The world's first steam-powered passenger railroad was the Stockton & Darlington Railway, operating 25 miles of track through Darlington in the North East of England. In September 1825, Robert Stephenson & Co.
Until 1968 Transport Act was passed, railway lines had to cover their costs. Some were hopelessly uneconomic caused by passengers deserting to buses/cars and freight to lorries.
The way I've heard it is that if BR wanted to close a line they altered the timetable so that the trains ran at inconvenient times for people wanting to get to work or the shops or whatever. People were then forced to take their car instead.
@@kiwitrainguy BR did change timetables etc which wasn't convenient for some people but a lot of people were abandoning the trains in favour of cars anyway in the 1950s and 1960s, this is part of the reason BR was hemorrhaging money, though what I meant by my original comment was that while Beeching suggested a closure it was the Transport Minister of the day that actually closed the line in question not Beeching
One could also say that the public who never used the railway may have had some responsibility. But questions over the validity of his passenger study have never been fully answered. It was done over a weekend too. The real villains here are Mr Marples who had to leg it over to his french chateau after "tax irregularities", and Mr Wilson who allowed Mrs Castle to close far more lines than Dr Beeching wanted to
great program, Beeching in my opinion was a terrible man who tore this country to shreds transport wise. I live in Somerset and we are stuck with a bus service that is being destroyed week by week by a council and a government who are happy to let public transport in the out lying towns and villages go the same way as Beeching AXE It would seem, that councils and the government have decided that they don't care about public transport, and don't want to take responsibility. Old age pensioners have been given bus passes to help them get into town to shop, In Somerset our council have cut the money paid to the bus company for bus passes by half, and plan to cut them by half again in June 2017. This means that in Somerset we could loose our bus service overall because the bus company after June will not be able to afford to run any form of bus service. Not that we have that good a service anyway, most of our services pack in at 18-00 at night which means that in Somerset getting to a show, the cinema or a meal out will set you back a£20 taxi fare before you start, then a taxi fare to get home again. So in my opinion Beeching has a lot to answer for in this country back in the early sixties he killed our railways, and for what, because he was the governments hatchet man and felt he was doing the right thing, I just hope that man made it to cloud 9 so that he can today look down and see the destruction he caused this country. Mike Palmer.
Michael Palmer beeching killes a LOT of kines because people started getting their own cars and abandoned the railway. It’s was a impossible situation. It’s the same today, people prefer their own car.... who can blame them?
Surely if the will and demand is there a direct Marple - Stockport service could be run?It would just have to go south via Chinley or north via Manchester.Maybe there is a freight only line that could be refettled and brought up to passenger standards that could be brought back into use to provide a shorter journey via Manchester? In fact at 07.35 when the map is shown and the closed lines are removed a line is still shown from near Bredbury running south to Stockport.If a new connection was made from the Manchester line the Marple -Stockport journey time would be shortened considerably.
11:19 I beg to differ Mr.Maconie. Though both are a good 10 minutes from the main shopping and business area of Marple Rose Hill is better located for the majority of residents, has a denser populated catchment area than the town's namesake station and isn't perched on a steep hill with a canal between it and the town it serves. EDIT: There is also the fact that by leaving Rose Hill open all trains to/from Piccadilly via Guide Bridge could be diverted to terminate there while trains to/from Piccadilly via Reddish North could terminate at Marple. This meant the track/platform layout at Marple could be simplified and a potential bottleneck on the busy Hope Valley line avoided. Anyone travelling from Rose Hill but wanting a station on the Reddish North route or Marple and wanting the Guide Bridge route can change at Romiley.
I like Stuart Maconie ,doesnt mess about ,gets straight to the point ,no faffing around,tackles the real issues and not afraid to either! In contrast he Southern programme in this series was pretty dire and didnt mention the real issues - the rapid population increase in the south since the Beeching cuts and the fact that some lines should be re-opened because of this and also to relieve the pressure on the busy Brighton mainline.Instead faffed around visiting closed stations in thinly populated areas,which are never ever likely to re-open and talking about lines that closed long before the Beeching report.In other words pretty dire!
The problem with this fixation with Beeching and these closures is that it is not a reflection of real railway history. Line and station closures did not begin with Beeching - they had been going on since start of the 1950s. There were large number of closures in 1951 and 1962. Had the Beeching report been written in 1950 it would have contained far more closures.
@@sameyers2670 BY the time the 1968 Transport Act came about in which a subsidy could be paid to lines that were loss making but of a social need they had closed. This also included lines that were nor even in the first Beeching report ie. Swanage to Wogret line.
