Beeching cuts
The Beeching Axe is an informal name for the British Government's attempt in the 1960s to reduce the cost of running the British railway system. The name derives from the main author of the report The Reshaping of British Railways, Dr. Richard Beeching. Although this report also proposed the development of new modes of freight service and the modernisation of trunk passenger routes, it is best remembered for recommending the wholesale closure of what it considered to be little-used and unprofitable railway lines, and the removal of stopping passenger trains and closure of local stations on other lines.
The report was a reaction to the significant losses which had begun in the 1950s as the expansion in road transport began to abstract significant passenger and goods traffic from the railways; losses which continued to bedevil British Railways despite the introduction of the railway modernisation plan of 1955 [1]. Beeching proposed that only drastic action would save the railways from increasing losses in the future.
However, successive governments were more keen on the cost-saving elements of the report rather than those elements requiring investment. Over 4,000 miles of railway and 3,000 stations were closed in the decade following the report, being a reduction of 25% of route miles and 50% in the number of stations. To this day in railway circles and amongst older people, particularly in those parts of the country that suffered most from the cuts, Beeching's name is still synonymous with the mass closure of railways and consequent loss of many local services.
Background
In tune with the mood of the early 1960s, the transport minister in Harold Macmillan's Conservative government was Ernest Marples, the director of a major road-construction company (his two-thirds shareholding were divested to his wife whilst he was a minister).[2][3] Marples believed that the future of transport lay with roads, and that railways were a dead-end relic of the Victorian past.
An advisory group known as the Stedeford Committee (after its chair, Sir Ivan Stedeford) was set up to report on the state of British transport and provide recommendations. Also on the Committee was Richard Beeching, who at the time was the Technical Director of ICI. He was later, in 1961, appointed Chairman of the newly formed British Railways Board. Both Stedeford and Beeching clashed on a number of issues related to the latter's proposals to drastically prune the rail infrastructure. In spite of questions being asked in Parliament, Sir Ivan's report was never published and the proposals for the future of the railways that came to be known as the "Beeching Plan" were adopted by the Government, resulting in the closure of a third of the rail network and the scrapping of a third of a million freight wagons.
Beeching believed the railway system should be run like a business and not a public service, and that if parts of the railway system did not pay their way—like some rural branch lines—they should be closed. His reasoning was that once these were closed, the remaining core of the system would be restored to profitability.
When Beeching was Chairman of British Railways he initiated a study of traffic flows on all the railway lines in the country. This study took place during the week ending 23 April 1962 , two weeks after Easter. The results of which were used to include in the report which concluded that 80% of the traffic was carried on just 20% of the network, with much of the rest of the system operating at a loss. The "The Reshaping of British Railways" report [4] (or Beeching I report) of 27 March, 1963 proposed that out of Britain's then 18,000 miles (29 000 km) of railway, some 6,000 miles (9 700 km) of mostly rural branch and cross-country lines should be closed. Furthermore, many other rail lines should lose their passenger services and be kept open for freight only, and many of the lesser-used stations should close on lines that were to be kept open. The report was accepted by the Government.
At the time, the highly controversial report was called the "Beeching Bombshell" or the "Beeching Axe" by the press. It sparked an outcry from many communities that would lose their rail services, many of which (especially in the case of rural communities) had no other means of public transport.
The government argued that many rail services could be provided more cheaply by buses, and in a policy known as "bustitution" (a portmanteau of "bus" and "substitution"), promised that abandoned rail services would have their places taken by replacement bus services.
A significant part of the report also proposed that British Rail electrify some major main lines and adopt containerized freight traffic instead of outdated and uneconomic wagon-load traffic. In general, politicians jumped at the money-saving parts of the plan but were less enthusiastic about those parts that required expenditures. Some of those plans were eventually adopted, however, such as the creation of the Freightliner concept and further electrification of the West Coast Main Line from Crewe to Glasgow in 1974. Additionally the staff terms and conditions were improved over a period of time.
Rail closures by year
At its peak in 1950, the mileage of the British Railway's system was around 21,000 miles (33 800 km) and 6000 stations. By 1975, the system had shrunk to 12,000 miles (19 300 km) of track and 2000 stations, roughly the same size it was in 2003.
Contrary to popular belief, Beeching did not start the rail closures, as a number of rail closures had occurred during the 1950s and certainly earlier [5]. In reality he was continuing a trend, as the Branchline Committee of BR had already closed a number of unremunerative lines between 1950 and 1963. Indeed, approximately 3000 miles (4800 km) of line had already been closed. After the publication of the first report, the closure process was accelerated.
