Has anyone ever seen an equivalent graph of goods traffic for the whole of railway history? I went looking for one, and could only find one from the start to around 1900, and another from 1983 on. Between those two dates the gross tonnage shifted fell from over 500M tons to about 150M tons. As so much of that latterly was coal and other bulk commodities, I'm sure revenue fell by a lot more. It was the small loads (wagonload, part-load and parcels) that pretty much vanished due to the influx of lorries after WW1.
Probably some avid researcher or three has done a book on it.
They may well have, and the decline certainly started after WW! when the War Ministry were selling off surplus equipment, and so many men had learned to drive during that war.
In essence, Beeching threw in the final towel on wagonloas traffic when it became clear that it was costing far more to move the remnants of it than the railways got in the rates they received for carrying it.
