Re: Dr Beeching

[Geoff Bannister <gbannister.rcts@argonet.co.uk>]

In article <36973881.6079802@news.freeserve.co.uk>,
news@nospam.freeserve.co.uk (Tony Polson) wrote:

> IMHO the two massive errors of judgement in the Modernisation Plan were 
> (1) Dieselisation using untried designs from a hatful of inexperienced
> diesel
> locomotive builders and (2) massive investment in marshalling yards at the
> time
> wagonload freight was in rapid decline.  You might wish to add the choice
> of
> Dieselisation instead of widespread electrification and application of
> expensive
> solutions to the retention of remote branch lines which had never been
> economic
> from the time they were built.

The interesting thing here, in hindsight as ever, is that Robert Riddles,
when he was the CME of BR, set his face firmly against dieselisation,
arguing that the way forward was to electrify and pointing out that, if we
dieselised, we would then set back electrification by a generation while the
book cost of the diesels was reduced. This is precisely what happened in
respect of the ECML. It was for that reason that Riddles stuck to his guns
over the Standard steam programme. If BR had been able to keep to its stated
way of developing the Modernisation Programme - ie by running the Pilot
Scheme diesels for 2/3 years before bulk ordering, we might not have seen
the railways in the financial mess they got into and might have avoided the
waste of huge sums of money which occurred as a result. It was the
Government which stampeded BR into accelerating the Modernisation Programme
by massive orders for untried (and sometimes unbuilt!) classes and started
the worsening financial slide which brought Beeching, who by the way was not
a railwayman but a hard nosed businessman, into the equation.

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