Reversing Beeching

[JohnR]

11 hours 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.

 

 

 

 

Indeed. Br inherited roughly 22,000 miles of railway in 1948. By 1961, this had been cut to 18,000. He proposed the closure of approximately 6,000 miles, and the 1968 Transport Act which introduced subsidies for passenger railways was aiming to stabilise route mileage at around 11,000 miles. There are currently 9,824 route miles open for rail traffic.

 

Given that, it is clear that the rail network should be larger than it currently is - recent reopenings have been at a very low level, and we have not even got back to the level Beeching envisioned in his report - let alone "reversing Beeching" 

 

The key problem really was what happened to closed lines after closure. If there had been a program of mothballing, or even preserving the right of way, then we would have reopened many more miles of route in the last 50 years. 

 

 

 

 

[Coryton]

1 hour ago, caradoc said:

Regarding Coryton's firest 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.

 

Indeed my local line is also one which should never have been built, at least in the way it was.

 

It was built entirely for competitive reasons, but never actually managed to compete with anyone thanks to successful obstruction.

 

It was on Beeching's list but didn't close, and now provides a useful commuter service and I think has the most frequent service of passenger trains it's ever had.

 

I would have to concede it's not the busiest of lines - with a half hourly service, in the rush hour a 153 isn't always quite large enough. But that's only because of people using the service because other (4 coach) trains they could use are themselves too busy to get on.

 

Edited to add:

 

Although in these parts given that - unlike London - driving and in some cases buses tend to be reasonable alternatives, it's quite possible that overcrowding is putting people off and larger trains would generate more demand. It does seem to be the case that busy services in the Valleys just have the capacity they need, unless shortformed.

Edited May 21, 2019 by Coryton

[Zomboid]

20 minutes ago, JohnR said:

Indeed. Br inherited roughly 22,000 miles of railway in 1948. By 1961, this had been cut to 18,000. He proposed the closure of approximately 6,000 miles, and the 1968 Transport Act which introduced subsidies for passenger railways was aiming to stabilise route mileage at around 11,000 miles. There are currently 9,824 route miles open for rail traffic.

 

Given that, it is clear that the rail network should be larger than it currently is - recent reopenings have been at a very low level, and we have not even got back to the level Beeching envisioned in his report - let alone "reversing Beeching" 

 

The key problem really was what happened to closed lines after closure. If there had been a program of mothballing, or even preserving the right of way, then we would have reopened many more miles of route in the last 50 years. 

The issue for me is more that it's near impossible to react to the changes that the modern world have brought.

The report was published in 1963, which was 56 years ago. Failure to see several decades into the future is not something I could hold against anyone.

 

Reopening, or even building entirely new routes to cater for the demand that has grown over the past 50 years seems to be almost beyond us. At least in England.

[JohnR]

Just now, Zomboid said:

The issue for me is more that it's near impossible to react to the changes that the modern world have brought.

The report was published in 1963, which was 56 years ago. Failure to see several decades into the future is not something I could hold against anyone.

 

Reopening, or even building entirely new routes to cater for the demand that has grown over the past 50 years seems to be almost beyond us. At least in England.

 

I quite agree - no one should expect Beeching, clever as he was, to forsee that far into the future. Hence my remark about preserving lines and rights of way. 

[rodent279]

41 minutes ago, JohnR said:

 

 

Indeed. Br inherited roughly 22,000 miles of railway in 1948. By 1961, this had been cut to 18,000. He proposed the closure of approximately 6,000 miles, and the 1968 Transport Act which introduced subsidies for passenger railways was aiming to stabilise route mileage at around 11,000 miles. There are currently 9,824 route miles open for rail traffic.

 

Given that, it is clear that the rail network should be larger than it currently is - recent reopenings have been at a very low level, and we have not even got back to the level Beeching envisioned in his report - let alone "reversing Beeching" 

 

The key problem really was what happened to closed lines after closure. If there had been a program of mothballing, or even preserving the right of way, then we would have reopened many more miles of route in the last 50 years. 

