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Who was Doctor Beeching and what was his axe?

Archive - Originally posted on "The Horse's Mouth" - 2016-02-06 23:29:28 - Graham Ellis

Lots of references in the local press here in Wiltshire to the Beeching Axe, and soemthing similar forseen for our bus network. But Dr Richard Beeching was born oin 1913 and passed away in 1985 - long before many of our current publiic transport users were even born. So here's a little bit about "The Beeching Axe".

In the 1950s and 1960s, car ownership was booming and train use dropping - with ever-growing losses being reported from the nationalised British Railways. Richard Beeching was commmissone to oversee a reduction in loss and hs team did so by cutting out large numbers of lines and stations often based on scant or partial data. Around 4,000 route miles and 2,000 stations closed in 10 years.

Only minimal work was done to look at the shape of the resulting network, although there was some. The effect of the removal of a feeder branch into a main line tended to be overlooked too.

Sixty years later, it's commonly acknowldged that the cuts went too deep and too little work was done to ensure that the network left was the optimum one for the future. Little or nothing was done to protect right of way assets, nd in spite of the horrendous costs, lines are stations have re-opened.

The current fear with buses is that cuts are proposed, once again, in order to reach a monetary target rather than an effective network, and that the smaller subsidised services are being considered in isolation from the commercial services with which they form a network.



Illustration - some lines that were closed in the 1960s, photographed much more recently!