Ian Hislop Goes off the Rails

Once Britain was proud of its trains.

The country had the first and greatest rail network in the world.

You could travel between cities, towns and villages in comfort and style.

But then, something changed.

In 1961, a certain Dr Beeching was hired by the Government

to write a report on the future of Britain's railways.

He recommended closing a third of the network, shutting down

thousands of stations and tearing up miles and miles of track.

Beeching became one of the most reviled men in the country.

I just felt it was wrong to close our railway.

You get men in grey suits sitting in far-off offices

and they look at a map and they use a pin.

And they haven't a clue about the area.

Resistance was futile.

This was the gospel. This is what had to happen.

This was what we had to accept.

In the wake of Dr Beeching's cuts,

Britain became a country of ghost lines and phantom platforms.

Many saw it as a devastating assault on both our industrial and cultural heritage.

Many more felt it was a body blow to ordinary rail passengers throughout the land.

Now, over 40 years later, I'm looking back to see

why Dr Beeching became enshrined in British folklore as the mad axe man.

And I'm asking whether Beeching's actions were a necessary evil...

or one of the great acts of vandalism of the 20th century.

Every day in Britain over three million people take the train.

I'm one of them. And I love the railway!

I like the train because you can sit down, read, look out the window...

Except when there aren't any seats and the only thing you can read is your overpriced ticket,

and if you look out the window you'll realise the train hasn't moved for over two hours.

Still, it's quicker by train.

Except when it isn't.

Train travel today undoubtedly lacks romance.

And I've always wondered whether Dr Beeching is to blame.

When he closed so many lines and stations, did he extract the network's soul?

Was that the start of our railways' decline?

I'm sure it was so much better in the old days.

"Unmitigated England came swinging down the line,

"that day the February sun did crisp and crystal shine.

"A village street, a manor house, a church, then, tally ho!

"We pounded through a housing scheme with telly masts a-row.

"Where cars of parked executives did regimented wait

"beside administrative blocks within the factory gate."

The poet, John Betjeman, was a huge fan of British railways and the joy of trains.

He also had a keen appreciation of their unique contribution to the fabric of our national life.

From the view out of a first-class carriage to the unique charm of a village station,

Betjeman eulogised train travel.

I can think of few pleasanter places to hang about in on a sunny afternoon like this

than Snettisham Station.

But Betjeman's idyllic vision was not shared by everyone.

In fact, many passengers found plenty to complain about.

Trains seem to be late for no reason whatever.

What about the stations?

Well, they could be a lot better.

This is a shocking place really, Fenchurch Street, really terrible.

Look at the carriages, they're absolutely disgusting.

-We never know why we're late, they never tell us.

-Do you feel angry?

I do. We wouldn't mind so much if fares hadn't been put up so many times.

-Anything to say about the railways?

-Shocking!

The reality of train travel in the 1950s and early 1960s

was that it wasn't that different from train travel today.

Even back then, complaints about high fares and low quality of service were par for the course.

The down at heel railway with its shabby stations was not in keeping

with the Government's vision for modern Britain.

Here then is the design for living of the future.

A town planned down to the last nail.

Planned to be lived in and enjoyed by 80,000 of the citizens of tomorrow.

The country had finally emerged from years of post-war austerity.

People wanted to get rid of the old and embrace all that was shiny, streamlined and convenient.

The Government was keen to capitalise on this mood

and forge a dynamic, modern nation

with a dynamic modern railway service.

But stations makeovers were trivial

compared to the real changes that had to be made.

The railways' finances were in meltdown.

They'd been losing money for years,

and by 1961 were in debt to the colossal sum of £136 million.

As a nationalised industry, this overspend was a huge headache for the Government.

Conservative Prime Minister Harold Macmillan was determined the situation must alter.

He wanted the railways to run like a business and pay for themselves.

It was thought only an outsider from the railways could deliver this,

so the job was offered to a captain of industry,

steeped in the values of the hard-nosed, commercial world.

# Cos he gets up in the morning and he goes to work at 9

# And he comes back home at 5.30 Gets the same train... #

Dr Richard Beeching had a PhD in physics and was considered

one of the most brilliant business brains in the country.

# And he's oh so good And he's oh so fine... #

By the age 43 he'd risen to the board

of one of Britain's top companies, ICI.

Now he was made Chairman of the British Railways Board.

