The Reframing of Beeching’s Legacy
GARETH DENNIS picks through the pages of Beeching’s infamous Reshaping report to evaluate its failures, its successes, and to reconsider its legacy.
A shorter version of this article also appeared in Issue 978 (8 March 2023) of RAIL magazine.
It is difficult to think of another government report that has lodged itself in the British psyche more firmly than the two-part Reshaping of British Railways. Published on the 27 March 1963 and subsequently known as the “Beeching report” after its infamous author, the document represents a mid-point in the evolution of Britain’s railway network from one ravaged by wartime neglect into the system we recognise today.
However, it is remembered unfondly by politicians, communities and campaigners as the document that heralded widespread reductions in the size of the railway. It was published during a period of significant change across all layers of British society, and consequently has become associated with the loss of innocence of the country, more even than the concurrent expansion of private vehicle usage and construction of the motorway network.
Setting the scene
The report did not appear out of nowhere. Both the Railways Act 1921, which created the Big Four, and the Transport Act 1947, which created the nationalised British Railways, had intended to improve the financial sustainability of the railways by reducing duplication in the system, both in terms of clerical capacity and physical assets.
The rail network had been contracting since the 1920s, and this accelerated following nationalisation. As the Railway Executive of the British Transport Commission (BTC, the body in charge of the state transport apparatus) realised the scale of the task of bringing Britain’s battered railways into the modern era, it also realised a single unified effort was required to accelerate the pace of change. This coalesced into the 1955 Modernisation Plan, or rather the Modernisation and Re-Equipment of British Railways.
Modernisation involved costly mistakes, but as a whole it is difficult to see that the overall programme failed given the extent to which it moved railway operations and technology forward. However, unlike the embryonic motorway building programme which was to be delivered regionally by the then hugely powerful local authorities, railway modernisation was centrally administered, and this meant it had to satisfy the patience of Treasury.
By 1959, that patience was running thin and, despite significant progress, the BTC published a report in July of that year re-appraising the plan and attempting to bring forwards the supposed “break even” date resulting from the investment.
This report, snappily titled the Re-Appraisal of the Plan for the Modernisation and Re-Equipment of British Railways, is important as it was the first to speak boldly about reducing the size of Britain’s railway network. Of its three parts, the second was dedicated to “the future size of the railway system” — while Modernisation had danced around the idea of widespread closures, Re-Appraisal did not. In its own words, “it was never intended that the whole of the existing railway network should be retained”. The word “rationalisation” was used liberally, alongside discussion of a “revival” of Britain’s railways, and the challenge of the slow process of line closures was highlighted.
Jump forwards a year, however, and the ever-increasing burden of a significantly over-sized rail network facing stiffer competition from motor traffic on improving roads became too much for government. By Treasury’s key measure — alleviation of the railway’s operating deficit — Modernisation had already failed. It proposed the dissolution of the BTC in a paper in December 1960, intending to reorganise the Railway Executive’s hefty debt and create a new Railways Board to oversee the system in a more commercialised framework of operation. Heavy criticism befell the BTC for not successfully integrating rail and bus services, and for its lack of progress in reducing the size of the network.
The most important piece of the puzzle arrived in 1962, with a new Transport Act setting the scene for the next phase of Modernisation as the BTC was dismantled, and new powers were created to enable rail services to be more rapidly altered or ended.
As the first chair of the newly formed British Railways Board (BRB), Dr Richard Beeching was tasked with answering the question that no industry leader has tackled before or since: what are the railways for?
More specifically, he attempted to determine what the railway’s place was in Britain’s overall transport system. Thanks perhaps to his industrial background, he answered this question more successfully for freight operations than for passenger operations, but nobody should be in any doubt that his intentions were to dismantle or undermine the success of the railways. There is no evidence for this.
His answer to this question would form the paper that would define his tenure: The Reshaping of British Railways.
Reshaping should also be seen as a re-branding and re-prioritisation of the ongoing Modernisation Plan. Indeed, in 1963, the upgrade of the West Coast Main Line was highly visible, with Euston station in a state of half-construction and half-demolition and overhead wires being erected — the work would continue until 1968. New rolling stock developed as part of the Modernisation Plan was still being manufactured and pressed into service across the country.
