If he was a doctor he would say you got 2 kidney doing the same job you should remove one of them to save calories

The biggest mistake was the tearing up of the railways and selling off or abandoning the stations and trackbeds: ownership should have been maintained.  Also it wa a case of economics first, politics second and environment a long way third!

'Oh Mr Porter',  crikey, my Granny used to sing this to us back in the 6ts.

He knew the cost of everything and the value of nothing!

The recurring theme in Beeching's self-defense is that he "looked at the traffic pattern" and decided it didn't justify the cost of operating a particular line. Such a position seems to totally ignore the network effect of slashing the network.

When asked about costs for things like electrifying lines he, again, references "the current traffic" ad infinitum. He isn't challenged that "the current traffic" was not a measure of the future traffic. The only certainty of Beeching's decisions is that if he closed a line there was ZERO traffic on it.  

When challenged about the effects of his cuts on state of railways at the time of the interview (1973) is that he doesn't have "the current traffic patterns", but despite his lack of evidence he remains certain that every decision he made still makes sense in 1973. Incredible hubris and willful blindness.

He also sidesteps the question of integrated transport policy with an 'above my pay grade' excuse, which is inexcusable for the man who headed British Railways.

Also MIA, apparently, was any consideration of the number of road deaths and injuries resultant from all that traffic being shunted onto the road network - all of which would incur costs to the UK Treasury through benefits and NHS funding, not to mention the amount of pollution roads generated vs. trains and associated illness and deaths.

All in all, Dr. Beeching's remit and his defense of his work are so obtusely defined as to ignore all the social and financial costs associated with his axe swinging.

Unrepentant to the end. If this had been implemented we would be in an even worse mess. All lines now grid locked, many reopening. He got it very wrong.

The amount of track removed in wales and very limited bus service that replaced it is so poor that unless you live in one of the three cities you require a car to get anywhere . Outside of Cardiff even getting around the city requires cabs as they have combined school buses with public buses and many drivers wont allow you to ride what they consider a school bus

I love railways and looking back don't like the idea of the cuts, but Dr Beeching gave some very clear answers on this interview that helped explain his reasoning. I can  understand the railway workers and their families not being happy about losing their livelihood but this does help explain why somewhat.

People should stop looking at Beeching as the main player in this story and dig a little deeper into the story of why the Tory government went the way they did over BR, Ernest Marples has a lot of questions to answer over his part in this and had there been Oversight with teeth in Westminster he would certainly be serving time over it along with a few of his chums.  It should also be noted that no other rail system in Europe had ever managed to cover its costs and why BR ended up in such a sorry state can be found in the subsidy comparison figures of that era, still, I guess we have the Marples mob to thank for our pitiful motorway system and lack of integration and also have a quick glance at the actual subsidies being paid out by Whitehall to train operators today in comparison to pre-privatisation, eyewatering.

Cut off the tributaries to feed the main line by offering busses then cut the busses 18 months later...legacy..

Of course there were two villains, Beeching and Marples. Marples should never have been appointed as Transport Minister, owning a company that was winning huge government contracts to build new roads and motorways. When this was pointed out in the press, he sold his shares......to his wife! The Marples' eventually slunk off to live in France, in order to avoid the consequences of a huge Inland Revenue investigation into their tax affairs. I'm not letting Beeching of the hook mind, he had no notion of an integrated transport system either. The whole nationalised transport system in the country, road, rail and water,  could have been shaken up, altered with much less pain, and made to serve it's owners who of course are the people of the country. Far too much is now lost and we shall always be stuck with existing roads that are under too much stress and the constant demand for new and hugely controversial roads......and railways.

It wasn't all Beeching's fault, his terms of reference were narrow. His remit was solely how to make the railway pay again, not to consider social needs etc

We need to consider the future of the railways in this country right now.  There are still hundreds of stations and indeed lines, which, with central government money, could be re-opened.  Most of Britain is now grid-locked on the roads.  Even remote areas along with most of the South East, South West and Midlands are grid-locked.  Take the M6 for example, probably now one of the busiest motorways in Europe.  We need to get freight off the roads and back on to the rail network at night when passenger services are quieter.  There are literally thousands of huge 44-tonne HGVs being driven endlessly to deliver goods all over the country to our supermarkets literally carving up the road network which is now at breaking point.  Cities such as Bristol, Birmingham, Manchester, Liverpool are grid-locked with traffic causing congestion charges to be enforced.  Not only that, but look at the amount of roadworks now taking place.  Beeching believed what he was doing in 1963 was right but he did not possess the hindsight of what is now happening almost 60 years later.

It wasn’t Beeching or governments that closed down uneconomical railways, it was the people: they didn’t use them. People were switching to cars. Oh yes they all came out to witness the last trains and travel on them, but it was too late.

There's no sense of hardship in the country as a consequence of the closures, he said. What happens when lines have to be closed for maintenance? He closed many alternative routes, leading to poorer services.

fascinating that he couldn’t see past ten years of planning the future public transport in a country.

If ever there was a grave that needs pissing on, this man lays in it

Not just our railways heritage...but most of what was this country's  
industrial backbone. We have become a shadow of its former self,rudderless and awash,in a sea of petty industries?

Now we are building HS2, badly needed for freight traffic. If this prat had kept the line from Mary le Bone north, (Great Central) this HS2 wouldn't have been needed, also the northern corridor would not have deteriorated to the extent it has.

How lucky we are that he wasn't a medical doctor, maybe if he had been an optician he wouldn't have been so shortsighted.