Most justified cuts? (Beeching or otherwise)

[DanielCF]

Been reading quite a few threads on which services and lines shouldn’t have been cut and what people would restore, as is to be expected on a railway enthusiast form.

But surely some cuts were necessary? There must be one or two things Beeching was right to consign to history. Or even things closed by BR in the 80s, several decades afterwards.

You’ll all have your own ideas of what “‘most justified” means, though to avoid making it too easy I’ll exclude merging cities with multiple stations (e.g Glasgow St. Enoch’s) as the impact on passenger services is relatively small and it’s a very easy decision to defend (at one point Glasgow had 4 city center rail termini which was just silly - moving to 2 was the right idea, though my knowledge of this mostly comes from Wikipedia so feel free to correct me if you want!)

 

[Bill57p9]

There was a lot of duplication left over from the heady days of independent rival companies which was easily justified. For example, Nottingham to Mansfield was served by 3 independent lines (Great Central, Great Northern, Midland) which largely followed each other serving the same communities: A no brainier for rationalisation. (However all 3 closed, with one subsequently reopened in stages as the Robin Hood Line)

There were also freight lines which served a specific market which closed with the associated industry, such as several quarry systems in Wales and colliery branches such as Calverton - notable for being both built and closed by BR.

There were some lines whose method of operation had become obsolete, whose market was better served by other routes. The High Peak Junction Railway springs to mind.

Then there were the financial basket cases which never made it in to the 1960s. Two jump out at me in Scotland: The Great Glen Railway (which could have been a different story if completed all the way to Inverness) and the Maidens and Dunure Light Railway (though a stub serving what is now the Craig Tara Holiday Park did survive into the 1960s)

 

[The Planner]

This will end well.

 

[ChrisT]

110 years before Dr Beeching the Newmarket & Chesterford Railway was closed using familiar tactics - the line was first singled - making it the first main line in the world to be closed. Closures have been going on ever since as the main source of revenue either dried up completely or changed or, in later years, due to rationalisation. A new line to Newmarket was built from Cambridge making the old alignment redundant. The Titfield Thunderbolt was filmed on the then recently closed Camerton to Limpley Stoke line which had lost its revenue from the local coalfield as mines closed. There are many more examples too numerous to list here.

For two most erudite publications on this subject I would suggest "Disconnected" and "Holding the Line" both by Chris Austin and Richard Faulkner, ISBN 978-0-86093-664-0 and 978-0-86093-647-3 respectively.

 

[Farigiraf]

A relatively recent one - I don't see any justification for keeping the Weymouth Harbour Tramway following the withdrawal of international ferry services from Weymouth. The only use case for it today would've been a terminus point for a potential West Dorset / East Devon tramway but it's not like such a thing would be built if the line were open today anyway.

 

[70014IronDuke]

Been reading quite a few threads on which services and lines shouldn’t have been cut and what people would restore, as is to be expected on a railway enthusiast form.

I think you are making a rather big assumption here: this is far from merely a 'railway enthusiast form' - the latter a typo, I suspect, for forum.

ITYWF here are many serving and retired professional rail people in here, many with excellent knowledge of their speciality. (Of course, they too are human, and have opinions.)

I'd say a majority of posters here are actually both defenders of Beeching pesonally and of the majority of cuts generally blamed on him.

But surely some cuts were necessary? There must be one or two things Beeching was right to consign to history. Or even things closed by BR in the 80s, several decades afterwards.

You’ll all have your own ideas of what “‘most justified” means, though to avoid making it too easy I’ll exclude merging cities with multiple stations (e.g Glasgow St. Enoch’s) as the impact on passenger services is relatively small and it’s a very easy decision to defend (at one point Glasgow had 4 city center rail termini which was just silly

Is it? Was it? It depends on what basis you run your railway. Perhaps traffic demands meant you needed four stations. (FWIW, though I am no Glasgow transport expert, I suspect in this case, after electrification of Glasgow suburban services, it made economic sense to close two terminii. But that should be only after examination of the specific situation of Glasgow transport needs come the mid-60s, not just a sweeping 'assessment' stating 'four bad, two good'.)

- moving to 2 was the right idea, though my knowledge of this mostly comes from Wikipedia so feel free to correct me if you want!)

Since you are from Scotland, you may be interested in this on-going personal anecdote.

I have a good friend, raised in Lenzie in the 50s and 60s. An intelligent guy, not really a railway enthusiast, but his grandfather was a lifelong railwayman for the LNER and then BR, I think in some low-level management job.

