Cost effective alternative to Beeching.

[James_D]

I would imagine a similar thread has been done previously so apologies if it has. I know talk of our friend Dr. B. Ching has been done to death but genuinely, would there have been a sensible and sustainable alternative to the axe? I.e not allowing an ever increasing amount of taxpayers money to be frittered away keeping loss making lines open.

Again, with the benefit of hindsight and seeing how passenger traffic has rebounded to pre-WW1 levels, it's easy to make a judgement of 'If only we'd done A B C at the time we'd be in X Y Z position now.' Naturally the nature of 21st Century travel, enviromental concerns, technology etc could not be forseen in the early 1960's. But it does make you wonder. Did nobody stop and think...'hang on, will we need all this infrastructure in the future?'

If the primary impetus around Beeching was a money saving exercise, then some thoughts I had on the subject may have been suitable:

• A local scheme for each line slated for closure, looking for volunteers to effectively run it as a trust-owned railway, like a heritage railway is now. With BR saying: "We'll turn the alignment, stations, signalling etc over to you. We'll donate some old locos and carriages that we're replacing anyway with Dieselification. We'll give you manuals on railway maintenance and allow your staff unpaid experience with our mainline maintenance gangs. You run and maintain the railway how you want, BR accept no responsibility for accidents or defects caused after handover to the trust. You decide on the level of service and what to charge passengers. Where appropriate we'll allow you to terminate at a main BR station" etc etc. Basically to get it off BR's books and into the hands of dedicated volunteers who'd be willing to keep a basic service going. Then with the caveat of, if demand returns, BR take over the line again and we'll guarantee you a job for your trouble.

• Instigate a grace period for certain marginal loss-making lines. Notify the location population say 6-months ahead of closure: The line is losing money, if you want to keep your local service then use it more often. Give the population a chance to realise what they have and improve usage. If usage improves, a stay of execution is given but monitored for another 6-months. If its a flash in the pan and drops again to unsustainability then definitely close it. This might have saved the Borders line for example as there was alot of opposition at the time of closure.

A load of cobblers or any other ideas? Oh to have a time machine! This is all pretty academic obviously but does make you wonder.

 

[Wirewiper]

There was a lot more that could have been done in the Beeching and pre-Beeching era to cut costs on unprofitable lines and avoid their closure - automation of level crossings and signalling, lightweight diesel railcars, unstaffed stations with conductor-guards issuing tickets on trains. Many lines when they closed still had loco-hauled trains, fully-staffed stations and manual signalboxes.

 

[Bletchleyite]

There was a lot more that could have been done in the Beeching and pre-Beeching era to cut costs on unprofitable lines and avoid their closure - automation of level crossings and signalling, lightweight diesel railcars, unstaffed stations with conductor-guards issuing tickets on trains. Many lines when they closed still had loco-hauled trains, fully-staffed stations and manual signalboxes.

The Paytrain concept - or even rural DOO with a new build of sliding door rolling stock - could easily have saved some lines, though others were closed correctly.

 

[duffield]

For lines which were slightly unprofitable but not basket cases, mothballing rather than ripping up and selling off the formation could have been a good idea, allowing for future population growth or road congestion making the line viable in the future. But this would have required a view of the future not involving the expected continual managed decline.

 

[yorksrob]

A lot of the things that should have been done on many lines which closed, were eventually done on some of those which remain open. Paytrains have already been mentioned, track rationalisation is another one. Local services between Tonbridge and Reading remain today becase spare thumper carriages were matched with some spare EPB driving trailers.