Beeching was exactly the right man for taking on the job

of turning around the railways' finances,

largely because he had the right image.

It was a time when politicians believed you needed technocrats,

experts, people who were doctors to solve these sorts of problems.

Nowadays we're not surprised to hear of a manager from a private industry

parachuted into an ailing public company.

But in the 1960s it was rare.

People couldn't understand what someone from the chemical industry

could possibly do for the railways.

The Mirror was pretty sneery.

"Last night Dr Breeching sat in his spacious office at ICI headquarters in London,

"and admitted with a bland smile,

"No, I have no experience of railways, except as a passenger.

"So I am not a practical railwayman but I am a very practical man."

To demonstrate this practicality,

Beeching first insisted the Government match his ICI salary.

# The best things in life are free

# But you can give them to the birds and bees

# I need money... #

Do you think that perhaps public service should in itself

be regarded as part of the reward for a job of your sort?

I don't think so under circumstances such as these.

This really is a straightforward industrial job.

Beeching's salary made the Mirror's front page.

"A New Rail Boss at £24,000"

And £24,000 was an unprecedented amount of money to give a public servant,

particularly when, as the Mirror points out, the Prime Minister was only making 10,000 a year.

Impervious to criticism, Beeching set out to save the railways from insolvency.

It will be possible to make them pay.

I think it's most important that they should be made to pay.

I think there can be no satisfactory future for the railways

unless they are made to pay.

Beeching inherited an industry that had barely developed since the 1900s.

He now faced an enormous challenge to correct more than a century

of inefficiency engrained in the network from its very start.

The system had evolved without a plan, built by railway barons

whose overriding concern was making a quick buck.

Even if that meant duplicating lines or constructing routes

that were unsustainable in the long term.

Public service was usually the last thing on their minds.

Trains were designed for profit.

Passenger travel had been a luxury, but then the general public fell in love with trains too.

They wanted to travel on them as well.

And an Act of Parliament in 1844 forced companies to offer cheap fares for all.

Every company had to provide a service on every line that would

cost no more than an old penny a mile and run at least at 12mph.

Some of them were a bit naughty and they'd run their trains at 6am and they were pretty unpopular.

But most took advantage of this and it opened up the railways to the masses.

This is when the British love affair with the train really began.

Rail travel was now seen as a democratic, even God-given right, and it was enshrined in law.

All very noble.

But the stark economic truth was that moving people around the country

was secondary to the real business of rail.

This was what the railways were originally about.

From raw materials like coal or iron ore

to manufactured goods and livestock,

what the railways were designed to do first was carry freight.

Trains literally drove the Industrial Revolution.

And the prospect of thousands of freight wagons, full to bursting, travelling up and down the country,

that's what excited the early railway entrepreneurs.

That's where the money was.

By the early 1850s, there was an astonishing 5,000 miles of railway

criss-crossing the country, owned by dozens of companies.

And this hectic growth showed no signs of stopping.

A century before Dr Beeching, some people thought the unchecked

expansion of the railways would end in disaster.

"Railways have set all the towns of Britain a-dancing.

"Reading is coming up to London,

"Basingstoke is going down to Gosport or Southampton,

"confusedly waltzing in a state of progressive dissolution,

"and know not where the end of the death-dance will be for them."

It wasn't just Carlyle who had an apocalyptic view of the railways.

Although they later came to define the British landscape,

for many 19th century NIMBYs, trains signalled the death of the countryside.

This line through the Severn Valley is now a popular tourist attraction.

But, in 1849, when plans were drawn up, there were local objections.

One landowner, Mr Thomas Charlton Whitmore of Apley Park,

insisted that the railway enter a tunnel when it went through his estate,

so the view from his house would be preserved.

A sizeable offer of compensation from the railways changed his mind.

And in a stunning volte face, he then started cutting down trees

so he would get a better view of passing trains.

Railways, though rooted in the world of money and commerce,

were fast becoming works of art in their own right.

Railways were considered not just

one of the highest forms of modern technology,

but they were part of a new shaping of the British landscape.

You can see the sheer thrill and enjoyment that architects had in designing stations.

They could let rip, they designed buildings that were a combination of

Greek temples mixed with railways, they could be Gothic cathedrals,

they could be fortresses,

and they were the most magnificent, thrilling, exciting things.

