factors are worth noting. The main ones are that BR fares policy (which had been very much about maximising the yields particularly from commuter and business traffic within existing capacity contraints) went out of the window; and that capacity enhancements previously unthinkable due to BR's external financing limit became feasible, particularly during the (now past) period whilst Network Rail existed as a Company Limited by Guarantee, essentially allowed to borrow almost without restriction whilst the debt magically avoided classification as public.

Given the now highly political debate on fares, it is often forgotton that between 1996 and 2003 they were raised by less than inflation; and that the performance related element of fare regulation that applied until 2003 meant that, as a result of the network meltdown after Hatfield in 2000, coupled with very low inflation, fares actually went down on many routes for a couple of years. During this same period, a series of major capacity enhancements began to address very longstanding pinchpoints, and the buoyant frnachise bidding progamme saw new services bid into timetables. I don't think the effect of both enhancing capacity and removing the constraint to 'pricing off' excess demand can be underestimated. Look at WCML frequencies such as 3TPH London to Manchester (from 1TPH in 1995); London Overground running 10 minute 5 car frequencies on the Noth London Line served half hourly by 2EPBs 30 years ago; grade seperation and massive capacity enhancement at London Bridge and Reading; new platforms and Peterborough and Nuneaton - the last two are good examples of reversing previous cuts by different means as they each in their own way help to manage capacity that had previously been lost when avoiding lines had been closed.   

Edited May 20, 2019 by andyman7

[Mike Storey]

3 minutes ago, andyman7 said:

As someone who has been involved in the analysis side of the business from the final BR years right through the (quasi) privatised era, I absolutely concur that the revenue and ridership trends we have witnessed cannot be glibly assigned either to privatisation or to the notion that it 'would have happened anyway'.

Many of the factors have been suggested already, but a few standout factors are worth noting. The main ones are that fares policy (which in BR times was very much about maximising the yields particularly from commuter and business traffic within existing capacity contraints) went out of the window; and that capacity enhancements previously unthinkable due to BR's external financing limit became feasible, particularly during the (now past) period whilst Network Rail existed as a Company Limited by Guarantee, essentially allowed to borrow almost without restriction whilst the debt magically avoided classification as public.

Given the now highly political debate on fares, it is often forgotton that between 1996 and 2003 they were raised by less than inflation; and that the performance related element of fare regulation that applied until 2003 meant that, as a result of the network meltdown after Hatfield in 2000, coupled with very low inflation, fares actually went down on many routes for a couple of years. During this same period, a series of major capacity enhancements began to address very longstanding pinchpoints, and the buoyant frnachise bidding progamme saw new services bid into timetables. I don't think the effect of both enhancing capacity and removing the constraint to 'pricing off' excess demand can be underestimated. Look at WCML frequencies such as 3TPH London to Manchester (from 1TPH in 1995); London Overground running 10 minute 5 car frequencies on the Noth London Line served half hourly by 2EPBs 30 years ago; grade seperation and massive capacity enhancement at London Bridge and Reading; new platforms and Peterborough and Nuneaton - the last two are good examples of reversing previous cuts by different means as they each in their own way help to manage capacity that had previously been lost when avoiding lines had been closed.   

 

Attaboy - got to go with you there on most of that, but I would urge caution on a couple of things:

 

1. Market pricing became even more important post-privatisation than it had in BR sectorisation. The TOCs got a glimpse of what we had done in BR InterCity, by nabbing a couple of extreemlee intellygent BA chaps, and copied their work (from fuselage profit centered calculations), as a way of getting around the regulated fares quandary. The majority of fares were regulated post-privatisation, in a way they had not been before (under BR), and we were thus still pricing-off suppressed demand, and that proportion only changed over time, as travel patterns changed. Regulated fares did not generate investment, but the way in which the TOCs worked around them, by premium pricing of long distance, high value premium fares - I was party to a deal with GNER that did just that - much higher pathing charges and very high Schedule 8 payments, both ways. for additional peak hour arrivals, something Virgin/Stagecoach then unashamedly copied a few years later.

 

2. Please don't confuse what TfL did with the rest of the British railway system. Their investment decisions were taken completely separately and did not follow the rules which the rest of us had to follow. Thank goodness for that, for their support for investment on the North London Line, and what became the London Overground, would never have passed muster with the usual suspects at Marsham Street. They proved both the practicality of socio-economic investment (which changed the case history in the infamous Blue Book and PDFH) and the suitability of the Management Contract type of franchise. It was a concerted backlash against the philosophy of franchising, not at all supporting of the prevailing concept.

 

 

[melmerby]

1 hour ago, Mike Storey said:

In Beeching terms, we have at least advanced from the startling isolation of his remit from the crook Marples (I can say that, can't I Mr Moderator, cos he is deaded? If not, I will insert "alleged".....), but that was then, and we are now.

 

If you read what he got up to your description would not appear to be erroneous!

[Coryton]

20 hours ago, The Johnster said:

 Beeching, bean counter that he was, reckoned he could stem the losses by closing unprofitable parts (and in all fairness to him that was the exact job he was hired to do). but almost fatally damaged the whole, which was only saved by the failure of the motorway network to provide an efficient and effective transportation network in the 70s and 80s, and since, due to fuel costs and congestion.