Said grandad told him BR did the wrong thing by electrifying Edinburgh - Carstairs and closing the Waverley route, on the grounds that the Carstairs route 'went through nowhere' while the Waverley served more, 'proper' towns.

I have tried to persuade him that, in the overall scheme of things, the small border towns on a winding, slow route meant an absurd outlay for near zero returns in comparison to the far lower cost of wiring (and resignalling) to Carstairs, and closing the Waverley. (Sad though the latter move was, I agree.)

I'm still not sure he believes me.

This will end well.

Heh heh heh!

 

[swt_passenger]

The Alnwick to Cornhill line closed to passengers by 1932. Some of the named stations were not actually in their villages, so it was easy for the new bus companies to take almost all the passenger traffic. It struggled on as a goods only line for another 30 years, but suffered from repeated flooding and bridge failures, which led to operation as short branches from either end.

I suspect there was probably a fairly reasonable case to have closed it completely in 1932. My father travelled on the line about 1935 as a young child, in the brake van with his grandfather, (a guard on the line), and explained that the train carried about enough parcels to fill a single horse and cart.

 

[Magdalia]

One of the joys of this forum is its inability to stop scratching the Beeching itch. The moderators only put us out of our misery on this discussion less than a month ago.

What lines, closed either by Beeching, or later, in the 70's would be viable now, if they had remained open?

Few years ago, I’d have said Leeds - York via Wetherby.

www.railforums.co.uk

You’ll all have your own ideas of what “‘most justified” means

Beeching brought coherence and acceleration to a sequence of closures that were already happening, for example in this part of the world these lines closed to passengers just before Beeching:

1959 St Ives-Kettering
1961 Haverhill-Chappel via Halstead
1962 Cambridge-Mildenhall

Once you take this into account, "most justified" Beeching cut is merely the most marginal case that had somehow been overlooked by regional managers until Beeching came along.

There were also freight lines which served a specific market which closed with the associated industry, such as several quarry systems in Wales and colliery branches such as Calverton - notable for being both built and closed by BR.

The list of closures due to the end of freight traffic would be a very long one.

Another category of justified closures is where lines were breached and uneconomical to repair. Two examples are Burnham Market-Wells Next The Sea which never reopened after the 1953 flood and Stirling-Crianlarich after the 1965 Glen Ogle landslide.

 

[ChrisT]

My father travelled on the line about 1935 as a young child, in the brake van with his grandfather, (a guard on the line), and explained that the train carried about enough parcels to fill a single horse and cart.

A scene repeated over and over again on the railways which is, of course, why many closed.

And not just in this country:

Riding on the City of New Orleans
Illinois Central, Monday morning rail
15 cars and 15 restless riders
Three conductors and 25 sacks of mail

The first verse of City of New Orleans written by Steve Goodman and performed by several others including Arlo Guthrie, my favourite.

 

[Grecian 1998]

It would be hard to criticise the closure of the Chesterfield to Lincoln line given the condition of Bolsover Tunnel. It was so bad that infilling efforts in the 1960s were abandoned for safety reasons. One line that even the most rose tinted nostalgist would probably accept is never coming back.

The Invergarry to Fort Augustus line is frequently mentioned as one that should never have been built, given that it ran through the middle of nowhere. Passenger traffic only lasted 30 years from 1903 - 1933, with goods traffic gone by 1946.

There are a fair few other lines which closed by the end of the 1930s. If these lines couldn't be justified at a time with much more limited road transport, it's very hard to see their closure as anything other than entirely necessary.

 

[eldomtom2]

A scene repeated over and over again on the railways which is, of course, why many closed.

And not just in this country:

Riding on the City of New Orleans
Illinois Central, Monday morning rail
15 cars and 15 restless riders
Three conductors and 25 sacks of mail

The first verse of City of New Orleans written by Steve Goodman and performed by several others including Arlo Guthrie, my favourite.

Of course the City of New Orleans survives to this day (sort of; when Amtrak took over the Chicago-New Orleans route was served by the daytime City and the overnight Panama Limited, Amtrak discontinued the City and kept the Limited, but later renamed the latter to the City of New Orleans due to the song's popularity).

 

[3141]

One of the joys of this forum is its inability to stop scratching the Beeching itch. The moderators only put us out of our misery on this discussion less than a month ago.

What lines, closed either by Beeching, or later, in the 70's would be viable now, if they had remained open?