Slight difference; trains from Marple used Tiviot Dale station, not Edgeley. Impossible to see exactly where it was on present maps, but from memory it was at a much lower level than Edgeley, and I guess in the area now covered by a dual-carriageway
It was essentially on the opposite side of the road from Tiviot Dale Methodist Church on the t-junction where Lancashire Hill joins Great Egerton Street.
Why did one man have so much power to do so much damage? Even in the US, the railroads have to petition the federal government to close trackage before anything can happen.
The Government employed Beeching to reduce the huge losses the state-owned railway was making. He did suggest that local authorities might support commuter lines such as Marple to Stockport, but they failed to take up the challenge. Stockport council and road builders deliberately destroyed the infrastructure in the 1980s.
Just before he was put in charge the department for transport introduced laws which made it easier to close railway lines. Nowadays it has been made purposely complicated to close lines.
@@calldfwp2230 That was the 1962 Transport Act which made line closures more easily achieved. It also broke up the BTC - British Transport Commission into 5 component organisations Road, Rail, Air, Rivers and Canals. Beeching was the last chairman of the BTC IIRC and the first Chairman of the newly formed BRB.
I have watched many programs on the beeching cuts to the railways in the 1960s.....but i think a lot of blame for many of the cuts to the railway lies with the labour government of the day who where very keen to close as many lines in the beeching report as possible they could not close them quick enough....they closed the great central railway just 2 months before they lost the general election to Edward heath in 1970 who called for an end to any more rail cuts
Gordon Skeemer people got a better life making more money and buying their first car. No need for the small railway lines. Yes blame the Labour Party for that. Well that will change now after Brexit. Good luck.
you know what i feel, instead of uprooting all the rails and demolishing all the stations on the way , he could have just stopped the service, leaving it for next generation to take on, if population increases and thereby traffic, they could have started the trains...or else leave the rails and station as it were.......i wonder what was going o his twisted little mind.......
Like so many things instigated by the government, there was a strong mindset to totally destroy something so that the decision cannot be reversed in the future and thus proving that the decision was wrong. In many cases where planning was granted to build on rail beds and goods yard there was a stipulation that build should commence within one year! There was no real attempt to make loss making lines profitable by running rail cars etc. The yardstick used were tickets sold one one particular day only (in April I think). Which heavily favoured where people went from and not where they went to. After all that l, they only needed to maintain the alignments and light rail or similar could have been reintroduced relatively cheaply. It was just a slash-and-burn mentality, aided strongly by Marples links to road building. Wasn’t there also something about him owning a scrap company that sold all the rail abroad too?
In the early 1950s at the time the Brtiish Railways were back under the control of the Tory party and its old great leader Winston Churchill who was determined to preserve the age of steam and railways. Churchill largely ran the railways thru old military generals and cronies and the Tory trucking interests and his various son in laws Sandys and Soames were not as influential as imagined in the three interests to Churchill, Defence (Navy and RAF) the Railways and the media . In the 1930 the family wealth and estates were largely diminished and MPs were hardly paid and despite the great speeches , Winston was not all that present in parliament, regarding himself as a journalist, in reality he was a highly paid columinist but that was largely how he made his moneyf rom 1895-1940. In terms of Railways , Churchill and his advisors saw it mainly about passengers and regional development. In the early 1950s Churchill saw the railways proftiable business as mainline passenger and coal and mail . Coal and mail riding at the back of passenger trains or in seperate mail trains trains were the basis of most railways proftiablity in the twentieth century and even at the times of John Major rail privatisation 1993 the Wisconin Central English Welsh and Scottish depended on mail and coal. General freight even in wagon loads or later container was not really seen as profitable or suitable for rail in the early 1950s , indeed the British rail managers saw it as the essence of the problem. Beeching saw freight as an answer and believed rail freight transported only 100-120 miles was potentially economic, few would have agreed.
pub guy: 1 hr to do 4 miles...get a bike/moped dude...the sidewalks all seem free of people/traffic...and the cause of this all: overpopulation. The elephant in the room.
The documentary highlights the challenge of developing an inclusive, sustainable traffic management system, as the solutions to over-population don't really apply to Greater Manchester.
