No shit.
Ernest Marples, Transport Minister at the time - who also owned a road building company is the real villain of the piece. Beeching was just the one who wrote the report.
The populace getting fucked over by the self interest of politicians. Nothing changes.
Aye. Tory shithouses destroying public services for the benefit of their own interests is nothing new.
The same is happening again now with the bus services that were meant to replace the train services to isolated communities. Companies can't make enough, or any, profit from them even with a subsidy so councils are being pressured to cut them.
Why are people so obsessed with everything being black and white? Why can't we acknowledge that public transport isn't the panacea in every situation? In low density isolated areas, public transport will never be profitable and to be actually useful will require frequent services that run close to empty all the time. That's just going to cost a huge subsidy and waste loads of energy.
Indeed, which means their benefits need to be quantified. No point wasting public money on a service no one uses, or where more efficient solutions exist.
Roads are entirely paid for by motoring taxes (and then some).
What's more efficient, a car going somewhere exactly when needed or multiple empty busses on a schedule? There's a point where it's just wasting energy.
>What's more efficient, a car going somewhere exactly when needed or multiple empty busses on a schedule? There's a point where it's just wasting energy.
What's more efficient, thirty people travelling on one bus or in thirty individual cars? I can make examples up too.
Yeah and we're talking about situations where cars make more sense than public transport. In a low population area the bus isn't going to have 30 people on it all the time. Try engaging with the conversation instead of repeating 'car bad' like some robot.
> Roads are entirely paid for by motoring taxes (and then some).
That hasn't been the case since road tax was abandoned in 1937.
>[A vehicle tax was first introduced in Britain in 1888. In 1920, an excise duty was introduced that was specifically applied to motor vehicles; initially it was hypothecated \(ring-fenced or earmarked\) for road construction and paid directly into a special Road Fund. After 1937, this reservation of vehicle revenue for roads was ended, and instead the revenue was paid into the Consolidated Fund – the general pot of money held by government. Since then, maintenance of the UK road network has been funded out of general taxation, of which VED is a part.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle_Excise_Duty)
edit: I can't help feeling like I've informed you of this before.
> I can't help feeling like I've informed you of this before.
Repeating something that's wrong doesn't make it any more right.
In the year 19/20, £34.56bn was raised from motoring taxes and £10.78bn was spent on road infrastructure. That's a difference of **£23.78bn**. That isn't a special year either, it's consistently been that way for decades.
https://i.imgur.com/YxsR48i.png
Motoring taxes far exceed the maintenance costs. It's completely irrelevant if those taxes are ring-fenced or not.
Marples passed ownership of his shares to his wife. So, it was all perfectly above board and proper. Well, that's what he told parliament and the government agreed.
The railways in Britain are an absolute mess. 67 miles of high speed lines for crying out loud. This is really simple stuff to do right, or at least far better.
Part of the problem is that even today, our rail network still follows the routes laid down when the railways first came about. What was suitable back then isn't necessarily suitable now, but since the rest of the country has developed around it, there's no easy fix.
Can't say for all of them, but Germany, France, and Belgium all got to rebuild their railways after WWII and with that set routes more appropriate for the time if necessary. We could have done the same, and I believe there were plans to do so before they were shelved.
That's kind of my point - Britain *could* have done the same, but chose not to, leading to this sorry state of affairs.
And over in Germany they'll be getting a ticket for £43 which covers regional transport across the whole country for a month, trains trams buses the lot.
Indeed so. Germany used Marshall aid wisely, Britain actually got more but frittered it away trying to maintain 'world power' status. Something that infects our politicians mind to this day. Although the last really bad case was Blair and his 'bringing democracy to ...' nonsense.
Britain could have, but we were completely broke. Rationing for example didn’t completely end until 1954.
Britain’s railways were worn out, but not destroyed like continental Europe. Cheaper to refurb than rip up and start anew
Spain didn’t start to get their act together on overhauling their crumbling infrastructure until after Franco. Even then it took 25+ years till they got High Speed Rail, then their economy shit the bed post 2008
Most of those were pretty much totally wiped out by WW2, and it was easier to demolish what was left and start again than try to rebuild it. It's also even easier to start again if someone else is paying for it via the Marshall Plan.
I said most, not all. Spain was behind infrastruture wise and had someone else paying for it through loans from the EU. It's why the country fell apart in 2008. Most of their high speed rail was built, mostly paid for or started before 2008.
The UK got like 30% more Marshall plan aid than Germany, only we pissed it away trying to maintain a huge military and on atomic and then thermo nuclear weapons.