 

 

 

 

I think your last paragraph is a very important point. I have thought fur a long time that the mistake was made not so much in closing lines, as in the dismantling, giving up the rights of way, selling off land and subsequent redevelopment.

Which takes us back to the point I made about 2 or 3 pages earlier-just because abandoned trackbeds etc are there, that does not mean they are suitable for reopening. What you can see is a fraction of what is required to reinstate a working railway.

Once it's gone, it's gone.

[Mike Storey]

32 minutes ago, JohnR said:

 

 

Indeed. Br inherited roughly 22,000 miles of railway in 1948. By 1961, this had been cut to 18,000. He proposed the closure of approximately 6,000 miles, and the 1968 Transport Act which introduced subsidies for passenger railways was aiming to stabilise route mileage at around 11,000 miles. There are currently 9,824 route miles open for rail traffic.

 

Given that, it is clear that the rail network should be larger than it currently is - recent reopenings have been at a very low level, and we have not even got back to the level Beeching envisioned in his report - let alone "reversing Beeching" 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Not sure of your current route miles number (I thought it was still over 10,200) but agree with your drift.

 

One thing though, is that a significant amount of mileage has been transferred from the national rail total to local light rail, tram and metro mileages - significant parts of Tyne & Wear, Manchester Metro, Docklands Light Railway, London Tramlink, and to a lesser degree, Birmingham, Sheffield and possibly elsewhere. Whilst the individual mileages are not huge, collectively it is a significant figure (I am not sure what exactly) and might reasonably be argued to be part of a national rail route mileage equivalent, for the purposes of determining the relation to Beeching's recommended figure. I think it could be argued that we are closer to the 1968 target route mileage, but using different formats.

 

[SED Freightman]

Another reason for the reduction in route milage is the closure of freight only lines which have now become something of a rarity.

[Coryton]

22 minutes ago, SED Freightman said:

Another reason for the reduction in route milage is the closure of freight only lines which have now become something of a rarity.

 

In some cases of course that's because they have had their passenger service restored...

[Arun Sharma]

These last few posts have hit on a rather important part of the closure policy which is rarely mentioned. Whilst, in theory, mothballing routes [against a future need or just "second thoughts"] might have seemed an attractive option, many routes such as Stainmore [Belah viaduct], S&C [Ribblehead Viaduct], GCR [Gt Ouse Viaduct] Teign Valley [numerous river bridges and propensity to flood] and S&DJR had such complex structures on them that their periodic maintenance and review, even in the absence of trains passing over them, would have been a full time job and could only sensibly have been done by the same railwaymen who had done the job when the lines were operational.

 

Thus, as far as the Treasury and BRB were concerned, the costs [in terms of salaries, pensions and bricks/mortar/steel rails etc.,] would have been almost unchanged from when the lines were operating. Since the purpose of Beeching's report was at least in part to produce an economically self-sufficient railway, such mothballing would have been an anathema. 

 

Note that Beeching himself stated that his remit did not cover any social need for retention of a specific railway as that was rightly in the province of local and central government who had access to the "bigger picture" and that these considerations may well take precedence over the purely financial.

[JohnR]

3 hours ago, Mike Storey said:

 

Not sure of your current route miles number (I thought it was still over 10,200) but agree with your drift.

 

 

 

I got it from ORR - I just converted it from km to miles.

 

https://orr.gov.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0008/25838/rail-infrastructure-assets-environmental-2016-17.pdf

[Mike Storey]

1 hour ago, JohnR said:

 

I got it from ORR - I just converted it from km to miles.

 

https://orr.gov.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0008/25838/rail-infrastructure-assets-environmental-2016-17.pdf

 

Thanks for this - I had not looked at the ORR site for a long time. This new version is a lot better.

 

I was obviously well out of date! But I do notice that the route mileage crept up last year, by about 40 miles, (provisional figure) to 9866 miles, including a few miles of freight only. So at least it is moving in the right direction again.....

[Coryton]

2 hours ago, Arun Sharma said:

Note that Beeching himself stated that his remit did not cover any social need for retention of a specific railway as that was rightly in the province of local and central government who had access to the "bigger picture" and that these considerations may well take precedence over the purely financial.

