Train of Thought
Published 27 Jan 2023In today’s video, we take a look at one Doctor Richard Beeching, the man who ripped up a third of Britain’s railways with nothing but a pen and paper.
May 4, 2023
Why British train enthusiasts hate this man – Dr. Beeching’s Railway Axe
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Interesting video. Could have been really interesting had they discussed why the heck nationalization was the only necessary solution. There is nothing worse than the government moving in and taking over any private industry. I am 100% against government running companies of any kind. No grants, no “investment”, no corporate welfare. If it can’t stand on its own two feet, it wasn’t meant to be.
So it makes me wonder, just how would this have been handled had the government just stepped away and let private industry take care of itself. I have no doubt it wouldn’t have looked the same, but it probably wouldn’t have been as bad either.
Comment by Dwayne — May 4, 2023 @ 02:15
The British government had already exercised quasi-nationalization in 1923 when they forced most of the mainline railway companies to merge into one of four regional monopolies (GWR, LMS, LNER, and SR). The costs of running the rail system during WW1 left many companies on the verge of bankruptcy, so forcing the “strong” companies to take on the “weak” ones was seen as the best solution.
The full nationalization of the Big Four in 1948 was partly due to the even greater burden of deferred maintenance forced on the railways by the traffic demands of WW2, but perhaps more importantly was part of the new postwar Labour government’s desire to take over the big firms and run them on a more explicitly socialist basis. To the evident surprise of the government, waving the magic wand of government control over a battered and money-losing railway network didn’t automatically fix the problems, but they were out of office by the early 1950s so the problem landed in Winston Churchill’s lap.
De-nationalizing wasn’t going to be any faster a fix, so British Railways embarked on a limited modernization scheme (that wasn’t sufficiently funded, of course) to electrify large stretches of mainline and standardize on a much smaller number of locomotive designs to ease maintenance and lower unit prices. Amazingly, even that didn’t fix the structural problems of the network, so a few Prime Ministers later, Doctor Beeching was brought in.
Beeching knew very little about the railway system before he was appointed — and many at the time would say he learned nothing during his tenure — and that may have been part of the plan. The minister he was reporting to, Ernest Marples, had a strong conflict of interest in that he had been the majority owner of one of the big construction firms commissioned to build the new motorways, and improving the railway network might have reduced the demand for expensive new motorway construction. The cuts recommended in the Beeching Report were announced with a bunch of new local roads and expanded bus services, but because the costs of these improvements were actually higher than the subsidies already being paid to British Railways, they lasted a year or two before being discontinued themselves.
Comment by Nicholas — May 4, 2023 @ 10:30
Thanks for the info. I’m not quite that up (not at all really) on British railway history. But it just proves the point that everything the government touches turns to crap. People who run businesses to make money, and have a skin in the game, care about the pluses and minuses on a ledger. Government bodies that run crown corporations have nothing but their salary to care about, and it matters not if there is profit in the end as the government will cover their incompetence and utter disregard for prudent management.
Comment by Dwayne — May 4, 2023 @ 17:33
You’re quite right that adding government control (even of the “arm’s-length” variety) almost never fixes the problem it’s intended to address. The lack of incentives for civil servants to earn a profit and the plethora of incentives for them to avoid making risky decisions means most government-run organizations will suffer from budget bloating and over-staffing almost from the get-go. As “Sir Humphrey Appleby” posted on Twitter earlier today, “In industry, if you screw things up you get the boot. In the civil service, if you screw things up, the Minister gets the boot.”
If only that was still true … these days in Canada at least, no minister ever seems to be at risk of losing their job for any kind of screw-up. The only danger seems to be getting on the wrong side of Dear Leader, in which case you’re off to the back benches ASAP.
Comment by Nicholas — May 4, 2023 @ 18:07
Not one person making money off of solving a problem will ever solve that problem and put themselves out of work. Homelessness, addictions, and on and on, no one will fix something that is providing them income.
Comment by Dwayne — May 5, 2023 @ 00:23