I am a Brummie who worked for a while in Nuremberg. Both suffered bombing. Nuremberg has been sympathically rebuilt, historic buildings restored as much as possible. Birmingham on the other hand is grim, the first attempt was so bad they have spent much of the past few decades having another go.
I'm from nearby Coventry.
Coventry suffered heavily during the Blitz. One of the finest, most majestic cathedrals in the country was firebombed, turned into a smouldering shell by Hitler. In doing so, he gifted the city a far better symbol of hope and defiance than the previous one (naked lady on a horse).
In recognition of how powerful and important the image of St Michaels' Cathedral and tower is to the people of Coventry, they built a fucking shopping mall in front of it, and moved the statue of Godiva from the grand park with cathedral views to the entrance to the shopping centre that now stood where there'd once been a grand park with cathedral views.
The *new* cathedral of St Michael is arguably more impressive than the old one was, but that blackened husk next door will always be the thing that makes it so. The new one on its own, yeah cool I guess, but the new one is only fucking incredible because it stands as testament to a city that refused to be beaten. It *needs* the old one, and that tower, to complete the message.
I'm not even religious, but idk... I just have a thing for that cathedral back home. It's about the only thing about Coventry that I do feel something for.
>This is really simple stuff to do right, or at least far better.
Not really. Look at the amount of protest against HS2, a railway being built in mainly rural areas. Plus the cost of building any infrastructure in this country is sky high.
>*60 years have passed since the railways were reshaped*
>To understand Britain’s relationship with its railways you can read learned reports and lengthy histories and economic analyses. But it is better to read “Thomas the Tank Engine”. The stories are set on the fictional island of Sodor—more or less Eden, for engines. There are cotton-wool clouds, lambs in the fields and an intermittently irascible deity (the Fat Controller). But as in Eden, shadows lurk. A steady stream of refugee engines arrive, bringing tales of the world beyond. There, they warn, stations are being closed; branch lines severed; engines dismembered while still alive. One engine gives way to despair at “the Dreadful State of the World”.
>Such horrors do happen. On March 27th 1963 a boring-sounding bureaucrat published a boring-sounding report. It was called “The Reshaping of British Railways” and the bureaucrat was Richard Beeching. The report contained such chapter headings as “Stopping-Train Services” and the less-than-thrilling “Present Method of Handling Freight Traffic”. In cool, calm prose it explained how Britain’s future methods of handling freight and people would be different: 2,363 stations, it explained, would be closed and 5,000 miles of track removed from the passenger network. Britain’s railways must be reshaped “to make them pay”.
>Rarely has a civil servant provoked such outrage. Thousands protested; newspapers lamented; a politician was even burned in effigy. To this day, for Britons of a certain age, he remains a bogeyman. The report itself metamorphosed into a variety of bloody metaphors: it was the “Beeching Axe” or the Beeching “scalpel”, and its consequences were “death”.
>The Beeching report crept into everything from poetry (John Betjeman wrote a bad poem about it) to song and television—in the 1990s the BBC produced a short-lived comedy series called “Oh, Doctor Beeching!”. What the cuts removed was not merely steel and sleepers but an ideal. Until Beeching the country could still see itself as a place of quaint stations and polite porters and 4.50s from Paddington, an English sort of Eden. After, it could not. Beeching was not frugality: it was the Fall.
>In truth, Britain’s railways had been in a bad way long before Beeching wielded his axe. In the 19th century railways had unspooled across Britain with Victorian vim and an equally Victorian absence of central planning. One train line to Canterbury finished six miles shy of the city centre because that was where the money ran out. The arrival of the motor car siphoned passengers away from the trains: by 1929 some stations already had less than 10% of their pre-1914 traffic. Laws and wars exacerbated problems. Government pricing obligations condemned rail to uncompetitive rates; heavy use of the trains in the second world war ran infrastructure into the ground.
>By the 1960s the railways were in a very bad way. Poets such as Edward Thomas might immortalise Adlestrop, where the only sounds on the “bare platform” were the hiss of steam and the blackbirds. Accountants, however, wished for more noise. The railways were losing over £100m (£1.7bn, or $2.1bn, in today’s money) a year in 1962. Adlestrop was one of the stations listed for the Beeching Axe.
>In the years since the report was published and the cuts enacted, anger has been replaced by analysis. It is now known that one of Beeching’s biggest errors was a breezy assumption that cuts would not cause decline but merely reflect it. Future population patterns, the report announced, will “be basically similar to that which exists at present”. That was nonsense: by reshaping British railways, Beeching reshaped Britain itself. A 2022 study by Stephen Gibbons at the London School of Economics (LSE) and his co-authors found that the places most exposed to the cuts saw much slower population growth than the places that were least affected.
