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    Britain Without Beeching
    Britain Without Beeching
    Britain Without Beeching
    Ebook111 pages1 hour

    Britain Without Beeching

    By Iain Bowen

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    About this ebook

    Imagine a world where the Beeching report was not delivered on time and was rejected by the incoming Labour government, and the concept of the Social Railway was delivered years earlier.

    There were some closures – although lines more often went into a mothball state – and there were still a lot of station closures, especially on main lines. Not even the Social Railway would cover the smallest villages, and many urban areas had stations closed due to very low usage and adequate alternatives. The retreat of small-wagonload freight continued at the same pace, and the move to Freightliner, Red Star Parcels and bulk-load still occurred.

    However, these actions would clearly have a number of consequences for British Railways. There would have been no extra money available for the railways, which would need to keep open the lines that would have been shut. The concept of the Basic Station and the Pay Train came in very early, mainly to save staffing costs, but even these changes failed to defray all the costs of the Social Railway. As a result, there was little money for new rolling stock and even less for improvements to the railway.

    Fifty years on from Beeching, our narrator sets out out with an All Line Rover ticket to travel this world. The world of the Slow Train.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSea Lion Press
    Release dateOct 15, 2018
    ISBN9781386509257
    Britain Without Beeching

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      Book preview

      Britain Without Beeching - Iain Bowen

      Britain without Beeching

      Iain Bowen

      First published by Sea Lion Press, 2016.

      Miller's Dale for Tideswell

      Kirby Muxloe

      Mow Cop and Scholar Green

      No more will I go to Blandford Forum and Mortehoe

      On the slow train from Midsomer Norton and Mumby Road

      No churns, no porter, no cat on a seat

      At Chorlton-cum-Hardy or Chester-le-Street

      We won't be meeting again

      On the Slow Train

      Flanders & Swann, The Slow Train

      Preface

      Imagine a world where the Beeching report was not delivered on time and was rejected by the incoming Labour government, and the concept of the Social Railway was delivered years earlier.

      There were some closures – although lines more often went into a mothball state – and there were still a lot of station closures, especially on main lines. Not even the Social Railway would cover the smallest villages, and many urban areas had stations closed due to very low usage and adequate alternatives. The retreat of small-wagonload freight continued at the same pace, and the move to Freightliner, Red Star Parcels and bulk-load still occurred.

      However, these actions would clearly have a number of consequences for British Railways. There would have been no extra money available for the railways, which would need to keep open the lines that would have been shut. The concept of the Basic Station and the Pay Train came in very early, mainly to save staffing costs, but even these changes failed to defray all the costs of the Social Railway. As a result, there was little money for new rolling stock and even less for improvements to the railway.

      They also had a number of political side-effects: Barbara Castle became much loved by saving the railway lines and eventually succeeded in being Prime Minister, successfully implementing a modified In Place of Strife and keeping the UK out of the European Economic Community; Butskellism continued in a modified form, keeping the UK ticking along but suffering from economic malaise for many years; Margaret Thatcher never rose above the status of Home Secretary in the Whitelaw government. It leads to a very different Britain, one where the Railways have not seen any serious investment since the Modernisation Plan.

      Fifty years on from Beeching, this is still the world of the Slow Train.

      Saturday 6th June 2015

      I must be mad – I've got two weeks off work and I'm going to spend it pottering around the railway network on a Rail Rover. It's not as if British Rail is well regarded – it generally isn’t – but I can't help feeling that, 50 years after the shelving of Beeching, the axe might be being sharpened again under Louise George's new Tory government, and there are certain lines that I'd like to see before they decline into nothing. So yesterday I popped into Snow Hill's portacabin that masquerades as a ticket office and bought a two-week All Line Rail Rover; they looked at me as if I was mad – in fact they had to look up how to ticket the damn thing. I don’t suppose they sell that many, it’s really a ticket for enthusiasts and nostalgics.

      So, at 8:30am, I'm at my local station – Spring Road, on the North Warwickshire Line. Of course, my local station is a commuter station, so we get a decent service – two trains an hour during peak hours; the Stratford semi-fasts don't stop here, and any other paths are taken up by phantom freight trains down past Stratford to Cheltenham. They keep on talking about sending some of the Bristols down the North Warks – as they used to many years ago – but it never seems to happen, the same way that the Cardiff trains never end up going down the Stourbridge Railway and onto the Old Worse and Worse as they used to do back in the ‘50s.