 

[6Gman]

If the primary impetus around Beeching was a money saving exercise, then some thoughts I had on the subject may have been suitable:

• A local scheme for each line slated for closure, looking for volunteers to effectively run it as a trust-owned railway, like a heritage railway is now. With BR saying: "We'll turn the alignment, stations, signalling etc over to you. We'll donate some old locos and carriages that we're replacing anyway with Dieselification. We'll give you manuals on railway maintenance and allow your staff unpaid experience with our mainline maintenance gangs. You run and maintain the railway how you want, BR accept no responsibility for accidents or defects caused after handover to the trust. You decide on the level of service and what to charge passengers. Where appropriate we'll allow you to terminate at a main BR station" etc etc. Basically to get it off BR's books and into the hands of dedicated volunteers who'd be willing to keep a basic service going. Then with the caveat of, if demand returns, BR take over the line again and we'll guarantee you a job for your trouble.

Totally impractical I fear. Heritage railways have enough trouble finding volunteers to run seasonal services - imagine recruiting volunteers to book on 03.30 on a Monday (and Tuesday, Wedn ...) morning in February.

 

[Lucan]

One of the main criticisms of the Beeching Report and the consequent closures is that those closures were based on the profitibility (or non-profitibility) of those lines as they were. No account was taken of the potential economies of modernisation such as replacing steam hauled branch line trains with diesel railcars, signal boxes with centralised control centres, automatic crossings etc, despite the fact that these features were clearly forseeable by then and were already being implemented in part. In fact, taking account of potential modernisation was specifically forbidden in the Beeching assessment.

At the same time, the railway remained until the 1960s under a legal obligation to distribute freight between any two stations that the customer wanted. I think Beeching himself complained that road hauliers were taking large mixed loads by trunk roads to the general area of the destinations, and dumping the lot at a station goods yard for the railway to complete the awkward and unprofitable "last 20 miles" of the deliveries via local stations. Beeching "solved" this by closing most of those local stations, but government could have solved it is a far less draconian way long before.

Of course, recognising increasing car ownership, there was an expectation that people living along closed branch lines would buy a car, drive to the nearest main line station and continue the main part of their journey by train; but that was not what people did; having bought a car they drove all the way.

 

[RT4038]

One of the main criticisms of the Beeching Report and the consequent closures is that those closures were based on the profitibility (or non-profitibility) of those lines as they were. No account was taken of the potential economies of modernisation such as replacing steam hauled branch line trains with diesel railcars, signal boxes with centralised control centres, automatic crossings etc, despite the fact that these features were clearly forseeable by then and were already being implemented in part. In fact, taking account of potential modernisation was specifically forbidden in the Beeching assessment.

And where was the money going to come from to fund this modernisation? The railways had already had a huge amount of modernisation money in the 1955 plan, and still the losses carried on, getting worse by the year. Clearly modernising per se was not working. You cannot polish a turd. Any further investment money was going to be spent on upgrading Inter City routes where competition from the new motorways was threatening existing traffics. What was the point in taking into account potential modernisation if there was no money available?

 

[Dr Hoo]

It is simply unsustainable to argue that Beeching did not appreciate the benefits of 'modernisation'. The creation of the British Rail 'brand', Inter City, liner trains, merry-go-round, air braking, electric train heating rather than steam, integral carriage construction rather than using chassis, block trains rather than wagonload, heavy axle loads to exploit the new power of (later) diesel traction, the creation of proper research capability at Derby, new analytical techniques such as cost-benefit analysis, the need for a 'level playing field' with road haulage costs, etc. all demonstrated a belief that (some) railways had a rosy long term future.

For what it is worth he also oversaw the first automatic level crossings but as later experience at Hixon, Beckingham and elsewhere showed, these were far from a panacea. Beeching also had the benefit of seeing how DMUs had affected the economics of many lightly-used lines. They were still losing money hand over fist and failing to stem the drift of passengers to road in most cases. When one reads the Reshaping Report again (as I often do (!)) you keep coming back to the fundamental demonstration from the traffic studies that a third of the network carried around 1-2% of the traffic, both passenger and goods.

Investment cash was in desperately short supply and was sensibly husbanded to finish the WCML (South) electrification, electrify to Bournemouth, build the Freightliner equipment, install welded rail to allow regular and sustained 90/100mph on main lines, etc. As I have also posted before; the rapid sale of surplus land and scrap thrown up by the closures raised millions of pound towards these ends.

