It Could Have Been [So Much] Worse...

I was having a pint of John Willie Lee's excellent bitter at the Anglesey Arms in Menai Bridge this afternoon, on my way to pick Jane up from work in Bangor - a circuitous route, admittedly, but a good pint's a good pint, all said and done - and set to perusing Julian Hollands railway miscellany "More Amazing and Extraordinary Railway Facts". I do love a good miscellany: they make great dipping material and go particularly well with a pint or two! What I hadn't realised, and I guess many others might not also, was that the Beeching report that led to the axing of the bulk of Britain's branch lines in the middle of the last century, eviscerating a network that had been built to service communities across the UK, no matter how small or far-flung, was not the only report he produced. There was slated to be a Beeching 2.0; not so much an axe this time, but rather a guillotine.

The power of the road lobby was just getting into full stride in the 50s and 60s and the governments of the day - Conservative and Labour alike - were only too happy to pander to the whims of the 'modernisers' of that sector; the railways were becoming to seen as archaic, too complicated and costly and so Dr. Beeching's notions of slimming back the rail network were met with enthusiasm and widespread support. His conclusions of course were, in the coming economic fashion of the time, macroeconomic; and ignored the minutiae of extra-urban and rural communities and their dependance on the branch lines that connected them both to each other, and to the larger, urban centres of commerce and supply. As we have it today, when the need for a fully-functioning rail network is most evident in the need to get road traffic under control and take heavy freight off the highways for environmental reasons, we find orselves with the sorry remnants of Beeching's first report.

We should however, be glad that his second report was not even considered, let alone implemented. His later proposals to the government of the day would have seen virtually everything apart from a few North-South trunk routes - nine in total - serving only the then major 'centres of population and industry' to quote Holland. Another 4,500 miles of railway would have been binned in favour of road traffic, leaving my country of Wales, as the prime example, without a single rail track to its name: it's bad enough as it is, but that outcome was plainly unthinkable, given how spread out and rural most communities are in this country. A classic case of vertical economic thinking, favouring the metropolitan centres over and above the rest of the population. Fortunately, his second report was canned, and it was rumoured that he was sacked from the British Railways Board and went back to his old job at ICI. Nevertheless, as is always the case - even in those days - he was elevated to the Lords in the 1965 Birthday Honours as a life peer...