Dr Beeching

[Re6/6]

To add, we must also not forget the Serpell report of 1983 (30 years ago this month). It's most drastic option saw most everything but a few main feeder lines to London cut. The only reason we tend to forget it was because none of it was acted on. Oh if only Beeching had been ignored so...

 

Serpell used to use our station back then.  He seemed a very pleasant individual.

 

As with 'Beeching', I suppose that our ire should be directed at the politicians who make/made the decisions.

 

Watching the repeated programme by Ian Hislop last night, what a duplicitous lot the politicians were back then.  

[Ohmisterporter]

Watching the repeated programme by Ian Hislop last night, what a duplicitous lot the politicians were back then.  

 Thank goodness they have changed. 

[Fenman]

I think that even without Beeching we'd have ended up with almost as many closures that we'd now be regretting (though not as many as Dr. Beeching would have made if he'd had his way) 

 

Although, conversely, some lines that Beeching had not proposed for closure were subsequently shut by over-enthusiastic railway managers (I've just spent a weekend in Norfolk, where Lynn-Hunstanton and Lynn-Dereham were two not proposed by Beeching, but subsequently ripped-up anyway).

 

It was the much-lauded Gerry Fiennes who was responsible for the closure of almost the entire Midland & Great Northern network in 1959, the first time an entire mainline had been closed, and the ruthless way it was pushed through may be said to have paved the way for Beeching.

 

Paul

[Edwin_m]

Tin hat on, but I can't see any case for keeping the M&GN even with the benefit of hindsight.  With no industry to generate freight, and a route that could have been designed to avoid anything resembling an intermediate centre of population, it was little use except for the Midlands to Norfolk holiday traffic.  Within a few years that would have deserted to cars or to Torremolinos. 

[Fenman]

Tin hat on, but I can't see any case for keeping the M&GN even with the benefit of hindsight.  With no industry to generate freight, and a route that could have been designed to avoid anything resembling an intermediate centre of population, it was little use except for the Midlands to Norfolk holiday traffic.  Within a few years that would have deserted to cars or to Torremolinos. 

 

Yet, strangely, the government is reputed (though in today's Times, so take it with a pinch of salt) to be looking at investing hundreds of millions of pounds in the east-west road that follows the same route as the M&GN mainline, due to the sheer numbers of people who want to travel along it!

 

Throughout the twentieth century the M&GN was a pre-WW1 railway in the way it was operated and in the mindset of the management. For some reason it persisted with the idea that its "mainline" was Great Yarmouth to Peterborough, relegating Norwich, the biggest economic centre in the region (and, presumably, the biggest potential generator of traffic), to branchline status.

 

The M&GN couldn't run a passenger train past an intermediate station without stopping, ensuring average end-to-end passenger journey speeds of 20-25mph (or less!).

 

You'd have thought there'd be a market for daytrippers from, say, Peterborough to Yarmouth, but the M&GN foiled that market by ensuring the last train to return to Peterborough was less than an hour after the first train of the day had arrived in Yarmouth.

 

Norwich to King's Lynn, a route over which there must have been some demand? The M&GN ran only all-stops services at odd times.

 

Lynn to Nottingham? Another all-stopper route, taking 4 hours to cover 78 miles - possibly a record for the slowest interurban service in the country?

 

The mindset of the railway managers was completely wrong for the requirements of the second half of the twentieth century. In 1962 Beeching's report showed the very heavy coach traffic operated on the roads parallel to the M&GN's former route - traffic that should have been going by train, but for which the M&GN never fought.

 

Of course, all this is easy with hindsight; at the time, everyone thought the future lay with heavily mechanised freight marshalling yards and, in that context, the M&GN was an absurd anachronism.

 

Paul

 

 

 

 

Edited: to remove a potentially confusing grammatical snafu.

[John_Hughes]

My Dad would tell you how wrong you are on that. He worked for BR in the early to mid-sixties. He said the stock you describe was filthy, old and unreliable. Making some of them servicable used up valuable resources. And it certainly didn't compare with the brand new luxury coaches or a car.