So far as the OP's 'period of grace' goes, most lines were not proposed for closure immediately. There were a few years in the mid 1960s when the writing was clearly on the wall but the 'support' from local customers failed to materialize, leaving Ministers like Fraser and Castle with little reason to save many lines.

 

[Killingworth]

Younger readers won't appreciate how rapidly the bottom fell out of the rail market after 1945. Cars, light vans and trucks spread across the nation very quickly. Harold Macmillan said we'd never had it so good, and for the greater part of the population that was true. Things were getting better every day, visible all around us as new buildings sprang up and slums were cleared. Motorways spread across the nation.

My early train trips might be on the North Tyneside electrics to Tynemouth and Whitley Bay, or on an express from Newcastle to York. From there I used to get a train to Market Weighton to visit relatives. In summer holidays we went to Scarborough on a train of musty old coaches that rattled and creaked through Gilling on an all but unused line to avoid York.

The electrics weren't much over 20 years old when the decision was made not to invest in the electrical distribution system and DMUs came in with a less frequent service. More cars came onto the roads and the trains were used less and less. It was a miracle that a window of financial opportunity opened to allow the Metro to be built.

The line from York to Hull via Market Weighton was closed, and from there to Driffield and Howden. I recall empty trains. I was then picked up at York and driven to destination, the car parked easily beneath the portico. Visiting York today the number of cars parked for the railway has increased 100 fold, current users unable to believe how easy it was to park in the 1950s!

That rambling Scarborough summer time Saturday service soon went. The last time we used it, about 1960 I'd estimate, there were many empty compartments.

The ECML was a little different. I'd have said some of the trains might be 14 coaches long. Some were packed, often with national service soldiers returning from foreign parts to Catterick Camp and Barnard Castle via Darlington.

Everywhere road was taking over. Freight trains in 1950 were mostly slow moving unbraked wagons, maybe needing pinning down on steep hills. Coal was a big user of rail. Almost every station would have sidings where coal wagons would be left. My earliest memory is of army surplus trucks delivering from there, but one chap still used a horse and cart. Smokeless zones and the onset of North Sea gas killed most of that trade.

The perception was that rail was doomed!

The wake up call may have come after Beeching when the ECML north of Newcastle was proposed for closure in Option A of the 1982 Serpell report. Seriously, it was, to leave a profitable railway. Examine that to find what was considered the best way to operate a cost effective railway. Actions that followed were the final death knell of much rail infrastructure. See here for Serpell.

That was about the time society had already started to swing the pendulum back, invisible at first, but it gathered momentum.

Looking at it today long distance commuting has grown immensely. Back then if you moved jobs you tended to move house. The man was normally the breadwinner and where his job went so did the family. 20 miles might mean a move. Many more firms gave removal expense packages to encourage living near to the place of work. Today family units increasingly include two equal breadwinners and their jobs may be 50 miles from home, in opposite directions. Even if working in the same place now, career progression may require future mobility over a very wide area.

The big increase in university education from the mid-1960s unleashed masses of students travelling the nation to and from home and then to visit fellow students and graduates around the land. The advent of the Student Rail Card was a stroke of marketing genius often overlooked.

Rail in general is no longer seen as doomed. However there are many lines which escaped the axe very narrowly, and would probably not escape if similar criteria were used today, despite the resurgence. Almost every route enjoys a degree of subsidy, however it is defined. For some it might save money to give current users a free dial a taxi card!

 

[yorksrob]

And where was the money going to come from to fund this modernisation? The railways had already had a huge amount of modernisation money in the 1955 plan, and still the losses carried on, getting worse by the year. Clearly modernising per se was not working. You cannot polish a turd. Any further investment money was going to be spent on upgrading Inter City routes where competition from the new motorways was threatening existing traffics. What was the point in taking into account potential modernisation if there was no money available?

