
Many railway lines in Britain that were closed in the 1960s are re-opening - edward
http://www.economist.com/news/britain/21697012-many-railway-lines-britain-were-closed-1960s-are-re-opening-re-coupling
======
jameshart
Travel between Oxford and Cambridge is a great example of how busted the UK
transport network is outside big cities. They're about 80 miles apart, as the
crow flies. By road, there's no decent east-west connections so it's a good 2
hour drive. By train, it's even worse - the shortest route is typically going
to involve travelling into London, changing stations via tube, then heading
back out on another line - probably a three hour train journey with two
connections.

Reopening the Oxford/Cambridge trainline (and by extension
Cambridge/Oxford/Reading) would be a huge boost to the development of the UK
tech industry, connecting academic centers to tech hubs.

~~~
edward
"East West Rail Link is a planned railway route linking the Great Western Main
Line, Oxford, Bicester, Milton Keynes, Bedford, Cambridge, Ipswich and Norwich
in England using part of the former Varsity Line. The western section from
Oxford to Bedford was approved by the Government in November 2011, with
completion expected in 2019."

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_West_Rail_Link](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_West_Rail_Link)

~~~
makomk
It's been obviously necessary for decades yet the Government dragged their
feet on it, and they're not even planning on constructing the segment into
Cambridge yet. In the meantime, Cambridge house prices have gone through the
roof due to a combination of a lack of transport links and programs to
encourage new businesses there, and the Government has committed huge amounts
of funds to HS2, which is yet another line out of London running in parallel
to existing lines. Coincidentally, traveling in and out of London is the main
kind of travel our politicians do. Also coincidentally, the Beeching cuts
seemed to hit cross-country lines that didn't directly benefit London the
hardest too.

~~~
madaxe_again
Beeching mostly hurt rural communities, but he absolutely murdered Wales's
transport network. What were 20 minute journeys now require a 200 mile circuit
via England. Here's a (spammy, sorry) article that illustrates just how mad it
was and is. [http://www.walesonline.co.uk/news/wales-news/7-ways-
beeching...](http://www.walesonline.co.uk/news/wales-news/7-ways-beeching-
cuts-stitched-6934180)

All on the idea that people would drive to a main line station, park, then
catch a train.

Except they never actually thought that, beeching and his chums were taking,
uh, considerations, from the automotive lobby, just like his predecessors did
when they ripped out the trams.

Cars suck for distance travel. Where did we ever get the idea otherwise?

------
arethuza
"many thought that roads would rule and rail would go the way of canals"

Particularly the transport minister who had a background running a
construction company that built motorways:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beeching_cuts#The_people_and_t...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beeching_cuts#The_people_and_the_politics)

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
One of the most shameful episodes in recent British political history.

That crook literally killed a strategically viable public transport network
just so he could line his own pockets.

~~~
kitd
For certain values of "viable".

The railways were massively loss-making in the 1960s, with ancient Victorian
infrastructure and pre-war rolling stock commonplace. They were only being
kept afloat by huge government subsidies. TBH Beeching's cuts were probably
the most logical way to save the industry _with what they knew at that time_.

Having said that, my preference (with 60-year-old hindsight) would have been
to mothball the loss-making routes, rather than tear them up completely.

~~~
gsnedders
> Having said that, my preference (with 60-year-old hindsight) would have been
> to mothball the loss-making routes, rather than tear them up completely.

Even twenty-five years ago when the privatisation of the railway was happening
there was an expectation that passenger numbers would continue their downwards
trend—certainly no though that it would end up with passenger numbers quickly
increasing throughout more of less the whole country.

It's worthwhile pointing out that much of what was got rid of was duplicated
routes: unless you have any expectation of the surviving route reaching
capacity, what's the point in keeping a parallel alignment free? In the vast
majority of cases, that rationalisation made sense, even in hindsight.

~~~
teh_klev
> what's the point in keeping a parallel alignment free?

Freight, which has seen a huge growth over the past 10-15 years, especially
inter-modal traffic.

~~~
Someone
Also: redundancy. If a road gets closed because of a traffic accident, people
take a slightly slower detour, and get home. For trains, there often is no
alternative that isn't at least twice as long, and includes a switch between
trains with a waiting time that is long because the time schedule wasn't
designed for that weird switch.

~~~
madaxe_again
Redundant, you say? Tear it up!

Amazing how that word is contronymic, yet not.

