Beeching Was Right

Lessons have to Sometimes be Learned Again

If there is an unfairly maligned figure in recent British history, it is Richard Beeching, the author of The Reshaping of British Railways, a report that was produced after analysing rail demand and making suggestions as to which routes should be cut in the face of rail losing lots and lots of money. Beeching didn’t do the cutting, he wrote a report and let the politicians decide. He also recommended that in many places, buses would be a better replacement due to low demand and lower costs.

Many of the services were barely used, and a bus works much better with low demand routes.

Various people have tried to suggest that Beeching fiddled the figures. Richard Beeching is no longer with us, so this is an easy slur to make, and one which has no solid evidence to back it. And over the past 30 years, the rail lobbyists and fans have repeatedly spun the line that the Beeching cuts were a bad thing, to the point that it is commonly accepted opinion in the UK, which eventually leads to the politicians creating a programme called Restoring the Railways:-

More than 50 years since the railways were radically reshaped during the infamous Beeching cuts of the 1960s, when thousands of miles of both track and stations were closed, this latest investment will kick-start development on more projects that have potential to reinvigorate local economies and level up opportunity across the country.

Restoring the railways will reinvigorate local economies, bring greater glories to Okehampton that were denied by the hand of Richard Beeching. So, as part of this £40m was spent on restoring the Okehampton to Exeter line. What were the results of this so far?

Network Rail @networkrail

🙌 🚆 We've doubled services on the popular Dartmoor Line to give you hourly trains between Exeter and Okehampton! That's after you made 50,000 journeys in the first 20 weeks of the line's reopening: ➡️ networkrailmediacentre.co.uk/news/restoring… #TravelByTrain

50,000 journeys sounds impressive, but first of all, that’s 50,000 single fares. Over 20 weeks, or 140 days, split over 16 journeys per day.

50000/140/16=22.3 passengers per journey. You don’t need a two carriage train for 22.3 people. You need one of these:-

£40m of taxpayers money has been spent on restoring this line, to carry, on average 358 passenger journeys per day at £4/ticket. Even if doubling it doubles the number of passengers, that’s a total of £2864 of revenue per day, or £1.05m of revenue per year.

Even if there were no costs of maintenance and if all the rail staff worked for free, on that basis it would take nearly 40 years to pay for the £40m of investment that was made in restoring this line. I’m going to guess that this line isn’t even making any money, so yet more taxes are being blown on this.

Well, we’ve run the experiment, and it looks like the good Doctor was right. So, let’s stop building more of this nonsense, shall we?