It is great to hear about the passenger business doing well in the U.K, but there is no mention of the growing freight business in the U.K. which has had it’s own problems with capacity and need for lines to be re-opened. I am glad Beeching’s destruction is being reversed, the fact that more private sector involvement could have been the way to save rail service was not thought of at the time. Imagine if the U.K had a short line movement like the U.S.A. the wagon load freight business might have survived and many lines could have been saved and made viable by low cost service orientated operators.
It shows what horrible things can happen when an elitist like Richard Beeching has the power to destroy a significant part of British civilization.
The unfortunate thing is that some critically needed routes can no longer be easily resurrected. It only needs one short segment completely blocked by a major urban redevelopment to mean linking surviving segments is completely unfeasible. Short sighted planning with an agenda at its worst but, alas, also familiar this side of the Atlantic.
John
It is unfortunate. Britain invented railroads and gave them to the world. And the world is still accepting this gift. To see then trashed in the place that they did so much for is sad indeed.
A little bit of context would be appropriate. When Lord Beeching presided over the abandonment of much of the lightly-used trackage of British Railways in the 1960’s, the organisation was in wretched financial shape and was losing buckets of money. Services were being provided that weren’t being used and lines that carried little traffic or paralleled better-engineered lines were still in place. It was quite comparable to the situation in the Northeast in the 1960’s and early 1970’s. Massive line abandonments occurred because it was too expensive to keep these lines in place.
At any rate, nobody had a crystal ball that could accurate project traffic patterns 40 years into the future.
Paul: Thanks for introducing some factual context into this thread.