Nationalisation good or bad ? (ex cheerful 2015 thread)

Sorry sounds like village gossip. Why would you blow up bridges straight after closure. This would wait until track recovery had taken place.

Large buildings erected on a prime site in a town built without planning permission, where is the proof?

Remember there had been plans around to close the line since the mid-fifties.

Also remember Beeching may have recommended lines for closure but it was the Secretary of State who had to give permission.

 

Track removal at certain locations occurred immediately after the last train. The Secretary of State was the notorious Ernest Marples, who could never have been accused of propriety. Documentation for that era no longer exists, I'm told, but the number of people who have separately told the same story makes it credible.

 

Verbal testimony should always be treated with a pinch of salt. It makes great social history in terms of people's perception and understanding of events they lived through, but is very much at risk of embellishment as time marches on. The problem with verbal accusations of foul play is that they have a worrying habit of making unfounded rumour into accepted fact by a wide variety of people, thus distorting the actual chain of events- look at the alleged German invasion of East Anglia during the Second World War. There may well have been some sort of arrangement in the case you raise, but in the absence of written proof and contemporary documentation, it can only remain speculation, no matter how many people appear to corroborate the story.

 

I'm afraid your history lets you down. The line closed in 1965, Marples was long gone by then.

 

Permission was given some considerable time earlier, giving time for local protests and an ill-fated preservation attempt to be developed.

 

Given several separate and independent testimonies from several sources, I'm prepared to believe them.

 

Apart from being (as we would consider) wrong on closing many lines because he kept within very narrow terms of reference, every biography or account I have read on Beeching portrays him as a very upright, honest person. Your suggestion that he colluded with some sort of underhand endeavour appears somewhat out of character.

 

That's your prerogative, but to misquote Louis B. Mayer of Metro Goldwyn Mayer fame, 'verbal [testimony] ain't always worth the paper its printed on'. As for Beeching, he was given a brief, and he produced the goods. Regardless of the quality of the research that went into the report, the essential point it raised was whether government was happy to back a railway industry that purely serves social need or a railway that purely pays for itself. One could even interpret the report as a document that was not necessarily intended to be a blueprint, but was to be an aid to arriving at some sort of 'middle way'.

In the end, it was up to the governments of the day to tick the boxes and implement the schemes, and I don't see any evidence of Labour clamouring to rubbish the report, despite their opposition being a factor in winning the 1964 election.

 

A bit on the closure & possible re-opening proposals here.
A LCGB tour hauled by T9 120 ran the day after closure.
http://www.disused-stations.org.uk/c/cranleigh/index.shtml

Another interesting link.
http://www.cranleighrailway.info/

 

Which I think was the last train over the route.

 

11/11/63 was the date set by Marples but objections meant that the line soldiered on until 14/6/65 so the actual closure took place under the auspices of Labour's Tom Fraser.

 

Yes, but the decision had already been made... Fraser merely rubber-stamped the inevitable. Too many vested interests!

 

"Beeching was nothing if not an arrogant bastard and was certainly a freemason." So you knew him, then?

 

I'm merely discussing the political climate of the time... Beeching was a mason, that is known, and surviving interviews of him demonstrate his breathtaking arrogance.

 

No you are not, you are making comments about a specific person. That is not "discussing the political climate"

 

I misread the meaning of the question and amended my reply accordingly.

 

Brighton Baltic seems obsessed by conspiracy theories in general and by allegedly improper ethics by Marples in particular. We must neither let wild conspiracy theories nor the benefit of 50 years' hindsight rule our judgement. The financial decline of British Railways after 1955, especially the commercial failure of the Modernisation Plan, made drastic action by the early 1960s inescapable. In those days there was little overall pressure on the road system, the burgeoning motorway system was expected to provide the strategic national network and the idea that that system would itself become overloaded was unimaginable. Certainly the closures were excessive but there seemed little effective community opposition in those days; we were still stuck in the mindset of passive acceptance of what the Government / Parliament had decided. The closed lines were undoubtedly losing money but there was, before 1968, no recognition of the socially necessary railway so, as most of them could not be made profitable, they were closed. Had the government of the day been prepared to accept the principle of subsidy then many routes could have been saved at the cost of the radical rationalisation which took place anyway on those lines which did survive.

Now, to turn to the particularly silly parts of Brighton Baltic's comments, his remark about the M1 displays a total lack of knowledge of history and geography. The M1 crosses the GCR at two points, one south of Leicester where the bridge remains as a monument to the M1 construction budget having to bear needless cost, and the other near Tibshelf where the line had been closed before construction of this part of the motorway. "Widening" on the GCR solum was therefore geographically and chronologically impossible. Many parts of the M1 (and other roads) had bridges built over railways that were closed within five years. In relation to Birmingham to Bristol, the MR route is both shorter and on a better alignment than the GWR route. Closure between Stratford and Long Marston, and Honeybourne and Cheltenham was wrong in its own right but retention instead of the Midland route would have been totally illogical. Perth to Aberdeen via Forfar should have been kept but again, in the social, economic and transport circumstances of 50 years ago was judged unnecessary. No part of this route has been used for roads apart from a tiny length at Coupar Angus. As for the route though Glen Farg, about three miles of the M90 is on the railway alignment and there is no justification for describing it snidely as a "Marplesway". Remember more lines were closed under Barbara Castle than under Ernest Maples; she preferred to hide behind the policy that she inherited rather than pursue her party's stated intention of halting closures.

 

I hadn't heard that. I read that it was the hasty demolition of the Taw bridge which put a stop to it...