- Branchline Committee closures
- 1950....150 miles (240 km) closed
- 1951....275 miles (440 km) closed
- 1952....300 miles (480 km) closed
- 1953....275 miles (440 km) closed
- 1954 to 1957....500 miles (800 km) closed
- 1958....150 miles (240 km) closed
- 1959....350 miles (560 km) closed
- 1960....175 miles (280 km) closed
- 1961....150 miles (240 km) closed
- 1962....780 miles (1 260 km) closed
- Beeching closures
- 1963....324 miles (521 km) closed
- 1964....1058 miles (1702 km) closed
- 1965....600 miles (965 km) closed
- 1966....750 miles (1 207 km) closed
- 1967....300 miles (480 km) closed
- 1968....400 miles (640 km) closed
- 1969....250 miles (400 km) closed
- 1970....275 miles (440 km) closed
- 1971....23 miles (37 km) closed
- 1972....50 miles (80 km) closed
- 1973....35 miles (56 km) closed
- 1974....0 miles (0 km) closed
Not all of the recommendations for railway line closures were implemented; a number of lines were kept open for a variety of reasons, including political manoeuvring. For example, the railway lines through the Scottish Highlands, although they were seen as not very cost-efficient by Beeching's definition, were kept open, in part because of pressure from the powerful Highland lobby. It has also been suggested that other lines may have been kept open because they passed through marginal constituencies. In addition, some lines that were listed for closure were kept open because the local roads were quite incapable of absorbing the resulting extra traffic.
Others were kept open simply because they provided vital links between towns. The Marshlink line connecting Hastings and Ashford in South-east England escaped closure as it made up the southern half of what was effectively a triangle of railways between Kent and Sussex. Its closure would have meant a hugely increased journey length - all the way up to Tonbridge - for anyone wanting to travel by rail between the towns. It is still open today although the majority of it is not electrified.
On the other hand, some routes that Beeching proposed to keep as major trunk routes, for example the Woodhead route, were eventually closed in favour of keeping alternative politically-sensitive routes open.
As a result of these factors, although there are still a number of rural railway lines in Britain, there are far fewer than before Beeching.
Overall, 2128 stations were closed on lines that were kept open. As well as minor railway lines, a few major inter-city railway lines were closed, where it was deemed that these lines were duplicates of other main-lines. The most notable of these was the former Great Central Railway, which linked London to the Midlands and north of England.
Since 1974, there have been few passenger railway closures in the UK. Indeed there have been some re-openings, usually on lines that had lost their passenger service due to Beeching, but had been left open for freight services, therefore reinstatement of passenger services came at a relatively low cost. However, in the 1970s and 1980s there was a large scale closure of such latterly freight-only lines, the demolition of structures and disposal of permanent way, which has made many such re-openings less likely in future, thus effectively making the Beeching legacy permanent.
Beeching II
In 1964, Dr. Beeching issued a second, less well-known, report "The Development of the Major Railway Trunk Routes" [6], widely known as "Beeching II", which went even further than the first report. The report singled out lines that were believed to be worthy of continued large-scale investment.
Essentially, it proposed that all railway lines other than major inter-city routes and important commuter lines around big cities had little future and should eventually close. If the report had been implemented, the railway system would have been cut to just 7000 miles (11 260 km), leaving Britain with little more than a skeletal railway system, with large parts of the country entirely devoid of railways.
The report was rejected by the then Labour government and Dr. Beeching resigned in 1965. Although politicians were ultimately responsible for the rail closures, Dr. Beeching's name has become synonymous with them ever since.
Changing attitudes and policies
It was in 1964, that a Labour government was elected under Prime Minister Harold Wilson. During the election campaign, Labour promised to halt the rail closures if elected. Once elected, however, they quickly backtracked on this promise, and the closures continued, at a faster rate than under the previous administration and until the end of the decade.
In 1965, Barbara Castle was appointed transport minister, and she began to look at the country's transport problems as a whole. Mrs. Castle decided that at least 11,000 route miles (17 700 km) of "basic railway" would be needed for the foreseeable future and that the railway system should be stabilised at around this size.