------
Doctor_Fegg
For a map of what we've lost, here's a map I researched and drew, covering
Southern England, the Midlands and Wales:
[http://www.geowiki.com/New_Adlestrop_Railway_Atlas.pdf](http://www.geowiki.com/New_Adlestrop_Railway_Atlas.pdf)

Haven't had time to finish it (paid work gets in the way...) or update it for
recent reopenings, but it gives you some idea of the network we used to have.

~~~
akshayn
Great map! Not sure if you are aware of
[http://www.openrailwaymap.org](http://www.openrailwaymap.org) \- although
your project includes interesting snippets ("proposed for reopening", etc)

~~~
Doctor_Fegg
Thanks! Yes, OpenRailwayMap is fun. I have an OSM rendering database sitting
around on my server - one of these days I'm going to sit down and do a railway
stylesheet for it...

------
rwhitman
If only politicians in the US were capable of seeing things this way..

So many smaller cities in the US northeast have been isolated from the
regional economy by railroad shutdowns, but there's so little interest in rail
here anymore that I doubt local leadership even understand the severity of the
problem.

Great example being the Lehigh Valley of Pennsylvania. Commuter rail
connections to NYC and Philadelphia from Allentown & Bethlehem PA were
completely dismantled in the 20th century. There's large highways connecting
them but the drive is 2-3 hours, lots of traffic. It's grueling by car. Yet a
person could comfortably commute by rail if it was available. So this sizable
metro area with tons of charm, walkable town centers and 19th century housing
stock almost frozen in time, just sitting economically sluggish as the larger
cities prosper around them. Very frustrating.

~~~
ZanyProgrammer
Yep a lot of passenger rail lines were turned into freight only lines in the
mid 20th century. Alas even a lot of those freight lines are being abandoned
now. Rail infrastructure is the kind of thing that is much easier and cheaper
to maintain than it is to get rid of and then build anew.

------
Animats
In the 1960s, Britain's railway lines had to either be modernized or closed.
There were a lot of small lines still running on old equipment. British Rail
had a huge inventory of steam engines. While steam engines are cool in small
numbers, they're huge polluters and very high maintenance. (A 1940s steam
engine needs about as much maintenance per day as a modern diesel-electric
needs in six months, and about once a year or two, a heavily used steam
locomotive needs a full rebuild.) Britain had too many trains with small
numbers of passengers.

------
darkclarity
Our railway system was built by competing railway businesses with lots of
inefficiency, it was nationalised, made painfully efficient (Beeching etc) and
franchised out to businesses. This is the next stage where demand is catching
up with the network and old routes are reopening.

~~~
smcl
There's a little more to the tale - East Coast rail being nationalised when
failing and then privatised once it returned to health
([http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/nov/27/privati...](http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/nov/27/privatising-
east-coast-rail-rip-off)) and the Govt selling off its Eurostar share prior to
it becoming more valuable
([http://www.theguardian.com/business/2015/nov/06/eurostar-
sel...](http://www.theguardian.com/business/2015/nov/06/eurostar-sell-off-
national-audit-office-report)). Also for some reason TfL remains in public
hands - maybe because it's too important for private sector to mess up?

~~~
billybofh
I remember when the bus system was being privatised and watching the transport
minister on the news explaining that he'd been 'inspired' by watching multiple
double-decker buses crossing in front of parliament - all with no passengers
and his feeling that 'something must be done'.

Yet London got left alone while the rest of the country got the full 'freedom'
of the private sector. It's a tad annoying ;-)

------
pieter1976
Now, if only the tram lines would be rebuilt things would be a lot smoother
(at least from a public transport perspective).

~~~
gsnedders
In Scotland at least the abysmal project management of the (new) Edinburgh
trams has likely killed any chance of more new tram lines in Scotland (I don't
think _any_ party has new tram lines in their manifesto for next month's
elections).

For those who don't know, it was budgeted at £375 million, and eventually
opened in a cut-back scheme (with about half the route cancelled) at £776
million.

~~~
pjc50
It was something of an administrative nightmare in that it was paid for by
Holyrood and project managed by the local council. There's an inquiry into the
causes of the failure which has _also_ run over budget, absurdly. But I don't
think it's entirely dead, there are still noises about extending it into Leith
sometime in the next decade.

Meanwhile the Borders railway appears to have opened successfully - and is
immediately full at commuting times. I hope they left enough space to double
track it.

~~~
gsnedders
> Meanwhile the Borders railway appears to have opened successfully - and is
> immediately full at commuting times. I hope they left enough space to double
> track it.

