Travel between Oxford and Cambridge is a great example of how busted the UK transport network is outside big cities. They're about 80 miles apart, as the crow flies. By road, there's no decent east-west connections so it's a good 2 hour drive. By train, it's even worse - the shortest route is typically going to involve travelling into London, changing stations via tube, then heading back out on another line - probably a three hour train journey with two connections.
Reopening the Oxford/Cambridge trainline (and by extension Cambridge/Oxford/Reading) would be a huge boost to the development of the UK tech industry, connecting academic centers to tech hubs.
"East West Rail Link is a planned railway route linking the Great Western Main Line, Oxford, Bicester, Milton Keynes, Bedford, Cambridge, Ipswich and Norwich in England using part of the former Varsity Line. The western section from Oxford to Bedford was approved by the Government in November 2011, with completion expected in 2019."
It's been obviously necessary for decades yet the Government dragged their feet on it, and they're not even planning on constructing the segment into Cambridge yet. In the meantime, Cambridge house prices have gone through the roof due to a combination of a lack of transport links and programs to encourage new businesses there, and the Government has committed huge amounts of funds to HS2, which is yet another line out of London running in parallel to existing lines. Coincidentally, traveling in and out of London is the main kind of travel our politicians do. Also coincidentally, the Beeching cuts seemed to hit cross-country lines that didn't directly benefit London the hardest too.
Beeching mostly hurt rural communities, but he absolutely murdered Wales's transport network. What were 20 minute journeys now require a 200 mile circuit via England. Here's a (spammy, sorry) article that illustrates just how mad it was and is. http://www.walesonline.co.uk/news/wales-news/7-ways-beeching...
All on the idea that people would drive to a main line station, park, then catch a train.
Except they never actually thought that, beeching and his chums were taking, uh, considerations, from the automotive lobby, just like his predecessors did when they ripped out the trams.
Cars suck for distance travel. Where did we ever get the idea otherwise?
> the Government has committed huge amounts of funds to HS2, which is yet another line out of London running in parallel to existing lines
FWIW, HS2 is mostly about increasing capacity, hence why it is parallel to existing lines. It moves intercity travel off the very busy WCML, which is near capacity, and is projected to remain near capacity after the opening of HS2 due to increase in commuter services and freight on the line.
This puts me in mind of what life is like here in Ontario, Canada. To travel by rail or bus between Waterloo and Niagara Falls requires a stop in Toronto and a layover. It's ~1.5 hours by car or ~7 by bus (and more expensive).
Ironically, since the 1960s, canals have been reopening at a faster rate than railways!
Many major canals have been completely restored (the Kennet & Avon, south Stratford, Huddersfield Narrow, Rochdale, Forth & Clyde, Edinburgh & Glasgow Union, Droitwich Barge & Junction, Caldon, Ashton) and still more are underway - including truly ambitious projects like the Thames & Severn (a canal across the hilly Cotswolds) and Wey & Arun (from London to the south coast).
The railways were massively loss-making in the 1960s, with ancient Victorian infrastructure and pre-war rolling stock commonplace. They were only being kept afloat by huge government subsidies. TBH Beeching's cuts were probably the most logical way to save the industry with what they knew at that time.
Having said that, my preference (with 60-year-old hindsight) would have been to mothball the loss-making routes, rather than tear them up completely.
Broadly true but there are some pretty big provisos.
The 1950s Modernisation Plan was British Railways' biggest misstep. Intended to bring BR out of the steam age, it was hobbled by politics, internal rivalries and short-sightedness: famously, dozens of new locomotive types were commissioned rather than standardising on two or three. To a large extent Beeching was a reaction against that ("you've had your chance") rather than an attempt to develop a successful railway for the 1970s and beyond.
Beeching did make some methodological mistakes (and again, there's much hindsight involved here, but many were pointed out at the time). I think the most infamous is not fully accounting for the traffic that branch lines fed onto main lines - a broad assumption that closing the branch line will save all its costs without impacting on the business elsewhere.
And BR under Beeching had an unwillingness to consider new ways of working that would have made the railway more economical. Eastern Region under Gerry Fiennes had great success with Paytrains - i.e. you remove the staff from stations and expect people to buy a ticket on a train - and in running short multiple units rather than full locomotive-hauled trains. In 2016 this is how most rural railways in Britain are run. But Beeching's BR refused to consider it on a national scale.