To bang on a bit more , post war Winston Churchill has a rather similar attitude to much of the railways as he did to the RN, he was the Battleships and cruisers as dated and obsolete, but thought they looked magnificent and impressive to the provincial voters, so keep them going as long as possible, but don't necessarily replace them . in terms of aircraft carriers , Churchill always favoured intermediate sized ones like Hermes and Bullwark , not the larger Ar Royal and Eagle, Churchill attempted to mothball the 1955 ark royal and had cancelled the construction of two more of the class and the larger Maltas in 1945. To Churchill the smaller British standards the tank engines and smaller tendered class 2-4 were intended to do 5 or 6 years service on suburban and closing service to coal mines and then run on lines in Wales, East Anglia and Devon and Somerset which were expected to have virutally no passengers, but even if they onlyc arried one or two passengers a trip, Churchill belived the branch lines, theri stations and servicing yards employed hundred of locals anstation gardens, shops, resteraunt and the mail and parcel service sustained the local economy and might allow some regional regeneration ins say Wales. So the truth about the standards is they were built for half a decade service in London and then run on lines without passengers while the larger express 5-7 classes are all attempts to develop more economical, easier and less spectacular replacements for Bulleids Pacific which the politicians and rail mangagers simply lacked the courage to scrap in 1955-56
How hard can it be. The was very little demand for these small lines. Would the complainers really want it to be paid by tax money year after year while not making any profit? This is such a stupid discussion, people loved their new cars and the freedom it gave them. Should the ordinary family be forbidden to own their own car.
Thank you for posting this. Really interesting
thanks for posting that. I remember my Gran telling me about this program when it aired (she lived in Marple) but I never thought I'd see it.
Poor Dr. Beeching, but still, he has a lot to answer for. It's now time to reassess the whole system.
At the time, those in the railway industry wanted to close lines. One gained kudos (and promotion) by being a clone of management.
why? it beeching only produced a report, labour closed all the lines
The world's first steam-powered passenger railroad was the Stockton & Darlington Railway, operating 25 miles of track through Darlington in the North East of England. In September 1825, Robert Stephenson & Co.
but his wass not the first steam loco, that was a guy in devon, stepho more than likley pinched the idea
beeching only produced a report, the labour party closed all the lines
It wasn't Beeching that ultimately closed the lines, the final say was with the transport minister of the day.
No it wasn't. The final decision was taken by the British public, who deserted the railways in droves to embrace the motor car. Use it or lose it!
Until 1968 Transport Act was passed, railway lines had to cover their costs. Some were hopelessly uneconomic caused by passengers deserting to buses/cars and freight to lorries.
The way I've heard it is that if BR wanted to close a line they altered the timetable so that the trains ran at inconvenient times for people wanting to get to work or the shops or whatever. People were then forced to take their car instead.
@@kiwitrainguy BR did change timetables etc which wasn't convenient for some people but a lot of people were abandoning the trains in favour of cars anyway in the 1950s and 1960s, this is part of the reason BR was hemorrhaging money, though what I meant by my original comment was that while Beeching suggested a closure it was the Transport Minister of the day that actually closed the line in question not Beeching
One could also say that the public who never used the railway may have had some responsibility. But questions over the validity of his passenger study have never been fully answered. It was done over a weekend too. The real villains here are Mr Marples who had to leg it over to his french chateau after "tax irregularities", and Mr Wilson who allowed Mrs Castle to close far more lines than Dr Beeching wanted to
Complete under estimated the need for local people destroyed the Railway's completely
great program, Beeching in my opinion was a terrible man who tore this country to shreds transport wise. I live in Somerset and we are stuck with a bus service that is being destroyed week by week by a council and a government who are happy to let public transport in the out lying towns and villages go the same way as Beeching AXE It would seem, that councils and the government have decided that they don't care about public transport, and don't want to take responsibility. Old age pensioners have been given bus passes to help them get into town to shop, In Somerset our council have cut the money paid to the bus company for bus passes by half, and plan to cut them by half again in June 2017. This means that in Somerset we could loose our bus service overall because the bus company after June will not be able to afford to run any form of bus service.
Not that we have that good a service anyway, most of our services pack in at 18-00 at night which means that in Somerset getting to a show, the cinema or a meal out will set you back a£20 taxi fare before you start, then a taxi fare to get home again.
So in my opinion Beeching has a lot to answer for in this country back in the early sixties he killed our railways, and for what, because he was the governments hatchet man and felt he was doing the right thing, I just hope that man made it to cloud 9 so that he can today look down and see the destruction he caused this country. Mike Palmer.
Michael Palmer beeching killes a LOT of kines because people started getting their own cars and abandoned the railway. It’s was a impossible situation. It’s the same today, people prefer their own car.... who can blame them?
