Our own John Watson spoke about Dr. Richard Beeching

Wed, Jul 29th 2015 at 6:30 pm - 9:00 pm

Speaker finder John Watson spoke about Dr. Richard Beeching, Visitors Host Grace and Banners Mike Clewes, Cash Desk Robert Allan


John started off with a brief history of the railways saying that rail drawn vehicles started before the invention of the steam locomotive. It had been realised that there was less friction if steel wheels were used on rail tracks when pulling heavy loads from such places as mines so horse drawn wagons were put onto rails to overcome problems of them getting bogged down in mud.

Thus when Stephenson came along with his Rocket it made sense to put it on rail tracks. There was an explosion in growth so that by 1846 there were 247 different railway companies. In 1923 the government forced these companies into amalgamate into 4 companies and this started the decline in the number of tracks.

In 1947 the railways were nationalised but this did not lead to an efficient organisation. By 1963 the system was losing £105 million per year the equivalent of almost £2 billion pound today. The whole system was very labour intensive. Also a strike by ASLEF in 1955 had shut the system down for 17 days. This had forced many rail users (both freight and passenger) to turn to alternate road based options and they never returned.

To try to make the system more efficient it was decided in 1958 to get rid of steam trains as they took too long to get up and running every morning but this took 10 years before the last loco was repaced by a diesel unit.

John said that Richard Beeching was not his favourite character in history because he was chairman of ICI who introduced Terylene which he believes had a very large detrimental effect on the textile industry in Bradford. Despite this he feels that Beeching was unduly blamed for the rail closures as it was the government ministers who took the decisions not him. He merely produced a report that highlighted where the losses were being made. As part of that report he highlighted lines that were profitable with passenger traffic and then other lines which would be more profitable if used for freight only.

By 1980 British Rail were back to being profitable after the severe cuts made to the network in the 1960's.


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