(Fiennes' book, "I Tried To Run A Railway", is an engrossing read and worthwhile for anyone interested in this part of history.)
> Having said that, my preference (with 60-year-old hindsight) would have been to mothball the loss-making routes, rather than tear them up completely.
Even twenty-five years ago when the privatisation of the railway was happening there was an expectation that passenger numbers would continue their downwards trend—certainly no though that it would end up with passenger numbers quickly increasing throughout more of less the whole country.
It's worthwhile pointing out that much of what was got rid of was duplicated routes: unless you have any expectation of the surviving route reaching capacity, what's the point in keeping a parallel alignment free? In the vast majority of cases, that rationalisation made sense, even in hindsight.
Lines like the borders line from Carlisle to Edinburgh and Birmingham to Cheltenham via Stratford were closed as "parallel alignments", and I sure everybody in the borders, along with anybody from Stratford trying to get to the South-East was completely reassured to know that there was actually no problem with them losing their access to the railway because some longer-distance travellers were still able to complete their journeys on a parallel route 50 miles away
Also: redundancy. If a road gets closed because of a traffic accident, people take a slightly slower detour, and get home. For trains, there often is no alternative that isn't at least twice as long, and includes a switch between trains with a waiting time that is long because the time schedule wasn't designed for that weird switch.
Agreed. And it'll be hard to re-claim right-of-way especially near growing towns. It'll cost billions to rebuild anywhere near the previous height of traffic. And it'll be needed especially as growth creates traffic that clogs roads.
Here in Iowa (again) some of our rail right-of-way was repurposed as 'trails on rails' which means they paved an asphalt strip down the middle and called it a trail. Seemed like a good idea- it already goes near/through/between rural towns where folks can use a good trail.
They never funded their maintenance(!) so 20 years later most are only a shadow of their original form - rutted shattered asphalt fragments with small trees growing haphazardly everywhere; gopher holes make it dangerous even for equestrian use.
But good news! it can be reclaimed for rail again when needed.
Envious! I assume the local folks fund their maintenance. Our problem is, some counties have the money and some don't. So a 50-mile trail may be fine except for 10 miles in the center that are rotten.
Iowa's roads were built all gravel (100 years ago). Then some rebuilt as pavement. I've never seen any just left to turn back - they don't do that without help.
Some were mothballed - the chase line, for example. The stretch between Walsall and Rugeley Trent Valley was closed to passengers, but remained open as an important freight line. It was then re-opened in the very late 80s with new unmanned station platforms being constructed for a low cost. It's in the process of being electrified too.
"Oh, Dr Beeching what have you done?
There once were lots of trains to catch, but soon there will be none,
I'll have to buy a bike, 'cos I can't afford a car,
Oh, Dr Beeching what a naughty man you are!"
Dear, darling Doctor Beeching. The UK is still trying to claw its way back to what it had before that fiasco :-/
> That crook literally killed a strategically viable public transport network just so he could line his own pockets.
I'm always somewhat sceptical when I hear criticism of this form. I know nothing about the case of Dr Beeching in particular, but isn't it plausible that someone supports commercial development of the road network whilst at the same time acting against the rail system simply because he believes that road is a better direction for the country to go in?
Unfortunately in the medium term he was right: road transport was cheaper and quicker at least until the end of the 70s and the oil crisis. Meanwhile air transport is cheaper and quicker for long distances.
It's only really now that road transport that has started to reach its throughput scaling limits in key places, and the need to reduce CO2 output and oil input that people are looking at rail again.
Road transport might be cheaper at first, but ongoing construction and maintenance costs do add up in a hurry, and as traffic builds the amount of money that has to be spent scales up pretty quickly.
A lot of the savings roads enjoy versus things like rail is that maintenance is perpetually deferred. A private railway has to ensure the tracks are all maintained to a very high standard, to do anything else is to invite disaster, but a local municipality can let its roads go to hell without much in the way of consequences.
If you were living at a time when motorways were seen as the way of the future, then why wouldn't you bring someone into government from that industry? It's like Michelle Lee from Google becoming head of the patent office.