@@bokhans If only TH-cam had a mute option...
Surely if the will and demand is there a direct Marple - Stockport service could be run?It would just have to go south via Chinley or north via Manchester.Maybe there is a freight only line that could be refettled and brought up to passenger standards that could be brought back into use to provide a shorter journey via Manchester? In fact at 07.35 when the map is shown and the closed lines are removed a line is still shown from near Bredbury running south to Stockport.If a new connection was made from the Manchester line the Marple -Stockport journey time would be shortened considerably.
11:19 I beg to differ Mr.Maconie. Though both are a good 10 minutes from the main shopping and business area of Marple Rose Hill is better located for the majority of residents, has a denser populated catchment area than the town's namesake station and isn't perched on a steep hill with a canal between it and the town it serves.
EDIT: There is also the fact that by leaving Rose Hill open all trains to/from Piccadilly via Guide Bridge could be diverted to terminate there while trains to/from Piccadilly via Reddish North could terminate at Marple. This meant the track/platform layout at Marple could be simplified and a potential bottleneck on the busy Hope Valley line avoided. Anyone travelling from Rose Hill but wanting a station on the Reddish North route or Marple and wanting the Guide Bridge route can change at Romiley.
I like Stuart Maconie ,doesnt mess about ,gets straight to the point ,no faffing around,tackles the real issues and not afraid to either! In contrast he Southern programme in this series was pretty dire and didnt mention the real issues - the rapid population increase in the south since the Beeching cuts and the fact that some lines should be re-opened because of this and also to relieve the pressure on the busy Brighton mainline.Instead faffed around visiting closed stations in thinly populated areas,which are never ever likely to re-open and talking about lines that closed long before the Beeching report.In other words pretty dire!
The problem with this fixation with Beeching and these closures is that it is not a reflection of real railway history. Line and station closures did not begin with Beeching - they had been going on since start of the 1950s. There were large number of closures in 1951 and 1962. Had the Beeching report been written in 1950 it would have contained far more closures.
I suspect a lot of the lines listed in the report would have gone anyway
@@sameyers2670 BY the time the 1968 Transport Act came about in which a subsidy could be paid to lines that were loss making but of a social need they had closed. This also included lines that were nor even in the first Beeching report ie. Swanage to Wogret line.
@@sameyers2670 An entire system, Midlands to East Anglia (the M&GN) was closed in 1959.
beeching had no power anyway, it was labour that swung the big axe
Slight difference; trains from Marple used Tiviot Dale station, not Edgeley. Impossible to see exactly where it was on present maps, but from memory it was at a much lower level than Edgeley, and I guess in the area now covered by a dual-carriageway
It was essentially on the opposite side of the road from Tiviot Dale Methodist Church on the t-junction where Lancashire Hill joins Great Egerton Street.
At 11.41 there is a crow hiding on a womans head the pub.
Was this before the Ordsall Chord was opened? Has it made any difference?
Why did one man have so much power to do so much damage? Even in the US, the railroads have to petition the federal government to close trackage before anything can happen.
The Government employed Beeching to reduce the huge losses the state-owned railway was making. He did suggest that local authorities might support commuter lines such as Marple to Stockport, but they failed to take up the challenge. Stockport council and road builders deliberately destroyed the infrastructure in the 1980s.
Just before he was put in charge the department for transport introduced laws which made it easier to close railway lines.
Nowadays it has been made purposely complicated to close lines.
@@nwrail Correct. Only two County Councils took up this opportunity: Cornwall and Surrey. The rest did not.
@@calldfwp2230 That was the 1962 Transport Act which made line closures more easily achieved. It also broke up the BTC - British Transport Commission into 5 component organisations Road, Rail, Air, Rivers and Canals. Beeching was the last chairman of the BTC IIRC and the first Chairman of the newly formed BRB.
Superb documentary - awful government transport planning!
I have watched many programs on the beeching cuts to the railways in the 1960s.....but i think a lot of blame for many of the cuts to the railway lies with the labour government of the day who where very keen to close as many lines in the beeching report as possible they could not close them quick enough....they closed the great central railway just 2 months before they lost the general election to Edward heath in 1970 who called for an end to any more rail cuts
Gordon Skeemer people got a better life making more money and buying their first car. No need for the small railway lines. Yes blame the Labour Party for that. Well that will change now after Brexit. Good luck.