 

If I recall correctly, there is a paragraph in the report saying that it was believed that social considerations wouldn't change the list of lines proposed to be closed. (And that some lines in urban areas that would have been listed for closure on financial grounds were left out because there might be grounds for retaining them).

[Coryton]

2 hours ago, Arun Sharma said:

These last few posts have hit on a rather important part of the closure policy which is rarely mentioned. Whilst, in theory, mothballing routes [against a future need or just "second thoughts"] might have seemed an attractive option, many routes such as Stainmore [Belah viaduct], S&C [Ribblehead Viaduct], GCR [Gt Ouse Viaduct] Teign Valley [numerous river bridges and propensity to flood] and S&DJR had such complex structures on them that their periodic maintenance and review, even in the absence of trains passing over them, would have been a full time job and could only sensibly have been done by the same railwaymen who had done the job when the lines were operational.

 

I suppose there is a difference between mothballing and allowing lines to be built over. Easier politically (if not financially) to rebuild a viaduct than knock down houses to re-open a line.

 

But given the pressure for land in some parts of the UK, a blanket rule that old trackbeds should never be built over would be very hard to keep to, and wouldn't make sense.

 

Much of what was the Cardiff Railway Company line north of Cardiff is now under the A470, and it would have made very little sense to preserve the trackbed of the line and squeeze the road in somehow when the line was built for purely competitive reasons and the closed portion is paralleled by another line with passenger service.

 

Moving further north, the closed lines from Aberdeen to Fraserburgh and Peterhead had, if I recall correctly, a handful of trains per day. Meanwhile there is (or at any rate was a few years go) a frequent interurban coach service serving both destinations and stopping at more useful places, operating all day, seven days a week. and starting from Aberdeen railway station. I can't think that many people would use the trains if they were still there.

 

However, if the trackbed as far as Ellon had been kept it would make a very good basis for a park and ride service to get round the rush hour congestion on the roads. (And maybe the coach services could start there to speed things up, with perhaps some rail services from the south terminating there rather than in Aberdeen).

 

But I doubt this would have been very evident a few decades ago.

 

 

[JohnR]

27 minutes ago, Coryton said:

 

 

Moving further north, the closed lines from Aberdeen to Fraserburgh and Peterhead had, if I recall correctly, a handful of trains per day. Meanwhile there is (or at any rate was a few years go) a frequent interurban coach service serving both destinations and stopping at more useful places, operating all day, seven days a week. and starting from Aberdeen railway station. I can't think that many people would use the trains if they were still there.

 

 

 

Freight traffic continued to Fraserburgh until 1979, of course.

 

I'd take issue with your point about use of the bus in the area. If we look at the area to the south of Aberdeen, we find that a) ScotRail have just added an additional hourly service between Montrose and Aberdeen. b) In response, Stagecoach has provided a new service, the 747, which will run through to Ellon and Peterhead, this runs alongside the X7 which runs from Perth through Dundee to Aberdeen via Montrose. 

 

So the train service to Aberdeen has gone from 2 trains an hour to 3 trains an hour, and the bus service has gone from 1 an hour to 2 an hour. The bus is slower (1 hour 40 to Aberdeen Airport against 58 mins by train), costs less (£11.35 on the bus v £16.20 on the train), and yet there is enough business for both routes to prosper. 

 

 

 

[Colin_McLeod]

Why does the presence of a few buildings on a former trackbed become perceived/used as a major obstacle to reopening a railway line, yet a motorway can be built where there never was any route before and any building in the way is just treated like the land purchase of the rest of the route.?

[The Johnster]

It is my view that the GW missed an opportunity at the grouping to concentrate Pontypridd-Cardiff passenger traffic on the Cardiff Railway, which ran through the more heavily populated eastern side of the Taff valley, releasing the 4 track TVR for more mineral paths or a faster non-stop to Ponty passenger service.  The outcome of this by the 70s would have probably been that the A470 would have obliterated the TVR between Radyr and Pontypridd, regaining it's current route near Treforest.