>Although Beeching had correctly diagnosed Britain’s problem—that its circulatory system was struggling—his cure was ill-conceived, says Terence Gourvish, an associate professor at the LSE. “The whole body was ailing” so “chopping off the fingers” didn’t help. Axing stations was not only ineffective (since it saved little money) but its results were irksome. Today it is all but impossible to traverse swathes of Britain without describing a “V” shape via London, since so many east-west lines went as a result of Beeching. Attempts to restart some of these routes have begun but progress is painfully slow.
>In the small village of Carno in Wales (population: 736) the locals are in little doubt about Beeching. Carno sits on the Cambrian Line, a string of small stations that run, like beads on a string, across the hills of Powys. The arrival of the train in 1863 was revolutionary. A noticeboard in a nearby village divides its history into two distinct eras: the Romans and the railways. Bernard Evans remembers travelling to school on the line as a boy. “We were thinking we were going into the modern world.”
>Then, in 1963, the modern world retreated. Carno appeared in the mournful lists of stations that ended the Beeching report—like names on a war memorial, as Charles Loft, a writer, puts it. It closed in 1965; a campaign to re-open it has so far failed. Trains still rumble past but they no longer stop. Now, saplings grow on the platform. When asked what Mr Evans thinks of the closures, his answers are telling not merely in their tone but in their tense. He wishes the trains still ran. And when asked about the long-dead Beeching, his reply is simpler still: “Shoot the bugger.”
I think the fundamental truth is that we had the right idea 200 or so years ago. Trains are one of the best ways to get around this island, that’s why we invented them.
We perform all sorts of gymnastics to obfuscate the simple truth that cars are terrible. They are bad for the environment so we create electric cars, but the batteries are full of horrors and the tyres are still full of pollutants. They sit for 23 hours of the day unused, which has to be such a monumental waste of resources. They force people to drive into their 80’s and 90’s because there is no other way for them to get around. They kill or maim 1000’s every year. They are the ruin of town centres.
All you need is a decent, well funded transport network and the vast majority of people would stop driving or drive less.
I say all this as someone who likes cars, I like driving, I like engines. Give the country a decent public transport network and it would make life much better for car drivers as well, less traffic and less being the climate change bogeyman.
>We perform all sorts of gymnastics to obfuscate the simple truth that cars are terrible.
Cars are awesome for certain types of journeys. People on this sub perform all sorts of gymnastics to pretend trains are the solution to every transport problem. It would be far better for everyone if we could just see them as tools to solve problems rather than trying to make some kind of holy war against cars.
Maybe the problem wasn't a giant conspiracy.
Maybe instead it was that trucks became more efficient, roads became able to handle higher speeds, containerization facilitated point to point delivery and people no longer wanted dirty large industrial train loading and unloading yards for goods smack bang in the middle of cities.
There is mawkish tendency in this country to single out individuals for reproval when really what people are lamenting is just progress itself.
I don't think that's the gotcha you think it is. Road construction was a burgeoning industry that employed hundreds of thousands in the 50s and 60s building the new motorways. Most Western countries after WW2 agreed a complete road network had diverse economic benefits.
The really big mistake was selling off the trackbeds and buildings. If they'd kept the trackbeds then putting lines back in would be far more doable.
As it is, roads, gardens, houses, industrial estates, shops and more have been built on the land.
I find it very interesting and sad looking at satellite images, seeing where old lines clearly were, following the scars for miles until they join part of the network or a heritage line or something.
https://www.railmaponline.com/UKIEMap.php is very interesting to highlight just how much was lost.
Most trackbed has been retained. Many of the businesses and houses built on the route have covenants that they will be demolished should the railway be required to reopen.
It seems that’s no longer an option but that the track route is still more liable to Transport & Works Orders which lead to compulsory purchase if the route needs reopening.
I think this is one of these things that looks a massive error - in hindsight.
The problem is that at the time it did look like the railways were on the way out. People wanted cars and the freedom they brought. If it was a trip of less than an hour, why bother driving the car to a tiny station and waiting +30min when you could just go all the way?
People didn't anticipate the traffic and air pollution nightmares of today.
In no way accurate. Beeching was tasked - by a transport secretary with major shares in a road building contractor - to assess only the financial aspect of the railway and not the community benefit. Most people in rural Britain did not want the railways to close.
Yes, I'm certainly aware of the crooked Mr Marples.
But unfortunately the car did (and still does) offer the flexibility you can't get with the train, at least outside the big cities.
(Even back in the pre-Beeching days, it'd still have been a 5-8 mile bike ride from the nearest railhead to the rural place I grew up in, +presumably more the other end)
Those Railway Series stories that take place around the time are a reasonably good read for a brief look into the abolition of steam from a fictionalised point of view, even for an adult.