 

My take on it -

 

http://eastmoor.blogspot.co.uk/2013/03/beeching-fifty-years-on.html

 

I certainly travelled quite a bit on some of this old stock, and my experience was rather different - ancient maps and dusty seats indeed, and not always appropriate for the journey it was diagrammed for (3 hours plus without a lav between Salop and Aber!), but it never seemed to cause any particular problems. I'd rather travel on the cushions in a decidedly out-of-date coach than be jammed nose-to-armpit in something modern and inadequate!

[Glorious NSE]

Yet, strangely, the government is reputed (though in today's Times, so take it with a pinch of salt) to be looking at investing hundreds of millions of pounds in the east-west road that follows the same route as the M&GN mainline, due to the sheer numbers of people who want to travel along it!

 

Given that (last time I went that way) they still hadn't got even a lowly dual carriageway connection to the insignificant hamlet of Norwich, i'd definately take it with a pinch of salt!

[Fenman]

Given that (last time I went that way) they still hadn't got even a lowly dual carriageway connection to the insignificant hamlet of Norwich, i'd definately take it with a pinch of salt!

 

There's that old joke - which motorway is the closest to Norwich? To which the answer is the Amsterdam Ring Road.

 

Which is not actually correct - the M11 which terminates at Cambridge is, I think, closest. But the fact that it could be true speaks volumes about how isolated Norwich is from the rest of the UK. The road proposal in yesterday's Times was to dual the A47, the main East Anglia-Midlands route.

 

Incidentally, the M&GN's one long-distance train, Yarmouth-Leicester-Birmingham, lives on, sort of; when the M&GN was closed, the service switched to an even more rambly route while also being extended, and is now the Norwich-Midlands-Liverpool service. Which is, of course, notoriously overcrowded. But the M&GN wasn't a useful route, oh no...

 

Paul

[Edwin_m]

The A47 is the principal route between Norfolk and the Midlands but from a railway point of view that role is taken by the Ely route.  Including links to Cambridge (another important place the M&GN didn't and couldn't serve) it has two trains per hour but they don't load to more than three cars. 

 

If there is any unsatisfied demand for east-west rail service in Norfolk and Cambridgeshire it could be met by lengthening the existing trains, as recently done north of Nottingham.  Retaining or reopening a parallel route which fails to serve any other significant centre of population* would simply split the market, double the operating costs and result in a poorer service. 

 

Unlike many other places subjected to railway closures, the principal towns/cities on the M&GN still have rail service at least every hour, and travelling between most of them is probably quicker than the M&GN timings quoted above even if one or two changes of train are now needed. 

 

*I don't think South Lynn counts as a centre of population.  As Kings Lynn isn't within walking distance, another leg of the journey is needed to access it and that could just as well be from Ely. 

[jjb1970]

I certainly travelled quite a bit on some of this old stock, and my experience was rather different - ancient maps and dusty seats indeed, and not always appropriate for the journey it was diagrammed for (3 hours plus without a lav between Salop and Aber!), but it never seemed to cause any particular problems. I'd rather travel on the cushions in a decidedly out-of-date coach than be jammed nose-to-armpit in something modern and inadequate!

When we go to the Buckinghamshire Railway Centre my wife (who is NOT a train enthusiast in any way!) and kiddies always comment on how much nicer the old compartment coaches are and how nice it would be if modern trains were like that. Mind you, if your benchmark is a 350/2 most trains other than their clone 3+2 high density trains are an improvement in comfort.

[Glorious NSE]

Unlike many other places subjected to railway closures, the principal towns/cities on the M&GN still have rail service at least every hour, and travelling between most of them is probably quicker than the M&GN timings quoted above even if one or two changes of train are now needed.  

 

Just to test that theory, versus the 4 hours quoted Transport Direct gives me 2 hours 40 minutes with todays arrangement, changing at Ely...

 

(And 27 minutes of that is the change!)

[Coldgunner]

I'm a regular traveller between Cambridge and Peterborough. The big issue with it is that if there is a problem at either Cambridge or Ely, it takes down the entire system. If there was still the links to the ECML from Cambridge, then they would work as fairly good redundancy systems, especially given the electrification of Cambridge.