 

It's a popular view.

 

But even if all the lines he closed remained open and continued to carry the same number of passengers, would that really have made that much difference to the rest of the network?

 

A lot of the lines that were closed never had a terribly frequent service, were carrying few passengers and many probably should never have been opened in the first place.

 

It's easy to look at a pre-Beeching map and imagine all the journeys that could once be made by rail. But if a lot of the lines were still open now with the same level of service, most people would probably still get the bus - far more frequent and maybe stopping in more useful places, or even drive to/from a station with a better service.

 

Which isn't to say that some of the lines that were closed wouldn't come in very useful now.

 

 

[andyman7]

45 minutes ago, Mike Storey said:

 

Attaboy - got to go with you there on most of that, but I would urge caution on a couple of things:

 

1. Market pricing became even more important post-privatisation than it had in BR sectorisation. The TOCs got a glimpse of what we had done in BR InterCity, by nabbing a couple of extreemlee intellygent BA chaps, and copied their work (from fuselage profit centered calculations), as a way of getting around the regulated fares quandary. The majority of fares were regulated post-privatisation, in a way they had not been before (under BR), and we were thus still pricing-off suppressed demand, and that proportion only changed over time, as travel patterns changed. Regulated fares did not generate investment, but the way in which the TOCs worked around them, by premium pricing of long distance, high value premium fares - I was party to a deal with GNER that did just that - much higher pathing charges and very high Schedule 8 payments, both ways. for additional peak hour arrivals, something Virgin/Stagecoach then unashamedly copied a few years later.

 

2. Please don't confuse what TfL did with the rest of the British railway system. Their investment decisions were taken completely separately and did not follow the rules which the rest of us had to follow. Thank goodness for that, for their support for investment on the North London Line, and what became the London Overground, would never have passed muster with the usual suspects at Marsham Street. They proved both the practicality of socio-economic investment (which changed the case history in the infamous Blue Book and PDFH) and the suitability of the Management Contract type of franchise. It was a concerted backlash against the philosophy of franchising, not at all supporting of the prevailing concept.

 

 

Your experience with longer distance TOCs who inherited the ex-InterCity businesses chimes with those of colleagues who worked there - my experience was in the ex-NSE area where yield management was rather cruder, and knowldge of ORCATS plus PDFH was the main influencer. Remember that unlike InterCity with Saver (off-peak) regulation, commuter fares were regulated on Seasons and full fare returns so the RPI-1 plus FIAP regime was pretty brutal on fare revenue. Of course, the franchise bottom line included Railtrack schedules 4 and 8 as well as FIAP adjustment payments so whether a TOC met targets or went cap in had to the SRA had rather more due to the luck of the drawer than neccessarily running the best show.

 

I fully accept the the process by which TfL was able to create the Overground was unqiue - it must be remembered that these were National Rail routes and the DfT were originally dead set against cdeding them to TfL, but a combination of political alignment (e.g. Mayor and Government being aligned first with New Labour and the n Tory-led coalition) and the investment boost of the Olympics enabled us to see what could be achieved when real inevstment was applied to a route with a huge amount of latent demand.

[rodent279]

1 hour ago, Coryton said:

 

It's a popular view.

 

But even if all the lines he closed remained open and continued to carry the same number of passengers, would that really have made that much difference to the rest of the network?

 

A lot of the lines that were closed never had a terribly frequent service, were carrying few passengers and many probably should never have been opened in the first place.

 

It's easy to look at a pre-Beeching map and imagine all the journeys that could once be made by rail. But if a lot of the lines were still open now with the same level of service, most people would probably still get the bus - far more frequent and maybe stopping in more useful places, or even drive to/from a station with a better service.

 

Which isn't to say that some of the lines that were closed wouldn't come in very useful now.

 

 

I think you can sum up a lot of closures with your 3rd paragraph-many lines should simply never have been built, let alone closed. Many never came close to a financial return, and only fulfilled a marginal social need.

Beeching's axe was a blunt one, and because his name is associated with a large amount of closures, he's a convenient target/scapegoat, but many of those lines would have closed anyway, even if he'd remained with Shell (or whoever it was). For me, Beeching, Sir Peter Parker and Bob Reid No1 laid the foundations of the railway we have. It's not perfect by any means, but wistful nostalgia for the past is never going to build us a modern transport infrastructure. We can learn from the mistakes of the past.

[Northmoor]

The (disused) local railway to me where I grew up in rural Wales, lost its passenger service in 1937 and goods in 1949.  That was the FOURTH time it had closed.  There were so many rural closures in the 1950s; I've always said Beeching merely proposed rolling up the next five years of closures and completing them in two.

 

Mistakes, yes of course there were, but there is an amazing correlation between the re-openings we've seen over the last 20 years and when those routes were closed.  Virtually all were post 1968, by which time the hunt for savings was becoming increasingly desperate and many were never even mentioned in the 1963 report.

