Beeching cuts Concepts

Rush Hour: How 500 Million Commuters Survive the Daily Journey to Work

by Iain Gately · 6 Nov 2014 · 352pp · 104,411 words

peak of over 1.1 billion in 1959 to around 650 million in 1980. A proportion of the fall was caused by the so-called ‘Beeching cuts’, named after Dr Richard Beeching, who produced two reports, in 1963 and 1965, which recommended that British Railways’ network should be pruned back to trunk

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lines and major branches. Several thousand miles of tracks were closed, including some commuter lines, although the Beeching axe fell mainly on rural stations, many of which had never been popular or profitable. The cuts were resented by the public, some of whom looked

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range to the horizon and beyond. The Soviet rail system was growing while its counterparts in the West were contracting. In the 1960s, when the Beeching cuts removed several thousand miles of track from service in Britain, the USSR added nearly 500 kilometres every year. However, these were mostly for moving freight

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wedding. It’s now something of a commuter-shed serving the nearby cities of Winchester, Portsmouth and Southampton. Its railway station was closed in the Beeching cuts of the 1960s, and the nearest surviving station at Botley is four miles away along a twisting country road that has several crosses, with bunches

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1997, while the average link between suburbs and centre was left to run with decrepit and overcrowded stock – if it wasn’t axed by the Beeching cuts. The latest manifestation of the bias towards grand projects is High Speed 2 (HS2), a new line that’s planned to run between London and

Britain's 100 Best Railway Stations

by Simon Jenkins · 28 Jul 2017 · 253pp · 69,529 words

easily. The handsome main station building was designed in 1846 by Sir William Tite for the Lancashire & Carlisle Railway. By the 1990s, a combination of Beeching cuts and British Rail neglect had reduced it to dereliction. Only Herculean efforts by the Carnforth Railway Trust brought it and the island platform back to

The World's First Railway System: Enterprise, Competition, and Regulation on the Railway Network in Victorian Britain

by Mark Casson · 14 Jul 2009 · 556pp · 46,885 words

, although there are some cases where the Wrst mover did not appear to choose wisely. A similar pattern was evident in the selection of the Beeching cuts of the 1960s: the lines that were Wrst to be closed were often those that were the last to be constructed, suggesting that they followed

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Yorkshire, which had a four-way hub at Market Weighton. It was eventually built in full, although most of it was closed down during the Beeching cuts of the 1960s. The construction of integrated regional schemes was encouraged by the Railway Committee of the Board of Trade, although this did no good

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Junction line from Whitacre to Hampton-in-Arden— but most were simply downgraded to local use rather than closed altogether. It was not until the Beeching cuts of the 1960s that wholesale closures occurred. Closures were so unusual that promoters could count on existing railways staying open—indeed, building a connection to

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many people have lamented what they perceive as the decline of the British railway system. The root of the problem is often attributed to the Beeching cuts of the 1960s, which eliminated many dead-end branches and some duplicate main lines. Privatization in 1994 is also said to have made matters even

A History of Modern Britain

by Andrew Marr · 2 Jul 2009 · 872pp · 259,208 words

the collapse of the car industry a decade later, or the end of shipbuilding on the Clyde. Suspicions have been heard ever since that the Beeching cuts were politically motivated. They had been prepared for by a secret committee on which sat industrialists but no railway people. They came a few years

Bike Boom: The Unexpected Resurgence of Cycling

by Carlton Reid · 14 Jun 2017 · 309pp · 84,038 words

to be rolled out further. FOLLOWING THE 1963 publication of Dr. Beeching’s report mentioned earlier, the motor-centric government of the day wielded the “Beeching Axe” and ripped out more than 5,000 miles of track from Britain’s historic and world-famous rail network. The steel rails may have been

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, in 1992, became director general of Britain’s Countryside Commission. In 1963, writing in Architectural Review, Dower proposed that the track beds left after the Beeching cuts should form a national system of “greenways,” and that it would be cyclists who would be the greatest beneficiaries of them. The idea lay fallow

Fuller Memorandum

by Stross, Charles · 14 Jan 2010 · 366pp · 107,145 words

side and sporadically illuminated by isolated lampposts. It used to be a railway line, decades ago, one of the many suburban services closed during the Beeching cuts--but it wasn't a commuter line. (I stumbled across it not long after we moved to this part of town, and it caught my

British Rail

by Christian Wolmar · 9 Jun 2022 · 337pp · 100,260 words

to grasp the principles of railway economics was to lead to the most infamous period in British Railways’ history: the publication in 1963 of the Beeching report and its aftermath. If the Modernisation Plan was a positive outcome of the conjunction of a number of political factors, the arrival of Dr Richard

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message picked up by the media.15 In a report to a Cabinet meeting in early March, Marples set out precisely how he wanted the Beeching report to be presented and acted upon. Speed was of the essence in implementing his plan, and basically what he considered the busybodies of the local

