any sort of passenger accounting which doesn't take account of incoming traffic, must surely set alarm bells ringing for anyone who wishes to use statistics to understand the what is going on
It makes a lot of sense.
If people in 1960s Normanton go from Normanton to Whitby on holiday once a year then, if they close the Whitby branch the Normanton people might still travel to a holiday destination by train (to Blackpool, Cleethorpes, Morecambe, Skegness etc).
If they close the line through Normanton then Normanton people are unlikely to use the train to go on holiday by train.
So, it makes sense to allocate the Normanton to Whitby revenue to Normanton (as outgoing traffic) rather than Whitby (as incoming traffic).
Then there are those untried assumptions - people would railhead to a nearer station, people will go another route, people will catch a bus instead
It's a bit confusing.
When someone is suggesting reopening a line, it seems common to overhype the catchment areas by counting lots of other towns/villages - e.g. an Okehampton - Tavistock line doesn't just serve those two relatively small places because apparently we should be including the huge catchment area of Devon villages (spread over a large age).
But when it comes to closing routes, you believe that people won't "railhead" at a station outside of the town/village they live in (but if you open a new station then people from other towns will flock to it)?
Ironically, one of the worst legacies of Beeching is that people are now far too scared to close basket-case railways and stations. I'd say there's a fair bit we should probably be looking at - the decision to throw two million quid at rebuilding Breich, when closing it was the obvious things to do, is one of the most egregious wastes of taxpayers' money I've ever seen
It's ridiculous that we are spending millions of pounds on Breich station - crazy.
But the same people who take a "money is no limit" approach to every sacred passenger are generally the ones who complain that privatisation is to blame for the ever increasing subsidies required!
BR would have let lots of stations and some routes wither away if it were allowed to continue. But privatisation means we have benchmark service levels, committed to for years at a time and then nobody dares reduce them at subsequent franchise - bar a couple of stations on the WCML around Stoke/Stafford there's been very few stations threatened with closure or downgraded to parliamentary status. If BR were still around (and free to tinker with fares/ service levels without the same accountability/ scrutiny) then they'd have wielded the knife much more ruthlessly (if the S&C was on their radar in the 1980s then I doubt some branches would still be operated by a nationalised operator in 2018!
Privatisation means it's a lot harder to reshape the network because the option of sneakily downgrading services/stations is no longer an option - maybe ironically it's saved the kind of poorly used stations/lines that it's biggest critics most admire.
most people in the sixties lived fairly close to where they worked, and long-distance commuting was much less common than it is now. That's why I can forgive him for closures like the Waverley Route. The Borders Railway has been very successful since it reopened, but only because the economy of the area it serves has transformed completely over the last fifty years. In 1968, you could probably count the number of daily commuters from Galashiels to Edinburgh on the fingers of one hand.
True - something that is hard for some people to appreciate from a modern perspective - in the '60s there were still manufacturing jobs in the Borders (before Pringle moved overseas) - if you lived there then you didn't need to leave the Borders on a regular basis - the idea of commuting all the way to Edinburgh would have been for the very rich.
There's very, very few Beeching-era closures that I think were serious errors of judgement. Of the two you mention that weren't on his hit list, I think Woodhead was sensible, and Glenfarg rather foolish, as it's lumbered Scotland with much longer and slower journeys north of Edinburgh ever since.
Woodhead had it's function whilst the long/slow/heavy freight from Wath/Tinsley to Lancashire was essential. Once that market left, the passenger market was never going to be enough to keep a second line from South Yorkshire to Manchester open - it didn't serve anywhere particularly large.
Glenfarg is a tricky one. It's a faster route from Edinburgh to Perth/ Inverness but Perth and Inverness aren't particularly large places (both smaller than Kirkcaldy IIRC). CityLink have generally abandoned central Perth (preferring the P&R on the outskirts) because the place isn't actually that big.
Running Edinburgh - Perth - Dundee would therefore serve smaller places than running the current route through Fife.
If you were to open a section of line alongside the M90 (today) then I think the bigger priority would be the section from Inverkeithing to Halbeath - speeding up journeys from Edinburgh to Glenrothes/ Leuchars/ Dundee/ Aberdeen by running through Cowdenbeath instead of Kirkcaldy - that'd need significantly less infrastructure than the route through Glenfarg (which only really serves Kinross/Milnathort).
A bigger "cheap" priority for Edinburgh - Perth would probably just be to double track sections of line from Ladybank to Bridge Of Earn (and maybe a crossover at the north of Ladybank so that Perth - Edinburgh trains can use the *southbound* platform!).
unfortunately logic and cold hard data won't deter the romantic idealists and the conspiracy theorists from continuing to peddle their nonsense
I fear you are right - there's this idea of Beeching as this hapless bloke travelling the country only on the wettest Winter days, managing to avoid "Market Day" in every town he visited, having the worst luck, or being part of a conspiracy involving Marples and some shadowy agenda.
But you won't change their minds - it's like the Attack Of The Unsinkable Rubber Ducks - their faith in the 1960s routes is unshakable.
For my own views , people can never let go of the Woodhead and Great Central closures.
Both had outlived their purposes in my view - Woodhead would have been a godsend in WW2 when huge coal flows went over the Pennines - and the GC , frankly, should never have been built.
Woodhead went once the coal traffic vanished , (and the equipment was up for renewal) and the GC was on the way out for much of the same reasons - declining coal flows to the South East and the ability to transfer the residual traffic (which was not much frankly) to parallel routes , a process started by Fiennes and the inventor of MGC (R T Munns) from the early 1950's. They - being very solid "traffic" railway managers could see the writing on the wall.....
Good points.
Most lines had a purpose when they opened, but that doesn't mean they still had a purpose fifty years ago and certainly not that they would have much of a purpose in 2018.
But, if this Forum had "likes", you know that you'd get a lot more likes saying something nostalgic like "they should abandon HS2 and re-open the GC instead" rather than trying to take a rational approach to the network.
He championed the railway, full stop. He worked out what it was good at, and what it shouldn't be doing in a rapidly-changing world. He showed that InterCity and commuter trains were effective and generated plenty of money, and channelled investment in improving them. He showed that changing the methods of freight handling could rapidly improve economics. He finally streamlined the network and removed a load of struggling secondary and duplicate routes that were never really needed in the first place, and only built in the highly competitive Victorian era.
This, this, a thousand times this!