Few years ago, I’d have said Leeds - York via Wetherby.

www.railforums.co.uk

Beeching brought coherence and acceleration to a sequence of closures that were already happening.

I'm really pleased to see several posts pointing out that line closures had been happening for many years before Beeching, who is so often depicted as some kind of monster that did things no-one would otherwise have thought about.

 

[Iskra]

Having recently hiked in the area, and despite appreciating the beauty of the terrain through which the line passed, and some of the evocative traffic that travelled the line; I find the closure of The Port Road entirely justifiable considering the sparse population and stations distant from the settlement they purportedly served.

 

[ChrisT]

I suppose that it is inevitable that a thread such as this should attract the name "Beeching". However, it had always been BR policy to close unremunerative branch lines but it was not until the 1960s that Dr Beeching was brought in and he certainly streamlined the process aided and abetted by Ernest Marples. This policy then continued long after the good doctor had returned to ICI.

There were two Beeching reports and it was the first that proposed closure of unremunerative branch lines, the second dealt with the duplication of trunk routes, amongst other things.

Gerard Fiennes, in his great book "I tried to run a railway" had this to say:

In 1962 the Marples/Beeching axis began to define their territorial ambitions about rural railways. They laid it down in general that rural railways did not pay, which was true; and could never pay, which was false. They did not, therefore, require more than the most elementary arithmetic on the losses either in general or in particular. They took no account of the new techniques; either coming into operation like diesel traction, or just around the corner like automatic level crossings, mechanised track maintenance, tokenless block signalling, and 'bus stop operation which can cut the cost of rural railways by more than half.

Fiennes, as General Manager at Liverpool Street, was able to do something about this and gives two examples, the East Suffolk and the Stour Valley. The former, he argued, would respond to simplification to a "basic railway" whilst the latter would not, with the result that the East Suffolk is still with us whilst the Sudbury to Cambridge section of the Stour Valley is not.

Here's a couple of photographs of these railways today, The Stour Valley at Sudbury and the East Suffolk at Woodbridge, both taken this year.



== Doublepost prevention - post automatically merged: 7 Dec 2025 ==

Of course the City of New Orleans survives to this day (sort of; when Amtrak took over the Chicago-New Orleans route was served by the daytime City and the overnight Panama Limited, Amtrak discontinued the City and kept the Limited, but later renamed the latter to the City of New Orleans due to the song's popularity).

Thank you. I didn't know that. Of course we don't know the accuracy of Mr Goodman's survey but I think we can safely assume that loadings were light.

 

[Clarence Yard]

Ernest Marples was quite a lazy minister - it was the appointment in April 1959 of James Dunnett as Permanent Secretary that started to changes attitudes to rail at the Ministry. He had come from the Ministry of Supply the previous year (as a Deputy-Secretary) and was the heir apparent when Sir Gilmour-Jenkins went.

What Dunnett did was break the cosy relationship that Gilmour-Jenkins had with the BTC and, from the Treasury, he appointed David Serpell as a Deputy-Secretary and then the fun really started.

Paragraphs 124-127 of the Modernisation Scheme laid out the policy that was to be implemented with regard to branch line and stopping services and the 1959 re-appraisal of the Scheme pointed out that the rate the withdrawal of such services was to be accelerated.

So, in policy terms, Beeching was seen by Government as a catching up and acceleration exercise in the face of mounting losses. Fiennes was right to point out that losses could be reduced by operating “a basic railway” but losses would remain. As the LMR figures you can find on the Railcar website show, introduction of diesel units certainly helped but they weren’t a total cure.

Classing a line as a justifiable closure depends on whether you are looking at its finances or the social/economic benefit it brings, or even both. If your policy is financially based, then most closures could be justified but if you look at social/economic benefit, it gets a bit harder.

The problem for any business is when you are offering the same service but your customers are not coming through your doors anymore and you need to do something urgently to stem the losses.

 

[Falcon1200]

the small border towns on a winding, slow route meant an absurd outlay for near zero returns in comparison to the far lower cost of wiring (and resignalling) to Carstairs, and closing the Waverley. (Sad though the latter move was, I agree.)

There is no connection or link between between closure of the Waverley route, in 1969, and electrification of Edinburgh/Carstairs, in 1991!

