Dr Beeching: villain or visionary?

Except that he didn't. For a start that infamous Beeching report, The Reshaping of Our Railways, issued 40 years ago on March 27, 1963, was officially only a series of recommendations. It was the governments, Tory then Labour, that decided to carry out the closures.

More than that, however, some argue that Dr Beeching's rationalisation of British Railways was vital, if painful.

Perhaps the cuts went too far here and there, but there was a strong case for streamlining the network. And he undertook some positive reforms which are benefiting passengers today.

To understand Dr Beeching, we must travel down the tracks of time to post-war Britain. The "golden age" of the railways had passed, and thanks to the motor car and lorry, the rail network had lost its position as the pre-eminent form of transport for passengers and freight.

Already the decline had been marked by a series of line and station closures in North Yorkshire. Haxby and Strensall stations, which York council is striving to revive, were last used by passengers in 1930.

The Gilling to Malton line closed to passengers the following year, as did the Pickering to Seamer line. In the 1950s, as the industry lost serious money, yet more routes were shut.

Financially, the railways were in a mess. The Tories set up a committee to investigate, and with good cause, said Professor Colin Divall, of the Institute of Railway Studies at York University and the National Railway Museum.

"The railways didn't even know what sorts of tracks were profitable and which were making a loss," he said. "In defence of the railway managers, they knew that was a problem as well and throughout the 1950s were starting to get to grips with this very question."

The committee concluded the railways needed a radical shake-up. They decided to abolish the British Transport Commission, the unwieldy body which controlled the railways as well as the inland waterways and other transport networks.

In its place, they set up the British Railways Board, and appointed the little-known industrialist Dr Beeching to chair it.

As technical director of ICI, he had no knowledge of the railways but he accepted the challenge. He discovered that 95 per cent of all rail traffic was being carried on about half the network. The other 50 per cent was hardly used.

So he advocated a rail revolution. Reshaping The Railways recommended the closure of 5,000 miles of track, almost one-third of the network. That envisaged more than 2,000 stations, thousands of passenger services and a third of a million freight wagons being scrapped.

This provoked outrage in the industry and among those whose branch line was set for the chop. "But among the chattering classes, in the quality press and on TV and radio, the reaction to the Beeching report was on the whole quite positive," said Prof Divall.

So is Dr Beeching's reputation as an axeman justified?

"I don't think it is really," answers Prof Divall. "He was clear from day one that he did believe there were a considerable number of miles of routes which were hopeless loss-makers. And it didn't matter what you did with them, they would continue to lose money and so would close.

"But there was a positive side to Beeching. I don't believe that Beeching himself thought that the railway had to make money in narrow financial terms in order to justify its existence.

"He did believe you had to know whether a service was making a profit or loss. Then, if the country wanted to retain the service for the wider benefit to society by subsidising it, that was a political decision."

Dr Beeching also believed in a future for the railway. And he set out to transform it from the Victorian model into a system fit for the second half of the 20th century. It was his idea to set up an inter-city service between major population centres, still the backbone of the modern railway.

He also made the transport of heavy haulage far more efficient, particularly in the "merry-go-round" trains which took coal from mines to power stations.

Nevertheless, even his supporters concede that some of his proposed closures were too savage. In North Yorkshire, campaigners mounted a stiff defence of the York to Harrogate line.

Transport minister Barbara Castle announced it would be reprieved in September 1966, although at the same time she approved withdrawal of passenger services between Harrogate and Northallerton, and from stations at Poppleton, Hammerton, Ripon and Melmerby.

Other stations to be axed by the Beeching closure programme were those on the York to Scarborough line. The number of lines entering Whitby station was reduced from four to one.

"In the immediate York area the main casualty was probably Earswick. That was on the line from York to Hull," recalled Patrick Howat, the York-based author of The Railways of Ryedale, which he is revising for publication again next year. "Earswick closed in November 1965."

Elsewhere, Tadcaster station, which opened in 1847 and which was selling 30,000 tickets a year by 1911, was another Beeching victim. It was closed in 1964. A year later, in November 1965, Pocklington station was closed down. An old station sign can still be seen in Pocklington School car park.

But another line to go was quickly resurrected by enthusiasts: by the end of the 1960s steam trains were again running from Pickering to Grosmont thanks to the North Yorkshire Moors Railway Preservation Society.

Mr Howat agrees that Dr Beeching "is regarded as a villain for taking away people's much-loved railway lines. The people who loved them so much didn't use them. People love them now more than perhaps when they were still around."

But the good doctor did make mistakes, closing lines which should have stayed open. "The most notable one is the line that went through Ripon. That was closed in 1967."

Nevertheless, he defends Beeching's railway legacy. "He was a man of great understanding trying to bring the railways into the modern era."

Updated: 10:23 Monday, March 24, 2003