The Conservatives commissioned Beeching. Nice try.
you are correct, labour did not close all of beechings reported lines but closed 100's of miles on top of his report
you know what i feel, instead of uprooting all the rails and demolishing all the stations on the way , he could have just stopped the service, leaving it for next generation to take on, if population increases and thereby traffic, they could have started the trains...or else leave the rails and station as it were.......i wonder what was going o his twisted little mind.......
Like so many things instigated by the government, there was a strong mindset to totally destroy something so that the decision cannot be reversed in the future and thus proving that the decision was wrong. In many cases where planning was granted to build on rail beds and goods yard there was a stipulation that build should commence within one year! There was no real attempt to make loss making lines profitable by running rail cars etc. The yardstick used were tickets sold one one particular day only (in April I think). Which heavily favoured where people went from and not where they went to.
After all that l, they only needed to maintain the alignments and light rail or similar could have been reintroduced relatively cheaply. It was just a slash-and-burn mentality, aided strongly by Marples links to road building. Wasn’t there also something about him owning a scrap company that sold all the rail abroad too?
In the early 1950s at the time the Brtiish Railways were back under the control of the Tory party and its old great leader Winston Churchill who was determined to preserve the age of steam and railways. Churchill largely ran the railways thru old military generals and cronies and the Tory trucking interests and his various son in laws Sandys and Soames were not as influential as imagined in the three interests to Churchill, Defence (Navy and RAF) the Railways and the media . In the 1930 the family wealth and estates were largely diminished and MPs were hardly paid and despite the great speeches , Winston was not all that present in parliament, regarding himself as a journalist, in reality he was a highly paid columinist but that was largely how he made his moneyf rom 1895-1940. In terms of Railways , Churchill and his advisors saw it mainly about passengers and regional development. In the early 1950s Churchill saw the railways proftiable business as mainline passenger and coal and mail . Coal and mail riding at the back of passenger trains or in seperate mail trains trains were the basis of most railways proftiablity in the twentieth century and even at the times of John Major rail privatisation 1993 the Wisconin Central English Welsh and Scottish depended on mail and coal. General freight even in wagon loads or later container was not really seen as profitable or suitable for rail in the early 1950s , indeed the British rail managers saw it as the essence of the problem. Beeching saw freight as an answer and believed rail freight transported only 100-120 miles was potentially economic, few would have agreed.
at the end of the day beeching produced a report. it was labour that closed the lines
pub guy: 1 hr to do 4 miles...get a bike/moped dude...the sidewalks all seem free of people/traffic...and the cause of this all: overpopulation. The elephant in the room.
The documentary highlights the challenge of developing an inclusive, sustainable traffic management system, as the solutions to over-population don't really apply to Greater Manchester.
To bang on a bit more , post war Winston Churchill has a rather similar attitude to much of the railways as he did to the RN, he was the Battleships and cruisers as dated and obsolete, but thought they looked magnificent and impressive to the provincial voters, so keep them going as long as possible, but don't necessarily replace them . in terms of aircraft carriers , Churchill always favoured intermediate sized ones like Hermes and Bullwark , not the larger Ar Royal and Eagle, Churchill attempted to mothball the 1955 ark royal and had cancelled the construction of two more of the class and the larger Maltas in 1945. To Churchill the smaller British standards the tank engines and smaller tendered class 2-4 were intended to do 5 or 6 years service on suburban and closing service to coal mines and then run on lines in Wales, East Anglia and Devon and Somerset which were expected to have virutally no passengers, but even if they onlyc arried one or two passengers a trip, Churchill belived the branch lines, theri stations and servicing yards employed hundred of locals anstation gardens, shops, resteraunt and the mail and parcel service sustained the local economy and might allow some regional regeneration ins say Wales. So the truth about the standards is they were built for half a decade service in London and then run on lines without passengers while the larger express 5-7 classes are all attempts to develop more economical, easier and less spectacular replacements for Bulleids Pacific which the politicians and rail mangagers simply lacked the courage to scrap in 1955-56
What He did in the 1960's was what He believed was RIGHT. Any one, with the benefit of hindsight can criticize.
Train lovers: damn the car and the motorways for nearly killing off a British institution.
Canal lovers: MUHAHAHAHAHAHA!
What a biasted
piece........14 years on, how bad does this look...... BBC down the pan...
What?
How hard can it be. The was very little demand for these small lines. Would the complainers really want it to be paid by tax money year after year while not making any profit? This is such a stupid discussion, people loved their new cars and the freedom it gave them. Should the ordinary family be forbidden to own their own car.