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town of around 16,000 people in Lincolnshire, to spend a couple of weeks on a farm nearby. However, the line fell victim to the Beeching cuts, worsening the economic situation of an already deprived area; and indeed Louth, which had been something of a railway hub, lost its other lines as

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a car depended for their mobility’. Her task was not made easier by her civil servants, who, she felt, were ‘temperamentally inclined to accept the Beeching cuts’, nor by the fact that British Rail’s annual deficit had grown to £159 million.5 Castle asked Stanley Raymond, Beeching’s replacement as chairman

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agreement with Raymond, she had to win over the unions. She succeeded by stressing that this was a much better outcome than if the second Beeching report had been implemented. She also promised that anyone made redundant would be well treated, a crucial red line for the unions. Despite some public protests

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, producing what economists call ‘agglomeration benefits’. Bustitution reared its ugly head again, even though Crosland was aware that it hadn’t worked previously after the Beeching cuts because the service was invariably simply inferior to that offered by trains. Crosland vowed it would be different this time, without explaining how, apart from

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services on lines that elsewhere it sought to close and suggested shutting the line between Spalding and March, which had already fallen foul of the Beeching axe. The Guardian did not hold back, calling it ‘a really rotten report’.23 It was the second part, which considered a series of options for

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the nineteenth century rather than in the final quarter of the twentieth. Nowhere was this more true than in its industrial relations. Even after the Beeching cuts, British Rail was still a very large organization which carried out many tasks not undertaken by today’s railway, such as constructing trains, running hotels

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was career managed so you could be in a parcels office one month and then working in a ticket office the next one. The second Beeching report was actually positive and lots was happening with the end of steam, the West Coast electrification and the TGV in France, all of which suggested

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the closures, is David Henshaw’s The Great Railway Conspiracy: The Fall and Rise of Britain’s Railways since the 1950s (Leading Edge, 1994). The Beeching report and its aftermath have stimulated a vast literature. Charles Loft’s Last Trains: Dr Beeching and the Death of Rural England (Biteback Publishing, 2013) is

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169 driver only operation 222 flexible rostering 218, 219–20 and NUR 218–19 OfQ 311 strikes 218–21 Atlantic Coast Express 52 Austin, Chris Beeching report 86, 88–9, 98 on bias towards affluent rail passengers 145 on closures 156 graduate training scheme 240–41 Settle–Carlisle line 264 singling 137

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see also Ministry of Transport Derbyshire, Nick 238 Design Panel 107, 111 Design Research Unit 107 The Development of the Major Railway Trunk Routes (second Beeching report) 95–8, 99, 101, 133, 240 diesel locomotives 5, 13, 84, 120–21, 125, 252 and APT 170 Deltics 5, 15, 84–5, 95, 185

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tickets 120, 317 choking off 307 discounts 12, 190, 287–8 increases 306–7, 328 market pricing 120 restrictions on rises 58–9 Faulkner, Richard Beeching report 86, 88–9, 98 on bias towards affluent rail passengers 145 on closures 156 Settle–Carlisle line 264 Stedeford report 79–80 Fenchurch Street station

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-speed routes 165–6 steam locomotives 123 franchising system xv–xvi, 337, 340–42 Fraser, Tom 98, 99, 130 freight services 188, 191–2, 328 Beeching report 86, 92–3 computerization 204 container traffic 92, 93, 131, 137 and electrification 13–14 marshalling yards 65–7 merry-go-round coal wagons 92

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197 Harrow and Wealdstone rail crash 34 Hatfield rail crash 339 Heath, Ted 140 helicopters 57 Hemingway, Brian 293–4 Henshaw, David 53–4, 78 Beeching report 85, 89, 101 Branchline Committee 69–70 steam locomotives 27, 29 Transport Act 1953 58 Herald of Free Enterprise disaster 229 Hidden, Anthony 293, 295

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203–4 mystery tours 46–7 NASA 112 National Freight Corporation 137 National Union of Railwaymen (NUR) 197, 200, 213, 214 and ASLEF 218–19 Beeching report 92 Blue Pullmans 160 driver only operation 219 flexible rostering 217 strikes 60–61, 198, 212, 217–18 see also RMT nationalization 17–25, 53

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structure 253–4, 257 and Ridley 257, 264–5, 302 sectorization 258, 260, 267, 279 Settle–Carlisle line 262, 264 Reshaping of British Railways (first Beeching report) 84, 85–95, 100, 101, 162 restaurant cars 37 RFS Industries 235 Ribblehead viaduct 123, 261, 263, 264 Richards, John 42–3 Ridley, Nicholas East

On the Slow Train: Twelve Great British Railway Journeys

by Michael Williams · 1 Apr 2010 · 216pp · 69,790 words

reads, ‘Future bright for delightful railway lines’. Although the future is less bright, I think, for newspapers like this one, who are undergoing their own Beeching axe all over the country as declining circulations put the parish pump out of business and the Internet takes over. Who would have bet, back in