In the case of Ashford - Hastings, for example, it was rationalisation, rather than modernisation. This was the case for a number of routes.

The crucial difference in these cases over a lot of those that did close, wasn't the merit of the route, rather that closure had been turned down for whatever reason.

 

[James_D]

Very well summed up there by @Dr Hoo and @Killingworth. All valid points but what i was getting at in my original post was not so much in relation to the viability or unprofitability of lines, which was increasingly obvious by the 1960's. What I was suggesting was merely an academic exercise about what could have been done had there been a different mindset. I.e, these links are a national asset, and whilst they are expensive and unviable at the minute, that's not to say they will always be. It's a similar analogy to the armed forces. Alot of money is invested in peacetime should they become necessary if and when. We can all see in 2019 much of the axe was very short sighted, and with the benefit of hindsight what could have been done differently/better to avoid the reality of now throwing billions at re-instating rail links that we previously had.

It seems odd that the Paytrain concept, which is essentially what we have alot of now, wasnt taken up more vigorously earlier. I often wonder what the state of the art was regarding early self-service mechanical ticket machines. Were they in existence by the early-60's?

 

[John Webb]

Regrettably the vast majority of politicians can only see, at most, 5 years ahead (ie to the next election), and very few will try and look beyond that period. Furthermore (having worked for 28 years in the Civil Service) the dead hand of the Treasury doesn't encourage forward thinking either in those supporting governments. It is quite something that the railways have got 5-year 'Control Periods' now which allows better forward planning. I was still in my teens when Beeching's report was published, and was clear to me even then that the results were 'fixed' to a considerable degree to get the answers the politicians wanted at the time, as subsequent revelations have shown!
But I must admit the resurgence of rail travel has surprised me! I would have not expected it 50 years ago.

 

[d9009alycidon]

Just to throw a few statistics (these are for Scotland only) the network was well in decline from 1948 onwards. A total of 381 passenger stations were closed between 1948 and 1963 with the peak years being 1950/51 (141) and 1955/56 (92). Post Beeching there were 393 stations closed between 1964 and 1969. In the decades following Nationalization, BR Scottish Region was known to be the most impoverished of all regions, and as soon as a closure was approved the regional management was keen to disposed of the land as an income stream to balance the books, indeed had HQ in London not stepped in to curtail the wholesale sell-offs then some subsequent re-openings such as the Argyle line would have not happened. (Source "Scottish Region: A History 1948-1973 (British Railways Region By Region) by A.J. Mullay)

 

[Dr Hoo]

I am not sure that I agree that 'much' of the closure/withdrawal of passenger services list was short-sighted. The great bulk of rural lines that closed have not been the subject of serious re-opening proposals. Ditto small wayside stations on lines that remained open.

The situation has been rather different in relation to former industrial and mining areas where some re-opened lines have been used as instruments of economic regeneration. I am not convinced that the current huge amounts of student travel, longer-distance commuting and leisure trips were foreseen by anybody in the relatively austere 1960s (when I was growing up). Both Beeching and Marples showed an early openness to new appraisal techniques and ideas of multi-modal transport integration in the main conurbations. Where lines have been re-opened it is interesting to note that stations have often been on new sites rather than original ones, to take account of subsequent developments, road links, land for parking and so forth. Ironically some of the lines that did survive unchanged actually struggle today with unsuitable stations so I think that quite a bit of money would have had to be spent anyway.

Turning to the 'Paytrain' point (and, by implication, un-staffed stations) it is easy to forget how limited technology was in 1962. As a comparison, typical ticket machines on the buses were Ultimatics, Setrights and Gibsons. These could really only issue a limited range of low fare local tickets. Lines that turned over to Paytrains usually only offered local-to-line tickets with a requirement to re-book at the main line station such as Norwich or Kings Lynn. This was inconvenient to passengers having to negotiate ticket barriers twice, risked missing onward connections, destroyed any 'link' between journey legs for accountancy/contributory revenue purposes and led to a higher overall fare. The stations that had been de-staffed usually lost other revenue such as parcels and were often poorly adapted to being unstaffed (e.g. because footbridges or subways were part of the station building, or there was no other covered waiting shelter). A considerable number of stations had no mains electricity but oil and gas lighting wasn't really feasible in an un-staffed context. Passenger information was impractical in the absence of 'long line' communication facilities, let alone modern displays.