This chaotic, commercial venture had become part and parcel

of the way Victorians imagined themselves,

and still influences how we see ourselves as Britons today.

And as the extent and popularity of trains grew,

rail travel even became the subject of an etiquette guide.

One that's still pretty useful now.

"The placing of a coat, a book, a newspaper, or any other article,

"on the seat of a carriage,

"is intended as a token that such a place is engaged."

"To prevent the vibration of the carriages to the arms and book,

"do not rest the elbows,

"but hold the book or paper in both hands, and support it by muscular power.

"Keep a sharp look out to prevent being carried beyond your station.

"The guards sometimes call out the name, but in such curious and varied dialect

"that it is next to impossible to gather their meaning."

MUFFLED VOICE

By the start of the 20th century, a country only 600 miles long

had 18,500 miles of railway.

With such a huge profusion of different companies and lines,

the system was complicated almost beyond comprehension.

But miraculously, it all worked!

If Dr Beeching had been compiling his report in the early 1900s,

he'd have found the railways in fine form.

Most lines were delivering a greater profit than ever before or since,

especially on the long distance routes.

Companies were actually investing in freight services

and in passenger trains, putting in better seating,

lighting, toilets - all designed to deliver the enjoyable travelling experience.

The golden age of Britain's railways

was somewhere between 1890 and the outbreak of the First World War.

That's when the railways are at their greatest extent physically,

that's where they've got the greatest amount of fresh interesting, intelligent talent.

They've been going long enough to have a routine and rhythm

and they look absolutely sensationally wonderful in every way.

# Oh, Mr porter, what shall I do?

# I want to go to Birmingham

# And they're taking me on to Crewe.. #

The democratic idea of a national railway

expanded immensely during the Edwardian era.

From upper class days-trips to the city,

to working class excursions to the seaside, the way to go was by rail.

People's passion for train travel continued well into the 20th century,

stoked by advertisements for the alluring places you could escape to by train.

Meanwhile, newsreels extolled the excellence of British locomotive engineering.

The Silver Jubilee Express, a new streamlined train, makes a trial run

before starting on a regular service between London and Newcastle,

and attains the amazing speed of 112 mph.

It remains so steady that one can read without any difficulty.

The Silver Jubilee is playing its part in keeping up the prestige of British Railways.

Throughout the 1930s,

British steam trains were smashing international records. It looked wonderful.

It looked like progress. But sadly, it was exactly the opposite.

While we were still in love with steam, other countries were already

heavily investing in really modern technologies like high-speed diesel and electric traction.

The great days of Britain's railways were already over.

A less glamorous rival was now challenging

the train companies' monopoly on delivering goods -

the lorry.

And the railways couldn't even fight back, because of Government legislation.

It was very difficult for them to charge flexible prices.

They couldn't turn down traffic so long as they could physically carry it.

And it was very easy for the road haulage operator to see

what the railways would charge and undercut them.

120 years after their invention, the railways were in a sorry state,

made much worse by the overuse and under investment of two world wars.

In 1948, this became our problem.

The Labour Government nationalised the railways.

They were now owned by all of us.

This was bad news for the taxpayer, because, by 1955,

British Railways was firmly in the red.

The British Transport Commission, which resided here in London,

was responsible for fixing this economic disaster.

This palatial building, erected by one of the great Victorian railway companies,

now hosted discussions to salvage a network in decline.

The British Transport Commission came up with a scheme.

It would transform the railways from an old-fashioned, rundown network

into a sleek, contemporary, efficient industry.

The estimated price tag for this was over a billion pounds -

the equivalent of 22 billion in today's money.

But the commission was convinced that this investment would revive the fortunes of the railway.

And this modernisation plan was called...

the Modernisation Plan!

A new word is coming to railways,

and with it a lot of exciting changes.

The word is modernisation.

The modernisation plan was really the great,

lost opportunity before Beeching,

because the railways did at last get all the money they'd been clamouring for

for years and years and years.

And if they had spent it more wisely, then maybe we might not have had Beeching.

British Railways began to phase out steam engines.

But they exchanged them for hastily commissioned diesels.

These fast developed a reputation for breaking down.

And, in an attempt to take on the lorry, 30 huge marshalling yards

were built, so freight wagons could be moved more easily.

The only thing missing was the freight.

The railway industry was unable to compete either with the prices

or with the logistical convenience that the road hauliers could offer.