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your view. She introduced the breathalyser, the 70 mph speed limit on motorways and car seat belts, but also presided over 2,050 miles of Beeching cuts in a betrayal of Prime Minister Harold Wilson’s pledge to reverse them. Even before Beeching, BR was swinging the axe in the West Country

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as any secondary railway in Britain – lucky it was electrified in British Rail’s 1955 Modernisation Plan, since this almost certainly saved it from the Beeching axe. But Graeme Bunker, the man in charge of the Cathedrals Express, is less interested in the scenery than whether we’re going to get to

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roofs and once-splendid wooden structures mouldered away with dry rot. Weeds grew through cracks in the platforms. It was the perfect scenario for the Beeching axe. But change was in the air. There were the first inklings that the endless advance of the motor car might end up strangling London, and

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-iron canopy comes from the demolished Pump House Hotel in the town and the passing loop in the platforms was only re-established after the Beeching cuts left the line bereft of proper places for trains to pass. In the 1960s Beeching also robbed the county of the Mid-Wales Line, which

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. But then came calamity. Running through an area of thin population with no heavy industry, the Heart of Wessex was a prime target for the Beeching axe. The names of the stations that closed in 1966 are an evocative rollcall of rural Dorset – Evershot, Marston Magna, Grimstone and Frampton and Bradford Peverell

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mud’ or ‘That big six-wheeler, scarlet-painted, London Transport, diesel-engined, 97-horsepower omnibus’? Or ‘Slow Train’, written in 1963, the year of the Beeching report. The song is a litany of some of the poetic-sounding country stations that were due to be closed by Beeching. But it is something

Fire and Steam: A New History of the Railways in Britain

by Christian Wolmar · 1 Mar 2009 · 493pp · 145,326 words

neighbour, the Great Eastern, with the shareholders losing much of their investment. The line, like so many built in this period, was closed following the Beeching Report, with passenger services ceasing in 1964 and freight the following year. There were, quite literally, hundreds of similar lines spreading around Britain. Even the Isle

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of the 1896 Act. The jam kept the railway going for over half a century, but it closed to passengers in 1951, long before the Beeching cuts, and to freight a decade later. With so many marginal lines built since the 1860s, it is hardly surprising that there were some early closures

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income from ticket sales and carriage of freight, the issue is far more complex in reality. As we will see in the debate over the Beeching cuts (in Chapter 14), the kernel of the problem was to determine what proportion of that revenue would be permanently lost, as many people using a

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commissioned, which might have helped create a corporate image but was a waste of scarce resources. David Henshaw, the author of a study on the Beeching cuts, put it wittily: ‘The British Transport Commission had inherited 400 odd [in fact it was 448] classes of steam locomotives and dealt with the problem

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and branch services to diesel was a missed opportunity given that the resulting cost economies could have made these lines far more resistant to the Beeching axe wielded in the 1960s. This was not for lack of available technology. As far back as 1921, one of Colonel Stephens’s railways, the Weston

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schemes such as electrifying vast swathes of line in the Eastern Region that served remote communities in the Lincolnshire fens (which soon fell to the Beeching axe). The London Midland Region tried to bid for the ridiculous number of 660 electric locomotives for the West Coast Main Line when 100 later sufficed

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be joined together. Many units, not necessarily the worst but those that happened to have been built in fewest numbers, were soon scrapped as the Beeching cuts (see below) began to bite. The Modernization Plan had called for a large programme of electrification of the West Coast Main Line to Manchester, Liverpool

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but in any case logic was not part of the Beeching process. These caveats were quickly forgotten in the orgy of closures that ensued. The Beeching report had been commissioned in order to demonstrate that minor railway lines were fundamentally uneconomic and it was hardly surprising that this was its conclusion. He

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up a commission in 1982 to investigate the future of the railways, headed by a former civil servant, Sir David Serpell, whose recommendations made the Beeching cuts look remarkably modest; on the other, the government gave the go-ahead for the modernization and electrification of the East Coast line, the biggest project

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Green, ref1 BBC, ref1 Beasley, Ammon, ref1 Beaufort, Duke of, ref1 Beckenham, ref1 Beckton, ref1 Bedford–St Pancras line, ref1 Beeching, Richard, ref1, ref2, ref3 Beeching cuts, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11 ‘Beer Trains’, ref1 Belfast, ref1 Belgium, ref1, ref2, ref3 Belmont station, ref1 benevolent funds

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, ref2, ref3 Clapham, ref1 Clapham Junction accident, ref1 Clayton tunnel accident, ref1 clergy, ref1, ref2 Clifton Suspension Bridge, ref1 closures, ref1, ref2, ref3; see also Beeching cuts Clyde, river, ref1 coaches, gas-powered, ref1 coal, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5; prices, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11; versus coke, ref12; industry, ref13

The Norm Chronicles

by Michael Blastland · 14 Oct 2013

miles a week by train? There is huge variability, ranging from the dedicated commuter to someone in the countryside, cut off from trains by the Beeching cuts in the 1960s, to whom a train trip is a rare treat (or not). At the bottom of this distribution will be sufferers from ‘siderodromophobia