[Zomboid]

17 minutes ago, Colin_McLeod said:

Why does the presence of a few buildings on a former trackbed become perceived/used as a major obstacle to reopening a railway line, yet a motorway can be built where there never was any route before and any building in the way is just treated like the land purchase of the rest of the route.?

Because there seems to be an obsession with reopening routes which weren't viable in the 1960s rather than looking at what the 2020s will require and building that.

[Coryton]

1 hour ago, JohnR said:

I'd take issue with your point about use of the bus in the area. If we look at the area to the south of Aberdeen, we find that a) ScotRail have just added an additional hourly service between Montrose and Aberdeen. b) In response, Stagecoach has provided a new service, the 747, which will run through to Ellon and Peterhead, this runs alongside the X7 which runs from Perth through Dundee to Aberdeen via Montrose. 

 

So the train service to Aberdeen has gone from 2 trains an hour to 3 trains an hour, and the bus service has gone from 1 an hour to 2 an hour. The bus is slower (1 hour 40 to Aberdeen Airport against 58 mins by train), costs less (£11.35 on the bus v £16.20 on the train), and yet there is enough business for both routes to prosper. 

 

I wasn't making a general point about bus services around Aberdeen.

 

My point was that four trains or so a day (each) to Fraserburgh and Peterhead would be unlikely to see much traffic compared to the much more frequent bus service, that calls in at more useful places on the way.

 

The last time I looked (which was I admit a few years) Fraserburgh and Peterhead both had 2 bus services an hour during the daytime, Monday to Saturday.

 

I'm not convinced that there is any reasonable way in which those rail services would prosper unless the frequency was dramatically increased. Maybe that could be justified, but I suspect not.

Edited May 21, 2019 by Coryton

[Colin_McLeod]

28 minutes ago, Colin_McLeod said:

Why does the presence of a few buildings on a former trackbed become perceived/used as a major obstacle to reopening a railway line, yet a motorway can be built where there never was any route before and any building in the way is just treated like the land purchase of the rest of the route.?

 

5 minutes ago, Zomboid said:

Because there seems to be an obsession with reopening routes which weren't viable in the 1960s rather than looking at what the 2020s will require and building that.

 

I'm not sure I follow the link between my question and the answer.

 

My question was not comparing viable with non viable routes but rather was comparing the reaction to a physical obstacle on a railway proposal with a similar physical obstacle on a road proposal.

[Zomboid]

Maybe I was making a leap... If we're fixated on putting back what was originally there, then things like stations which have been sold as residences and other obstacles on the old track bed become problems when (especially if the land has been sold) we'd be better off completely forgetting the old route and building brand new.

 

Obviously if the old route is intact and suitable for the planned service then that is worth considering. But asking "what can we reopen" is the wrong question to be starting from, and immediately leads on to 'that route has been built on' as an obstacle.

 

As for objections, I doubt there would be any difference. Look at HS2...

Edited May 21, 2019 by Zomboid

[lanchester]

 

Sorry folks, this intervention is a little wordy!

 

Clearly, Beeching was tasked with modelling a railway system that would at least come somewhere to breaking even, GIVEN CURRENT CONDITIONS. That is really all he could be expected to do - the forward view is why we have politicians, rather than bureaucrats, in charge  (OK, allegedly).

 

The political classes (of both major parties) failed totally here. Bear in mind that although Beeching was commissioned by the Tories, almost all of its application, plus quite a few of the closures that weren't in Beeching, plus the failure to go through with some of his more positive proposals, were under the Labour government of 1964-1970. That nice Mrs Castle's DoT did indeed bring in the concept of social payments for otherwise unviable routes, but only after most of the likely candidates had already been closed. (oh, and while we are talking about the crook Marples, there was certainly something 'crooked' about the Humber Bridge, wasn't there? A vital link now, but it took several decades to justify itself - certainly didn't have the transformative impact on Humberside that voters were promised).

 

But I digress. Political failings fall into two classes as I see it - there are economic developments that nobody saw coming - the men in white coats would have been round - which while disastrous (for the railway were perhaps forgiveable or at least understandable; and those which really should have been predicted because they were to a greater or lesser extent the results or desired outcomes of other government policies.

