Nationalisation good or bad ? (ex cheerful 2015 thread)

And the fact remains that Marples was deeply corrupt - ended up selling Marples Construction to his wife to escape accusations of conflict of interest, and latterly did a runner overseas to escape prosecution for a gigantic fraud. The alignment of significant stretches of the M1 right next to the GCR was no accident! Now, not EVERY significant closure was reused for roads, of course not, but that doesn't excuse their closures nor the wilfully deceitful figures BR used to justify them.

 

Interesting. Makes one wonder why there was no further attempt to reopen the line. I know the council in Ilfracombe have said they would love to have it back, as the local economy has never recovered from the mortal blow dealt by the line's closure.

 

virtually, every local council that has a closed line to or running through it would like it back. They don't want to pay for it but that doesn't stop them claammering to have it back.

How many passengers used the station in its last summer of operation.

 

There is around 15km of the M1 parallel to the GCR. It is certainly no accident; it is called minimisation of severance. Perhaps Brighton Baltic thinks that the long stretches of HS1 parallel with the M20 or LGV Nord parallel to the A1 are the malign influence of Marples' ghost?

 

I think it is generally accepted that Marples wasn't an upright member of society. However significant stretches of the M1 do not run right next to the GCR.

 

I suppose Beeching's on-screen manner might be interpreted as arrogance in hindsight, but it might also be interpreted as the manner of a man who was essentially quiet, yet self-assured enough not to bother speaking about his achievements in life. Film footage suggests that he spoke to engine crews during his commute from East Grinstead to London. This might only have been a 'pose for the camera', but then again, there's always the chance it wasn't, and that he was simply trying to understand the railways from an operational point of view.

I gather the 'vested interests' you refer to might be the Stedeford Committee of 1960, which included Beeching and Marples to examine the state of Britain's transport, and its findings probably formed the basis for the Transport Act, 1962 which dissolved the BTC. Granted the committee consisted of several prominent industrialists wholly unrelated to railway operations, but surely, as potential bulk customers of the services the railways offered (or were not offering), their vested interest was justified? Or should wider industry have been kept out of the loop regardless of their status as important customers of the railways? It has to be said that the latter attitude was displayed by the GWR in the early 1920s and in all probability was a factor in driving some of their traffic to the roads. With an industrialist such as Beeching planted at the top of the railway industry, perchance the railways could finally be made to come to terms with the pressures facing external industry and the need to cut cloth according to means...

Taking a different tack, it has to be said that railway management in the 1950s proved somewhat lacking in judgment and essentially tried to channel most of the investment intended for the 'Modernisation Plan' into creating the railway of 1948 in 1955. Two avenues for investment should have been a more progressive (ie. not crash) dieselisation and a reconfiguration of marketing strategy/market research to establish the direction in which British industry was going, and make recommendations for more targeted investment. But once again, this is only through the benefit of hindsight.

 

Another thing that Brighton Baltic had "heard", possibly from a guy in Cranleigh.

 

No, from a website dedicated to the Ilfracombe branch.

 

Never believe what you read on a website!

 

Yes, that is true, but I hadn't found anything to contradict it!

 

Way back in post 34 I recommended a book by Charles Loft.

In all seriousness, I recommend you read it and some of the other works he references.

It is very helpful in understanding the climate of the time both economic and social and the history of closures before and after Beeching.

I would also recommend subscribing to the cock-up rather than conspiracy theory of life.

 

As for the vested interests, I'm talking about the road haulage and construction companies, bus operators, the unions serving the same, whose attitudes didn't change for years (remember when the WSR mooted operations into Taunton? I'm told the bus union protested because it might jeopardise the livelihood of one bus driver and thus nixed it!).

 

Aye, but what of The Great British Railway Conspiracy? Some closures were perhaps inevitable, but the majority were unnecessary and based on wilfully deceitful maths.

 

No they objected because the bus drivers were members of the rail Union for historic reasons. They did not want full time paid jobs being replaced by volunteers.

 

What of it? The very word conspiracy in the title is a give away.

 

Having spent 47 years serving politicians I can confirm that cock-ups abound. I never came across a conspiracy and the only corruption I ever found was not of the financial kind but of the intellectual kind where people voted according to the party whip when they knew that it was not the best thing to do.

 

In that case, I think you confuse 'vested interests' with 'lobby groups', which was certainly an activity that the railways indulged in during the inter-war period. There was even a time when the railways themselves owned or had substantial interests in bus companies! The fact that Marples was given the job of Transport Minister probably says a lot about what his superiors thought of his ministerial competency, as the Ministry of Transport was considered a political graveyard. It just so happened that Marples was in a prime position to do engage in shady dealings, and it was his good fortune that he happened to have been 'involved' with a road construction firm... Judging by his flight to Monaco in 1975 over tax issues, I can believe that he was apt to feather his own nest. But to tar everyone at the time with the same brush is a bit much. Cynicism can be good, but when off-loaded in large doses, it doesn't make for interesting company in a pub...

 

Sorry, I've seen far too much of the dirty underbelly of the Establishment and how it works and how it treats those who attempt to uphold honesty and moral rectitude... There is some stuff to which I am party which is not yet in the public domain, but will be hitting headlines in the new year... stuff to both boil and chill the blood... It has completely destroyed my trust in authority. So yeah, you could call me a cynic...

 

Upholding honesty and moral rectitude starts with refraining from libelling the dead and spreading gossip as historical fact.