On its publication, however, Reshaping was immediately decried as a swinging axe. It was loudly and vigorously opposed by figures on both sides of the political spectrum, by the unions, by the press, and by communities across Britain, particularly those in the rural fringes. For decades afterwards, indeed to the present day, Beeching’s name would be indelibly ascribed to all the line closures of the mid-twentieth century, whether they were preceded by Reshaping or not.
Despite its infamy, and the regularity that Reshaping is still cited, I would suggest that many who aim to gain political capital by referring to the “Beeching cuts” fail to understand the context I’ve outlined above, and are unlikely to have read or understood the report itself.
For the rest of us who are interested in the historic and present-day relevance of Reshaping, and on the sixtieth anniversary of its publication, it feels like a good time to open it up, dig through its pages, and understand why such a vilified document represented a critical, if imperfect, step in creating the modern railway system we have today.
It’s worth starting by saying that, though a few original copies of Reshaping are in circulation (I’m very pleased to have one behind me as I type this), anyone can access the report from the Railways Archive with a quick internet search. I’d recommend downloading a copy.
A sense of inevitability
Reshaping came in two parts that were bundled together in a slip of paper when issued originally. Part 1 was the report, which included the narrative around the proposals, numerical analysis and the lists of doomed stations and services. Part 2 included twelve maps, acting as a companion to the analysis in Part 1. We’ll focus on Part 1, but it is worth having the maps to hand.
The first part of the report consists of sixty pages plus a further 88 pages of appendices. Its foreword opens with a quote from 1960, where the then Prime Minister Harold Macmillan states that “the railway system must be remodelled to meet current needs, and the modernisation plan must be adapted to this new shape.”
Though he is never named in the report, it can be read in Beeching’s voice. His foreword takes on a tone of fatherly inevitability, framed by the infallible (as he saw it) analysis undertaken by his team of boffins who had spread themselves across the country to establish the necessary statistics. His foreword also makes a series of exclusions that seem frustratingly familiar today — not making extensive numerical comparisons of costs between the different sorts of transport provision, including private motor car and lorry versus rail, is a key omission.
Nevertheless, his assertions that no comprehensive national assessment of rail’s usage had been previously undertaken were true. He also states that commercial viability is not the key driver of his assessment; he lays out that Reshaping rather aims to developing the rail system to “provide as much of the total transport of the country as they can provide well”, allowing him to eliminate “only those services which, by their very nature, railways are ill-suited to provide.”
This helps us to understand the way in which the report was created. Understanding what types of traffic the railway was good at carrying and what types of traffic the railway was losing to alternative modes would help Beeching to expand the former and reduce the latter.
He closes the foreword by acknowledging that his proposals would have far-reaching impacts on railway staff, communities and industry — and passes the buck onto government to ensure that these consequences are managed appropriately. Given that government had called on him to front the contraction of the railway that they were ultimately pursuing, it is understandable that Beeching would seek to limit the liability of the BRB in this respect.
Having set out his stall, Beeching moves on to outline the problems facing British Railways — “The nature of the problem” as he titles it. He describes the untenable position of the railways’ finances reasonably dispassionately. From 1952 onwards, British Railways ran an operational deficit and in 1961 made an annual loss of £86.9M. Incidentally, this is nearly £2bn in today’s money, far less than the £6.5bn industry subsidy from 2019/2020 (the last mostly pre-COVID figure).
He then picks out the clerical challenge — the railways’ monopoly had meant that accountancy and record keeping had been limited to global accounts. In other words, there were only really headline numbers, with little useful breakdown by routes or traffic type. This made it very difficult to have a precise handle on the sorts of traffic types and flows (of both passengers and freight) that the railways were suited to carrying. This also limited the ability of the railway companies, or indeed the nationalised organisation, to understand the extent of cross-subsidy of traffic types and routes.
Reshaping, as the next chapter laid out, provided the chance to understand these numbers by: determining what made railway transport different to its competing modes, understanding how these differences could be harnessed to make rail competitive, working out where these favourable conditions existed on the rail network, and shaping the network and services to optimise these conditions.
There is no such thing as impartial analysis, though. The data collection and processing had shortcomings we’ll explore in more detail shortly, and the view of what constituted “success” was prone to conscious or unconscious biases. Whilst acknowledged, there was no rigorous cross-examination of the analysis through these lenses.