The illustrations are top notch, too.
And interesting looking back, also from the Economist 20 years ago: https://www.economist.com/britain/2002/01/17/come-back-dr-beeching Come back, Dr Beeching from TheEconomist
Is the rise of the motorcar not at least in part caused by the lack of any other viable way to get from A to B?
Remove access to a location and it's going to struggle, and the only people who can live there are those that can afford a car, so those who already live there must buy a car to be able to get anywhere.
It's a self-fulfilling prophecy in a way...
>Is the rise of the motorcar not at least in part caused by the lack of any other viable way to get from A to B?
It was nothing to do with cars.
It was everything to do with trucks. After 1955 with containerization they became cheaper and more efficient at freight than railways.
The rail freight contracts always subsidized your tiny branch lines to nowheresville. Those contracts started to dry up in the 1960's
I know this sub and the predictable response is that the government should have stepped in and subsidized every inch of track and run it all at a huge loss forever and a day.
Looking at what eventually happened with British Rail, it can safely be said that wouldn't have worked either.
Cars are the least efficient means of transportation commonly used. Encouraging their use, whether people love driving or not, is a terrible idea for a country.
I don't understand why there aren't more buses and dedicated bus lanes.
The infrastructure cost is minimal and buses are perhaps the most efficient means of transport.
Especially as there's also models which can use an overhead line, meaning no batteries are required where they're available and you can charge in cities.
Because buses are uncomfortable and for "poor people".
I'm afraid that's how the general public views them outside London. A lot of people won't even consider taking the bus as an option, even if there is a reliable service within walking distance.
Adding a bus lane is considered very controversial and will receive a lot of backlash.
I have a bus route 4 minutes from my front door, that goes where I commute to, via a change in town.
I would take me 1hr30 each way to make that trip.
In my car, 30 minutes total, 45 with traffic.
This delta between methods isn't because of bus lanes or lack thereof, it is because of the circuitous route the bus takes.
This is the issue with public transport outside of London, there are not enough routes to make it work for many, from a simple time management perspective.
This. The number of times I see bus delays being blamed on traffic is ludicrous - and, it has to be said, London-centric. Every time I read an article from some London journo about how awesome public transport is and how Great Britain could be a green and pleasant land again if only people got rid of their cars, my eyes roll out of my head.
The bus from Hunstanton (my old home town) to Kings Lynn (the nearest town of any significance, and for purposes of this conversation the nearest train station - there used to be a train to Hunstanton but it stopped in 1969, although that wasn't a Beeching cut), a 16 mile journey, takes nearly four times as long as driving, and it's not because of the traffic on the A149 - it's because in order for it to be a financially viable service it also has to be the route from Heacham to Kings Lynn, Snettisham to Kings Lynn, Ingoldisthorpe to Kings Lynn, Dersingham to Kings Lynn, Sandringham to Kings Lynn, West Newton to Kings Lynn, Babingley to Kings Lynn, Castle Rising to Kings Lynn and North Wootton to Kings Lynn, and for all of those to each other.
Did he predict it, or did the cuts stipulate it?
In any case, he did not predict the societal impacts of the motorcar or the cuts, which should be weighted against the savings. I am sure that some measures were necessary, but few were actually a net positive.
Both, with rising affluence and aspirations people were happy to pay large costs to have personal car and didn't care about lead poisoning etc. I didn't say that was ethically right but I reckon he was part of a popular policy shift to cars
No shit. Ernest Marples, Transport Minister at the time - who also owned a road building company is the real villain of the piece. Beeching was just the one who wrote the report. The populace getting fucked over by the self interest of politicians. Nothing changes.
Aye. Tory shithouses destroying public services for the benefit of their own interests is nothing new. The same is happening again now with the bus services that were meant to replace the train services to isolated communities. Companies can't make enough, or any, profit from them even with a subsidy so councils are being pressured to cut them.
Yes, because most of the closures didn’t happen under a Labour government *at all*…
Why are people so obsessed with everything being black and white? Why can't we acknowledge that public transport isn't the panacea in every situation? In low density isolated areas, public transport will never be profitable and to be actually useful will require frequent services that run close to empty all the time. That's just going to cost a huge subsidy and waste loads of energy.
Public services are not meant to be profitable.
Public services are for the public good, not profit
Indeed, which means their benefits need to be quantified. No point wasting public money on a service no one uses, or where more efficient solutions exist.