The British Transport Commission's idea that

freight would return to pre-war levels, was simply unrealistic.

In fact, it was almost inevitable that the Modernisation Plan would

fail to pull British Railways out of the red, because the money

the Government had put up was not a grant or a subsidy -

it was loan to be paid back with interest.

By the start of 1960s, British Railways' deficit was £112 million.

And it was out of control.

Something would have to be done.

Harold Macmillan isn't generally seen as a radical Prime Minister,

but he took a hard line on the railways.

They were to run like a business and aim to pay their own way.

Put in charge of making this happen was Transport Minister Ernest Marples.

Marples, however, was pro-road.

In fact, he'd amassed a fortune building roads before entering politics.

There he became one of the most controversial ministers of the post-war era.

I don't think Ernest Marples

would have survived five minutes in politics today

because he seemed to take almost perverse delight

in upsetting people and in flirting with scandal.

Macmillan had a very high opinion of Marples,

almost as high as Marples' opinion of himself.

Macmillan could see that Marples would be the right sort of person

to pursue a difficult and potentially very unpopular policy towards the railways.

Marples relished the task of taking the railways in hand.

There was to be no place for the nooks and crannies of the network

so beloved by the Betjemans of this world.

Marples brought in the like-minded Dr Beeching

to facilitate his unsentimental plan for the railway's future.

The bottom line would be...

the bottom line.

Isn't there something to be said for the railways

being run as a service to the nation

rather than on the strict profit and loss basis

of a private company?

There is something to be said but I think it's a doubtful argument.

Somebody's got to pay

and if a service of this kind is not supported by those who use it,

then it means a tax on the populous in general.

The 17th of April 1961 might have seemed like

a normal Monday to passengers and railway staff around the country.

In fact, it was day one of a seven-day survey into line traffic

on which Beeching would base his report.

The results starkly exposed the inefficiency of the railways.

The key thing Beeching did establish

was that about 95% of rail traffic travelled on half the network,

and the other half of the network just wasn't carrying enough to be viable.

That was the important statistic.

Beeching now felt he had the evidence to justify the policy

he and Marples had intended to implement from the start -

mass closure.

There's nothing modern about hiring a spin doctor.

Beeching needed to manage the bad news,

and he hired John Nunnely, who'd been director of publicity for the Express newspaper group.

Now at British Transport HQ, he had to stop the papers getting wind of the closures.

-The press itself had been pretty hostile, hadn't it?

-Yes.

-Newspapers really wanted to get advance information.

-I bet.

Because they wanted to run stories which would

warn the general public their station could be axed and all the rest of it.

And were there no leaks?

No. I decided that I would hire something like 25

absolutely first rate typists from the private sector.

-Not from within the railways.

-Right.

Every night I personally destroyed every typewriter ribbon that had been used.

-In case it had a name left on it?

-Exactly.

The long-awaited report was finally made public in March 1963.

This is it - this is The Beeching Report,

official title, "The Reshaping of British Railways",

an early example of euphemistic management speak.

"The Reduction of British Railways" would have been accurate,

or "The Rescuing of British Railways" if you wanted to be optimistic.

But "The Reshaping" it was.

It came in two parts. Part one, the report, which was tables, charts, arguments, and part two,

a series of detailed maps, all to show that Beeching had done his homework.

But the section that most people turned to, was appendix two in the end of part one,

which was a list of passenger services, line and station closures.

And it has been said that this list reads like the list of names on a war memorial.

Abbey Town, Acrow Halt, Acton Central, Addingham, Addlestrop, Ainsdale...

Henfield, Hensall, Henstridge...

Stratton Park Hall...

Yelvertoft and Stanford Park...

Yeovil Halt, Yeovil Pen Mill, Yeovil Town, Yetminster, Yorton.

There was a sense that a great portion of Britain had been given a sort of death sentence.

And it was a PR disaster.

Beeching just wasn't the sort of political animal who would see how that list

would in a way become a testament to what a terrible person he was.

The Guardian published a poem called Lament which ended,

"We shall stop at you no more because Dr Beeching stops at nothing."

# Ellersdale for Tideswell... #

It gave a romantic quality to all those lost destinations which was

immediately exploited by people like Flanders and Swann.