Beeching continues, detailing where rail is strongest. He highlights that “the benefits which can be derived from possession of this high cost route system are very great.” High capacity, dense flows of traffic, low fixed costs per unit moved, as well as safe, reliable, scheduled and high speed movements of goods and passengers were rightly listed as key advantages of rail.
He then explains how the optimal railway system would concentrate on those routes that can best exploit these capabilities, and that the railway system he is assessing operates significantly outside of these parameters, to the point where bad traffic (as he describes it) is impacting on the operation of the whole system such that good traffic (again, his description) is being lost to the roads.
His next chapter examines the present state of the railways and, in his words, “seek[s] to show, as quantitively as possible” the extent to which British Railways was failing to optimise for the sort of traffic it was best suited to convey. It is from this point onwards that the numerical analysis begins.
Digging into the numbers
Though it isn’t the greatest of Beeching’s statistical crimes (we’ll get to those in due course), he makes use of only one year of global income figures to assess British Railways’ financial position. Whilst sounding almost apologetic over his use of quite a narrow time series of data, he does then conclude that using that single year provides “a sound basis for decision making”.
In 1961, British Railways’ finances could be broken down as follows:
The deduction of the expenses from the income of the railway in 1961 gives the £86.9M value quoted earlier. These figures did not include either the interest payments on the railway’s debts, nor the capital outlay associated with the ongoing Modernisation Plan.
The costs of infrastructure maintenance and signalling are approximately equivalent to the non-capital expenditure of Network Rail today, and it is interesting to observe that, despite the difference in scale of the network being operated, the 1961 outlay sat at £2.5bn (in today’s prices) compared to approximately £6.8bn in 2019/2020 (a mostly pre-COVID figure, to avoid skewing numbers). It is more difficult to directly compare train operations and maintenance given how fragmented the non-infrastructure segments of the industry are today.
Having laid out these big-picture figures, the report then begins its analysis of traffic types against route mileage in the following two chapters.
The split of railway operations across passenger (fast and semi-fast, stopping and suburban) and freight (mail, coal, minerals, wagon-load and sundries) operations is laid out and makes for instructive reading. In 1961, the greatest source of income for the railway was in the movement of coal, accounting for receipts of £108M. Following this was fast and semi-fast passenger services, accounting for £91M.
When you deduct the direct and indirect costs, the picture looks a little different. Only mail and coal traffic generated a net revenue when accounting for all costs, not just direct operating costs. However, by both measures, a significant shortfall in revenue was identified for stopping passenger services and both wagon-load and sundry freight traffic.
Next up, the shape of the network as it stood was broken down by the types of railway corridor. Of the total route mileage of 17,830 miles (compared with around 9,800 miles today), 10,000 was double track and 5,900 was single track. Infrastructure maintenance costs were broken down per mile and by track type. These fixed costs, as Beeching explains several times, are related to the route mileage independent of what traffic travels over it, and accounted for around a quarter of the cost of running the railway.
It is at this point we start to understand the shortcomings of the data collection process associated with the subsequent analysis.
To understand the extent to which these fixed infrastructure costs are offset by traffic density, Beeching arranged for traffic surveys, “which were made in great detail” in his words. However, rather than being repeated for multiple weeks across a year or, ideally, several years, the traffic surveys all took place at once, on the week commencing the 17th April 1961.
Undertaking these surveys on multiple weeks over at least two years and ideally three, providing some level of repeatability of seasonal and economic effects, should have been considered critical in creating a robust dataset given the long-lasting and irreversible consequences of the work.
However, the clerical resources available at the time to undertake such a significant data collection task are not to be overstated, so alongside the political pressure to provide quick answers, I can understand why data collection was so limited.
What creates the problems in the resulting analysis is the treatment of the collected data as infallible. In normal circumstances, researchers would make adjustments in confidence based on the quality of the data, and in this situation I would suggest that using only one week’s worth of data would have merited a significant widening of confidence intervals.
Beeching does concede that his assessment “could not be based firmly on the traffic surveys alone” but asserts that “there can be little doubt about the general reliability of the picture revealed.” Whilst I agree that the broad picture could be seen as accurate, it should not have been seen as a suitably detailed analysis to determine the fate of, or indeed prioritise the closure of, any given railway line.
Nevertheless, he presses on, and the central paragraphs on page ten of the report really get to the heart of the challenge facing British Railways. Even the highest quality survey data would have still reached the same determinations.