[Fenman]

Just to test that theory, versus the 4 hours quoted Transport Direct gives me 2 hours 40 minutes with todays arrangement, changing at Ely...

 

(And 27 minutes of that is the change!)

 

The timings I gave were the M&GN's weekday trains - I was making the point that they didn't seem to care about interurban passenger traffic. At weekends, when running holiday specials (even though these were in such vast numbers they clogged what was, in many places, a single line route), the Nottingham-Lynn timing magically became 2 hours. Still not stellar, but a respectable 40mph end-to-end journey time given those single-track bottlenecks.

 

So the question for me is why could they do that at weekends, but not bother during weekdays. Maybe there wasn't enough traffic to justify it; well, maybe, but why then do Beeching's maps show a heavy density of express coach passenger traffic on that route?

 

That 2 hours 40 for Lynn-Norwich, of course, compares with 1 hour by car; but it misses the important point that the supposedly duplicate railway line does not mirror social or economic travel patterns in this part of the country. For example, the majority of people in Lynn will go, as their next "big city" shopping centre, to Peterborough, an easy journey by M&GN but not easy on the railway we have left. An M&GN run at weekend speeds with DMUs should easily have connected the two centres in an hour.

 

People in Wisbech, a significant market town (with its own current campaign to be reconnected to the rail network) would go to either Lynn or Peterborough for their "big town" experience (yes, don't laugh...), the two ends of the M&GN line running through it. Now, of course, they use their cars.

 

It is now not possible to travel by rail within Norfolk from the east to the west; even Beeching did not propose the closure of the one remaining Lynn-Norwich line, something that enthusiastic railway managers did after his departure.

 

I have no idea whether or not the M&GN could ever have been made to pay, and whether or not it would have been a better route instead of the Ely line. The point (going back to the OP) was that railway managers had already started axing mainlines before Beeching joined the railways, and they continued axing deeper than he ever proposed long after he left. It's easy to create a bogeyman; but there were a lot of admired railway figures (like Gerry Fiennes) who were enthusiastic slashers, despite their protestations that they loved railways.

 

Paul

[Edwin_m]

That just goes to prove that the M&GN had the ability and the willingness to offer reasonable journey times when there was enough through traffic on offer.  The fact that they didn't on weekdays suggests that there wasn't, and the railway then had to try to survive on the thin pickings at the wayside stations in a very rural area.

 

I think coaches on the parallel road are a red herring.  They are probably carrying holidaymakers, who don't mind if the journey is a bit slow as long as it is reasonably cheap, comfortable and above all direct.  It's also seasonal traffic, and while most of the coaches will be used elsewhere in the winter that's not possible with the fixed infrastructure of the railway.  As I pointed out above, the railway holiday traffic dropped off dramatically in the 60s, because more people went on packages somewhere more sunny and for those that remained the car or coach were much more convenient when travelling with a family and a fortnight's worth of luggage.  And as others have noted, the railway also decided or realised (depending on your point of view) that it wasn't economic to provide equipment that was only used in the peak holiday season.

 

The point I'm trying to make is Gerry Fiennes may have loved his railways but he could recognise a no-hoper when he saw one.  Compare and contrast the East Suffolk Line. 

[Oldddudders]

Railwaymen since 1948 were under remit to do as the paymaster, aka HM Government, required. Thus when asked to get the cost-base down, all sorts of initiatives were devised, of which closures were just one. After all, as we know, steam could have gone on for many years, but introducing DMUs cut the footplate crew by half, reduced depot maintenance staff. CWR reduced at a stroke the need for daily inspection and knocking in keys etc. PSBs knocked out hundreds, probably thousands of manual signalboxes, many of them open three shifts. Those things were under way long before Beeching.