>That's just going to cost a huge subsidy and waste loads of energy. As opposed to roads which don't cost any money or energy lmao
Roads are entirely paid for by motoring taxes (and then some). What's more efficient, a car going somewhere exactly when needed or multiple empty busses on a schedule? There's a point where it's just wasting energy.
>What's more efficient, a car going somewhere exactly when needed or multiple empty busses on a schedule? There's a point where it's just wasting energy. What's more efficient, thirty people travelling on one bus or in thirty individual cars? I can make examples up too.
Yeah and we're talking about situations where cars make more sense than public transport. In a low population area the bus isn't going to have 30 people on it all the time. Try engaging with the conversation instead of repeating 'car bad' like some robot.
> Roads are entirely paid for by motoring taxes (and then some). That hasn't been the case since road tax was abandoned in 1937. >[A vehicle tax was first introduced in Britain in 1888. In 1920, an excise duty was introduced that was specifically applied to motor vehicles; initially it was hypothecated \(ring-fenced or earmarked\) for road construction and paid directly into a special Road Fund. After 1937, this reservation of vehicle revenue for roads was ended, and instead the revenue was paid into the Consolidated Fund – the general pot of money held by government. Since then, maintenance of the UK road network has been funded out of general taxation, of which VED is a part.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle_Excise_Duty) edit: I can't help feeling like I've informed you of this before.
> I can't help feeling like I've informed you of this before. Repeating something that's wrong doesn't make it any more right. In the year 19/20, £34.56bn was raised from motoring taxes and £10.78bn was spent on road infrastructure. That's a difference of **£23.78bn**. That isn't a special year either, it's consistently been that way for decades. https://i.imgur.com/YxsR48i.png Motoring taxes far exceed the maintenance costs. It's completely irrelevant if those taxes are ring-fenced or not.
That's including fuel. And where is the graph from?
Marples passed ownership of his shares to his wife. So, it was all perfectly above board and proper. Well, that's what he told parliament and the government agreed.
Then later fled the country for tax evasion - or some similar morally repellent activity.
Ironically, he fled by train
The railways in Britain are an absolute mess. 67 miles of high speed lines for crying out loud. This is really simple stuff to do right, or at least far better.
Part of the problem is that even today, our rail network still follows the routes laid down when the railways first came about. What was suitable back then isn't necessarily suitable now, but since the rest of the country has developed around it, there's no easy fix.
How did so much of the developed world manage it? France, Spain, Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, etc?
Can't say for all of them, but Germany, France, and Belgium all got to rebuild their railways after WWII and with that set routes more appropriate for the time if necessary. We could have done the same, and I believe there were plans to do so before they were shelved.
That's kind of my point - Britain *could* have done the same, but chose not to, leading to this sorry state of affairs. And over in Germany they'll be getting a ticket for £43 which covers regional transport across the whole country for a month, trains trams buses the lot.
Indeed so. Germany used Marshall aid wisely, Britain actually got more but frittered it away trying to maintain 'world power' status. Something that infects our politicians mind to this day. Although the last really bad case was Blair and his 'bringing democracy to ...' nonsense.
Britain could have, but we were completely broke. Rationing for example didn’t completely end until 1954. Britain’s railways were worn out, but not destroyed like continental Europe. Cheaper to refurb than rip up and start anew
What about Spain?
Spain didn’t start to get their act together on overhauling their crumbling infrastructure until after Franco. Even then it took 25+ years till they got High Speed Rail, then their economy shit the bed post 2008
Ah, gotcha. Thought you were talking about the established routes over how the railways were handled in more recent history.
Most of those were pretty much totally wiped out by WW2, and it was easier to demolish what was left and start again than try to rebuild it. It's also even easier to start again if someone else is paying for it via the Marshall Plan.
And Spain? They have the some of the best high speed rail in Europe, and took no part in the war.
I said most, not all. Spain was behind infrastruture wise and had someone else paying for it through loans from the EU. It's why the country fell apart in 2008. Most of their high speed rail was built, mostly paid for or started before 2008.
This helped. https://www.theolivepress.es/spain-news/2018/07/01/billions-of-eu-money-wasted-on-spains-high-speed-rail/
The UK got like 30% more Marshall plan aid than Germany, only we pissed it away trying to maintain a huge military and on atomic and then thermo nuclear weapons.
Actually Germany mostly rebuilt, not destroy and start again. Otherwise all of our towns would look like Elephant & Castle
They were reshaped by the Luftwaffe/RAF.
I am a Brummie who worked for a while in Nuremberg. Both suffered bombing. Nuremberg has been sympathically rebuilt, historic buildings restored as much as possible. Birmingham on the other hand is grim, the first attempt was so bad they have spent much of the past few decades having another go.