# No more will I go

# To Blandford Forum

# And Mortehoe

# On the slow train from Midsomer Norton

# And Mumby Road

# No churns, no porter

# No cat on a seat... #

Beeching's report would change the map of Britain for good.

# We won't be meeting again

# On the slow train... #

Over 200 branch lines were to be closed.

More than 2,000 stations shut down.

And 5,000 miles of track would be pulled up.

There's never been a Domesday Book of Britain's railways like this.

Remote areas of the highlands will lose their services.

Wales takes a body blow as well.

In the North East, little more than the main North-South links will remain.

Holiday resorts in the West Country share the fate of many market towns,

no station, no passenger trains.

North Devon and North Cornwell resorts are especially hit.

"Attend the long express from Waterloo, that takes us down to Cornwall.

"On Wadebridge station, what a breath of sea scented the Camel Valley.

"Cornish air, soft Cornish rains, and silence after steam."

Thanks to the train, the South-West coastline had become

the prime location of the English bucket and spade holiday.

This is a charming poster from the early 1960s

showing the seaside resorts that you could get to from Waterloo,

on the glamorous sounding Atlantic Coast Express.

But after Beeching had done his work, all these stations were closed

and you couldn't get to any of these towns by rail.

The North Cornish village of Padstow depended on its trains.

The railway had arrived here in 1899 and immediately revolutionised

the local economy, carrying fish out and tourists in.

Over 60 years on, the track which had brought

such prosperity to Padstow was carried off for scrap.

At the old station there is now a car park.

And along the old coastal route,

the views are only enjoyed by walkers and the occasional cyclist.

When the railway went, it was the workers on the local lines who were hit first.

I met up with Trevor Knight and Rod Thompson, who'd found their jobs under threat.

I don't think there was a case to do what they did

to this part of the world, just cut it right out

and isolate everybody, cos that's what it did, like.

Do you think their research into numbers was scientific and rigorously done?

If you see a stranger in the camp, you think, what's he doing?

Why has he got a clipboard?

You used to see them get off a train and they'd be watching to see who got on and off.

When we were observing all this,

it was a time when there was less people travelling,

like midday or something like that,

rather than in the mornings when there was people going to work,

children going to school, various places.

So are you suggesting it was a fix?

Yes!

There are people who suggest that the figures were collated

by going to railway stations when they weren't very busy,

and going at off-peak times rather than at the commuter rush

or when schools were coming out.

Absolute rubbish!

You say that very confidently.

I do say it confidently. Absolute rubbish.

It's extremely unlikely that surveys were rigged.

But in fact there was a generally hurried approach

to analysing the results, and there wasn't a great deal of thought

given to, should we do another survey at another time?

Should we look at how we can cut costs or have initiatives to increase traffic?

I remember the divisional manager at Plymouth

wrote a letter with a very, very good plan for the Exmouth line.

And the reply he got, which came from headquarters,

was, "It is not the job of the divisional manager

"to tell us how to run the railways efficiently, it's to close it down."

Closing hundreds of lines meant cutting thousands of jobs.

Railway workers were devastated.

John Betjeman added his voice to the protests.

You know, I'm not just being nostalgic and sentimental

and unpractical about railways.

They are not a thing of the past.

And it's heartbreaking to see them left to rot,

and to see the fine men who've served them all their lives,

made uncertain about their own futures and about their jobs.

I think it's more than likely we'll deeply regret the branch lines

we've torn up and the lines that we've let to go to rot.

The travelling public joined the mounting opposition.

It's a very sad thought, you know, to us

that some boffin boy at grimy old Liverpool Street, some economist,

may be the means of closing down this eight miles of very nice line,

merely for the sake of balancing his books.

It's a nationalised industry, and if it is losing money,

it's only a drop in the ocean compared with other industries.

And it's an essential service that I think we're entitled to.

Dissatisfaction was escalating.

Beeching acted swiftly by stepping up the PR campaign.

He requested help from an unlikely source.

BBC Television presents Tony Hancock in...

Hancock's Half Hour.

I hate train journeys, always have.

They drive me up the wall. Hour after hour,

clickety clack, bigelly bong,

clickety clack, bigelly bong...

This lot are going on a different train for a start.

Another thing I hate about train journeys: passengers.

Every time I travel by train I get mixed up with the most

ugly looking lot of geezers you've ever seen in your life.

The lugubrious Tony Hancock was one of Britain's best loved comedians.

