Losing Track: 5. Beeching (Channel 4, 1984)

the beachy report was a disaster for the British nation a disaster for British Transport but because I was a Roman I knew it as a disaster for British Railways and British Rail women scenes of railway dereliction like these can be seen all over the country most of them are as a result of a policy pushed through by dr. Richard beaching when chairman of the railways the policy was unveiled in a report called the reshaping of British Railways published in March 1963 the presentation of the document to the public and the railway workers was handled with the precision of a moon launch security was very tight the typing of the final report was done by seven women brought in from an outside agency who worked in a locked room the softening up process which the public relations department engaged in before the launch was so successful that the bbc's panorama programme showed a large slice of the promotion film which dr. beaching introduced in proposing the closing down of stations and services we are only recommending the continuation of a process that's gone on for some time the railways for many years now have been losing traffic to road vehicles to the private car to the bass under the lorry and this closure of services is a necessary part or leads to necessary accompaniment of the other process of building up the good parts of the railway those parts that carry nearly all the traffic now much of the country's transport needs can be provided by other means of a more convenient sometimes more efficient yet throughout the country we are still moving tiny separate consignments of freight stage-by-stage from one marshalling yard to the next and we're still suffering an enormous financial loss and the stopping passenger train which utilizes a lot of expensive equipment to carry a handful of passengers a few miles rather slow beachings plan showed his intention to rip up one-third of the network the threatened services are shown in red beachings brief was to make the railways pay his plan of action was singularly unimaginative he decided on the contraction of the network and the fewer people travelling would pay higher fares there are the suburban services yes it looks as if it ought to be profitable doesn't it and here's the reason it isn't this is the price to be paid in the long off-peak hours for the brief morning and evening Russia's expensive rolling stock idle staff still on hand but scarcely anyone traveling I'm sure you'll all be relieved to hear that we don't intend to close down suburban lines even though we lose money on quite a lot of them this is traffic that we handled better than anywhere else in the world and we like doing it so long as the price is right but you mustn't be surprised if we try to get the price a little writer than it is at the moment in the future and this is important too from the passenger's point of view because if the fares are too low the overcrowding will go on getting worse and not enough money will come in to enable us to improve the services and increase their capacity so it matters to you if the fares are too low if there's one way you don't get people to come on the railways is to make fares high-low fares will always bring people on to transport not put them up so I don't know it was an absolute contradiction time and still is a contradiction the maps and graphs which littered the report were impressive at first sight they even detailed the takings of individual stations but economists at the time questioned how the data was gathered and applied and criticized it for giving the impression of being much more precise than it was we looked ahead 20 years to see what the traffic would be in 1984 but to do this we started by examining all the traffic demands that exists at the present time it meant collecting a massive detail from all aspects of life which could in any way affect the demand for Transport over the next 20 years with an annual production growth rate of 4% and an extra 8 million people by 1984 things should look good for the railways but if present trends continue 3/4 of all households will own a car by then some will have two or more air transport will retain its speed advantage over longer distances and is expected to increase its share of internal passenger journeys the role of passenger services in future would have to be to provide a cheaper alternative to air on the longer routes and a more comfortable alternative to the car on intermediate or shorter journeys beaching like many at that time took a highly optimistic view of the future among other things car ownership was overestimated but more crucially the information was misleading cars per household would never mean cars per person and consequently there would be more people without private transport than his figures implied this was characteristic of what was wrong with the report not the failure to predict accurately but the unsound way that the conclusions were reached his bland assurance that 95% of all traffic would be maintained even after branch lines were cut was based on just one week survey and a lot of guesswork beaching seem to think that the railways should be main lines only the major flaw in this thinking was a failure to understand the function of the branches these local lions fed traffic onto the main railway routes the network is rather like a river cut off the small Springs and tributaries that feed it and the river dries up far from keeping 95 percent of the traffic as beaching hoped the railways lost passengers and freight as fast as stations closed friend Beach nism started to bite the attitude Wars of the railway workers why should I worry I may be next and so the whole question of real merit real morale went down and down and down and even today the British Railways board try and run campaigns to get back to the old days it is not possible Beach nism was the cancer in the the body of railway morale a cancer that worked and destroyed the morale on British Railways there was widespread outrage at beatings proposals but although the railway workers were first in the firing line three hundred thousand of them will be made redundant they didn't