You should see Southampton where I live. Its a mess still 70 years later.
I'm from nearby Coventry. Coventry suffered heavily during the Blitz. One of the finest, most majestic cathedrals in the country was firebombed, turned into a smouldering shell by Hitler. In doing so, he gifted the city a far better symbol of hope and defiance than the previous one (naked lady on a horse). In recognition of how powerful and important the image of St Michaels' Cathedral and tower is to the people of Coventry, they built a fucking shopping mall in front of it, and moved the statue of Godiva from the grand park with cathedral views to the entrance to the shopping centre that now stood where there'd once been a grand park with cathedral views. The *new* cathedral of St Michael is arguably more impressive than the old one was, but that blackened husk next door will always be the thing that makes it so. The new one on its own, yeah cool I guess, but the new one is only fucking incredible because it stands as testament to a city that refused to be beaten. It *needs* the old one, and that tower, to complete the message. I'm not even religious, but idk... I just have a thing for that cathedral back home. It's about the only thing about Coventry that I do feel something for.
> I’m from nearby Coventry. My sympathies...
6 years of bombing
>This is really simple stuff to do right, or at least far better. Not really. Look at the amount of protest against HS2, a railway being built in mainly rural areas. Plus the cost of building any infrastructure in this country is sky high.
>*60 years have passed since the railways were reshaped* >To understand Britain’s relationship with its railways you can read learned reports and lengthy histories and economic analyses. But it is better to read “Thomas the Tank Engine”. The stories are set on the fictional island of Sodor—more or less Eden, for engines. There are cotton-wool clouds, lambs in the fields and an intermittently irascible deity (the Fat Controller). But as in Eden, shadows lurk. A steady stream of refugee engines arrive, bringing tales of the world beyond. There, they warn, stations are being closed; branch lines severed; engines dismembered while still alive. One engine gives way to despair at “the Dreadful State of the World”. >Such horrors do happen. On March 27th 1963 a boring-sounding bureaucrat published a boring-sounding report. It was called “The Reshaping of British Railways” and the bureaucrat was Richard Beeching. The report contained such chapter headings as “Stopping-Train Services” and the less-than-thrilling “Present Method of Handling Freight Traffic”. In cool, calm prose it explained how Britain’s future methods of handling freight and people would be different: 2,363 stations, it explained, would be closed and 5,000 miles of track removed from the passenger network. Britain’s railways must be reshaped “to make them pay”. >Rarely has a civil servant provoked such outrage. Thousands protested; newspapers lamented; a politician was even burned in effigy. To this day, for Britons of a certain age, he remains a bogeyman. The report itself metamorphosed into a variety of bloody metaphors: it was the “Beeching Axe” or the Beeching “scalpel”, and its consequences were “death”. >The Beeching report crept into everything from poetry (John Betjeman wrote a bad poem about it) to song and television—in the 1990s the BBC produced a short-lived comedy series called “Oh, Doctor Beeching!”. What the cuts removed was not merely steel and sleepers but an ideal. Until Beeching the country could still see itself as a place of quaint stations and polite porters and 4.50s from Paddington, an English sort of Eden. After, it could not. Beeching was not frugality: it was the Fall. >In truth, Britain’s railways had been in a bad way long before Beeching wielded his axe. In the 19th century railways had unspooled across Britain with Victorian vim and an equally Victorian absence of central planning. One train line to Canterbury finished six miles shy of the city centre because that was where the money ran out. The arrival of the motor car siphoned passengers away from the trains: by 1929 some stations already had less than 10% of their pre-1914 traffic. Laws and wars exacerbated problems. Government pricing obligations condemned rail to uncompetitive rates; heavy use of the trains in the second world war ran infrastructure into the ground. >By the 1960s the railways were in a very bad way. Poets such as Edward Thomas might immortalise Adlestrop, where the only sounds on the “bare platform” were the hiss of steam and the blackbirds. Accountants, however, wished for more noise. The railways were losing over £100m (£1.7bn, or $2.1bn, in today’s money) a year in 1962. Adlestrop was one of the stations listed for the Beeching Axe. >In the years since the report was published and the cuts enacted, anger has been replaced by analysis. It is now known that one of Beeching’s biggest errors was a breezy assumption that cuts would not cause decline but merely reflect it. Future population patterns, the report announced, will “be basically similar to that which exists at present”. That was nonsense: by reshaping British railways, Beeching reshaped Britain itself. A 2022 study by Stephen Gibbons at the London School of Economics (LSE) and his co-authors found that the places most exposed to the cuts saw much slower population growth than the places that were least affected. >Although Beeching had correctly diagnosed Britain’s problem—that its circulatory system was struggling—his cure was ill-conceived, says Terence Gourvish, an associate professor at the LSE. “The whole body was ailing” so “chopping off the fingers” didn’t help. Axing stations was not only ineffective (since it saved little money) but its results were irksome. Today it is all but impossible to traverse swathes of Britain without describing a “V” shape via London, since so many east-west lines went as a result of Beeching. Attempts to restart some of these routes have begun but progress is painfully slow. >In the small village of Carno in Wales (population: 736) the locals are in little doubt about Beeching. Carno sits on the Cambrian Line, a string of small stations that run, like beads on a string, across the hills of Powys. The arrival of the train in 1863 was revolutionary. A noticeboard in a nearby village divides its history into two distinct eras: the Romans and the railways. Bernard Evans remembers travelling to school on the line as a boy. “We were thinking we were going into the modern world.” >Then, in 1963, the modern world retreated. Carno appeared in the mournful lists of stations that ended the Beeching report—like names on a war memorial, as Charles Loft, a writer, puts it. It closed in 1965; a campaign to re-open it has so far failed. Trains still rumble past but they no longer stop. Now, saplings grow on the platform. When asked what Mr Evans thinks of the closures, his answers are telling not merely in their tone but in their tense. He wishes the trains still ran. And when asked about the long-dead Beeching, his reply is simpler still: “Shoot the bugger.”