I’ll quote the two key lines, verbatim: “One third of the route mileage carries only 1 per cent of the total passenger miles. Similarly, one third of the mileage carries only 1 per cent of the freight ton miles of British Railways.”
This gets to the crux of the issue. Poor data collection notwithstanding, there was a fundamental misalignment in the density of traffic carried on an enormous proportion of the railway network.
In terms of revenue, one half of the network was not earning remotely enough to cover its costs, whilst the other half, in Beeching’s words, “has earnings which cover its route costs more than six times.”
Looking to passenger and goods stations, the picture was even more bleak. With 7000 stations in operation, approximately one for every 2.5 miles of track, half of these stations accounted for only 2% of passenger receipts. 34 stations accounted for over a quarter of the remaining receipts.
Being presented with these stark numbers, the direction the subsequent recommendations took is understandable.
A simplification of services
The next few chapters of the report explore the types of traffic in more detail, and in parallel with the maps in Part 2, a detailed picture of the shape of railway operations emerges.
Beeching makes a well-argued case in favour of inter-city services (as he terms the fast and semi-fast passenger services), citing the success of the “luxury train of the future” provided by the new Blue Pullman. He points out that maintaining multiple major terminal stations in cities across the country makes little sense, proposing the concentration of services into fewer stations in Leeds and Glasgow, as well as removing the duplication of inter-city routes into Exeter, Carlisle and Birmingham.
He also states that the value of tackling long distance seasonal peak flows with extra trains is limited, which heralded one of many secondary impacts of Reshaping: the demise of the holiday special trains, removing the need for holding large stocks of reserve coaches and relying on expensive staff overtime. Another change was the use of seat reservations and fares to manage demand, “as is the custom with airline services”. His various proposals would create the modern inter-city service that remains hugely successful today.
The assessment of passenger operations moves on to stopping trains. His deliberations on this are extensive, but essentially, he suggests the majority of such services, particularly in rural areas, are better served by buses. As he rightly points out, rail and bus services were competing with each other whilst losing the bigger battle against private transport.
Whilst he was reasonably effusive about inter-city travel, he is heavily disparaging of all types of stopping service, including those on otherwise busy main lines. His analysis is not entirely unsound.
He tackles some of the questions head on. Reducing fares to attract more traffic would require ridership to increase many times before any fare reduction would allow a service to be revenue neutral. Fares would have to increase significantly beyond affordability to cover the costs of lightly used services. Rail buses, a reduced timetable or fewer intermediate stations all make little difference to operating costs given the majority of expenses come from the fixed infrastructure.
Beeching concludes, rather brutally, that “a high proportion of stopping passenger train services ought to be discontinued as soon as possible… and as soon as procedure permits” and goes into some detail over the means by which to deal with the resulting hardship of a closure. This would allow for the rare instance where a line would remain open if there was no viable alternative, essentially referring to northern Scotland and central Wales, but its conditions were egregious.
Next, suburban services come in for consideration. Outside of London, Beeching considered only eight places to have kind of suburban operation: Glasgow, Edinburgh, Newcastle, Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds, Birmingham and Cardiff.
For London, Beeching decries the low fares resulting in an inability to justify investment in capacity enhancement despite severe overcrowding. He also highlights the conflict, one very much still present today, between long distance traffic and suburban traffic. He isn’t the first to then suggest that working hours be staggered, and employment be dispersed to the edges of the city — the nature of London’s congestion was as much a hot topic in the 1960s as it remains today.
Beeching is more disparaging about suburban services beyond the capital, and I think here lies one of the most critical shortcomings in his analysis. By not considering the potential for these cities to grow, both on their own merits and in response to London’s limitations, he failed to future-proof these types of service, limiting them in favour of long-distance services. To my mind, this is a greater failure than his judgements on rural line closures, and has had longer lasting and greater impacts on the railway’s ability to drive modal shift onto trains and away from private transport. It is a mistake that we are still trying to unpick with many of our largest and most complex infrastructure projects.
The report moves on to talk about freight. Beeching first briefly touches on mail and parcel trains (these were often routed as or formed part of passenger services), which in the 1960s were still a significant and important element of rail operations and are now an almost totally lost traffic. He then moves onto a very detailed analysis of freight traffic of all kinds.