mount a national campaign they tried to get support from other unions to oppose the cuts but they were unsuccessful in this strangely the railway unions decided not to fight a campaign on their own so it was left to the local people passengers and railway workers to fight the closures without any national support this fragmented opposition gave the Beeching cuts an easy passage strong local opposition was no guarantee of success protectors at lay still in Suffolk were unsuccessful the closure went ahead and passenger train stopped running in 1966 even though British Rail were prepared to keep the line operating for nuclear waste they refused to permit its use by passengers for passengers the only focus then as now for objecting to a railway closure was a public inquiry held by a transport users consultative committee these were bodies appointed by the government ostensibly to look after passenger interests the terms of reference were very restricted if the committee were prepared to accept that hardship would result from the closure of the line they could recommend retaining it but of the 450 hearings only 45 recommended against closure hundreds of communities were left isolated and Wales was particularly badly hid the BGN report was devastating in my opinion and that report would met with a mint and did mean the complete destruction of the railway system in Wales as all many lines were taken away which had the terrible effect upon the wheels as a country Coltrane's from mines to steel works fueled the industrial base of South Wales using the same tracks as the local passenger trains but even the heavy freight was not enough to save this area from the Beeching plan only five years before the reshaping report British Rail made a propaganda film describing how it planned to build new railways in the area planning new tracks for new railways across old fields and ditches cutting up the pastoral pattern up and down the valleys down below the mountains down to the industrial sea out of the muck in the mud the clean and clanging lines were springing new life lines of a changing life links between village and village between Township and steel works between estate Factory and mine and the open mouth of the valleys most of the links in our derelict and the villages and estates that remain have to cope without the Train train still roam - tree Herbert the busy station is near the top of the Rhondda Valley in South Wales the trains shuttle passengers down the valley to Cardiff and back the line once went further burrowing under the hills through a two mile tunnel round into the next Valley and down to bridge end but since 1969 tree Herbert has been the end of the line enormous inconveniences resulted for travelers and workers on the line either lost opportunities for promotion or more seriously they lost their jobs this closure was contested by the railway workers one of these is Gordon Cole's people would come up on the line from Cardiff they would change a tree Herbert get on the train man and they would go from tree event over to British Empire line on the station which was about a mile I err up in the valley that shouldn't be applause because it's at the joining point of two little communities Blair on LAN Lancome then of course was to proceed up through the village of Lancome beautiful the area in the salon in the winter when the snow is out and you'd go into the tunnel it would be all uphill going up through the tunnel and then you'd be going downhill then into blank wouldn't be through the valley the other side down into cameraman and you'd go down gradient all the way through my stage mn him to pretend itself where there was a market that was the only opportunity for the Rhondda Valley to have a connection with the the Ovid value of the other side under Lin V Valley which we went through you went through an another tunnel the and we're all communities the community of Ronda the community of the oven valley the community of Berlin V Valley were related in many ways young people met one another got married and moved there was a movement between the valleys and when they put up that line for closure it was obviously going to have an impact upon this movement the people so in 1968 the railway workers launched a local campaign initially we got the branch members together and then we went sent out su clones to all organizations you can think of with leaflets to individual members of the public we met these people dressed them in the clubs and in the churches and chapels and what-have-you and discussed it with them and the result was that we ended up with several thousand objections despite the strength of local opposition and clear-cut evidence of hardship the transport users consultative committee recommended removing the service after a public inquiry the Minister of Transport agreed and the service was cut when they closed the line they put the replacement service on but that replacement service again wasn't used and eventually was withdrawn it would take you about ten minutes to go by rail once the those claws need to take you in the region about 45 minutes to an hour the replacement bus had to use local roads which were even worse then than they are now so that replacement service was an impractical one from the start it's a torturous road lots bends in it narrow and in the winter time with severe weather very dangerous indeed we are so much about community life family life by certain people today and you think to yourself one with all this has been destroyed because once we lost the service then not me and meant that the communication was lost between the two valleys the direct communication we been locked as a result of the withdrawal ourselves we are locked in Scotland like Wales was threatened with drastic cuts most of its railways ran through sparsely populated areas where the Train was the only lifeline for far-flung communities in winter when the roads were blocked by snow it was the trains that got through all the services marked in red on the map were to go the closure plan made no mention of the torahs potential of many Scottish lines which often ran through spectacular scenery beachings report