Well, I'm still not sure if my judgement is right in placing this here instead of in Railfanning, but I hope it's of interest anyway--an article and an editorial on perspectives of the Beeching cuts in Great Britain in the 1960s, and how they seem to have been in error, some of them seriously so. How many parallels do we have here?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2013/mar/0 ... s-railways

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree ... NETTXT3487

And now a couple of British bonuses--

First up, a film on on the transition from steam to diesel traction in Great Britain, featuring some footage of what would become the Tornado:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IQ0oKi0xBig

And a history of rail accidents and the lessons they provided to improve safety on railways with improved signalling systems:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SxpBzGCKA0w

This one stands out in my memory:

The New York Central Harlem Division North of Wassaic to Chatham, New York, where there was a junction with the Boston and Albany and Rutland "corkscrew". South of Wassaic the line is operated by Metro-North. The line from Dover Plains north to Wassaic was actually rebuilt and put into service around 2000.
Consequently, anyone interested in the history of this division should acquire The Coming of the New York and Harlem Railroad by Louis V. Grogan. It is an excellent history of the line.

Stephen

I read the first article. A bit of preservation history in it -

"And then there are the preserved steam lines, including the North Yorkshire Moors and West Somerset railways. Many of these are built on track closed by Beeching and have become a key part of Britain's heritage industry. The European Federation of Museum and Tourist Railways includes 102 passenger-carrying preserved railways in Britain and Ireland. The total for the rest of Europe is 117. The British have a love for railways that Beeching never understood."

A couple things should be pointed out:

The Guardian/Observer, in whose pages these articles appeared, is thoroughly "leftist" in its political approach--by United States standards, they would be somewhere to the "left" of even the worst stereotyping of the current President's politics by his most rabid opponents. (The political spectrum itself in the U.K. is somewhat to the left of the United States'.)

The Beeching Report and its effects have been debated from the minute it was printed. The political liberal/socialistic, which viewed railways as a public transit utility and asset to be run for the public's benefit, of course viewed the cutbacks as horrendous, a breach of public trust, and "war" against the lower classes who found themselves dependent upon the then-nationalized railways. In the long historical view, however, it can be put on a par with America's deregulation of the rail, trucking, and airline industries in 1980--we might not have a rail industry today in those locations without those measures.

Most of the lines in question in the UK were handling passenger traffic only, as freight traffic had been reduced to a shadow of its former self by trucking and industrial redevelopment. Don't forget, Britain is a vastly smaller country, where passenger travel by rail remains reasonably competitive (especially with Europe's high road fuel taxes). Comparing the history, the economic settings, and the physical geography of the two countries' rail networks isn't like apples and oranges; it's more like apples and golf balls.

Another factor affecting rail preservation: the wholesale abandonment of rail lines in the UK coincided with the end of steam and reductions in the use of vintage rail carriages, started under the Rail Modernisation Plan of 1955. This helped in the formation of "light railways" and future heritage railway operations. If the United States and Canada had seen a coincident phase-out of steam, route-miles (Conrail/Amtrak/Rock Island), and older coaches (pre-stainless) during the 1950s, things might have gone differently here.

Well, gee, Sandy, I guess we all know now that you are of a conservative/libertarian stripe!

Please explain how we are to ascribe the objectivity to your rants that you see so lacking at the Guardian/Observer.

I guess I am at a lost to understand what your political perspectives have to do with railway preservation.

Mike

Is that so much different from what we had happen here?

The main difference I see (and you'll be glad to point out if I'm wrong) is that the system in Great Britain was nationalized ("Conrail") at the time of the big reductions, with a touch of the Norfolk & Western in it (steam under construction very late). Based on this, the change would seem to place things at 1960 here, in the sense that the last steamers by N&W (built in 1953, retired in 1960) would be about the same age as the last steamers in Great Britain (built in 1960, and retired by 1968).

Another difference is that the biggest steamers in Great Britain would be 4-6-2s that would be about the size of S&A 750--which roughly correspond to most of the surviving operational steamers running here today.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Observer



See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Guardi ... al_opinion

I've had the chance to read/look at, side by side on the same days over several years, the London Times, the Independent, the Guardian/Observer, and the Telegraph. An exercise like that truly highlights the political biases possible in newspapers and media sources, not just in opinion writing but in selection of stories and coverage.