However, towards the end of the 1960s it became increasingly clear that rail closures were not producing the promised savings or bringing the rail system out of deficit, and were unlikely ever to do so. Mrs. Castle also stipulated that some rail services that could not pay their way but had a valuable social role should be subsidised. However, by the time the legislation allowing this was introduced into the 1968 Transport Act, Section 39 of this Act made provision for a subsidy to be paid by the Treasury for a three year period. There were a number of services and railway lines that would have qualified and benefited from these subsidies, but a number had already been closed or removed, thus lessening the impact of the legislation. Nevertheless, a number of branch lines were saved by this legislation.
Overview
The closures failed in their main purpose of trying to restore the railways to profitability, with the promised savings failing to materialise. By closing almost a third of the rail network, Beeching managed to achieve a saving of just £7 million, whilst overall losses were running in excess of £100 million. These losses were mainly because the branch lines acted as feeders to the main lines, this feeder traffic was lost when the branches closed — in turn meaning less traffic for, and a worsening of the finances of the main lines, and the increasing vulnerability of the main line. The assumption at the time was that car owners would drive to the nearest railhead (which was usually the junction where the closed branch line would otherwise have taken them) and continue their journey onwards by train, but in practice having once left home in their cars, they used them for the whole journey.
The use of light rail concepts, already in use on some branch lines at the time of the report, was ignored by Beeching. Such concepts have since been successfully utilised by British Rail and its successors on lesser-used lines that survived the axe.
The "bustitution" policy which replaced rail services with buses also failed. In many cases the replacement bus services were far slower and less convenient than the train services they were meant to replace, resulting in them being extremely unpopular with the public. As a consequence of this, most of the replacement bus services only lasted a few years before they were removed due to a lack of patronage, thus effectively leaving large parts of the country without any means of public transport. In practice, this policy proved unsuccessful, as the travelling public never saw a bus service as a suitable replacement for a rail service.
The closures were brought to a halt in the early 1970s when it became apparent that they were not useful, that the benefit of the small amount of money saved by closing railways was outweighed by the congestion and pollution caused by increasing reliance on cars which followed, and also by the general public's hatred of the cuts.
The last major railway closure (and possibly one of the most controversial) resulting from the Beeching Axe was of the 98-mile-long (158 km) Waverley Route main line between Carlisle, Hawick, and Edinburgh, in 1969; plans have since been made in 2006 with the approval of the Scottish Parliament to re-open a significant section of this line. With a few exceptions, after the early 1970s proposals to close other lines were met with vociferous public opposition and were quietly shelved; this opposition stemmed from the public's experience of the many line closures during the main years of the cuts in the mid and late 1960s. Today, Britain's railways, like nearly every other railway system in the world, still require a subsidy and run at a deficit.
One of the major criticisms made of the Beeching report was that it failed to take into account future trends such as population growth and the greater demand for travel. The population of many of the towns which had their railways closed in the 1960s has now grown significantly since, leaving these towns more in need of rail transport. Unfortunately much of the land of railways closed during the Axe has since been sold off and built over, making the railways prohibitively expensive to re-open. This is as much a criticism of the policy since the Beeching closures of the wholesale disposal of former railway land rather than the protection of trackbeds using a system similar to the US Rail Bank scheme for possible future use.
In the early 1980s, under the government of Margaret Thatcher, the possibility of more Beeching-style cuts was raised again briefly. In 1983 Sir David Serpell, a civil servant who had worked with Dr Beeching, compiled what became known as the Serpell Report[7] which called for more rail closures. The report was met with fierce resistance from many quarters, and was quickly abandoned.
Reopenings
Ironically, since the Beeching cuts of the 1960s, traffic levels have grown significantly and in some areas this has become close to gridlock. Hence in recent years there have been record levels of passengers on the railways, despite the fact that travelling by train is becoming more and more expensive. This in turn means that it is now more feasible to provide railway links to more rural areas. A modest number of the railway closures have therefore been reversed. Notable amongst these is the Robin Hood Line in Nottinghamshire, between Nottingham and Worksop via Mansfield, which reopened in the early 1990s. Previously Mansfield had been the largest town in Britain to have no rail link.
In the West Midlands a new Birmingham Snow Hill station was opened in 1987 to replace the earlier Snow Hill station, which had been closed and demolished in the early 1970s. The tunnel underneath Birmingham city centre that served the station was also reopened, along with the line towards Kidderminster and Worcester. This introduced a new service between Birmingham and London, terminating at Marylebone. The former line from Snow Hill to Wolverhampton has been reopened as the Midland Metro tram system. The line from Coventry to Nuneaton was reopened to passengers in 1988. Despite the successful and potential re-opening of many rail routes as light-rail and metro lines, the concept is still under-threat due to the varying popularity of these schemes with successive governments (see Darling Axe).