 

In the first category, it is interesting to note that government (of either shade) clearly did not believe in its ability to deliver the stuff they had promised voters. Pre Beeching, 'Supermac' famously said that 'most of our people have never had it so good' but the often-missed subtext was 'and if we don't pull our fingers out, we'll never have it so good again'. This sort of thing was seen by the people as a promise of ever-increasing growth and prosperity (which is, actually and give-or-take, what most of us got) but:

 

No-one predicted not only that private motoring would rapidly become so ubiquitous and affordable (to the point that now, having a problem running a family's SECOND car is for some a definition of poverty). Actually, no-one saw that the availability of a used car market might be significant. Doh!

 

No-one predicted that leisure time (and the cash to exploit it) would grow so rapidly, or if they did:

no-one predicted that flights to the Costas etc would become so affordable (although of course, when they did, government fought tooth and nail to defeat the likes of Freddy Laker). These points have opposing consequences: Beeching was more right than he could have known in suggesting that a lot of 'seaside branches' were only going to get even less viable (although oddly I don't think either Ilfracombe or Hunstanton were on the original hit list), but equally the general pressure on transport on what are now crowded areas such as the Lakes, Peak District, Dartmoor and Exmoor, which now would love to have some relief through railway service, could not have been predicted.

 

The idea that folks with or without cars would be prepared to commute a couple of hours each way each day, regardless more or less of price, is definte looney bin time.

AS is the idea that most people would live as far away (rather than as close as possible) to their factory/place of work

And more importantly, although of course business and industry was expected to get more efficient, no-pne could allow themselves to believe that the traditional major industries for which the railways were created - coal, steel, shipbuilding, textiles etc would be so decimated (effect on freight) or even where they survived, would have such a reduced need for workers (effect on passengers). 

 

No-one would have foreseen quite what a revolution containerisation would bring to both international and internal freight, and particularly which ports needed better rail facilities (and in fairness, Beeching I think DID have some feel for this). But the current desirability of boosting service to for example Felixstowe and Southampton, rather than London Docks and Liverpool, would not have been apparent then.

 

So, to honour a 50th anniversary, we were promised the moon, but when we actually got it, no-one was more surprised than the folks who had bought our vote.

 

All that is kind of understandable, Predictions are hard, especially about the future, to quote Yogi Berri. But there is a lot of other stuff that Westminster should have factored in to 'moderate' the Beeching conclusions, because they were the foreseeable consequence of existing government policy. I give just a few examples.

 

The New Towns programme appears to have been completely ignored from a rail point of view. OK there was Milton Keynes Central, but did anyone really think about ways of serving Peterlee, Cumbernauld, Skelmersdale - and is anyone surprised that these were not, shall I say, quite as great an improvement on the old slums as might have been hoped.

 

I mentioned containerisation above, but in the Beeching era it was the country's intention to join the Common Market - did no one think that this might change dramatically the pattern of freight flows and the relative importance of different ports?

 

Governments rightly put a lot of money into promoting industrial investment in declining industrial areas - how often were rail linkages, even to major sites like car plants, considered? (Pre War trading estates, like Trafford Park or Team Valley, often did have rail facilities - but it kind of helps if your customers have as well).

 

BR, NCB, and CEGB were all under state ownership (fairly uncontroversially at the time). Remind me, how long did it take for any movement on the MGR concept? (Again, Beeching, read properly, is supportive here).

 

And, still ongoing, the policy of building big new hospitals in areas almost devoid of public transport, despite an ageing population of users who can't (or shouldn't) drive. (That, incidentally, is a lovely example of achieving local efficiencies at the expense of system efficiencies, and is theefore in the same category as policies of closing feedee branch lines that do't technically wash their face but contribute to the viability of the greater network).

 

So, let's hear it for joined up Government! None of the above is Beeching's fault - it is the politicians failing to believe in, think through, and act on, the consequences of their own policies (which may themselves be entirely virtuous).