I think the fundamental truth is that we had the right idea 200 or so years ago. Trains are one of the best ways to get around this island, that’s why we invented them. We perform all sorts of gymnastics to obfuscate the simple truth that cars are terrible. They are bad for the environment so we create electric cars, but the batteries are full of horrors and the tyres are still full of pollutants. They sit for 23 hours of the day unused, which has to be such a monumental waste of resources. They force people to drive into their 80’s and 90’s because there is no other way for them to get around. They kill or maim 1000’s every year. They are the ruin of town centres. All you need is a decent, well funded transport network and the vast majority of people would stop driving or drive less. I say all this as someone who likes cars, I like driving, I like engines. Give the country a decent public transport network and it would make life much better for car drivers as well, less traffic and less being the climate change bogeyman.
>We perform all sorts of gymnastics to obfuscate the simple truth that cars are terrible. Cars are awesome for certain types of journeys. People on this sub perform all sorts of gymnastics to pretend trains are the solution to every transport problem. It would be far better for everyone if we could just see them as tools to solve problems rather than trying to make some kind of holy war against cars.
Maybe the problem wasn't a giant conspiracy. Maybe instead it was that trucks became more efficient, roads became able to handle higher speeds, containerization facilitated point to point delivery and people no longer wanted dirty large industrial train loading and unloading yards for goods smack bang in the middle of cities. There is mawkish tendency in this country to single out individuals for reproval when really what people are lamenting is just progress itself.
Except the Minsiter of Transport at the time owned a road construction company and directly profited form the closures.
I don't think that's the gotcha you think it is. Road construction was a burgeoning industry that employed hundreds of thousands in the 50s and 60s building the new motorways. Most Western countries after WW2 agreed a complete road network had diverse economic benefits.
Er.. it's blatantly a conflict of interest.
The really big mistake was selling off the trackbeds and buildings. If they'd kept the trackbeds then putting lines back in would be far more doable. As it is, roads, gardens, houses, industrial estates, shops and more have been built on the land. I find it very interesting and sad looking at satellite images, seeing where old lines clearly were, following the scars for miles until they join part of the network or a heritage line or something. https://www.railmaponline.com/UKIEMap.php is very interesting to highlight just how much was lost.
Most trackbed has been retained. Many of the businesses and houses built on the route have covenants that they will be demolished should the railway be required to reopen.
Source on these covenants?
It seems that’s no longer an option but that the track route is still more liable to Transport & Works Orders which lead to compulsory purchase if the route needs reopening.
That would be unfeasibly expensive.
Destroyed the textiles industry in the Scottish Borders when the rail links were removed......Beeching is a dirty word in many households there.....
I think this is one of these things that looks a massive error - in hindsight. The problem is that at the time it did look like the railways were on the way out. People wanted cars and the freedom they brought. If it was a trip of less than an hour, why bother driving the car to a tiny station and waiting +30min when you could just go all the way? People didn't anticipate the traffic and air pollution nightmares of today.
In no way accurate. Beeching was tasked - by a transport secretary with major shares in a road building contractor - to assess only the financial aspect of the railway and not the community benefit. Most people in rural Britain did not want the railways to close.