For the few remaining local passengers on a 'basic railway' things were often pretty grim. The chorus of commentators that started off saying that the lines "could be saved by being run much more efficiently" were soon claiming that, having followed their advice, "British Rail deliberately ran down the service".

 

[Killingworth]

I'd forgotten how road transport got a tremendous boost after 1945 as the services sold off masses of surplus trucks. Their flexibility soon ate into rail freight loads.

In the 1950s large metal trunks might still have gone by luggage in advance services, although most were leather or composite materials by then. They'd be collected from your home, put on the train and delivered to your hotel from the nearest station, like Scarborough, Blackpool, Bournemouth or Gleneagles. No wheeled cases to clog up the train and trip the unwary on platforms.

It was so liberating to load the car, strap it to the roof, on the running boards or piled inside. Rail was so much hassle in comparison. Even if the taxi took you to the station, a porter helped to get luggage to the guards van, and the reverse at destination it took a lot of planning.

Ticket office gone, porters gone, toilets gone, warm waiting rooms gone, luggage in advance gone, all to save the railway money. Passengers used to that level of service voted with their feet, adding to those who were quick to embrace car ownership.

Railways looked to be in dire straights and a number of strikes that removed freight and passenger services further encouraged use of competive alternative modes of transport. Beeching often gets blame for cuts but there was a momentum of closure before he came along. Serpell produced even more drastic plans.

It may be less the stations and lines that were fully closed, as the simplified junctions, lifted tracks, truncated station platforms, sold off tracks and railway property that has constrained plans to easily improve the resilience of the surviving network today.

 

[Bletchleyite]

No wheeled cases to clog up the train and trip the unwary on platforms.

Wheeled cases are only really an issue because of inadequate luggage provision. If you have properly sized overheads (as Desiros and Class 80x have) and some decent floor level racks then they are fine.

 

[Killingworth]

Wheeled cases are only really an issue because of inadequate luggage provision. If you have properly sized overheads (as Desiros and Class 80x have) and some decent floor level racks then they are fine.

Having seen the massive crate sized cases with 4 wheels hoist onto TPE services for Manchester Airport I'd observe that some of their users can barely heave them aboard the train, let alone hoist them up to any form of overhead luggage facility .

 

[Bletchleyite]

Having seen the massive crate sized cases with 4 wheels hoist onto TPE services for Manchester Airport I'd observe that some of their users can barely heave them aboard the train, let alone hoist them up to any form of overhead luggage facility .

The airlines are at fault for this by charging per piece for hold luggage - each member of the family having one smaller bag each would make so much more sense.

 

[yorksrob]

I am not sure that I agree that 'much' of the closure/withdrawal of passenger services list was short-sighted. The great bulk of rural lines that closed have not been the subject of serious re-opening proposals. Ditto small wayside stations on lines that remained open.

The situation has been rather different in relation to former industrial and mining areas where some re-opened lines have been used as instruments of economic regeneration. I am not convinced that the current huge amounts of student travel, longer-distance commuting and leisure trips were foreseen by anybody in the relatively austere 1960s (when I was growing up). Both Beeching and Marples showed an early openness to new appraisal techniques and ideas of multi-modal transport integration in the main conurbations. Where lines have been re-opened it is interesting to note that stations have often been on new sites rather than original ones, to take account of subsequent developments, road links, land for parking and so forth. Ironically some of the lines that did survive unchanged actually struggle today with unsuitable stations so I think that quite a bit of money would have had to be spent anyway.