 

Much more recently, in the late '80s, the DTp (Department of Transport) got a bee in its bonnet about singling of lines - a new key indicator of BR management's virility. I think an annual target was set. This was in the gung-ho Sector era, when income and investment were on the up, and BR's bargaining power ought to have been stronger. BRB was supposed to negotiate its subsidy and cash limits with the DTp, who acted on behalf of HM Treasury. But the Director, Financial Planning told me in 1990 that the relationship  with the Treasury at that moment was more like nose-to-nose!

[Fenman]

That just goes to prove that the M&GN had the ability and the willingness to offer reasonable journey times when there was enough through traffic on offer.  The fact that they didn't on weekdays suggests that there wasn't, and the railway then had to try to survive on the thin pickings at the wayside stations in a very rural area.

 

I think coaches on the parallel road are a red herring.  They are probably carrying holidaymakers, who don't mind if the journey is a bit slow as long as it is reasonably cheap, comfortable and above all direct.  It's also seasonal traffic

 

The point I'm trying to make is Gerry Fiennes may have loved his railways but he could recognise a no-hoper when he saw one.  Compare and contrast the East Suffolk Line. 

 

I agree with much of what you wrote, but I'm obviously not making myself clear. There were many things the M&GN did wrong, largely (I think) because it was run like it always used to be, mostly focussed on pick-up freight and on the tiny numbers of passengers being transported one or two stops between equally tiny villages.

 

Its inter-urban operations were run as if no-one had a clue why they were there. The idea that, for example, business people might want a morning train to take them to a neighbouring city, then an evening train to take them home after they'd had half a day or so to conduct business, was utterly lost on the M&GN - whose principal daily express, the "Leicester", contrived to arrive in Birmingham from Norwich after the one return train for the day had already left.

 

The reasonable journey times at weekends were not for scheduled services but for specials. Clearly a completely different mentality was at work, where the object was to flush as many specials as possible through the system, leading to what were not bad travel times. So those times could have been replicated for scheduled services - but were not. You say that was obviously because there was no traffic to justify them, but looking at the social and economic flows that went on then and continue today (cars and express coaches), I don't think that it is at all obvious.

 

It wasn't that the M&GN thought there was huge demand for village-hopping, which traffic would have been lost had the interurban services been accelerated by not stopping at them (passenger numbers were always pretty low at most of those villages, if 1950s traffic surveys are to be believed). I think it was because it was that it had always done things this way, and it failed to adapt to changing passenger needs.

 

It was not unique in this - the example I quoted of those mechanised marshalling yards showed other "modern" railway managers also fixing the wrong problem. But the M&GN was equally culpable in not adapting to changing circumstances and, in the context of the business it generated, Gerry Fiennes axed it.

 

In his autobiography, Fiennes makes it clear that he did not consider himself one of life's great thinkers, and nor did he think he was particularly creative; clearly re-imagining the twentieth century railway was not within his grasp. For all his impressive strengths as a man of action and a leader, he, like most of his contemporaries, did not envision much more than incremental change (which is not to belittle it -- any incremental change involving Deltics and assorted electrification schemes, among others, is well worth having).

 

I'm not sure why you think the coach traffic was seasonal: Beeching looked at annual flows of passengers and freight in the context of traffic he wanted the railways to "win back" from the roads and, after the M&GN's demise, there was a startlingly high concentration of express coach traffic on the roads that paralleled that route. Since we know railway holidays were already in decline, I'd be surprised if the bulk of it was that (and we know that even today, express coaches run hourly services throughout the year along the M&GN's mainline route, as well as the hourly long-distance train services).

 

But as I also wrote, I have no idea whether or not a reinvented M&GN would have been sufficiently "successful". But it seems to me there are some indications that it might have been, and there is certainly enough evidence to make me question why it was closed rather than the Ely route. Then again, I may just be too romantic.

 

Paul

[John_Hughes]

The we've always done it this way mentality existed in a lot of other places away from the M&GN; the Mid Wales line was a typical example - it was almost impossible to get a sensible through train from Moat Lane to Brecon (let alone from Welshpool or Newtown, or indeed anywhere else) right up until the end; trips began and ended at various odd places along the line, waited connections for 30 minutes or more at Builth Road, and the whole service generally behaved as if road motors had never been invented.