 

If I can allow myself a final observation, which is still relevant. The Green Belts. These started as a concept pre War when it seemed a real possibility that the Great West Road out of London (and others) would soon have ribbon development all the way to Bath or Bristol. 'Clearly' we need to ring fence towns and communities to preserve their character etc etc.

 

But suppose, in the light of what we now know about the environment and transport and where and how people choose to live, we had chose instead positively to encourage MOST development onto those established radial (from a London perspective -other cities are available) transport corridors, and preserve the fingers and slivers of 'countryside' that still went quite deep into many conurbations. There would have been two consequences:

1) many more people would be on or close to the 'town/country' edge, in other words have ready acccess to green fields (a ring by contrast is the most effective way of minimising the numbers on that edge).

2) concentrating most freight and passenger traffic onto linear routes is exactly what railways, and buses, and some styles of road freighting, are designed to be good at. With the random dispersion of new industries and new housing into the 'non green belt' countryside, sensible and effective transport systems or networks, of whatever mode, are rendered almost impossible. Look at the location of Distribution Centres, out in the country near motorway intersections, which makes some sense in trucking terms, but is not too good if you want a young labour force that probably can't afford even to insure a banger on minimum wage.

 

But I guess it's too late now.

 

Any one who's still with me, sorry for wasting your time. But the point is, Beeching actually got a lot more right than the subsequent implementation (which wasn't his doing) can give him credit for. 

 

 

[Coryton]

13 minutes ago, lanchester said:

2) concentrating most freight and passenger traffic onto linear routes is exactly what railways, and buses, and some styles of road freighting, are designed to be good at. With the random dispersion of new industries and new housing into the 'non green belt' countryside, sensible and effective transport systems or networks, of whatever mode, are rendered almost impossible.

 

I suspect this is one of the two main reasons that there are such good bus services into South Wales Valleys - the housing (and places of employment) are neatly arranged in a linear fashion so a bus service can serve lots of people without having to meander through the countryside as in much of the UK.

 

(The other reason being that I imagine there are more than the usual percentage of people there who can't afford to run a car).

 

 

[Joseph_Pestell]

2 minutes ago, Coryton said:

 

I suspect this is one of the two main reasons that there are such good bus services into South Wales Valleys - the housing (and places of employment) are neatly arranged in a linear fashion so a bus service can serve lots of people without having to meander through the countryside as in much of the UK.

 

(The other reason being that I imagine there are more than the usual percentage of people there who can't afford to run a car).

 

 

 

But where bus services are really good (not just frequent, but comfortable, wi-fi available, etc), car users will use them in preference to having to drive themselves, find a parking space, etc. It's not jjust about affordability.

[Coryton]

4 minutes ago, Joseph_Pestell said:

 

But where bus services are really good (not just frequent, but comfortable, wi-fi available, etc), car users will use them in preference to having to drive themselves, find a parking space, etc. It's not jjust about affordability.

 

No, of course not.

 

Though there are also plenty of car users (I suspect a large majority) who wouldn't contemplate the bus no matter how comfortable and cheap they are.

 

In a lot of people's minds travel is either by car or - in certain circumstances such as trips to London - by train and - if necessary - taxi. But a bus into town to get the train? Absolutely not!

 

It's tempting to think that if bus companies subsidised dramatically increased frequencies for a while, the services would become so much more attractive that they would generate enough traffic to maintain them commercially.

 

Sadly, I suspect in most cases it isn't true.

 

 

[Mike Storey]

2 hours ago, lanchester said:

 

Sorry folks, this intervention is a little wordy!

 

Clearly, Beeching was tasked with modelling a railway system that would at least come somewhere to breaking even, GIVEN CURRENT CONDITIONS. That is really all he could be expected to do - the forward view is why we have politicians, rather than bureaucrats, in charge  (OK, allegedly).

