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.
Particularly the transport minister who had a background running a construction company that built motorways:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beeching_cuts#The_people_and_t...