Although Dr Beeching's sense of humour was hardly legendary,

he now despatched his Publicity Officer to get Hancock on board.

Who's little one's this, then?

-That's mine.

-Right, catch, there you are.

I said, "How much would you want for it?"

"Well," he said,

"Dr Beeching is paid 24,000 a year.

"I want the same."

I said, "I'll give you half."

"Done!"

I'm not looking forward to this at all.

Hancock fronted a spoof investigation.

Sparing no expense, celebrity photographer Terence Donovan

took the pictures, which ran as a campaign in national newspapers.

This advert was called The Train That Wasn't,

and it's about cuts in services.

Hancock complains, "Oh, that Beeching! Look what he's done now.

"Removed my favourite train from the service, 29 minutes after midnight.

"Very cosy too, only one passenger per carriage.

"'You can cut what trains you like, but not mine,' I said to Beeching."

The official railway's response runs underneath.

"At present, some trains run almost empty.

"These services lose the railways large sum of money, waste manpower and equipment.

"Economies must be made.

"The few people affected may have to use other forms of transport or travel earlier."

There's no evidence the costly Hancock Report

convinced anybody of anything.

The death of their railways was no laughing matter

to those at the sharp end of the cuts.

Especially when Beeching's faith in alternative transport

seemed excessively optimistic.

"I've had an idea," he said.

"Do you think you can provide me with a map of every bus service

"in this country, showing the coverage nationally?"

-We put it as an appendix.

-Yes, it's here.

And if you look at that map,

you would find there was not, at that time, a hamlet,

village or town

which was not covered by bus services.

"Nearly all the rail services which we intend to cut out

"run parallel with bus services.

"And even when they don't,

"it's very much cheaper to run a bus instead of the railway."

But as far as the politicians were concerned,

a comprehensive bus service was never on the cards.

Richard Marsh was later a minister

when the provision of buses was on the Government's agenda.

Beeching was desperately, the whole time,

looking for something specific on it.

-To offer?

-Yeah.

And, and it wasn't there.

Were the Cabinet aware that it wasn't there, that the buses wouldn't materialise?

Oh, yes, I think everybody did.

-It was just a sop?

-Yeah.

The Government's vision of future transport lay elsewhere.

In the same way that the train defined the Victorian era,

the car was the ultimate expression of the 20th century.

A symbol of modernity for an individualistic age.

The car, from the mid 1950s, was, apart from anything else -

and beyond a means of transport - a consumer dream.

It was something you could own.

You can't own a railway.

A railway takes you where the railway goes,

a car takes you where, theoretically, you want to go.

The idea of having some exciting little Ford Anglia,

or Ford Prefect, with its plastic seats, was a terrific dream.

But even before today's environmental fears,

the downside of car culture was apparent.

Traffic congestion was a serious problem even when Beeching published his report.

Aware of this, the lines he chose to keep were often commuter links

or inter city routes, taking people in and out of the big urban centres.

Yet Beeching's efforts to ease congestion would make little impact

in the big scheme of things.

The national transport strategy was in the hands of Ernest Marples,

minister and sometime road construction magnate.

And he believed not in trains, but in tarmac.

Whilst we can squeeze the last ounce out of our existing roads

by traffic management and traffic engineers,

the solution ultimately to the problem must be new roads.

The section of the M6 was opened by Mr Marples,

adding 27 miles to the northern section of the Birmingham-Preston motorway.

The minister entered into the spirit of the occasion.

Some thought Marples' zeal for road building was, well, a bit dodgy.

Amongst his critics was a recently launched satirical magazine.

"Aim of the Marples Master Plan:

"to run down all forms of transport in Britain

"with the exception of the private motor car,

"so that Britain's roads become clogged to saturation.

"Thus far, Marples is acting in league with the motor cartels.

"Then will be his hour.

"His army of traffic wardens will take over all points of strategic importance.

"And Marples will assume supreme control of the national destiny."

Well, got a bit overexcited at the end there.

But actually that is pretty prophetic.

And that, of course, was Private Eye in 1962.

And as the current editor, I'm very impressed

that my illustrious predecessors had got Marples' number quite so early.

The man who'd built, financed and championed roads

was never going to be sympathetic to the railways' case.

Though he made a reasonable show of it in public.

It looks to outsiders rather as though if Dr Beeching says, "Close it", that's it.