Not for all of it was — there's certainly provision in places, but there's
also parts where doubling would be incredibly expensive (the viaducts
especially, where the maximum dimensions of the trains it has been built for
are larger than it was originally built for, are inherently single-track now).

~~~
martinald
There's passive provision (ie: at not a lot of extra cost - perhaps no real
new infrastructure, not entirely sure) to run a 4tph service to Gorebridge +
continue half of them to the rest of the line.

I think a 4tph / 2tph service pattern is fine and future capacity could be
gained by platform extensions + longer trains.

I'd rather they 'value engineer' it to that level now than build a double
track railway at significantly extra cost, and spend the ~£100m (educated
guess) on other railway improvement projects for other areas (eg, the quad
tracking of the ECML near Musselburgh to allow them a 2tph service - will cost
around £100m for the various improvements).

------
ascagnel_
Following on from this: access to rail is now seen as a potential boom. In my
area, areas with rail access are outgrowing areas without it [0].

[http://www.northjersey.com/news/population-rebounds-
around-t...](http://www.northjersey.com/news/population-rebounds-around-train-
stations-in-n-j-1.1546298)

------
gpvos
Roughly the same thing as the Beeching cuts is currently happening to night
trains on the European continent. There is demand, but due to a combination of
high track access charges, the fact that train operating company management is
only interested in high speed trains, and lack of vision by the governments
and EU, night trains are being cut drastically in both Germany and France.

~~~
Al-Khwarizmi
And in Spain too.

------
petecooper
A propos of nothing, the linked URL set a new record for Ghostery on my
browser: 64 trackers found. Yikes.

~~~
astrodust
They really should gamify this and build in a high-score feature for
situations like that.

------
hackuser
Does the UK, or other countries, have a political movement similar to the U.S.
that opposes government investment in things like transportation, education,
etc?

~~~
QuantumCookie
Not as strongly. The main issue is, for all the cheap talk that comes out of
the government, the fact is that spending (on many things, but especially
infrastructure) is divided into London (plenty of money) and the rest ("maybe
some of what's left, and you provincials better be grateful").

------
vixen99
Richard Beeching cut 100,000 jobs, closed 2,000 railway stations & 5,000 miles
of track built at the cost of untold labourers' lives. Pollution, traffic jams
and commuter misery were some of the results.

He was a public servant who knew he'd never have to bear the responsibility
for his actions which affected millions.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Burdensome taxes to support underutilized rail infrastructure cause misery
too. We can call names at public policy, but that's not a good way to manage
public policy. Efficiency has to matter too.

And, strangely, this article insists there's no central decision-making group
for managing rail stations and lines. Then, _how did Mr. Beeching manage to
close all those lines?_

~~~
a_humean
When Beeching wrote the report the stations, carriages, services, and rail
were publicly owned and centralised under one public company: British Rail.

In the mid-90s the services, carriages, and the stations were sold off as
14-year franchises to the private firms (most of which are actually public
rail companies from other countries such as Germany and France), but the rail
itself kept in a weird thing called National Rail that has an odd
public/private structure that I don't understand. Ownership and responsibility
for the network is somewhat unclear in many cases. I think at this point there
is a political consensus that its been a complete mess and a botched
privatisation that either need to be redone or just be re-nationalised, though
Conservatives try to not talk about it if they can (they implemented it).

There was an awkward period in recent years in which one of the private
companies abandoned a major line as unprofitable and it was temporarily
nationalised - it ended up becoming the most popular and profitable line while
under public management.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_Coast_(train_operating_co...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_Coast_\(train_operating_company\))

~~~
gsnedders
> the rail itself kept in a weird thing called National Rail that has an odd
> public/private structure that I don't understand

No, it wasn't. The rail itself was sold off as Railtrack.

Following on from the Hatfield crash, after which it spent £580 million on
repairing similar track faults as which caused the Hatfield crash, and a few
hundred million more on compensation, which led to the failure of the company
and it entered "railway administration" (essentially a special form of
administration created along with the privatisation of the railways to avoid
the railway ceasing operating when in administration). Network Rail then
bought Railtrack in 2002, bringing the railway infrastructure back into public
hands. Railtrack was then subsequently liquidated.

~~~
a_humean
Oh sorry, I forgot that part of the history. I was a little young at the time
so the Hatfield crash is not something I remember in much detail.

------
sbardle
Many of the pre-Beeching lines cannot be re-opened, as they have been built
over with roads and housing, especially in the South East. The closest you
will get to experiencing pre-Beeching railways is the Hogwarts Express in
Florida, I'm afraid.

------
smegel
> Feasibility studies take years.

They don't really. Just ask China how it's done.

