In March 1963, Britain embarked upon a route which would divert the course of the country’s transport network forever.
Dr Richard Beeching’s report, The Reshaping of British Railways, came a century after life in Britain had been revolutionised by the construction of a vast and intricate network of railway lines, which had dramatically reduced travel times and made many previously almost unreachable corners of the country relatively easily accessible.
Motor cars and trains had been battling to achieve dominance over Britain’s transport network. The Beeching Report, which proposed dramatic cuts to rail services, shifted the balance decisively in favour of cars.
‘The Beeching Axe’ as it became known, was almost entirely relentless. With the closure of the Barnstaple to Torrington line to passengers in 1965 and the Barnstaple to Ilfracombe line in 1970, North Devon, and especially its coastal areas, effectively lost their railways. From 1874 to the mid-20th century, the Barnstaple to Ilfracombe train would be packed with holidaying tourists. In the years after 1945, however, passenger numbers had dramatically tailed off.
Although, by all accounts, the final train to travel on the, by then scaled down service, in October 1970 was jam-packed; and many have had cause to miss the service in the 50 years’ since.
Unpopular as the Beeching ‘reshaping’ has proven to be, it would be unfair to characterise Dr (later Lord) Beeching as some sort of mad axeman. For one thing, not all the cuts in the 1960s were solely attributable to him - some had already been scheduled anyway. He was also attempting to address some serious pre-existing problems. The rail industry which had been nationalised in 1948 by Clement Attlee’s Labour government was running at a substantial and mounting loss by 1961, as much as £300,000 a day. Beeching hoped to fulfil Tory prime minister Harold Macmillan’s stated aim to create a train service ‘modelled to meet current needs’.
Beeching’s basic plan was to cut costs by closing all the least used and less profitable stations and services. His suggestions were carried out and the effects were dramatic. By the end of the 1960s, more than 2,300 stations had closed, and around 5,000 miles of track. Almost 70,000 people lost their jobs as a result and the rail network was reduced to a bare skeleton of the complex busy network it had been before 1963.
Many felt Beeching went much too far. Some lines were spared. The Tamar Valley Line between Plymouth and Gunnislake in Cornwall was targeted by Beeching for closure but in the end remained in use because local roads were poor. In Exmouth, the Avocet train line linking Exmouth and Exeter was only saved after a local campaign fought to save it. It has since attracted customer usage numbers well in excess of a million a year, prompting many to wonder if some of the lines which Beeching succeeded in closing might have ended up proving similarly profitable had they had the chance. Another criticism was that Beeching’s proposal that bus services could fill the gap left by the trains simply didn’t happen, leaving many areas without public transport.
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It is generally fair to say that Harold Wilson’s Labour government, elected in October 1964, was less keen on the cuts than the Conservative government, which had appointed Beeching as the first chairman of the British Railways Board in 1961. In December 1964, Tom Fraser who had replaced Ernest Marples as transport minister announced Beeching would soon be removed from his post.
Despite this, a second Beeching Report, entitled the Development of the Major Railway Trunk Roads was published in February 1965. This time, the proposals in the new report were not carried out, but the closures recommended from the first report continued. Beeching had undeniably made his mark.
By the end of the 1960s, it was becoming clear, the ‘reforms’ had failed to meet one of their principal objectives. The rail network was still losing lots of money. To many people it seemed as if the changes had been a total failure. The rail services were devastated by the Beeching Axe while the rail service as a whole had still been left fundamentally unprofitable.
Thirty-eight years after his death, Lord Richard Beeching remains a hugely controversial figure. Some see him as a villain who deliberately wrecked the railway industry to reenforce his prejudice in favour of cars as the dominant form of transport. Some see him as an innocent scapegoat who took the blame for harsh decisions made by others. Others see his decisions as perfectly sound. Still more people think he simply went too far.
The train network underwent another unpopular upheaval when rail privatisation occurred between 1994 and 1997. Before the pandemic, there was serious discussion about reversing many aspects of the Beeching Report’s reforms. Whatever happens in the future, however, there is little doubt Beeching changed Britain’s railways forever. Indeed, they changed Britain forever.