Turning to the 'Paytrain' point (and, by implication, un-staffed stations) it is easy to forget how limited technology was in 1962. As a comparison, typical ticket machines on the buses were Ultimatics, Setrights and Gibsons. These could really only issue a limited range of low fare local tickets. Lines that turned over to Paytrains usually only offered local-to-line tickets with a requirement to re-book at the main line station such as Norwich or Kings Lynn. This was inconvenient to passengers having to negotiate ticket barriers twice, risked missing onward connections, destroyed any 'link' between journey legs for accountancy/contributory revenue purposes and led to a higher overall fare. The stations that had been de-staffed usually lost other revenue such as parcels and were often poorly adapted to being unstaffed (e.g. because footbridges or subways were part of the station building, or there was no other covered waiting shelter). A considerable number of stations had no mains electricity but oil and gas lighting wasn't really feasible in an un-staffed context. Passenger information was impractical in the absence of 'long line' communication facilities, let alone modern displays.

For the few remaining local passengers on a 'basic railway' things were often pretty grim. The chorus of commentators that started off saying that the lines "could be saved by being run much more efficiently" were soon claiming that, having followed their advice, "British Rail deliberately ran down the service".

"Not being subject to a 'serious' reopening proposal" is by no means synonemous with a railway not being useful today. If we define the term 'serious' as meaning having any hope of success in current circumstances, then I doubt that one would have been able to put together a 'serious' reopening proposal for the Whitby, Settle and Carlisle or Marshlink lines today, had they been closed. Yet here they are, well used and in some cases much loved by passengers.

Similarly, there is a wealth of difference between running a service efficiently - de-staffing stations, pay trains, well considered track rationalisations, and running a service down, i.e running the trains at pointless times, reducing the time between first and last trains to make them unusable for a day trip, running at times that destroy meaningfull connections.

 

[MarkyT]

I'd forgotten how road transport got a tremendous boost after 1945 as the services sold off masses of surplus trucks.

And demobbed countless people newly able to drive and maintain them.

 

[Killingworth]

And demobbed countless people newly able to drive and maintain them.

True. These obscure details of social history can have major repercussions in ways that are largely overlooked.

 

[ChiefPlanner]

And demobbed countless people newly able to drive and maintain them.

Frankly , unless you were a salaried member of staff in a nice warm office at HQ, your working conditions in a very run down , investment starved railway - particularly on the motive power side - were dire . Nice enough am sure in somewhere idyllic like on the Kingsbridge branch shed - awful in some urban shed in inner London. Even the excellent G Fiennes commented on the disgraceful conditions at Ipswich when he was a young shed master , you can imagine what 1948 Stratford was like for a young cleaner / fireman , who could earn better money in less grim conditions with better shift patterns.

Not all glory and "company service ethos" , as indeed it was in many other heavy industries like steel and especially coal. Social history is incredibly relevant.

 

[MarkyT]

Frankly , unless you were a salaried member of staff in a nice warm office at HQ, your working conditions in a very run down , investment starved railway - particularly on the motive power side - were dire . Nice enough am sure in somewhere idyllic like on the Kingsbridge branch shed - awful in some urban shed in inner London. Even the excellent G Fiennes commented on the disgraceful conditions at Ipswich when he was a young shed master , you can imagine what 1948 Stratford was like for a young cleaner / fireman , who could earn better money in less grim conditions with better shift patterns.

Not all glory and "company service ethos" , as indeed it was in many other heavy industries like steel and especially coal. Social history is incredibly relevant.

My father, a London area shedmaster in the late 1950s and early 60s, says recruitment and retention for many grades had become extraordinarily difficult by that time. Many new employees barely lasted a week once they became familiar with the conditions. And nobody was going to spend any money on improving the working environment at steam depots when they were all about to be abandoned.

