The Borders line is back

On the day the Queen marked 40 years as monarch she enjoyed a train ride. No ordinary train ride, but one that is a potent symbol of the rail renaissance that is happening now across Britain. The Borders railway re-opening … Continue reading →

 

40 years???? It has been 63 years since George VI died, 62 since the coronation. The significance of the date was that this Queen has now been on the throne longer than Queen Victoria, who was the previous longest.

 

Maybe the Queen is like the pets on Blue Peter and they replaced her with a new one forty years ago and now it's been leaked by the NRM?

Also the route was not closed in the Beeching era.

 

Well, I also posted a comment there and the "40 years" has been corrected. I hadn't thought about the timing of the closure in relation to Beeching. Even if it was not actually one of his, the extensive closures around that time are associated with his name. But feel free to post another comment there.

 

The "Beeching" closures are a valid description because the line was proposed for closure by the Beeching Report; the fact that legal appeals extended the closure period of this - and other routes - isn't sufficiently good a reason to separate them from other "Beeching" closures which took place fairly soon after the Report was accepted by the Government [aka Mr Marples].

 

Was it one that was supposedly going to be 'saved' by Wilson and his government during the 1964 GE campaign? You know, like the lines around Whitby were all going to be 'saved', and we know how that went...

 

If you read carefully, the Waverley route was pushed through rather later, during the Wilson government, and the politics within government were an important factor in the final decision. David Spaven's book (I believe just reissued in a 2nd edition) is a very good guide to the line's decline and rebirth.

 

This appeared on the BBC website a few days ago.

Borders Railway extension business case due by late 2027 - BBC News

 

But the closure of the Waverley route was signed off by a Labour transport minister. a member of a party who campaigned on “no more major rail closures”.

 

A campaign promise that was rapidly broken, as people from Whitby will remind you...

The reality is that what were or weren't "Beeching" closures can be tricky to pin down, because the process extended over several years, proposals were advanced at different times, and decisions made by different ministers. There were then other closures (Woodhead to passengers, Oxford-Cambridge) that weren't even in the Report, but advanced at the time of the others. And then there were the delayed closures (e.g. Swanage, Alston, Tunbridge Wells West - Eridge) that were in the Beeching Report but not implemented for many years - were they "Beeching" or "not-Beeching"?

 

As can Barbara Castle's railway policies; even today after the release of many apposite government documents, her general attitude towards railways remains contested. I think she believed in railways, evidenced by her introduction of the idea of the social railway, but that she was constrained by the Treasury view that the Beeching proposals were needed.

 

A view that was also internalised by BR management - there have been a number of interesting articles in Backtrack about the closures programme in Scotland, which suggest that the proceeds of closure were seen as a necessary part of income for a time.