OTD - 16th February 1965 - Beeching

[whole diary]

[CyclingSid]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/february/16/newsid_2545000/2545597.stm

They do it better than I can. Caught it on the early News Briefing.

[grahame]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/february/16/newsid_2545000/2545597.stm

They do it better than I can. Caught it on the early News Briefing.

Very interesting - thank you.  That's the second Beeching report - the one that promoted the rebuilding of the remaining core after the culling of the earlier report. Perhaps part of the problem was that the first report produced such a storm and wreckage that it hampered much of any rebuild.  Comment and explanations welcome here; I suspect that this could end up being a lively discussion!

[Electric train]

This bit was obviously a politicians input "This report is not a prelude to closures on a grand scale,"

[Robin Summerhill]

But of course it doesn’t rule out closures on a non-grand scale, did it...

In many respects the original Beeching Report was correct, in that the country could not tolerate spending huge sums of money maintaining services that nobody wanted to use. As I’ve said here before, it should be a salutary lesson to those who think the Treasury should continue subsidising the railway industry post-pandemic.

But even in the brief précis in the BBC^» (British Broadcasting Corporation - home page) article, it regurgitates again the same nonsense that it was thought, at the time, that duplicate routes were “wasteful competition.” It can only be wasteful if two or more routes serve the same places. In some cases they did (Sheffield to Nottingham being a good example), but when they pick up and drop off traffic along the way they are only duplicates in their starting and destination points. That is largely irrelevant; if, for example, the ECML^▸ (East Coast Main Line) was closed north of Berwick because it “duplicated the WCML^▸ (West Coast Main Line), a train from London to Edinburgh stopping at Stafford and Crewe would be no use to people in Newark or Retford or Thirsk, they would all be going by car in the future and a whole potentially lucrative income stream would have been lost.

The last time I saw Beeching on TV^▸ (Thames Valley) was long after he had left BR^▸ (British Rail(ways)) – I think he was wheeled out to comment on the then new Serpell Report. He had still not got it into his skull that duplicate routes are only duplicate route when the duplicate calling points, and was still talking disparagingly of there still being “two routes to Scotland.”

But of course there were many aspects of the second report that did see the light of day – Freightliner. MGR and bulk traffic such as aggregates are the most obvious examples. We also had the Transport Act 1968 which accepted that there were some cases in which railways should be subsidised when they provide a necessary public service. But even if we had had that in 1963 the closure programme would still have been substantial

[eightonedee]

and was still talking disparagingly of there still being “two routes to Scotland.”

Never mind that Dr B - there's at least 10 going into London.........! We only need two don't we, Westerners - one to Paddington and a back up one to Waterloo!

[grahame]

and was still talking disparagingly of there still being “two routes to Scotland.”

Never mind that Dr B - there's at least 10 going into London.........! We only need two don't we, Westerners - one to Paddington and a back up one to Waterloo!

I thought that for most of us, the route into Waterloo had been rendered far less practical with a long wait at Salisbury ...

People always say there are 3 things you don't talk about: politics, religion and money.

and on a rail forum, Beeching is also a subject guaranteed to raise the temperature of discussion and set the views of friends against each other!  But - please - feel free to go ahead; we are strengthened by our sharing and understanding of different view points.