 

The political classes (of both major parties) failed totally here. Bear in mind that although Beeching was commissioned by the Tories, almost all of its application, plus quite a few of the closures that weren't in Beeching, plus the failure to go through with some of his more positive proposals, were under the Labour government of 1964-1970. That nice Mrs Castle's DoT did indeed bring in the concept of social payments for otherwise unviable routes, but only after most of the likely candidates had already been closed. (oh, and while we are talking about the crook Marples, there was certainly something 'crooked' about the Humber Bridge, wasn't there? A vital link now, but it took several decades to justify itself - certainly didn't have the transformative impact on Humberside that voters were promised).

 

But I digress. Political failings fall into two classes as I see it - there are economic developments that nobody saw coming - the men in white coats would have been round - which while disastrous (for the railway were perhaps forgiveable or at least understandable; and those which really should have been predicted because they were to a greater or lesser extent the results or desired outcomes of other government policies.

 

In the first category, it is interesting to note that government (of either shade) clearly did not believe in its ability to deliver the stuff they had promised voters. Pre Beeching, 'Supermac' famously said that 'most of our people have never had it so good' but the often-missed subtext was 'and if we don't pull our fingers out, we'll never have it so good again'. This sort of thing was seen by the people as a promise of ever-increasing growth and prosperity (which is, actually and give-or-take, what most of us got) but:

 

No-one predicted not only that private motoring would rapidly become so ubiquitous and affordable (to the point that now, having a problem running a family's SECOND car is for some a definition of poverty). Actually, no-one saw that the availability of a used car market might be significant. Doh!

 

No-one predicted that leisure time (and the cash to exploit it) would grow so rapidly, or if they did:

no-one predicted that flights to the Costas etc would become so affordable (although of course, when they did, government fought tooth and nail to defeat the likes of Freddy Laker). These points have opposing consequences: Beeching was more right than he could have known in suggesting that a lot of 'seaside branches' were only going to get even less viable (although oddly I don't think either Ilfracombe or Hunstanton were on the original hit list), but equally the general pressure on transport on what are now crowded areas such as the Lakes, Peak District, Dartmoor and Exmoor, which now would love to have some relief through railway service, could not have been predicted.

 

The idea that folks with or without cars would be prepared to commute a couple of hours each way each day, regardless more or less of price, is definte looney bin time.

AS is the idea that most people would live as far away (rather than as close as possible) to their factory/place of work

And more importantly, although of course business and industry was expected to get more efficient, no-pne could allow themselves to believe that the traditional major industries for which the railways were created - coal, steel, shipbuilding, textiles etc would be so decimated (effect on freight) or even where they survived, would have such a reduced need for workers (effect on passengers). 

 

No-one would have foreseen quite what a revolution containerisation would bring to both international and internal freight, and particularly which ports needed better rail facilities (and in fairness, Beeching I think DID have some feel for this). But the current desirability of boosting service to for example Felixstowe and Southampton, rather than London Docks and Liverpool, would not have been apparent then.

 

So, to honour a 50th anniversary, we were promised the moon, but when we actually got it, no-one was more surprised than the folks who had bought our vote.

 

All that is kind of understandable, Predictions are hard, especially about the future, to quote Yogi Berri. But there is a lot of other stuff that Westminster should have factored in to 'moderate' the Beeching conclusions, because they were the foreseeable consequence of existing government policy. I give just a few examples.

 

The New Towns programme appears to have been completely ignored from a rail point of view. OK there was Milton Keynes Central, but did anyone really think about ways of serving Peterlee, Cumbernauld, Skelmersdale - and is anyone surprised that these were not, shall I say, quite as great an improvement on the old slums as might have been hoped.

 

I mentioned containerisation above, but in the Beeching era it was the country's intention to join the Common Market - did no one think that this might change dramatically the pattern of freight flows and the relative importance of different ports?

 

Governments rightly put a lot of money into promoting industrial investment in declining industrial areas - how often were rail linkages, even to major sites like car plants, considered? (Pre War trading estates, like Trafford Park or Team Valley, often did have rail facilities - but it kind of helps if your customers have as well).

 

BR, NCB, and CEGB were all under state ownership (fairly uncontroversially at the time). Remind me, how long did it take for any movement on the MGR concept? (Again, Beeching, read properly, is supportive here).

