Beeching did not believe he was “preparing the country for a future based on road and air travel”.

Had he been so minded, he would not have allowed the London to Manchester, Birmingham and Liverpool electrification to continue – the project almost ran out of money during his tenure at the British Railways Board – which finished London to Birmingham flights and made London to Manchester a competitive market.

Beeching was given a brief and worked to it. The decisions on what to cut were ultimately made by successive Governments of both major parties.

He also showed that the railways should major in what they did best – InterCity express passenger trains, commuter services in the largest cities, and freight in trainloads. This is, essentially, most of what the railway does today.

I posted on the Beeching misapprehension recently:

http://zelo.tv/YQ3umu

but I see he is still being called wrong. It was ever thus.

Beeching is and always was merely the monkey of the double-act. The organ-grinder and real villain of the piece was one Ernest (later Baron) Marples, one time Minister Of Transport – but first and foremost proprietor of the largest road-building firm in the country.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernest_Marples

Insisting he’d divested himself of the company (and the consequent conflict of interest) before joining Parliament, it later transpired that he had indeed sold said company – to his wife, of course. Marples was last seen stuffing vast quantities of various denominations of currencies and bonds into a suitcase and fleeing the country ahead of a sweeping investigation over allegations of vast tax evasion and fraud. If you want a window into the “Ur” state of the “entrepreneurial” Tory soul, you could do a lot worse than study this carpetbagging shyster.

It’s often instructive in this context to look into the history to see how we came to be where we are. As they say: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

“The Railway Mania was an instance of speculative frenzy in Britain in the 1840s. It followed a common pattern: as the price of railway shares increased, more and more money was poured in by speculators, until the inevitable collapse. It reached its zenith in 1846, when no fewer than 272 Acts of Parliament were passed, setting up new railway companies, and the proposed routes totalled 9,500 miles (15,300 km) of new railway. Around a third of the railways authorised were never built – the company either collapsed due to poor financial planning, was bought out by a larger competitor before it could build its line, or turned out to be a fraudulent enterprise to channel investors’ money into another business.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railway_Mania

Railway Mania was the dot.com boom of its time.

HS2 should be abandoned until it is really needed. Across most of europe the drive for rail investment is coming about because freight transport is so heavy that it can no longer co-exist with fast passenger trains. So new lines are being built to move fast inter-city passenger traffic away, freeing up pathways for freight.

Due to the collapse of Railfreight from political indifference, this pressure doesn’t exist in the UK.

The umpty billion for HS2 should be re-allocated to expanding the network where it is needed and begin to encourage freight away from our chocked roads and back onto the rails where it belongs.

@3

But like the dot.com boom, the more fanciful projects fell by the wayside and were never completed and those that were completed stood or fell on their own merits under BR. Christian Wolmar posits quite reasonably that by the ’60s BR was in fact successfully rationalising its own network based on need. The Marples/Beeching plan was little more than a (sadly) successful attempt to justify spending hundreds of millions on road building by cutting the rail network off at the knees.

@4

It’s not about practicality, it’s about being seen to be doing something, even if it is ultimately useless. HS2 is something they can point to to offset the accusation of being in the pockets of the motorist lobby.

I remember the railways before Beeching. I took the train into Manchester every day to school. Then, suddenly, we didn’t have a station and I had to take the bus. It was a big improvement – cheaper, more reliable, cleaner, more friendly, warmer, on time … no more detention for being late!

Clearly the train was still the only option for the long haul – going to Leeds or Liverpool, for example, and the rare visit to London. But the train was far from a pleasure.

I’m not sure rail has improved since then. These days I prefer to drive or even fly within the UK. Trains are simply too expensive (even with subsidies), too crowded and too inconvenient (compared to a car).

Obviously trains are ideal for travel from the outskirts of London into the centre. There really is no option. But why are we subsidising these routes? I would guess 90% of the UK population travel rarely by train. Why are they subsidising the 10% who do especially as most are in the south east? (Beeching was, of course, London-centric as a brief inspection of the rail network map will confirm.)

5

“But like the dot.com boom, the more fanciful projects fell by the wayside and were never completed and those that were completed stood or fell on their own merits under BR.”

The Railways Act of 1921 provided for the grouping of 120 separate and often competing railway operating companies into the four companies – LMS, LNER, GWR and SR- which were nationalised into British Railways in 1947.

The Railways Act 1921, also known as the Grouping Act, was an Act of Parliament enacted by the British government of David Lloyd George intended to stem the losses being made by many of the country’s 120 railway companies, move the railways away from internal competition, and to retain some of the benefits which the country had derived from a Government-controlled railway during and after the Great War of 1914-1918.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railways_Act_1921

Beeching was by no means the first government initiative to sort out the historic legacy of too many lines serving the interests of small numbers of passengers from small rural stations. I became aware in the early 1970s of an active Conservative lobby for their cause. The facts are that railways can provide some services relatively efficiently: bulk freight, intercity passenger services and, for social reasons, commuter services into major conurbations so as to reduce road congestion. Of course, in London, the Congestion Charge was introduced to reduce road use in central London.

Btw the economic theory under-pinning road pricing was developed in the late 1950s by Alan Walters, who went on to become Mrs T’s personal economic adviser. He wrote a manual for the World Bank on the subject:

Track Costs and Motor Taxation, Journal of Industrial Economics (1954) and The Theory and Measurement of Private and Social Cost of Highway Congestion, Econometrica (1961), as well as: The Economics of Road User Charges (John Hopkins University Press, 1969).

More surprising, as recently as the 1970s senior Labour figures wanted to close the railways because they were transport for the wealthy.

This isn’t at all surprising – it’s exactly the same nonsense that many Labour and left-of-Labour activists spouted about Crossrail and are now spouting about HS2.

Helen: you’re bizarrely and weirdly wrong about rail freight transport in Great Britain: freight transport tonne-km increased by 60% in the 15 years from 1995-2010, and now accounts for 12% of surface freight. Network Rail is expecting another 30% growth over the next decade.

The main justification for Phase I of HS2 (which is a capacity enhancement project with speed as a minor additional benefit) is precisely the same as you’ve noted happens in the rest of Europe: to free up more paths for railfreight and for commuter trains.

Finally – it’s worth remembering that Beeching did his work in the 1960s, when the kind of detailed research and analytical methodologies that we now base transport decisions on were in their absolute infancy (occasionally, rail geeks will whinge that his work was RIGGED!!! because of some irrelevant methodological flaw that reflected the fact he was the first person to do it).

It was a time before the concept of carrying out a B/CA for projects with greater social than private returns was even really understood. Not only was that not Beeching’s brief, it wasn’t even something that it would have been reasonable to expect Marples to understand or commission.