page_title: History of rail transport in Great Britain 1948–1994
section_title: The Beeching reports
hierarchical_section_title: History of rail transport in Great Britain 1948–1994 / The 1960s: Rationalisation / The Beeching reports
caption_attribution_description: British English: The overgrown remains of Lilbourne station in Northamptonshire, on the former LNWR line from Rugby to Market Harborough which closed in 1966, one of thousands of rural stations and lines which were closed by the Beeching Axe. On the left of the picture is the overgrown remains of the down platform (towards Rugby), the other platform is even more overgrown. The tyre tracks in the centre are where the rails once ran
context_page_description: The history of rail transport in Great Britain 1948–1994 covers the period when the British railway system was nationalised under the name of British Rail, until its eventual privatisation in 1994.
  The railway system in this period underwent modernisation, reorganisation and rebranding, some of which proved controversial. The use of steam locomotives on the network also ended in this period. Due to falling passenger numbers, rail subsidies from the government were necessary to keep the railways financially viable. Concerns about the levels of these contributed to the Beeching cuts which closed down many less well used lines.
context_section_description: By 1960, the railway's performance was low, with a deficit of £68m. This increased to £87m in 1961 and still further to £104m in 1962 (£2.24 billion in 2019 terms). Under the Transport Act of 1962, Harold Macmillan's Conservative government dissolved the British Transport Commission, and created the British Railways Board to take over its railway duties from 1 January 1963.
  The railway's huge deficit and the reputation earned during the Modernisation Plan fiasco for bad financial planning led the government to take firm action. In 1962, the Transport Minister Ernest Marples appointed Richard Beeching as head of British Railways with a brief to cut the spiralling losses. Beeching was a businessman rather than a railwayman and his high salary (particularly in a nationalised industry) caused controversy. His report The Reshaping of British Railways (commonly known simply as "The Beeching Report") issued in 1963, concluded that much of the railway network carried little traffic and should be closed down. His report proposed a massive closures programme which would involve 5,000 miles of track, and 2,363 small stations being closed, which came to be known as the Beeching axe. The report also proposed that British Rail electrify some major main lines and adopt containerized freight traffic instead of outdated and uneconomic wagon-load traffic. The closures recommended by the report were mostly implemented. They peaked in the mid-1960s and continued until the early 1970s. By 1975, the system had shrunk to 12,000 miles (19,000 km) of track and 2,000 stations. In the event, the closures failed to produce the hoped for savings, or to restore the railways to profitability.
  In 1965, Beeching issued a second, less well-known, report The Development of the Major Railway Trunk Routes, widely known as "Beeching II", which singled out lines that were believed to be worthy of continued large-scale investment. This did not recommend closures as such, but outlined a 3,000-mile "network for development". The fate of the remaining network was not discussed in the report.
caption: The overgrown remains of Lilbourne station in Northamptonshire, one of thousands of rural stations which were closed
exif: {}