Bit of an obscure one this, but as there’s been a couple of decent train threads on here recently it’s worth asking – Can anyone recommend a book on the Beeching axe of the 1960s?
Not really looking for a tear-stained anorak account (ie the current wiki article), but something more critical.
It seems like the railways had grown organically from the 1800s into a bloated entangled mess – reform was clearly needed. Yet Beeching is universally despised / derided as a failure in popular culture. Wondering what the straight of it is.

we as a nation couldnt afford the railways, and good money was to be made selling all the lines and trains for scrap, also there was a vast surplus of ex army lorries and a lot of unemployed men who could drive them, that helped to make the motorways a needed resourse again adding to the demise of the railways.

Google Serpell of the 70,s or 80,s where he wanted to cull nearly all the lines.

Beeching destroyed an essential infrastructure. Lines and stations were obliterated.

What was needed was an operational change – eg unmanned stations, lighter rolling stock, etc.

Pretty sure the Serpell report had no credibility – that is just from googling though.

I’m interested in the political dimension of the Beeching report where it was guillotined through, very much at odds with the consensus approach of the civil service at that time. The fact that one man’s vision, a consultant essentially, could be realised like that seems odd.

Everyone can and do use the roads, the railways always had to be paid for to travel, they needed vast investment etc, sadly a lot of investmnet was put into untried technology in the locomotives, to many builders, to many designs, and quite a lot of failures to quickly, they should have slowly got rid of steam and introduced diesel and preferably electric at a slower rate.

Now we have priovatised railways, and a publicly owned company to own the tracks, both a licence to ask for more money every yeear to fund the shareholders and waste huge amounts of tax payers cash.

The Serpell report was essentially an attempted re-run of Beeching-style closures of secondary routes. Unlike the first attempt, there were fewer obvious candidates for closure; Serpell ran into a political trap with the infamous ‘table A’, which showed all but a few ex-London mainlines closed, and left Glasgow and Edinburgh as the northern outposts of the network.

This option was seized upon by the report’s opponents, and they successfully killed the whole exercise. The report did, however, set the tone for the next few years, with BR cutting costs and attempting to close lines by stealth.

As for Dr Beeching in popular culture; my 5 year old Thomas fan, and lover of all things railway, said the other day about the “trains being sad, do they think they will be shut down?” I say, “no it’s just the slow music”, him ” but what about Dr Beeching?”. I imagine that in his head the good doctor appears as a deranged Scooby Doo style mad medic!

Chapter 14 of Christian Wolmar’s ‘Fire & Steam’ gives a pretty balanced view of the Beeching Cuts and the book as a whole is a pretty good primer on the history of Rail in this country.

My experience is that within the industry the prevailing view is that that although some of the closures on non viable routes were valid, the cuts went far too deep in most areas, largely as a result of the fact that the focus of the Beeching review was too narrow – ie on bottom line profitability of lines rather than the overall social / economic benefits of the rail network.

Wolmar references a book called The Great Railway Conspiracy by a guy called David Henshaw. Not read it, and by the sounds of it is very critical of Beeching, but may be worth checking out.

I have mixed feelings about Beeching. The railways were uneconomical at the time. The road lobby did have a strong influence on his report. We could make better use of those railway lines now in many locations.

BUT we’ve got loads of cycle routes of the back of Beeching’s axe.

Thanks SprocketJockey – some good recommendations there.

11 minutes late by Matthew Engel is very good, explains how it wasn’t just beeching really, and why everything was buggered up in the first place.

Interestingly, the latest talk within the industry is all about “devolution”, and better alignment between the TOCs and maintenance/ infrastructure. There is a distinct possibility we could be going full circle within the next couple of years to a hybrid of the BR regional model and the pre-nationalised railway.

I reckon I may be getting out at the right time!

beeching used strange methods to asses the validity of a line to. iirc one for branch line was to only consider journey which stated and end on that same branch line, so if you used a train to get to the main line your use of that line did not count towards keeping it.

Beeching also recommended that where train were taken away buses should be put in place. This part of the Beeching report was not implemented.

Lastly the transport minister at the time was a major shareholder in the road construction company that got all the government contract for the motorways.Can we say conflict of interests?

Everyone can and do use the roads, the railways always had to be paid for to travel, they needed vast investment etc,

So does road travel, transport methods need subsidy. The railways did need and do need reform, we as a nation just seem tobe spectacularly bad at it.

So does road travel, transport methods need subsidy. The railways did need and do need reform, we as a nation just seem tobe spectacularly bad at it.

Bang on, but spending on roads is seen as capital investment while pending on railways is seen as subsidy.

There was some interesting programmes on BBC Four a year or two ago called Beeching’s Tracks, Edwina Currie even presented one, you should be able to track them down online.

Pete Waterman has presented a couple of decent programmes on Beeching – one of the episodes of ‘Beeching’s Tracks’ and another called ‘Down the Line’.

Perhaps surprisingly he was supportive of much of what Beeching did.

iirc one for branch line was to only consider journey which stated and end on that same branch line, so if you used a train to get to the main line your use of that line did not count towards keeping it.

Interesting – strikes a chord with what I was told (a long time ago) about the Falmouth Branch in Cornwall. The line survived Beeching, but became a sparsely serviced passenger branch.

Of course, the line actually terminated at Falmouth docks, so had the potential for freight traffic (no idea what the dock freight traffic would have been pre Beeching…)

My relatives (farmers) would use the Penryn yard to put seasonal freight onto the train service – but all freight services on the branch were cut as being unviable…

…However, when they looked into it, all receipts for freight traffic were accounted for at Truro – where the Falmouth branch leaves the mainline.

At a stroke, the economic viability of the branchline was hugely diminished, and the viability of the mainline over stated.

This was a major double whammy, repeated all over the network – because the viability of the mainline was overstated at the expense of it’s feeder network. Remove the supporting network (all your beloved cycle trails 👿 ) and the mainline starts to look shaky.

11 minutes late by Matthew Engel is very good, explains how it wasn’t just beeching really, and why everything was buggered up in the first place

Seconded – a good read