The rail system just helped mop up the unmet demand from the road network. Mostly it is young people without cars, or older people with ridiculous commutes and lots of money. Outside of big cities the country had restructured itself around the A roads, not the traditional town with a railway station.
Haven't had time to finish it (paid work gets in the way...) or update it for recent reopenings, but it gives you some idea of the network we used to have.
Great map! Not sure if you are aware of http://www.openrailwaymap.org - although your project includes interesting snippets ("proposed for reopening", etc)
Thanks! Yes, OpenRailwayMap is fun. I have an OSM rendering database sitting around on my server - one of these days I'm going to sit down and do a railway stylesheet for it...
If only politicians in the US were capable of seeing things this way..
So many smaller cities in the US northeast have been isolated from the regional economy by railroad shutdowns, but there's so little interest in rail here anymore that I doubt local leadership even understand the severity of the problem.
Great example being the Lehigh Valley of Pennsylvania. Commuter rail connections to NYC and Philadelphia from Allentown & Bethlehem PA were completely dismantled in the 20th century. There's large highways connecting them but the drive is 2-3 hours, lots of traffic. It's grueling by car. Yet a person could comfortably commute by rail if it was available. So this sizable metro area with tons of charm, walkable town centers and 19th century housing stock almost frozen in time, just sitting economically sluggish as the larger cities prosper around them. Very frustrating.
Yep a lot of passenger rail lines were turned into freight only lines in the mid 20th century. Alas even a lot of those freight lines are being abandoned now. Rail infrastructure is the kind of thing that is much easier and cheaper to maintain than it is to get rid of and then build anew.
They'll get there. It'll take time for them to realize what a gold mine they abandoned, but they'll get there. In the West Coast, that's happening with a lot of lines. Los Angeles still owns a good amount of the old Red Car right of Way, and many of the transit lines opened over the past 25 years have been built using that land, with a lot of the proposals for the next 25 years doing more of the same. The Bay Area did similar with BART, using a lot of newly abandoned rail right of way, and up here, many of the proposed projects have essentially been to reopen one rail line or another that's been closed for 40-50+ years.
In the 1960s, Britain's railway lines had to either be modernized or closed. There were a lot of small lines still running on old equipment. British Rail had a huge inventory of steam engines. While steam engines are cool in small numbers, they're huge polluters and very high maintenance. (A 1940s steam engine needs about as much maintenance per day as a modern diesel-electric needs in six months, and about once a year or two, a heavily used steam locomotive needs a full rebuild.) Britain had too many trains with small numbers of passengers.
Our railway system was built by competing railway businesses with lots of inefficiency, it was nationalised, made painfully efficient (Beeching etc) and franchised out to businesses. This is the next stage where demand is catching up with the network and old routes are reopening.
I remember when the bus system was being privatised and watching the transport minister on the news explaining that he'd been 'inspired' by watching multiple double-decker buses crossing in front of parliament - all with no passengers and his feeling that 'something must be done'.
Yet London got left alone while the rest of the country got the full 'freedom' of the private sector. It's a tad annoying ;-)
The thing that bemuses me about TfL is a similar public run arrangement was recently encouraged and proposed for another part of England. It was blocked at the last minute. London definitely gets special treatment, even when it goes against the narrative.
> Also for some reason TfL remains in public hands - maybe because it's too important for private sector to mess up?
The TfL ultimately has a lot of the same responsibilities as the DfT within Greater London; the actual operations of most TfL routes are contracted out.
Of course, many cities do have tram lines - Manchester's network is substantial, reuses abandoned railway lines in part, and has received a lot of investment in recent years including a project right now to put a second line across the city centre.
Many are surprised to hear London has a tram line (South of the river, near Wimbledon), or that other towns have light rail schemes put back in within the last 20-40 years.
Guided bus routes have also started to emerge: smooth, segregated routes that run every few minutes using relatively cheap, replaceable and potentially entirely green vehicles with less up-front planning, consultation and construction than a light or heavy rail solution.
It's interesting to me that we seem to be going into an age where people value public transport more and more, but I suspect that's because VED and other costs associated with running a car in the UK have risen so sharply in recent years.