In a somewhat relieved tone, he shows that the heaviest trafficked routes for freight also happen to be the busiest passenger routes, enabling a concentration of services to use a small number of lines.
From this point, however, Beeching starts to lay out some of the more revolutionary elements of the Reshaping report — a radical overhaul of the way in which rail freight functioned.
Firstly, he tackled the changing patterns in coal movement, with historic flows generally from mines to city centres being replaced by those from mines to power stations. Reshaping initiated the development of what would become merry-go-round trains, delivering coal non-stop to power stations in newly-built hopper wagons.
For mineral trains, he didn’t add much other than pointing out the need to expand single-commodity trains and end the use of mixed-commodity services that required extensive marshalling. He did point out that some mineral movements provided “some of the best examples of really efficient use of rail transport.”
Wagon-load freight covered a huge range of goods traffic, and he rightly attempts to consider the different types of commodity in turn. He identified that any goods that were distributed by road were carried at a heavy loss thanks to the costs of hand-transfer between vehicles.
He categorised this traffic into two types: siding to siding or siding to dock traffic which accounted for 71% of tonnage and generally provided a positive yield, and traffic that passed through local goods stations at one or both ends of its journey. In the latter case, this traffic was almost always loss-making and required extensive manual labour.
Further investigation delved deeper into this traffic as well as road-hauled goods traffic that could be returned to the rails, and looked at how best to accommodate (or not accommodate) it. This led to probably the most important innovation detailed in Reshaping: the liner train, or as we now know them, intermodal services.
Internationally, the shipping container had already proven its worth, and by the early 1960s, battles were being fought over what their standardised dimensions would be — their expected proliferation was not in question. Beeching was tuned into this, seeing an opportunity to expand on research that had already been conducted under Modernisation. Whilst it would be another five years before the first trial of a Freighliner service, the proof-of-concept was contained within Reshaping.
Whilst Beeching believed that inland rather than coastal ports would be the primary source of this traffic, he did understand the potential of this type of operation to maximise the advantages of rail over road on high density corridors, and the endurance and continued growth of this type of traffic proved him right beyond all doubt.
When it came to sundry traffic — that is, consignments too small to fill an entire wagon — there were three pathways as Beeching saw it. One was the replacement of loosely loaded “common-user” wagons with new, efficient trains designed to minimise turnaround times and maximise conveyance speeds. Another was to shift this type of traffic into the liner trains. The final option was to let the traffic be lost to road.
In all, the recommendations highlighted by Beeching would prove highly effective in modernising British Railways’ freight operations, reducing the size of the wagon fleet by hundreds of thousands of vehicles and reducing average shipment times from days to hours.
Last, but not least…
From this point onwards, the report turns from the specifics of routes and traffic towards operational and administrative savings, looking at the volume of stored materials, the road fleet, mechanisation of maintenance, efficiency in clerical work, and so on.
By 1963, British Railways had already reduced its staff headcount from around 650,000 to 475,000. This rate would essentially continue through to privatisation, but Reshaping expected that the contraction of services and network size would result in an additional reduction of 40,600 staff.
The report begins to round itself off by assessing the expected savings resulting from the plan. Much as Modernisation had predicted an operating surplus by 1962, Reshaping predicted a surplus by 1970. As we now know, this would not come to fruition.
Before summarising his report, Beeching looks at other factors “influencing the future role of the railways”. He starts by stating in somewhat dated terms that, despite the report’s focus on profitability, “none of the proposals put forward here does violence to concepts which others might reasonably have wished to include”, which is a rather pompous way of saying that he did not believe that other measures of success or value would have resulted in different outcomes, which in a broad sense I am inclined to agree with.
Nevertheless, he does tackle a few key points directly, namely: the coordination of all transport modes together, social benefit rather than profit as a measure of viability, long-term trends in employment and population growth, and the limitation of industry by reducing services.
To the first of these, Beeching wrongly concluded that his proposals didn’t prejudice the balance of rail versus road versus air — I say wrongly chiefly because of his views on non-London suburban rail.
On social benefit, Beeching determines that different measures of value based on social benefit would have limited impact on his proposals — whilst theoretically false (take the example of rural services feeding inter-city ones), history judged this point as correct, as Barbara Castle’s social railway concept did not change the post-Reshaping map very much at all.