Beeching saw South Wales as a declining industrial region. As a result, it lost the majority of its network. Since 1983 it has experienced a major rail revival, with 32 new stations, and three lines reopened within 20 miles (32 km) of each other: Abercynon–Aberdare, Barry–Bridgend, and Bridgend–Maesteg. The Ebbw Valley Line is also scheduled to be re-opened.
In Scotland, a 35-mile (56 km) stretch of the former Waverley Route between Edinburgh and Galashiels is expected to be reopened in 2011 now that funding has been approved. The closure of the line in 1969 left the Scottish Borders area without any rail links. The Edinburgh-Bathgate line, reopening in 1985, was the first success of a new policy introduced by the Thatcher government of experimental reopenings that would become permanent only if well-used. It was and did. Plans are now in hand to reopen the section between Bathgate and Drumgelloch. More recently, a four-mile (6.4 km) section of the Argyle Line was reopened in December 2005, serving Chatelherault, Merryton and Larkhall for the first time since 1968. Also, after several years of 'false' promises dating to the 1980s, the railway from Stirling to Alloa and Kincardine is currently being rejuvenated, and will open in 2007, providing a passenger (and freight) route once again.
In addition a small but significant number of closed stations have reopened, and passenger services been restored on lines where they had been removed. Many of these were in the urban metropolitan counties where Passenger Transport Executives have a role in promoting local passenger rail use. Several lines have also reopened as heritage railways; see List of British heritage and private railways.
One effect of the Beeching closures which was not always immediately obvious was the single tracking of some formerly double track sections of line. In some cases - e.g. Princes Risborough (at one time the junction of four separate lines and an important railway town, after the closure of the GCR it was reduced to a single platform station) to Bicester singling was done but the line was re-doubled by Chiltern Railways in the early part of the 21st century. Another line which was singled was the line from Inverness to Dingwall which is now the major barrier to increasing the number of trains on the Far North Line from Inverness to Thurso and Wick. The Wessex Main Line formerly an express route from London to the South-West, was singled and effectively reduced to a cross-country line, since at national level it was viewed as duplicating the Great Western Main Line.
Notwithstanding the positive environmental implications of a reopening, many of the areas along these routes have expanded and grown over the last 40 years. Where some lines were not profitable in 1963 (on a backdrop of falling passenger numbers and a rise in car use on uncongested roads) they could well be profitable now, or at least could have a desirable and impact on reducing road congestion, pollution and congestion on the railway lines that have remained open, and thus be worth operating with a government subsidy. However in many instances it would be prohibitively expensive for lines closed by the Beeching Axe to be reopened; although it was not stipulated in the report, since Beeching there has been a policy of disposing of surplus-to-requirements railway land. Therefore many bridges, cuttings and embankments have been removed and the land sold off for development; closed station buildings on remaining lines have often been either demolished or sold.
References
- ^ http://www.railwaysarchive.co.uk/docSummary.php?docID=23
- ^ http://www.bilderberg.org/railways.htm
- ^ http://www.rodneyb.demon.co.uk/marples_trading_companies.htm
- ^ http://www.railwaysarchive.co.uk/docSummary.php?docID=13
- ^ Passengers No More: by G.Daniels & L.A.Dench Ian Allan(1975) ISBN 0-7110-0438-2
- ^ http://www.railwaysarchive.co.uk/docSummary.php?docID=14
- ^ http://www.railwaysarchive.co.uk/docSummary.php?docID=29
See also
Further reading
- Forgotten Railways: by H.P. White (1986) ISBN 0-946537-13-5.
- The Great Railway Conspiracy: by David Henshaw (1994) ISBN 0-948135-48-4.
- British Railways after Beeching: by G. Freeman Allen, Ian Allan.(1966) (No ISBN)
- BR 1948 - 1973: by T.R.Gourvish Cambridge.(1974)
External links
- Petition calling for line re-openings
- Website about Beeching cuts in more detail
- Railway maps before and after cuts
- Extensive before and after photo collection of closed stations, with commentaries
- History of the closed Guildford to Horsham branch line
- download the Beeching Report Part 1
- download the Beeching Report Part 2 (maps)