Only about 11 currently operating, apparently [1].
As for London, Wimbledon is one of four termini. The vast majority of the system is in Croydon, including loops through the town centre. There's regularly proposals for new extensions, but at the moment it looks like all of them are on ice down to lack of funding.
In Scotland at least the abysmal project management of the (new) Edinburgh trams has likely killed any chance of more new tram lines in Scotland (I don't think any party has new tram lines in their manifesto for next month's elections).
For those who don't know, it was budgeted at £375 million, and eventually opened in a cut-back scheme (with about half the route cancelled) at £776 million.
It was something of an administrative nightmare in that it was paid for by Holyrood and project managed by the local council. There's an inquiry into the causes of the failure which has also run over budget, absurdly. But I don't think it's entirely dead, there are still noises about extending it into Leith sometime in the next decade.
Meanwhile the Borders railway appears to have opened successfully - and is immediately full at commuting times. I hope they left enough space to double track it.
> Meanwhile the Borders railway appears to have opened successfully - and is immediately full at commuting times. I hope they left enough space to double track it.
Not for all of it was — there's certainly provision in places, but there's also parts where doubling would be incredibly expensive (the viaducts especially, where the maximum dimensions of the trains it has been built for are larger than it was originally built for, are inherently single-track now).
There's passive provision (ie: at not a lot of extra cost - perhaps no real new infrastructure, not entirely sure) to run a 4tph service to Gorebridge + continue half of them to the rest of the line.
I think a 4tph / 2tph service pattern is fine and future capacity could be gained by platform extensions + longer trains.
I'd rather they 'value engineer' it to that level now than build a double track railway at significantly extra cost, and spend the ~£100m (educated guess) on other railway improvement projects for other areas (eg, the quad tracking of the ECML near Musselburgh to allow them a 2tph service - will cost around £100m for the various improvements).
Several of the completely new bridges were built with single track capacity as well. I suspect the government thought they were being a bit clever forcing Network Rail to shave a few million off the cost this way, but actually just not laying the second set of rails doesn't really save much so actually the savings came in places where they will cause a lot of pain later
To be fair it was budgeted at £450m when it was approved and the work started. Current expectations are that because all the preparatory work was done, and the trams and track were already bought, the route can be completed to Leith for about £100m (in 2007 prices), so overall it's coming in at somewhat less than double the expected price. The reasons were a combination of poor project/contractor management and significant unexpected difficulties with utilities.
It doesn't really seem in this case that the budget overrun is the most controversial bit. The sting in the tail is that it resulted in the duplication of existing bus routes with an infrequent service and a comparable travel time. As an MVP it is terrible - what would the Show HN comments be like? "did you even identify your target market?"
The more disappointing part is that it tends to poison the well for ambitious public transport projects in future. That Leith extension will come some time after the Last Trumpet.
But, you know, just as long as RBS got their lovely public funded tram linking Gogar Deathstar to town then it was all worth it.
Every time I've been on it it's been busy and reasonably fast, an impression which is well backed up by the usage stats. Definitely speeds up a lot of journeys from Edinburgh park. My impression is that most of the criticism comes from people heading to the airport where the bus is still by far the best option, although even then trams successfully drag people onto public transport who have strong prejudices about buses.
It is pathetic slow. This trams should travel 70-100km/h not 40km/h. It is also almost empty between 10-16 when people are at work in banks (Gogarburn, Gyle). Ticket system is also ridiculous, you need to validate you card twice.
The speed from the airport down to the depot is pretty shocking, mostly because it takes a whole bunch of ridiculously tight turns. Once it's through that it picks up quite a lot. Never seems to zoom along, although as much as anything else I think that's because it's a much smoother ride than the bus.
> The speed from the airport down to the depot is pretty shocking, mostly because it takes a whole bunch of ridiculously tight turns.
That's true, though it's only c. 3km of the 14km route. Certainly the 10km/h restriction round those bends makes it seem crazy slow and impedes progress out there. (I originally wrote, though deleted it, a question wondering how big the time saving would be; perhaps a minute?)
The section beyond Murryfield is mostly straight and it does get up to a fair speed between stops, which are mostly about 1km apart. It's the crawl around Murryfield (due to having to take a circular route around the edge of Haymarket (railway) depot) and the curves out by the airport that really kill any feeling of speed, though, no matter how fast it gets up elsewhere.