 

[Bill57p9]

Beeching produced a report which fulfilled the brief he was given: recommend changes to make the railways profitable in pure economic terms, i.e. social benefit was out of scope.
The result was a proposal for a network vastly reduced focussed on high yield routes, mainly trunk inter city (IIRC the InterCity concept was part of that report) and high volume commuting. What was possibly overlooked were the loss leaders in a network context: the contribution loss leaders make to feeding trunks.

The railways were in need of a thorough overhaul in the 1960s and the road congestion we see today was simply not foreseen.

What I find most disappointing isn't that lines were closed, but that the land was given up, often for a pittance, making it prohibitively difficult to undo most closures.

However, this thread is meant to be about justified closures. Anything shifting just fresh air isn't providing a beneficial service, however today we appreciate that "value" is not measured purely by the farebox.

 

[Uncle Buck]

What I find most disappointing isn't that lines were closed, but that the land was given up, often for a pittance, making it prohibitively difficult to undo most closures.

Respectfully, I can never understand this line of argument, that comes up here all the time. It seems you are saying that BR should have closed the railway but kept the land. Why would they do that? They wouldn’t have closed the railway if they thought they would need to reopen it. When the secondary school near me was demolished and rebuilt elsewhere, the land it previously occupied was sold for housing.

 

[61653 HTAFC]

A couple of post-Beeching closures that were fully justified:
Firstly the Clayton West branch which closed in Jan 1983. The line only survived as long as it did because of the coal traffic, so once the pits closed it would have become a basket-case. West Yorkshire Passenger Transport Executive wisely chose not to continue subsidising the handful of daily passenger services.
Secondly a much more recent one- Teesside Airport station. One could make a similar case for British Steel Redcar or IBM, but at least those stations did serve a purpose once. Teesside Airport was a daft idea from day one.

 

[hexagon789]

Teesside Airport was a daft idea from day one.

It was funded by the Airport and when it opened, they provided a shuttle bus to the terminal.

So originally at least, it wasn't a terrible idea for a station.

 

[Bill57p9]

Respectfully, I can never understand this line of argument, that comes up here all the time. It seems you are saying that BR should have closed the railway but kept the land. Why would they do that? They wouldn’t have closed the railway if they thought they would need to reopen it. When the secondary school near me was demolished and rebuilt elsewhere, the land it previously occupied was sold for housing.

My personal view - rightly or wrongly - is that the unique* rights of way should have been retained in public (not BR) ownership as potential future alignments. Whilst it might be an unpopular opinion, I am happy to see former railway routes recycled as roads or path/cycle ways as they are still fulfilling their fundamental societal purpose: transporting people and possibly goods/livestock. Railway routes are virtually flat and typically straighter, offering efficient connectivity corridors, regardless of mode of transport. (For an example of a road that would be greatly improved if the long abandoned railway alignment could be recycled, see the A70 between Muirkirk and Douglas).

Yes, the vast majority would never be used for transport again, but once the alignment is lost it is almost always prohibitively expensive to recover.

I don’t see this really as the same as blocks of land since procuring a block of land is usually far more straightforward that a very long strip.

Personal view, as I say, and of course hindsight is almost always 20/20.

* Unique, as in not where three railway companies ran side-by-side.

 

[RT4038]

It was funded by the Airport and when it opened, they provided a shuttle bus to the terminal.

So originally at least, it wasn't a terrible idea for a station.

Wasn't there a Teacher Training college or something by the Station (since closed) that provided passenger traffic there as well?

 

[Uncle Buck]

My personal view - rightly or wrongly - is that the unique* rights of way should have been retained in public (not BR) ownership as potential future alignments. Whilst it might be an unpopular opinion, I am happy to see former railway routes recycled as roads or path/cycle ways as they are still fulfilling their fundamental societal purpose: transporting people and possibly goods/livestock. Railway routes are virtually flat and typically straighter, offering efficient connectivity corridors, regardless of mode of transport. (For an example of a road that would be greatly improved if the long abandoned railway alignment could be recycled, see the A70 between Muirkirk and Douglas).

Yes, the vast majority would never be used for transport again, but once the alignment is lost it is almost always prohibitively expensive to recover.

I don’t see this really as the same as blocks of land since procuring a block of land is usually far more straightforward that a very long strip.

Personal view, as I say, and of course hindsight is almost always 20/20.

* Unique, as in not where three railway companies ran side-by-side.

I suppose you could argue that the right of way should have been retained for transport purposes- and indeed, there are some instances of this, like the M90 being built along the old railway line- but I just can’t see why people think that BR should have retained the route “just in case”…in what other field does that happen? But we could re-litigate this multiple times without coming to a conclusion.