Oh, not a bit of it, not a bit of it!

Dr Beeching, with whom I'm in a very friendly relationship,

cannot close a line that's objected to, a passenger line.

Only the minister on behalf of the Government can do that.

And I go into the evidence very carefully.

Beeching's job was strictly to identify the financial case for closure,

and leave it to politicians to decide

whether there was a social case for keeping a line or station open.

In 1964, with an election looming, Labour leader Harold Wilson

saw votes in stating his commitment to that social case.

He pledged to halt major rail closures whilst he worked out his own transport policy.

In Siloth and in Hull immediately before the General Election,

the Labour Party was saying, "We will re-open these lines next week if you vote Labour."

Of course, immediately after the election there was a hurried attempt

to redefine the words "major" and "halt", so that they could say

they had halted major rail closures without actually having to do that.

Once in power, Wilson, unsurprisingly,

saw the merits of Beeching's plan, after all.

He was on his own mission to modernise Britain.

But there were times when he found the political price of closures too high.

We had an argument about the Welsh lines

which were doing very, very little at that stage.

And Beeching's attitude to that was, well you just shut the thing down.

And then it eventually went to the Cabinet, as to what we would do.

After I had finished, there was a complete silence,

and George Thomas in those days, who was a friendly Welshman, said,

"Prime Minister, we can't do that."

And Harold Wilson said, "What do you mean we can't do it?"

"It goes through seven marginal constituencies," he said.

If he'd been there, I think he would have just exploded.

Beeching had no sympathy with such trifling conflicts of interest.

He was resolute that, if followed rigorously, his plan would deliver.

Beeching was mesmerised by the idea

that there could be a core railway that was profitable.

And therefore, if you cut enough branches,

you'd get a railway that could then pay for itself forever.

But really that's a myth.

It was a simplistic way of doing economics.

There's a railway with two lines,

we'll take one out and we'll save 50% of the cost.

Well, I'm sorry, it isn't like that.

You still have to maintain all the bridges, all the drains, everything.

Railways are really an onion, and if you strip bits off you never,

well, until you've destroyed it, get to the profitable core.

Private Eye at the time made it clear

that they thought Dr Beeching's policy of removing the branch lines

from the body of the railway was pretty silly.

And they illustrated this with a cartoon of Dr Beeching himself,

in which he does his job of cutting down the railways,

and then they remove his extremities, cutting off his arms and his legs,

and then they say, "With his arms and legs cut off,

"he's not much use, so let's sack him."

So they do.

A bit of satirical exaggeration there. Beeching wasn't fired.

However, in 1965 he left British Railways,

by "mutual agreement" with the Government.

As he laid down his axe, he picked up a peerage and returned to ICI

as Lord Beeching of East Grinstead, a town which had kept its station.

Can I have a single to Marylebone, please?

'He'd been hired to rationalise the railways.

'But, as it turned out, his methods weren't quite as rigorous as he'd thought.'

Beeching was mocked in a letter to the Times as a very efficient, very expensive computer.

But it was because he lacked the number-crunching skills

of a good computer, that he got some of his calculations wrong.

Nowadays, with electronic ticketing,

you know where and when a ticket was purchased.

And computer modelling allows you to predict passenger behaviour.

In his day, everything was entered in ledgers by hand,

and collecting exhaustive ticketing information simply wasn't feasible.

But even with more accurate figures,

many of Britain's railways would still have been doomed.

There is no doubt that Britain had too many railways

after the Second World War.

There were some branch lines that had really been built

on very shaky economic grounds,

and had been losing money for years and years.

But I think it's possible to say that maybe something like

a third of the mileage that he closed

should have remained open and would provide a very useful service today.

The fact is, this isn't ancient history.

The damage inflicted by Beeching is still felt today.

Which explains why I'm taking the car now,

when, 40 years ago, I'd be getting the train.

Once a railway line ran though this windswept countryside

in the remote Scottish Borders.

Edinburgh is 50 miles that way, and Carlisle about 50 that way.

And this railway was completed in 1862.

It quickly became known as the Waverley line,

because this is the wild and romantic countryside

in which Sir Walter Scott set his Waverley novels.

Neither the line's history

nor its value to the communities it served, could save it.

In 1968, the notice of final closure went up.

The town of Hawick would be hardest hit.

It would now be left further from a train than anywhere else in mainland Britain.