Roughly the same thing as the Beeching cuts is currently happening to night trains on the European continent. There is demand, but due to a combination of high track access charges, the fact that train operating company management is only interested in high speed trains, and lack of vision by the governments and EU, night trains are being cut drastically in both Germany and France.
Does the UK, or other countries, have a political movement similar to the U.S. that opposes government investment in things like transportation, education, etc?
Not as strongly. The main issue is, for all the cheap talk that comes out of the government, the fact is that spending (on many things, but especially infrastructure) is divided into London (plenty of money) and the rest ("maybe some of what's left, and you provincials better be grateful").
Kind of, some people think we should reduce the deficit by cutting government spending, others want to spend less on the NHS, but nobody takes it anyway near the level seen in the USA.
Richard Beeching cut 100,000 jobs, closed 2,000 railway stations & 5,000 miles of track built at the cost of untold labourers' lives. Pollution, traffic jams and commuter misery were some of the results.
He was a public servant who knew he'd never have to bear the responsibility for his actions which affected millions.
Don't stress the "public servant" overmuch. He was a buccaneering captain of private industry who was given five years' leave from his employer (ICI, Imperial Chemical Industries) to come and sort out the railways.
This was in the context of British Rail having just wasted a huge amount of public money: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_rail_transport_in_G... . Beeching did the job he was hired for and did it well: he wrote a report that identified which lines were profitable and which weren't. The politicians who took action based on these facts are the ones who bear the responsibility for those actions.
To be fair his analysis would be better described as nearly competent than "done well". Government ministers were responsible for approving the cuts he recommended (and a few he didn't), but they did so based on partial and often completely inaccurate figures and without any challenge to closure as the only option. Alternatives like de-staffing and removal of common carrier obligations could have transformed the economic case for a lot of lines, as indeed could the faster roll-out of diesels.
Burdensome taxes to support underutilized rail infrastructure cause misery too. We can call names at public policy, but that's not a good way to manage public policy. Efficiency has to matter too.
And, strangely, this article insists there's no central decision-making group for managing rail stations and lines. Then, how did Mr. Beeching manage to close all those lines?
When Beeching wrote the report the stations, carriages, services, and rail were publicly owned and centralised under one public company: British Rail.
In the mid-90s the services, carriages, and the stations were sold off as 14-year franchises to the private firms (most of which are actually public rail companies from other countries such as Germany and France), but the rail itself kept in a weird thing called National Rail that has an odd public/private structure that I don't understand. Ownership and responsibility for the network is somewhat unclear in many cases. I think at this point there is a political consensus that its been a complete mess and a botched privatisation that either need to be redone or just be re-nationalised, though Conservatives try to not talk about it if they can (they implemented it).
There was an awkward period in recent years in which one of the private companies abandoned a major line as unprofitable and it was temporarily nationalised - it ended up becoming the most popular and profitable line while under public management. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_Coast_(train_operating_co...
In terms of operations, the carriages were sold off for a song as 3 theoretically competing rolling stock operating companies (ROSCOs), which the francisees are pretty much obliged to lease from. These remain a license to print money.
The stations were all sold as part of Railtrack, although with a few exceptions they are operated by the train operators.
The initial franchises were largely for 7 years - the 14 year model came later. There was also no involvement from other national operators at this time - North-east and GWR were management buy-outs, although they fairly quickly sold themselves on to bus companies, Bus companies took over most of the rest of the franchises as well, leaving the rest to Sea Containers, Virgin (working 50-50 with... a bus company), and Connex which was basically a French bin lorry company.
National Rail is effectively just the remains of the BR branding, and was passed alongside the Rail Settlement Plan (which is very broadly the ticketing operation) to the Association of Train Operating Companies.
The East Coast line was abandoned twice as being not-profitable within the constraints of making the required premium payments to the government. Nationalization was reasonably successful, and the nationalized company did make premium payments, but they were not as much as National Express would have had to pay to retain the franchise.
Sorry for a double-reply, but I missed this bit before…
> I think at this point there is a political consensus that its been a complete mess and a botched privatisation that either need to be redone or just be re-nationalised, though Conservatives try to not talk about it if they can (they implemented it).