 

And, still ongoing, the policy of building big new hospitals in areas almost devoid of public transport, despite an ageing population of users who can't (or shouldn't) drive. (That, incidentally, is a lovely example of achieving local efficiencies at the expense of system efficiencies, and is theefore in the same category as policies of closing feedee branch lines that do't technically wash their face but contribute to the viability of the greater network).

 

So, let's hear it for joined up Government! None of the above is Beeching's fault - it is the politicians failing to believe in, think through, and act on, the consequences of their own policies (which may themselves be entirely virtuous).

 

If I can allow myself a final observation, which is still relevant. The Green Belts. These started as a concept pre War when it seemed a real possibility that the Great West Road out of London (and others) would soon have ribbon development all the way to Bath or Bristol. 'Clearly' we need to ring fence towns and communities to preserve their character etc etc.

 

But suppose, in the light of what we now know about the environment and transport and where and how people choose to live, we had chose instead positively to encourage MOST development onto those established radial (from a London perspective -other cities are available) transport corridors, and preserve the fingers and slivers of 'countryside' that still went quite deep into many conurbations. There would have been two consequences:

1) many more people would be on or close to the 'town/country' edge, in other words have ready acccess to green fields (a ring by contrast is the most effective way of minimising the numbers on that edge).

2) concentrating most freight and passenger traffic onto linear routes is exactly what railways, and buses, and some styles of road freighting, are designed to be good at. With the random dispersion of new industries and new housing into the 'non green belt' countryside, sensible and effective transport systems or networks, of whatever mode, are rendered almost impossible. Look at the location of Distribution Centres, out in the country near motorway intersections, which makes some sense in trucking terms, but is not too good if you want a young labour force that probably can't afford even to insure a banger on minimum wage.

 

But I guess it's too late now.

 

Any one who's still with me, sorry for wasting your time. But the point is, Beeching actually got a lot more right than the subsequent implementation (which wasn't his doing) can give him credit for. 

 

 

 

Like it, but unfortunately, industry and commerce tends to prefer hubs, not linear, developments, so that is what we have.

 

Linear development of housing along railway routes was in fact much in vogue, with both governments national and local, and with developers, many of whom were connected with private railway companies, in the earlier days. As were the earliest Garden City developments, by Lady Barnett and subsequent "innovations".

 

I am not sure I concur with your view about incursion into Green Belt - where such ribbon development was uninhibited, particularly Birmingham, and to some extent later, Manchester, it has not been done in the logical way you suggest, but has led instead to the merging of brown belt with green belt, to such an extent, that you can barely work out where you are on the outskirts of those metropoli (as has become the case with so many other cities and towns in recent years). Public transport did not really benefit in those cases, and it has taken many decades for it to catch up. Transport is not the only, and often not the overriding priority, when considering town planning, but I agree that it has rarely been considered adequately in the UK.

 

As with so many other things, it is a consequence of the Laissez-Faire approach which defines English, if not Scottish and Welsh, history. But I would also proffer that the Napoleonic or Teutonic approach to codified and strictly planned and controlled evolution of society and industry, has also had considerable drawbacks. Commuting is something that came late to them, but it exists in ever-increasing quantities and distances now, just as much due to property prices as it is in the UK.

 

Even the Latins are at it, and I say that with a half-Italian wife - for many decades the Italian authorities refused to acknowledge the importance of commuting into cities like Torino, Genova, Milano and Bologna, preferring to think that everyone should live in the cities, who worked there. That was kind of engineered by making FS completely crap at providing a decent service to commuters. But people power prevailed eventually, and huge amounts have been invested to make that so. You can now commute daily over huge distances, if you want to, given the vast extent and frequency of their new high speed services, but they had only asked that the 07.46 from Allesandria to Torino was not cancelled three times a week..... (The current parties in power would like to reverse all this, if they could, but even they understand the electoral disaster that would entail).

 

It all comes down to land prices, and with that, house and office/factory prices. If you try to control those, as some have attempted to do, you are on to a real hiding. Far better to tax the bejessus out of the values obtained through no effort, and use that to bring some sense into the game.