It might be the case that it would have been a huge benefit if the right of way was available now, but they didn’t know that when they closed it back then.

 

[MarkyT]

It was funded by the Airport and when it opened, they provided a shuttle bus to the terminal.

So originally at least, it wasn't a terrible idea for a station.

A more integrated plan might have relocated the passenger terminal to the north end of the runway in the 1960s rebuild of the former military base, swapping places with the cargo facilities. It could have been a short walk from the station, avoiding the need for a bus shuttle. Note the station wasn't opened until 1971, a time when several Beeching-inspired closures were still in progress.

 

[Bevan Price]

One factor rarely mentioned about the Marples / Beeching closures failed to stop British Rail(ways) losing money. Indeed, passenger numbers probably declined more than expected, because instead of using replacement bus services to reach railheads, many people chose to do the full journey by car - or not travel at all.

Hindsight is easy, but the closure of some "duplicate" routes was ill-considered, failing to recognise the need for alternative routes if the residual route became blocked, or over-congested. For example, if a few new connections had been made, parts of the GC London Extension could have provided alternative freight paths, rather than use the crowded southern parts of WCML.....

 

[eldomtom2]

A couple of post-Beeching closures that were fully justified:
Firstly the Clayton West branch which closed in Jan 1983. The line only survived as long as it did because of the coal traffic, so once the pits closed it would have become a basket-case. West Yorkshire Passenger Transport Executive wisely chose not to continue subsidising the handful of daily passenger services.

The asterisk there is that Clayton West was a Beeching-proposed closure, it just took a couple of decades to happen.
The 190-so stations that closed after the Beeching report but were not listed for closure in it are a more interesting topic to my mind.

 

[61653 HTAFC]

It was funded by the Airport and when it opened, they provided a shuttle bus to the terminal.

So originally at least, it wasn't a terrible idea for a station.

Maybe not initially a terrible waste of railway money, sure. But that airport was never particularly busy so it was still a waste of money- it was just a waste of the airport owner's money.

 

[mike57]

There were a lot of branch lines which to be honest were 'basket cases' and needed to close. A good example from our area, the Malton and Driffield railway, closed to passengers in 1950, and freight in 1958 once the quarry at Burdale closed. It passed thorugh an area with a sparse population linking two small market towns. Even in 1869, 16 years after opening it was seen as a hopeless case, that was never going to make a profit, but once built it struggled on.

The problem with the Beeching cuts is that by that time there was a view that the railways were 'finished' and that road building and motorways were the answer. This meant that as well as the obvious basket cases other railways which today would be useful and well used were closed often (dons tin hat!!!) using dodgy accounting. This then carried on under the following Labour government in spite of election promises to the contrary.

The problem with the replacement bus services which were supposed to take the place of the closed railways were that journey times were longer in a lot of cases, bus services can be cut or altered much easier, and didn't 'join up' with the railway at the railhead either geographically or timewise.

Overmanning was another problem, some less used branch lines might have had a future if the operations had been massively simplified, but my feeling is that the Unions of the period would not have accepted the changes.

It worth remembering that a lot of the real basket cases had been closed prior to Beeching, maybe if the network had been pruned of the worst examples immediately after WW2 then the later 'lets close everything' mentality would never have gained traction.

 

[The exile]

Respectfully, I can never understand this line of argument, that comes up here all the time. It seems you are saying that BR should have closed the railway but kept the land. Why would they do that? They wouldn’t have closed the railway if they thought they would need to reopen it. When the secondary school near me was demolished and rebuilt elsewhere, the land it previously occupied was sold for housing.

It might not seem logical to you but it’s the way things are done in Germany, for example, so someone sees some logic to it. It’s not an absolute “never”, and if another authority requires the land for something the process of de-dedication to railway use will be accelerated, but it stops potentially strategic land being sold off “for ever”. Of course, it helps that on the whole, the population density in Germany - and the resultant pressure on land use - is lower than in England.

 

[The Planner]

Hindsight is easy, but the closure of some "duplicate" routes was ill-considered, failing to recognise the need for alternative routes if the residual route became blocked, or over-congested. For example, if a few new connections had been made, parts of the GC London Extension could have provided alternative freight paths, rather than use the crowded southern parts of WCML.....

This one is always brought up. Where was the freight going once it got to the southern end? You would also have needed to comprehemsively upgraded it as well.