I've also discussed and debated British rail and transport policy with a couple pen pals over there, some of them over the course of thirty years or more. And occasionally the media coverage of BR, privatisation, denationalisation, etc. have come up. One of those pen pals, a book dealer, sold me quite a few books on the politics of British Rail, Beeching, etc. and even rounded up for me a copy each of the Beeching Report and the successor Serpell Report (which would have reformed BR even further into a matrix network, but got nowhere politically).

The opinions expressed in my posts are not those of some rabid Rush Limbaugh or Glenn Beck acolyte, but that of a libertarian rail enthusiast who has been following British railway history for decades, and paying attention to a lot more than paint schemes or loco classes.

And attempting to distill the complexities of the roles of politics, economics, culture, and sociology into a review of Britain's rail history vis a vis U.S. rail history, the rail preservation movement, or even a simple article on the Beeching Report is like attempting to explain World War Two in a paragraph.

Britain's major motivation for dieselisation was the Rail Modernization Plan of 1955, which had political ramifications and demands in addition to business ones. Remember, at the same time period that BR was formed (1947-48), Britain also nationalised the coal mines, utilities, etc. The closer analogy to U.S. railroading might be the PRR, where there was a decision to get rid of steam pretty much as soon as feasible in the public eye (the early scrapping of T1's in favor of diesels); the chaotic ordering of "one of everything" from every builder in a search for whatever worked, leading to the ordering of locomotive models that probably should never have been built (Baldwin Centipedes and Sharks, F-M C-Liners, and Lima-Hamilton transfer units?); and a push for expansion of electrification (happened in UK, didn't on PRR). Throw a bit of PRR-NYC Penn Central "warfare" into the mix: the regions of BR, loosely based on predecessors SR, LNER, GWR, and LMS maintained separate motive power and rolling stock philosophies (and pre-BR steam) for decades.

Generally speaking, the U.S. was about a decade ahead of Britain in rail technology and development, and the automobile's spread was pre-WW2 in the States and post-war in the UK. The "Beeching Axe" fell while there were still steamers lingering, as well as old slam-door stock and wagons and rail branches that operated with the same local feel as depicted in The Titfield Thunderbolt movie or the Fiddletown & Copperopolis/Toonerville Trolley cartoons. There was simply more to save later in the U.K. when people who cared found enough disposable income to act than in the U.S.

Ultimately, the premise of the articles in question revolves around the presumption that it was foolish to reduce the rail network the way it was. But remember that this stems from a mindset where the rail network is seen as a public utility and passenger service as a public obligation, not a business. We could have similar arguments in North America today over how the major U.S. rail lines were "foolish" to spin off lines to short lines or regionals or even major railroads, or how some railroads may have reduced track mileage and sidings too far as they now lay additional track capacity in places where it was removed twenty years ago. But this discussion over Beeching is more comparable to debating whether Amtrak should have reduced all the passenger operations it did when it started in 1971, and instead kept all the predecessor passenger trains.

The situation in England harks back to the end of World War I, when the country was all but broke, with a huge percentage of its male population either dead or wounded. It was supporting a world-wide empire. The country barely began to recover from the war when the Depression struck, followed by World War II. The country was once again devastated by war starting in 1939, and on the heels of World War II, the empire began to break apart. Rationing in England did not end until the mid-1950's, more than 10 years after the end of the war. There simply wasn't money to buy diesel locomotives, and people could not afford to buy cars. As was noted above, England was at least 10 years behind the USA in many ways.

I'd be very careful about suggesting that the US and UK are walking down the same path a decade apart.......the cultural and geographic differences prevent the same path from even being available in both places at once.

I'd compare (and badly) the British view of the rail network with the US view of the highway network. Suppose a victorious Tea Party decided to stop subsidizing highway construction and maintenance, privatize their operation by selling them off to corporate interests who would charge individual drivers tolls.....and, by the way, they would start with city streets rather than the interstate system? When the rail network and walking are how you have been getting where you need to go for generations, nationalizing and severe cutting of service and availability removing any of your options is certainly an issue of concern.

The devolution of freight delivery in the UK to trucking from rail.....freight there was 4 wheeled cars with no brakes chained together, so our unit train concept wasn't particularly of interest. Trying to make Europe into a sort of America through common curency, open borders, interchangeability is an interesting idea that isn't working out to well....but then, neither is our economy, so perhaps scale isn't all important.