Regardless of whether they're willing to, the non-ministerial Competition and Markets Authority undertook a project to "looks at whether increasing competition in passenger rail services could lead to better value for money and improve service quality"[0]. Nobody is bound to the results, but it seems compatible with what the Conservative policy has been: keep the privately run operators, but have them compete on-track (i.e., both run services) compared with the current status of just having them compete off-track (i.e., bidding for the franchise).
> the rail itself kept in a weird thing called National Rail that has an odd public/private structure that I don't understand
No, it wasn't. The rail itself was sold off as Railtrack.
Following on from the Hatfield crash, after which it spent £580 million on repairing similar track faults as which caused the Hatfield crash, and a few hundred million more on compensation, which led to the failure of the company and it entered "railway administration" (essentially a special form of administration created along with the privatisation of the railways to avoid the railway ceasing operating when in administration). Network Rail then bought Railtrack in 2002, bringing the railway infrastructure back into public hands. Railtrack was then subsequently liquidated.
> but the rail itself kept in a weird thing called National Rail
It's called "Network Rail", "National Rail" is the organisation that provides a joined up timetabling and ticketing system for all of the train operating companies (e.g. Virgin, GWR, ScotRail etc).
Network Rail operates and maintains the physical infrastructure upon which the trains run e.g. track, signalling, special trains (such as de-icers, permanent way test trains, leaves-on-the-line cleaning trains).
edit: prior to Network Rail there was RailTrack which went bust after the fallout from the Hatfield rail crash.
Sure. I'm in the US. Iowa's DOT has constantly reevaluated the use of roads as land-use and rural residences change. Bridges de-commissioned; road maintenance turned to 'class B' which means no maintenance. In fact they recently re-committed their budget 100% to maintenance and 0% to new roads. Mostly because global weather instability has been really rough on our huge, vulnerable road network. Agriculture is important to us; every field has to have access to roads and markets.
Normally I'd be against nationalisation, but having been a 'SouthEastern' commuter for over 20 years, I can only hope this will result in an improved service.
TfL doesn't actually run the TfL Rail services—the big difference is their operator receives a fixed sum for operating them, compared with the other operators where they pay a fixed amount to the DfT and pocket any profit they get beyond that. Arguably, the big difference is that it means TfL Rail will only get investment if TfL decides, because there's no motivation for the operator to do so. At the same time, TfL Rail isn't in competition with the Underground, etc. so better inter-modal connectivity becomes more worth investment.
In practice, other British rail companies only seem to make improvements if the government pays for them most of the time too. There's very little actual private-sector investment in the railways; it basically just seems to be a license to print money.
Chiltern are owned by Deutsche Bahn are they not? A state operator running a better railway, who'd've thought it. (And aren't the improvements all funded by the back door by central government anyway?)
There's plenty of improvements that are made by TOCs, though often not the things that get big headlines: service frequency increases are often done by the TOC, wifi on-board became commonplace on intercity services without government funding, etc.
Certainly there's plenty of cases where the improvements are only made because they're a requirement of the franchise specification (with or without funding), but I think it's unfair to say that all improvements have happened because of government intervention.
We're in the middle of trying to establish a high speed corridor at the moment, I'm all for it personally but honestly it's been a ludicrously expensive project so far and the opposition to it is huge and mounting.
As the Beeching Report [0] itself states on page 6, in 1963 on gross revenues of £474.7m the total deficit was 33%; £-159.3m (net receipts £-86.9m, interest and charges £49m, capital interest £23.4m), which is 1.3% of the 1963-64 Public Spending of £12,000m.
But your society let him do this. Were there a massive uproar, this measure would probably be downsized or cancelled. I think we too should stop letting random public servants assume that kind of decision-making.
Many of the pre-Beeching lines cannot be re-opened, as they have been built over with roads and housing, especially in the South East.
The closest you will get to experiencing pre-Beeching railways is the Hogwarts Express in Florida, I'm afraid.
Reopening the Oxford/Cambridge trainline (and by extension Cambridge/Oxford/Reading) would be a huge boost to the development of the UK tech industry, connecting academic centers to tech hubs.