Madge Elliot, a local housewife, was appalled.

What did you think would happen if they closed the railway, what would be lost?

At that time it took just about three hours to go to Edinburgh,

52 miles in the bus.

Now that's quite a slice out of your day, isn't it?

And how long in the train?

An hour and 25 minutes.

I remember my mother saying to me, I said, "Someone should be doing something."

And she turned round and she said, "Well, what about you?"

That was it.

Madge organised a petition to save the railway,

and took it all the way to the Prime Minister.

This picture outside Downing St, that's you, isn't it?

That's me, a young me, a long time ago.

A very fetching suit!

I wouldn't be seen in it now!

You seem to have wrapped it up like a present.

That's right, in red paper because it was a Labour Government,

and the black ribbon because it was the death of our railway.

-But they did close the line anyway?

-Yes, they did.

And your local paper here has got a special train

being sent down to London with a hearse on it.

-Yes.

-And then there's this joke here,

because the advert at the time was, "It's quicker by train",

and you lot have put up, "It's quicker by hearse."

Yes. And that's a fact today, you know, Ian.

People that use the crematorium in Edinburgh,

the hearse gets through a lot quicker than the bus, public transport,

so it is quicker by hearse!

Very few lines were ever rescued by the militancy of crusading locals.

By 1973, almost 4,000 miles of track and over 3,500 stations

had either been dismantled or left to rot.

Despite Beeching's axe, the railways never did pay their way.

Britain had once shown the world the possibilities of rail travel.

Now the country had discarded a large part of that heritage.

What did we lose culturally when we lost those branch lines?

Everything that matters. We lost the poetry of the English landscape, I think really.

Everything became a bit prosaic after that.

When you put a branch line train in the landscape,

I don't know why, it always looks beautiful.

A lovely little Great Western Tank Engine puffing white clouds of steam,

that's an image that still charms us.

It's clear how much affection there is for this image of train travel,

because today, heritage lines are hugely popular with the public.

The Severn Valley Railway, a Beeching casualty,

is just one of more than 100 lines

which have been rescued by volunteers.

These engines, however, do more than just puff out nostalgia.

They are a reminder of a time before railways lost the nation's respect.

I love them. But I do know that this isn't

a totally accurate picture of what Britain before Beeching was like.

There was an idea that before Beeching,

the railways were a fantastic network, and you could travel

to every tiny village in the country by rail.

And you'd be met by a porter who'd take your ticket

and then maybe transport you to the local manor house or whatever.

And this is something of a myth.

The reality is if we want a better transport system,

we've got to be prepared to pay for it.

It's a lot easier to say, "Beeching got it wrong,

"Marples was a bad man, there was a conspiracy",

than to face the very difficult choices people faced at the time.

Beeching and Marples ultimately made their choice in purely economic terms.

But I still think their dismissal of the social

and cultural cost of cutting the railways was a real failure.

The railways do mean more to the nation than just one way to get from A to B.

And actually today, some of Beeching's axed lines could provide

an alternative to car travel, and ease the strain on the environment.

Millions are even now being spent on reinstating part of the cut Waverley Line.

Fortunately, other parts of our railway's heritage fared better.

In 1966, London's St Pancras Station, a Victorian masterpiece,

was destined for demolition.

It was only thanks to the protests of John Betjeman and others

that it escaped the wrecking ball.

Recently, it has been restored and adapted for the 21st century.

Here in this new state of the art station, there is a statue.

And is it of the visionary Dr Beeching?

No. It's of John Betjeman,

the nostalgic poet and champion of our railway heritage.

Not Beeching, who wanted a modern railway industry, but Betjeman,

who delighted in an old-fashioned train service.

What we all want, of course, is the best of both of their worlds,

and this struggle between them continues today.

How far do you go with cutting a public service

in the name of efficiency before you lose the whole point of it?

Not just with trains, but with buses, post offices and the NHS.

It's the same argument.

Personally, I want an up-to-date, reliable railway,

but I also want one that preserves what was so valuable in its past.

I realise I may have to wait some time for this.

But it would be worth it.

# No more will I go

# To Blandford Forum

# And Mortehoe

# On the slow train from Midsomer Norton

# And Mumby Road

# No-one departs, no-one arrives

# From Selby to Goole

# From St Erth to St Ives

# They've all passed out of our lives

# On the slow train... #