Re: Dr Beeching

["B.Rumary" <brian.rumary@virgin.net>]

As has been said by others, the real problem with the Beeching 
Report (or rather the way it was implemented), was that it never 
looked properly at HOW the system should be operated. It worked on 
the basis that each line should either go on operating as it always 
had or be closed. Not until the 1970's was any real attempt made to 
change operating methods so that a reasonable service could be 
provided at a reduced cost.

I live near Wells in Somerset and used to go to school there in 
1950's, when the Cheddar Valley line was still running. The waste 
of money to be seen just at Wells station was enormous! There were 
_three_ sets of goods sidings, all within less than a mile of each 
other, two signal boxes, a fairly big loco shed with a turntable, 
and the station had its own pannier tank as a pilot. The shed 
turntable was only needed for the occasional class 2 2-6-0 that 
came through, which could have been replaced by a large tank loco 
for all the work it did. And of course there was the usual army of 
staff to man all this.

When they built a bus station they could have moved the railway 
station next door to it and made true multi-mode transport 
interchange possible. However they built it some distance away, 
which meant a trek through over a quarter of a mile of back 
streets, with no direction signs at either end to tell you where 
the other station was or how to get there. Typical 
bloody-mindedness! Now the railway station and line are under a 
by-pass and the bus station is a garden centre.

The trouble was that BR, at both management and staff level, was 
full of stick-in-the mud dinosaurs. From my memories of those 
times, there did not seem to have been much real protest from the 
unions about job losses. They only seemed interested in retaining 
the existing staffing practises for the bits that were left. Their 
attitude seemed to be that "we don't care if only 1 mile of track 
is left open, as long as that mile is worked under existing 
regulations". Both the ASLEF and NUR were notorious for their 
pig-headed views - even more than the NUM! "Eh up lad, if it were 
good enough for George Stephenson its good enough for thee!"

And these attitudes didn't just go back to the fifties. British 
railways were getting hopelessly out of date even in the 19th 
century, when compared to what was happening in the US and some 
parts of Europe. Most of the colonies were saddled with British 
ideas, but as soon as they got any freedom of action, they dropped 
these methods as quickly as they could. The best of the British 
loco builders, like Bayer Peacock and North British, soon followed 
suit, at least as far as overseas orders were concerned. 
Unfortunely our railway companies still thought they knew it all 
and would have no truck with these new-fangled ideas. Surely the 
supreme example of this head-in-the-sand attitude was when Anderson 
at Derby tried to tell Beyer-Peacock how to design a Beyer-Garrett!

Brian Rumary, England

http://freespace.virgin.net/brian.rumary/homepage.htm