was a crude cost-cutting exercise with sparse attention paid to expanding the use of the railways some closures were averted mostly in the highlands people there felt especially threatened because all they had was a bare skeleton of a network a lot of the CST fought battles did manage to get the message of hardship accepted the line north of Inverness got a reprieve hosted the line which runs west from Fort William to Millay the Beeching cuts also threaten lines in the big cities the North London line runs for 16 and a half miles through densely populated suburbs its trains provide a quick inefficient service yet it too was on beachings closure list the line runs to the city bypassing the West End and provides the only effective public transport link between the suburbs of North London Richmond its western end is also the terminus for London transports district line there are a number of interchanges with both the tube and other British rail services after Richmond comes queue the home of the Botanical Gardens then it crosses the Thames and passes through a varied landscape a mixture of densely populated residential areas strange wastelands and industrial developments it's heavily used along this stretch by people traveling to work or taking the day out at one of the many popular places like Q or Hampstead heat after Hampstead Heath the pastor through the Victorian suburbs of kentish town and Highbury and on to the city of London it's particularly used by passengers from all points of the line as a direct route to the city British royals intention to close the line was made public in 1963 well I heard about the closure because it was under threat and when the Beeching report was published the North London line was mentioned and everybody in this area decided to fight the closure now what I did first of all as a school teacher was to get information of the use of the line by pupils and teachers at the big school that I taught at other schools in the area would be affected if the line would too close Margaret Ogden joined a committee set up to save the line they realized that they would have to have independent information if they were going to fight successfully the first step was to find out just how many people did use the line I prepared a questionnaire to all the local schools and then other people were concerned about factories and so we were able to use the same questionnaire and we sent this out to factories as well for example we asked people to show that the station nearest their Factory and then they were asked to note down here the numbers of people joining and using the line from the various stations along it how did you use the information well we use the information in writing our report and this is the report that we produced including all the figures about the use of the line and we sold it for two and sixpence and this we round up Center MPs we're able to send to anyone who we thought would be influential the committee eventually won the battle to keep the line open it wasn't saved all in one go there would be a promise that it was postponed for six months and our Chairman would say you mustn't let up your publicity you've got to keep on with your efforts and in the end actually in June 1965 there was a reprieve announced why were you successful I think we were successful because we cared I mean we weren't going to let that line disappear from the map and we had experts who had knowledge of British Rail we had railway guards who worked for nur on our committee we had an artist who helped us and who knew a printer that helped us publish the report and our Chairman was a journalist Chris Hall and he showed us how to keep our campaign in the eye of the local papers but although the line was saved it is still not secured a new threat centered on the eastern end of the line has emerged in 1983 British Rail announced plans to close the City of London terminus of Broad Street a new campaign got underway to oppose the closure in the meantime the familiar cycle of dereliction has begun which can only serve to strengthen the case for closure this process of allowing the line to run down prior to closure acts like an early warning sign to travelers worried about the future of their particular route the line from Winchester to Alton in Hampshire was originally double track then one track was taken away and finally both tracks the process was repeated with variations all over the country beaching tried to justify all this by attempting to push his conviction that railways were unnecessary in all the rail services which we intend to cut out run parallel with bus services and even where they don't it's very much cheaper to van abbas instead of the railway and therefore if there is a social need for some minimum level of service it's really much better to provide it by BATS beaching could argue that because he was only interested in a minimum level of service trains were unnecessary but buses could never replace trains they're not as convenient and a far less reliable in practice in fact 7 out of 10 replacement buses have now gone beaching didn't appear interested in the long-term effects of his cuts whether they apply to passengers or Freight in some places where the traffic is light on the roads now we shall in fact push some traffic from the roie's onto the roads but in other places on the trunk route where the road traffic is very heavy we aim to draw freight bank all of the railways far from drawing frayed back onto the railways the Beeching closures drove it away in the ten years following the Beeching report the railways lost a quarter of their Freight and they went on losing it road haulage boomed the permitted wait for lorries went up and up and with it the cost of maintaining the roads for them to run on compared with these costs beaching savings looked laughable he saved no more than 25 million pounds in 10 years barely enough to pay for a mile and a half of London motorway at 1972 prices you

Channel: stablestaple

Views: 108,666

Keywords: Losing, Track, Dr, Beeching, Kerry, Hamilton, Channel

Id: wV63tqmZ63M

Length: 25min 40sec (1540 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 16 2011