There are interesting comaprisons but you also need to consider the differences in the basis behind what you are comparing to understand why they aren't accurate below the surface. Sandy is right, it is very hard to grasp or explain. I look back at theeads like "why can't we build a new steam engine by public subscription - they did in England" - they are all in this together, we are each in this individually for the most part explains the cultural bias. herding cats there is easier since all the cats know about herding and want to go in pretty much the same direction anyhow.

dave

Fans feeling that a 'classic' line shouldn't have been ripped up is one thing, but there are lines in the US that were pulled up which even people in the industry feel shouldn't have been.
For example, of all the passes over the Cascade Mountains in WA state, the Milwaukee Road's Snoqualmie pass and tunnel was considered by many to be the superior of the main routes over the mountains. It's a biking.hiking trail now and many in the industry in the pacific Northwest deeply regret that line being ripped up. That tunnel would be perfect for running stack trains through it today. But at the time, few realized that tunnel height would be an issue in the future.

Perspectives on this article from a high-speed rail site.

http://www.cahsrblog.com/2013/03/cuttin ... the-future

"But what turned out to be a short-term problem [passenger rail deficits] created by a unique set of circumstances – namely, oil that has never been that cheap again – left in the minds of many a lasting belief that rail really was obsolete. For people who came of age in the 1960s and early 1970s, the narrative of trains as something from the past, with no place in a modern society, became gospel. . ."

"What Beeching and the public thought was a permanent situation in 1963 turned out to have been a temporary problem. Today, demand for passenger rail service is soaring, but the cuts have made it difficult and more costly to meet the demand."

This is also at least part of what drives the NIMBY opposition to heritage rail, as partially exhibited by the throes of the Santa Fe Southern, the hostility of certain groups against the Adirondack Scenic, and by complaints some years back against the Durango & Silverton, the Western Maryland Scenic, and the New Hope & Ivyland, and likely others that I don't know about.

When Chicago lost the Chicago Aurora and Elgin (shutdown July 1957) as well as the Chicago, North Shore & Milwaukee (shutdown Jan 1963) they lost the best chance of a truly integrated transit system as both terminated in Chicago's Loop via trackage rights on the CTA. Either would cost billions to rebuild if you could manage to get through all the lawsuits from adjacent land owners even though the CA&E Right of way was mostly left intact if in case it it was ever wanted again for that purpose. It pretty much a bike trail today. Much of the CNS&M RofW remains as well.
Unfortunately there exists a "We're never going to ever need that again!" mindset in both corporate and Govt circles. Even for a RofW that a RR would want to "bank" in place the property tax and other liabilities discourage it.

While not necessarily an "error" at the time, it is possible that a great number of rail abandonments may prove premature. Our country continues to grow and the past several decades has seen a gradual movement toward repopulating the urban cores abandoned by "white flight" during the mid-20th Century. More recently there has been a rise in fuel prices, resistance to new urban freeways, and a general move toward alternatives to road transport.

Just as we bemoan the destruction of much of our urban transit infrastructure (at a time when, let's face it, the expanding availability of highways, cheap gas, and the shift to the suburbs diminished the demand for transit for all but the poor and politically disenfranchised), it is possible that we will eventually come to regret eliminating much of our capacity for freight service, especially in urban areas. As a nation, we may not be producing as much as we used to, (I don't expect to see urban steel mills built again), but we do consume an awful lot. Food and various products will continue to flow into crowded cities, while it is also conceivable that local governments could impose limitations on trucks in congested areas.

Given all of these factors, is it possible there could be a new demand for rail freight service into our cities? If so, would it even be possible with all of the yards and secondary lines that have been permanently removed and redeveloped?

In the 1920s the railroad industry was at its peak in terms of route-miles, and the population of the country was around 120 million. Currently, our population is over 315 million. A lot of factors, including the emergence of the highway system have more than absorbed this growth, but one could imagine that continued expansion will eventually exceed our current rail capacity, especially if public money for highway construction and maintenance does not dramatically increase.

I am at a loss to identify what this has to do with railway preservation except in only the broadest terms. In terms of abandoned rail lines ( torn out or rail banked ) to be utilised for museum operations there are many examples of this and of course suburban population density without a buffer zone from NIBY potential can be an issue onto itself.
One line that comes to mind that has this potential is a branch that runs in open country from Sturtevant WI ( just outside of Racine and close to I-94, to the small community of Union Grove formerly owned by the Milwaukee Road that if I remember correctly only serves a single industry which is a gravel operation. It seems to around five miles long and I am sure there are many examples of this sort of potential right of way that could be used for preservation \ operation purposes, but have little potential for common carrier purposes let alone the liability and legal issues that are bound to them.
The situation in the U.K is not transferable to the U.S for cultural reasons. I don't see any connection nor any opportunity for the sort of grant money that exists there ( such as a national lottery) developing here, now or in the future.