[brianusa]

The good doctor is the whipping boy for many things that weren't his fault.  Not that he didn't deserve all the subsequent scorn but most of his reasoning's have  been rethought over the years and while he personally was not responsible for the many closures, some of which occurred before his time, he gets the blame nonetheless.  His job was to make money for BR and he did it in the only way he knew how; get rid of the waste and duplication.  This may of worked in the short term but a terrible mistake for the long, considering how much has been put back as he and others had no idea what the future would bring and that was not their problem anyway.  A good job that no more infrastructure was destroyed in the event of todays traffic.

    Brian.

[caradoc]

Really interesting discussions in this topic, thanks to all contributors.

 

andyman7 mentioned the North London line; What a renaissance that route has had, from serious attempts to close it in the 1970s to what we have now !

 

11 hours ago, Coryton said:

 

A lot of the lines that were closed never had a terribly frequent service, were carrying few passengers and many probably should never have been opened in the first place.

 

It's easy to look at a pre-Beeching map and imagine all the journeys that could once be made by rail. But if a lot of the lines were still open now with the same level of service, most people would probably still get the bus - far more frequent and maybe stopping in more useful places, or even drive to/from a station with a better service.

 

Which isn't to say that some of the lines that were closed wouldn't come in very useful now.

 

 

 

Regarding Coryton's first paragraph; My local line, the Neilston branch, is definitely one that should never have been built, being the remaining stub of the Caledonian's Lanarkshire & Ayrshire Railway, constructed solely to avoid traffic being carried over a competitor's existing, and perfectly adequate, line. Most of it lost its passenger service long before Beeching, however I am grateful for what is left (despite attempts to truncate it in the 1980s) and nowadays it forms part of Glasgow's excellent suburban rail network. Another line in the 'should not have been built' category (and I realise this may not be a popular view !) is the Great Central's London Extension; In itself a magnificent railway, but serving nowhere of any importance that did not already have a perfectly good rail route to London. 

 

Mention has also been made of the practice, in order to justify closure, of collecting revenue and passenger figures at 'quiet' times rather than busy days, however were the busy days not atypical of the year-round traffic levels ? An example of such a railway is the much-loved and missed Somerset & Dorset, which was incredibly busy on Summer Saturdays; But that was what, 7 or 8 days of the year ! Did the traffic on the remaining 357 days of the year pay the route's costs - Given that Bath Green Park only ever justified two platforms, and that parts of the route remained single track to then end, I am not sure it did.

 

Ilfracombe was cited as a line that should not have closed, but this was another depending on summer holiday traffic. And in 2007 our family holiday was there, but if the line had remained open, and even with the benefit of Privilege rail travel, we would still have gone by car; For ease of transporting four people plus luggage, and visiting attractions in the area (eg the Lynton & Barnstaple Railway), many of which would have been difficult, if not impossible, to reach by public transport.

 

I do agree that some closures were short sighted, for example where towns were deprived of their link to the rail network. Some, such as Mansfield, Larkhall and Alloa, have had that situation rectified; Some, such as St Andrews, might yet; And others like Callander, Witney and Chipping Norton, never will.

 

 

 

Edited May 21, 2019 by caradoc
Spelling mistake

[Edwin_m]

9 hours ago, rodent279 said:

I think you can sum up a lot of closures with your 3rd paragraph-many lines should simply never have been built, let alone closed. Many never came close to a financial return, and only fulfilled a marginal social need.

Beeching's axe was a blunt one, and because his name is associated with a large amount of closures, he's a convenient target/scapegoat, but many of those lines would have closed anyway, even if he'd remained with Shell (or whoever it was). For me, Beeching, Sir Peter Parker and Bob Reid No1 laid the foundations of the railway we have. It's not perfect by any means, but wistful nostalgia for the past is never going to build us a modern transport infrastructure. We can learn from the mistakes of the past.

It is instructive to look at the actual numbers from 1952 onwards (https://www.gov.uk/government/statistical-data-sets/tsgb01-modal-comparisons, first link, Excel file).

 

Peak of 1950s increase in rail travel: 42 million passenger-km in 1957, 17% of all travel.

At about the time the statistics would have been gathered for the Reshaping report: 37mpk in 1962

Low-point: 33mpk in 1968

Note that the rate of decline was roughly the same before and after Beeching, so any extra loss due to route closures was offset by improvement on other routes.  I don't think these figures support the theory that the main lines were damaged by loss of the branches. 

 

Another low-point: 31mpk in 1982 (the year of the flexible rostering dispute IIRC)

Low point: 36mpk in 1994

Back to the 1950s peak: 42mpk in 1997 but now only 6% of all travel, mainly because of growth in car use.

80mpk/10% in 2016 and 2017

 

On the issue of seasonal routes Beeching may have been right for the wrong reasons.  The advent of cheap overseas package holidays hit domestic holiday traffic hard in the 60s and 70s.  As pointed out people with cars would probably use them rather than the train for any holidays they still took at UK resorts.  So most of the "summer Saturday" rail traffic would have disappeared within a few years even if BR had continued to provide for it. 

 

Edited May 21, 2019 by Edwin_m