 

And don't get me started on the Heads of the Valleys Line...!

[jonny777]

I have resurrected this thread, mainly because after a gap of over 40 years I have been re-reading "I Tried To Run A Railway" by Gerry Fiennes.

 

It would appear that he was not only responsible for the closure of the M&GN, but also the GC London Extension, as well as (he says) the planning of a marshalling yard at Tinsley.

 

However, the majority view would be that Beeching promoted the idea of the Merry Go Round operation between colliery and power station, and this is one of the examples used by supporters to show how revolutionary he was.

 

Not true, implies Fiennes in the book; and not only "not true" but that Beeching actually delayed the MGR idea by a number of years.

 

According to Fiennes, he and someone called Freddy Gray were looking at the revolution in goods trains when steam locos would no longer haul them, and realised there would be no need to stop at regular intervals for water and coal; in fact no need to stop at all except for crew changes if the journey was that long.

 

They received a request from Scotland for new 24.5t wagons for a service to supply the new Cockenzie power station with coal from the new Monktonhall colliery. The Scots had requested 550?? wagons. Fiennes and Gray decided the service could be worked by 44 x 32.5t wagons just going round and round as many times as was necessary or practicable each day.

 

Not only that, but everyone loved the idea; the CEGB agreed to re-design all their new power stations on this principle and the NCB had agreed at least to set up Monktonhall and Bevercotes mines to the principle. But then the plans reached Beeching and were vetoed because he had done his calculations on the old fashioned method where most 16t coal wagons did nothing for 6 months of the year.

 

Fiennes says that he even showed Beeching that MGR could reduce the number of coal wagons from 500,000 to 100,000, but to no avail. The whole plan was thrown out and five years passed before they were re-instated.

 

Now this might be Fiennes gilding the lily in his favour; but it seems that any idea which concludes Beeching invented and encouraged MGR is wrong.

[jonny777]

I think that possibly although Beeching threw out the proposal on his arrival to the BRB in 1961, something about the big cost savings must have stuck in his mind and he went on to embrace the idea in later years.

 

I wonder if he enjoyed the plaudits that he might have been given for introducing an idea (literally revolutionary, if you like puns) which really was not of his own making? I am amazed at the amount that I cannot remember from my first reading all those years ago. Mind you, in those days I was in my late teens and the book reading would have taken a low priority compared to Melody Maker, Sounds and Private Eye.

[30851]

The book "Milk Churns to Merry-Go-Round" by R.T. Munns goes into some details about the start of the MGR process. Mr. Munns was heavily involved in the setting up of MGR from the start - he states the idea was first suggested by G Fiennes just before a meeting on the 4th September 1957 about the new power station at Thorpe Marsh. However the idea never took off for this power station due to the NCB and CEGB not being interested at the time. He then talks of trying to overcome the CEGB and NCB objections (mostly done by the fact the power stations were getting bigger and there was no choice!) and the technical issues - this is what took up the years. He make no mention of Dr Beeching trying to stop it - the only complaint he makes is that the BRB gave out the impression they invented it when in fact it was the Eastern Region. The book (which is well worth buying if you can) also describes some of the strange things that took place due to the strong Regions of the time - for example, the Thorpe Marsh power station was right on the border of the Eastern and North Eastern region and the two connections to the site were in different regions. The CEGB had to deal with each region separately to get the two connections installed.

 

The other famous Beeching idea - the Freightliner - is also a bit older. If you look at the Trains Illustrated Magazine for December 1958 there is a picture of two Co-Bo's passing Wellingbourgh with the Condor. The description includes "The train is the prototype of a new "Freight Liner" service for container traffic, for which trains of flat wagons will be kept permanently  coupled and will link major traffic centers regularly and at high speed". Obviously this idea must have got nowhere until Beeching found it and pushed it. Before that the idea must have just got buried as too difficult/different. As a guess it may have been too difficult due to the fact the price that British Railways had to quote was based on the goods in the container and not on just the cost of moving a container - these laws being changed with the transport act of the Beeching era.

 

Rob