On future development, Beeching compounded his error on suburban rail services outside of London by supposing no great additional urban development. Interestingly, though, he did foresee the problems of continued concentration of the economy in London. He also pointed out that the Channel Tunnel — because yes, this was very much in serious planning at this point — would be valuable for Britain’s wider rail network, and that liner train development would take account of the future existence of a fixed link to Europe.
Lastly, he hand-waves away the impacts on industrial development by essentially stating that if industry hasn’t established next to the railways that had been in place for a hundred years, they were unlikely to materialise, which is somewhat disingenuous given the rapidly changing shape of industry at the time, a notable proportion of which he had overseen in his previous role at ICI.
Beeching closes his report with a summary of all that he had determined, listing the fifteen steps (I won’t reproduce this list) that he believed would return British Railways to profitability by 1970.
This isn’t quite the end, though, as the body of the report represents less than half of the overall document.
Appendix 1 details the traffic studies that support the main analysis. Appendix 2 forms perhaps the most sinister and infamous section of the report — the lists of stations and services to be snuffed out, accompanied by the maps in Part 2 that show where line closures sit. Appendix 3 lists the expansive rolling stock reduction programme that would herald further efficiencies, including the acceleration of the replacement of steam. Appendix 4 lays out the current analysis of the liner train concept, concluding the report with perhaps its most insightful innovation.
A long-lasting legacy
Reshaping was far from perfect. It was tainted by statistical overreach, the unconscious biases of its author, and by the political demands being placed upon the BRB by government. The impact on rural communities of rail closures was acute, but I would argue the worst outcome it created was the long-term diminishment of suburban capacity outside of London, which has had a far more insidious effect on rail usage nationally.
However, Reshaping tackled the most important question about railways — what their role in modern society was — more effectively than any government report since. It created inter-city and intermodal services, which were genuinely world leading. It undeniably pushed British Railways into the modern era.
Only a year after Reshaping was published, a general election brought Labour into power. In its capacity as a minority government, Labour pressed on with the report’s recommendations, though under increasingly intolerable pressure. This pressure was not just because of the impacts the cuts were having on communities — the railway’s operating deficit continued to climb despite the massive annual contraction in network size.
Beeching, meanwhile, continued to lead the evolution of British Rail, as it was known from 1965. This same year, the famous Rail Symbol began to be seen at stations and on trains and a second report titled The development of the major railway trunk routes was published. This report is often misrepresented as looking at the further contraction of the rail network, but it was in fact an assessment of the value in enhancing the core mainline network to further attract passenger and freight custom.
In 1966 the Labour government won a majority. In March 1967, the then Minister of Transport Barbara Castle published British Railways Network for Development which re-affirmed many closures that campaigners and communities had hoped would be cancelled. Crucially, however, it began a process establishing a funding framework for the lines which provided a necessary social good, acknowledging at last that an operating profit in a narrow commercial sense was an impossibility for Britain’s post-war railway system.
By this point Beeching was long-gone. Railway closures continued into the 1980s, but the last year of significant contraction was 1970. British Rail had not managed to find its way into overall profitability by this point, and so by that narrow metric, Reshaping had failed just as Modernisation did.
1968 had finally brought some level of coordination to bus services, with the creation of the National Bus Company. However, the decline in bus services was not arrested, and there was little integration with rail services. Less than two decades later, bus services were deregulated, obliterating a key component in Beeching’s justification for ceasing rail operations on many lines. Bus services continue to be cut to this day, with public transport provision in large parts of rural and semi-urban Britain being essentially non-existent.
Whilst the traffic surveys and some of its predictions of the future were lacking, the analysis in Reshaping was far in advance of what had gone before. The report, and indeed the railways, did not exist in a vacuum, and the wider geographical and political changes happening in the UK and beyond far exceeded the impact of the railway closures on the railway’s fortunes. The decline in overall rail ridership had been arrested by the 1970s, and the 1980s brought significant gains in usage as the success of inter-city services cascaded passengers onto the rest of the network. Meanwhile, intermodal freight has been an unmitigated success story.
Road’s overall share of traffic had peaked in the UK by the mid-1990s, and rail’s share of traffic has subsequently doubled. The story is still unfolding, but the role of Beeching’s report is far more complicated than ministers or headline writers would have you believe.