 

[Bevan Price]

I expect that people will still be arguing the rights and wrongs of the Marples / Beeching closures 100 years from now.
In my opinion, some lines were always financial basket cases and should probably never have been built; but that is what you get with free market forces and lack of rational planning. Closure of most such lines was inevitable. The long (about 2-3 weeks) ASLEF strike in 1955 had been a trigger to accelerate the existing trend from rail to road by both passengers & freight, worsening the financial state of BR.

The difficulty over Marples/Beeching comes about other lines, those which could be quite busy - but still lost money. It often appeared that closure was considered as the only option -- when it would have been more sensible to find ways to reduce costs and try to attract more business. Just consider some of the lines proposed for closure, and consider what a mess we would be in, but for the (incomplete) change in policy when Labour replaced the Tories in 1964.

Liverpool to Southport.
Liverpool Lime Street to St. Helens Shaw St. & Wigan North Western.
Manchester to Bury (now part of Metrolink)
Manchester to Buxton.
and Lime Street to Manchester would have been left with St. Helens Junction as the only intermediate station.
All were proposed for closure, leaving several hundred thousand people with no rail services.
No stations at Huyton, Earlestown, Newton Le Willows, Formby, Bootle, etc.

Was that sensible?

Likewise, Beeching considered "duplicated" routes to be undesirable. No - we probably don't need 3 or 4 different routes between Manchester and London -- but the policy deprived many intermediate towns / cities of what would now be useful services.

 

[yorksrob]

Likewise, Beeching considered "duplicated" routes to be undesirable. No - we probably don't need 3 or 4 different routes between Manchester and London -- but the policy deprived many intermediate towns / cities of what would now be useful services.

And keeping two routes between London and Brighton (as an example) would have been sensible.

 

[30907]

It seems odd that the Paytrain concept, which is essentially what we have alot of now, wasnt taken up more vigorously earlier. I often wonder what the state of the art was regarding early self-service mechanical ticket machines. Were they in existence by the early-60's?

The only self service ticket machines I remember are the simple single-fare type used by LT (each station that had them needing several).
LT buses only went over to conductor-operated ticket machines, replacing tickets issued from a rack and clipped, around 1960, and I'm not sure other operators were significantly earlier.

 

[Dr Hoo]

The only self service ticket machines I remember are the simple single-fare type used by LT (each station that had them needing several).
LT buses only went over to conductor-operated ticket machines, replacing tickets issued from a rack and clipped, around 1960, and I'm not sure other operators were significantly earlier.

It is remarkable to think that when HM The Queen opened the Victoria Line in 1969 (complete with ‘automatic’ DOO trains and automatic gates opened by state-of-the-art magnetic tickets) she had to put a sixpence [a 2.5 pence coin for younger readers] in a ‘single fare’ machine. It didn’t work. Neither did the second one! Tells you all that you need to know about the sophistication of mechanised UK ticket issue in the 1960s.

 

[Dr Hoo]

I expect that people will still be arguing the rights and wrongs of the Marples / Beeching closures 100 years from now.
In my opinion, some lines were always financial basket cases and should probably never have been built; but that is what you get with free market forces and lack of rational planning. Closure of most such lines was inevitable. The long (about 2-3 weeks) ASLEF strike in 1955 had been a trigger to accelerate the existing trend from rail to road by both passengers & freight, worsening the financial state of BR.

The difficulty over Marples/Beeching comes about other lines, those which could be quite busy - but still lost money. It often appeared that closure was considered as the only option -- when it would have been more sensible to find ways to reduce costs and try to attract more business. Just consider some of the lines proposed for closure, and consider what a mess we would be in, but for the (incomplete) change in policy when Labour replaced the Tories in 1964.

Liverpool to Southport.
Liverpool Lime Street to St. Helens Shaw St. & Wigan North Western.
Manchester to Bury (now part of Metrolink)
Manchester to Buxton.
and Lime Street to Manchester would have been left with St. Helens Junction as the only intermediate station.
All were proposed for closure, leaving several hundred thousand people with no rail services.
No stations at Huyton, Earlestown, Newton Le Willows, Formby, Bootle, etc.

Was that sensible?

