Nearly two decades after it was closed under the Beeching Axe and its tracks ripped up, lonely Penygroes station on the Caerrnarfon to Afon Wen line stands as a stark reminder of the brutal rail closures of the sixties. MIKE ESAU
Introduction
Every page is a mine of information - with dozens of never before seen images.
Sample pages from the book
Among the elite group that have clearly managed this feat are Flying Scotsman, Stephenson’s Rocket (no - despite the widespread popular misconception, George Stephenson did not invent the steam railway locomotive, that was down to Richard Trevithick), maybe Royal Scot, if only because of the marketing of the biscuit brand, perhaps Mallard, officially the world’s fastest locomotive, and, dare I say it, Thomas the little blue engine. Another name that can be added to this list is that of Dr Richard Beeching.
Former British Railways chairman Dr Beeching has long been popularly portrayed as an axe-wielding ogre who closed as many railways as he could, got rid of the universally-loved steam engines and left communities all over Britain with no access to trains. Indeed, a mistake often made in print is referring to a particular branch line as a ‘Beeching closure’ when he had nothing at all to do with it, the particular withdrawal of services taking place before his appointment to the British Railway Board in 1961.
Many people still hold the view that if the dreaded doctor hat not descended on the nation’s railways in the sixties, many of the closed lines would still be running today. Some of the more informed among us have from the start seriously questioned the criteria used by him and those that came afterwards to justify the closure of individual routes, particularly those serving large centres of population.
Mountains of hindsight are regularly expressed with the aim of expressing the view that Beeching was wrong in this or that case, that route closures were premature, and if only the powers that be had foreseen the expansion of rural communities in commuter belt country, and the nightmarish road congestion from the 1980s onwards, in which households on even very modest incomes support two or maybe three secondhand cars, the decisions regarding the wholesale pruning of the rail network in the sixties may have been very different. In several, though by no means all, of these ‘lost line’ scenarios, it is difficult not to sympathise or agree wholeheartedly, but it is so easy to pass judgement long after the event, without looking at the circumstances that prevailed at the time when many hard decisions were made.
Coming into the sector from a purely business point of view, in 1963 he produced a report, The Reshaping of British Railways, which became one of the seminal documents of British railway history. It led to the closure of around a third of the nation’s railway network, throwing tens of thousands of railwaymen on to the dole queue, disenfranchising some of the country’s biggest towns from train services as well as country branches lines, in a vain bid to cut the soaring British Railways deficit in an age where passenger numbers dwindled as car ownership ran rampant.
On the other hand, it also streamlined the network in a way that helped ensure its survival into the 21st century, an era in which passenger numbers are now at their highest for many decades. So was Beeching a villain - or a hero? The story of the man who probably had the biggest impact on the nation’s railways since George and Robert Stephenson invented Rocket is outlined in this special publication to mark the 50th anniversary of his controversial appointment.
Robin Jones April 2011
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