New edition of The Reshaping of British Railways

[DavidB-AU]

The National Archives has published a new edition of the death warrant.

 

http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/news/808.htm

 

Priced at £9.99 with a 10% discount for the next week.

 

Cheers

David

[Fenman]

Although the maps are a little small in this format, it's been beautifully produced and feels like a well made book (the content is another matter altogether). 

 

Paul

[Bernard Lamb]

AFAIK it has never been published, but TNA at Kew also hold a version of the report written in pencil by the man himself.

I did post a short history of how this rare document survived in a special area of the forum.

The feeling was that if it reached too wide an audience it would generate too much heated comment.

I am going to take the risk by repeating some remarks here in the light of the original published document being flagged up in this thread. 

Please try to keep any replies civil  and adopt an historical rather than emotive attitude.

The document contains very few corrections.

It does not contain any lists of lines or stations.

It simply ends with a few lines drawn across the page.

I read this document while I was involved in the research for a book on one particular line.

There were several proposals with alternatives to closure that were unknown outside of a very small group of mainly professional railway men.

The more people who were asked the more interesting and convoluted the story became.

One of these proposals had a lot going for it and the idea was to track down the history of the decision making.

Why was this alternative plan not adopted?

Who actually made the decision?

This thought process led to asking the question of exactly how much Dr Beeching knew about, or was involved in, detailed decisions.

I have come round to the view that in many cases he was hardly involved and simply took the results from the various local teams at face value.

He set out the ground rules and others did the work.

First and last pages of report attached.

Bernard

 

 

 

[Fenman]

This thought process led to asking the question of exactly how much Dr Beeching knew about, or was involved in, detailed decisions.

I have come round to the view that in many cases he was hardly involved and simply took the results from the various local teams at face value.

He set out the ground rules and others did the work.

 

Nice to see photos of the handwritten report - thanks for sharing those.

 

I had read that Beeching was a brilliant analyst who spent a great deal of time gathering his thoughts, then set them out on paper sequentially without needing to make much reference to anything else. The manuscript seems to support that view.

 

I wouldn't be at all surprised if the detail of the closures was largely unknown to him: he was the chairman of a massive organisation and it was his job to lead the Board in setting the strategy, not to get involved in management's detailed implementation of it. The enthusiasm of some professional railwaymen for cutting lines is well-known (Gerry Fiennes refers to his own tendencies to slash routes in his autobiography, albeit writing the caveat that he believed railwaymen generally preferred running railways to closing them).

 

Beeching did other good things which are largely ignored (InterCity, liner trains, developing the trunk routes). Off the railways, his work in reorganising England's previously Medieval system of courts was extraordinarily successful. He was clearly some kind of a genius.

 

As an aside, his report does not list for closure many of the lines that were subsequently cut (eg, King's Lynn-Hunstanton). I would suggest that is evidence of the enthusiasm with which some professional railwaymen took to the idea of closures. Although, of the routes listed in Beeching for closure but which subsequently escaped the axe, the ones that caught my eye were the sections of what is now London Overground. How times change.

 

Bernard: please try to keep any reply civil. Thanks! 

 

Paul

[dibber25]

I have a copy of the original. I was surprised when consulting it recently, to find that the Swanage branch was not listed. Goes to show that once the momentum of closures had gathered pace, anything could come under threat. Seems likely that the desire to put a by-pass round Corfe on the trackbed was one of the reasons why the branch closure was pushed through. Of the lines that got reprieved, most are now carrying record numbers of passengers. I think Beeching was the fall-guy for government policy in a land where most people wanted splendid new roads and thought railways were outmoded. The real villain of the piece was Ernest Marples. I don't think Beeching was particularly innovative - liner trains for instance were already in use elsewhere - the diminutive White Pass & Yukon had been using standardised container trains since 1952 and had the first container ship. Beeching just saw an opportunity. 

CHRIS LEIGH

['CHARD]

Nicely phrased, Chris.

 

Marples certainly had a lot to answer for.  In my area of interest, Scottish (Region) were zealous with the stroke of the pen, hence the coining of the name 'closerati' for that administration (they had an unwholesome habit of almost gleefully ransacking the remains too).  Ceratinly some lines were destroyed that didn't fit Beeching's basic criteria.  Equally, the grants for socially necessary railways conveniently came in during '68, when most of the damage was already done, and that may have saved some of the casualties.

 

Richard Marsh should really be on the shortlist for the Mini-me to Beeching's evil genius as well.  Later Chairman of British Rail, he was absolutely cavalier about consents to closures in his time as cabinet minister for transport in 1968-69.  Followers of the Waverley Route will be able to draw parallels with George Dubya at this point, no doubt.

 

 

I know it's lazy to use Beeching as a byword for all that was wrong about the unjustified closures, but it's a convenient shorthand when it suits.   I'm a sucker for burning effigies, and voodoo dolls, and Beeching will forever be the poster-boy for that horrible but compelling era.

[Guest Max Stafford]

"...Followers of the Waverley Route will be able to draw parallels with George Dubya at this point, no doubt..."

 

Aye, with Marples as Reichsfuehrer Cheyney/CEO of Halitosis or whatever it's called.

 

Dave

[dibber25]

I recall a conversation, back when the Class 59s were delivered, with Ken Painter, then Rail Transport Director at Foster Yeoman. He had been in a senior position in BR Bristol, I think, in the Beeching/post-Beeching era. He told me that there was a plan to eliminate ALL freight from Somerset. He put a stop to it by ensuring that FY was tied in to rail transport from Merehead for the foreseeable future. Of course, he then left BR and joined FY to deal with the same contract from the other side of the table. Sadly there weren't many railway managers of that calibre. The government also provided some nice little incentives. When I negotiated with BR over Staines West station, I was told that BR received a premium of some thousands of pounds for every station canopy that was removed. That's why some very fine buildings got mutilated and passengers have to stand out in the rain.

CHRIS LEIGH

[Bernard Lamb]

Richard Marsh should really be on the shortlist for the Mini-me to Beeching's evil genius as well.  Later Chairman of British Rail, he was absolutely cavalier about consents to closures in his time as cabinet minister for transport in 1968-69.  Followers of the Waverley Route will be able to draw parallels with George Dubya at this point, no doubt.

From memory I do not know what actually appeared in David Spaven's book, but in discussions while I was helping him on it, the topic of Richard Marsh came up quite often.

Richard Marsh  was sadly too ill after an initial approach to converse with on detailed matters.

He did say at one point that the  closure of The Waverley Route was probably his greatest mistake.

I will get into trouble for that quote without references to back it up, but I think it originated at a dinner hosted by Lord McAlpine who sat Richard Marsh next to a person with a known interest in railways.

The subject of at what level senior politicians in the 1960s got involved in individual rail closure issues is a subject that has had very little written about it.

Reading various files at Kew just reinforces my viewpoint that the true history has yet to emerge.

In many other subjects also I might add being currently engaged in researching MI9 involvement in The Far East.

Bernard