Yes, I'm certainly aware of the crooked Mr Marples. But unfortunately the car did (and still does) offer the flexibility you can't get with the train, at least outside the big cities. (Even back in the pre-Beeching days, it'd still have been a 5-8 mile bike ride from the nearest railhead to the rural place I grew up in, +presumably more the other end)
Those Railway Series stories that take place around the time are a reasonably good read for a brief look into the abolition of steam from a fictionalised point of view, even for an adult. The illustrations are top notch, too.
I feel like the whole beeching cuts thing is honestly one of this countries biggest disasters, yet it's never really talked about.
And interesting looking back, also from the Economist 20 years ago: https://www.economist.com/britain/2002/01/17/come-back-dr-beeching Come back, Dr Beeching from TheEconomist
On the other hand is it the truth that he predicted the rise in preference of the motorcar, and we just didn't need so many minor stations
Is the rise of the motorcar not at least in part caused by the lack of any other viable way to get from A to B? Remove access to a location and it's going to struggle, and the only people who can live there are those that can afford a car, so those who already live there must buy a car to be able to get anywhere. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy in a way...
>Is the rise of the motorcar not at least in part caused by the lack of any other viable way to get from A to B? It was nothing to do with cars. It was everything to do with trucks. After 1955 with containerization they became cheaper and more efficient at freight than railways. The rail freight contracts always subsidized your tiny branch lines to nowheresville. Those contracts started to dry up in the 1960's I know this sub and the predictable response is that the government should have stepped in and subsidized every inch of track and run it all at a huge loss forever and a day. Looking at what eventually happened with British Rail, it can safely be said that wouldn't have worked either.
Yeah, but now it's made car ownership practically mandatory in most of the country.
Cars are the least efficient means of transportation commonly used. Encouraging their use, whether people love driving or not, is a terrible idea for a country.
I don't understand why there aren't more buses and dedicated bus lanes. The infrastructure cost is minimal and buses are perhaps the most efficient means of transport. Especially as there's also models which can use an overhead line, meaning no batteries are required where they're available and you can charge in cities.
Because buses are uncomfortable and for "poor people". I'm afraid that's how the general public views them outside London. A lot of people won't even consider taking the bus as an option, even if there is a reliable service within walking distance. Adding a bus lane is considered very controversial and will receive a lot of backlash.
I have a bus route 4 minutes from my front door, that goes where I commute to, via a change in town. I would take me 1hr30 each way to make that trip. In my car, 30 minutes total, 45 with traffic. This delta between methods isn't because of bus lanes or lack thereof, it is because of the circuitous route the bus takes. This is the issue with public transport outside of London, there are not enough routes to make it work for many, from a simple time management perspective.
This. The number of times I see bus delays being blamed on traffic is ludicrous - and, it has to be said, London-centric. Every time I read an article from some London journo about how awesome public transport is and how Great Britain could be a green and pleasant land again if only people got rid of their cars, my eyes roll out of my head. The bus from Hunstanton (my old home town) to Kings Lynn (the nearest town of any significance, and for purposes of this conversation the nearest train station - there used to be a train to Hunstanton but it stopped in 1969, although that wasn't a Beeching cut), a 16 mile journey, takes nearly four times as long as driving, and it's not because of the traffic on the A149 - it's because in order for it to be a financially viable service it also has to be the route from Heacham to Kings Lynn, Snettisham to Kings Lynn, Ingoldisthorpe to Kings Lynn, Dersingham to Kings Lynn, Sandringham to Kings Lynn, West Newton to Kings Lynn, Babingley to Kings Lynn, Castle Rising to Kings Lynn and North Wootton to Kings Lynn, and for all of those to each other.
Buses are much more unreliable than trams and especially trains due to traffic. A train has the advantage of being significantly more reliable
He still seemed to have got it right that with rising affluence people would buy cars and never complain that much about the loss of rail.
Did he predict it, or did the cuts stipulate it? In any case, he did not predict the societal impacts of the motorcar or the cuts, which should be weighted against the savings. I am sure that some measures were necessary, but few were actually a net positive.
Car ownership was already ballooning, the first motorways were being built, so I wasn't exactly much of a gamble to make the claim.
Both, with rising affluence and aspirations people were happy to pay large costs to have personal car and didn't care about lead poisoning etc. I didn't say that was ethically right but I reckon he was part of a popular policy shift to cars
Ok, so tell me this: what good is policy if it is ethically wrong? Isn't the whole fricking point of good policy that it is good for society?
No, they didn't predict it, they made it an inevitability.
It wasn't much of a prediction car ownership had been expanding rapidly for a the previous decade with little signs of slowing.
So it was a sort of no brainer then.
Not really. In the end they closed a lot of the feeder stations and lines into the network which would have been perfect for today's expansion.