Likewise, Beeching considered "duplicated" routes to be undesirable. No - we probably don't need 3 or 4 different routes between Manchester and London -- but the policy deprived many intermediate towns / cities of what would now be useful services.

The circumstances and background to the North West closure proposals mentioned are widely misunderstood. Both Marples and Beeching appreciated the tensions between strict commercial considerations and wider social aspects.

As early as the British Transport Commission Annual Report and Accounts for 1961 (covering the year when Beeching took over chairmanship half way through and published in June 1962) it was noted that suburban services in different areas produced "widely different results". This was a follow-up to one of Dr Beeching's first public speeches, to a northern industrialists' lunch in March 1962, at which he pointed out that the Tyneside electric services lost money heavily and might be closed.

Services around Liverpool and Manchester tended to suffer from the problem that trip distances were very short and fares low - much lower than many journeys around London. Routes such as Southport and Bury tended to have high peak frequencies (and thus resource requirements) but little business off-peak. The areas that they served generated little freight traffic and in some cases costs could not be shared with longer distance services either.

Taking the Southport line as a more detailed case study: peak services ran at 10tph, mainly with double sets. The off-peak service was only 3tph, usually only needing single sets, at least during the week. The route was full of level crossings and closely spaced signalboxes. Operation covered three shifts. Part of the route was four-tracked, allowing fast trains to overtake stoppers. Liverpool Exchange and Southport Chapel Street were both huge stations with complex layouts and extensive ageing buildings. It was hardly surprising that it lost a lot of money.

It tends not to be appreciated that electricity for traction was very expensive back in the 1960s. Quite apart from the relatively low efficiency of low voltage third rail and cumbersome control arrangements for first-generation equipment, BR's load profile in these areas was very unattractive. Demand peaked just when domestic and industrial demand was also high, especially in the early mornings so generation had to be from the least efficient plant, fired up for short spells. It was no surprise that BR 'pulled the plug' on the South Shields electrified service as early as January 1963!

Taking a look at (non-London) urban transport planning more widely; even by early 1962 a Steering Committee on Merseyside Traffic and Transport had been formed, bringing together local authorities, BR, bus operators, the Mersey Docks & Harbour Board together with the MoT. This eventually led to the Loop and Link scheme to exploit the full potential of the Merseyside electric lines. This idea was rolled out more widely in 1963, with a series of special enquiries (commonly known as the Conurbation Studies) to look at the issues surrounding commuter services listed for closure in the Reshaping Report. Marples kicked of the meetings in Glasgow, the North West and Birmingham. Cost-benefit analysis was to be applied across all modes to pick up on Beeching's suggestions in his report. As he had written, "...it may be cheaper to subsidise the railways than to bear the other cost burdens which will arise if they are closed".

Beeching had exposed the issues and thrown down the gauntlet to other stakeholders in his Report. It was for others to take forward his suggestions. As is well known, the lines mentioned, together with more around other cities, did survive and have gone on to provide valuable services (albeit re-configured to tram/metro in some cases). It was a pity that some of the Marples and Beeching momentum was lost in the early years of the Wilson administration, especially under Tom Fraser. Barbara Castle did eventually hit her stride with the Transport Act 1968 and the establishment of the PTEs.

 

[Lucan]

...when HM The Queen opened the Victoria Line in 1969... she had to put a sixpence ... in a ‘single fare’ machine. It didn’t work. Neither did the second one!

LoL! I heard a story about when she opened Calder Hall power station. For the cameras, she pressed a big button, and an indicator needle on huge electricity meter rigged up behind her rose from zero to 50 megawatts in the next few seconds. It was all theatre of course, with a man behind the hoarding operating the needle. It actually takes quite a bit of time and care to bring a nuclear reactor up to power - I know, I've been involved.

Perhaps at the Victoria Line opening, just to be sure, they should have had a man inside an otherwise empty ticket machine casing, to push a ticket out when he saw the royal sixpence drop in.