      Spring Road is, of course, unmanned, like the vast majority of stations with under 200,000 passengers a year; at just over 100,000, it's busy – but not that busy. There's a bus shelter on each platform, and it is one of the few stations with ramps rather than steps down to it. The ticket office closed in 1965, like so many others, and the line is operated on the paytrain scheme – or rather the don’t-paytrain scheme, as everyone knows to get on the carriage without the gripper and get off at Moor St, where the barrier on Platform 1 is rarely manned. One advantage of being in the West Midlands PTE area is that we have modern station boards from the 1990s with the PTE livery; there are places still on totems in the more neglected areas of the network, never mind BR Helvetica.

      The train is, as usual, a two-coach Class 152 Runner DMU, designed in the late 1980s for suburban work and only built because of the increasing failure of the original DMUs built under the Modernisation Plan. Loosely based on the Mk2 coach, they aren't the most comfortable units out there, but people are rarely on them for more than an hour – and some of the later versions are better for comfort and for longer distance workings. We pull out on time, and call at Tyseley – which is one of the few four-platform local stations where all four platforms still work. We don't call at Small Heath or Bordesley, as neither has service at the weekend (except Bordesley, if a certain football team are playing at home), and run fairly quickly into Moor Street and then on to Snow Hill, where I get off and the service continues on to Stourbridge Junction.

      Snow Hill, frankly, is extremely bleak. The old west island platform is abandoned, as it has been since the early 1970s, growing weeds and full of litter, decay and security fences – not that there is anything worth stealing; they are more for the safety of people who might otherwise wander into dangerous buildings. Even on the east island, the facilities are boarded up except for one waiting room and the toilets. If you walk over the footbridge you find the old station hall completely boarded up, with just a plastic cabin for the ticket-checkers and the portacabin for the ticket office which is open during the day. The listed frontage onto Livery Street, however, has been maintained reasonably well, although it has been needing a deep clean since steam ceased on the line in 1966 – it is one of the blackest buildings in Birmingham.

      There's a 20-minute wait here, but luckily the train for Shrewsbury is in the bay platform already; it's a three-coach Class 101 DMU, coming up for its 60th birthday, and luckily is one of the ones that have had a third refurbishment. The Shrewsbury has been a Cinderella service since it transferred from New Street to free up capacity there. I find a seat at the front where I can look through the windows, and pour a cup of tea from the Thermos; there are no catering facilities here at Snow Hill and I'm too idle to walk out to get a takeaway from Brewsmiths. The other bay is empty; it deals with the services to Dudley, but on a Saturday they run only every two hours and there’s nothing this early – the PTE would rather send people to Cradley Heath and put them on a bus to the Merry Hill shopping village than run trains directly there via Dudley.

      We actually leave a couple of minutes early, which is not unusual on the Snow Hill lines at weekends. It is a direct run to Wolverhampton Low Level. The Monday to Friday Shrewsbury service sometimes calls at West Bromwich and Wednesbury Central, the Saturday and Sunday services don’t. However, there aren’t that many stations left – most of the ones within Birmingham were closed in the late 1960s – and it is hard to tell the closed stations from the open ones as we pass through at a leisurely 30-40mph. There has been some talk of reopening a couple of them, but with money (as ever) short on the railway and the bus-focused PTE stretched to the limit on the railway side subsidising Sunday and evening services, it hasn't happened – and it isn’t likely to with our new government. The journey up the old GWR main line is slightly more scenic than the equivalent on the Stour Valley line, but not by much. Rundown factories, new warehouses and boxy new housing are clustered around at certain points; in other sections there are just abandoned sidings, overgrown embankment and the signs of fly-tipping. After a signal check at Bilston Central, which – like all the other open stations except West Bromwich – has been reduced to bare platforms and bus shelters, we pull into Wolverhampton Low Level.

      Wolverhampton Low Level is actually looked after by a team of volunteers; it has been sympathetically dealt with despite everything being boarded up. All the station facilities are at High Level, with an ugly 1970s concrete escalator link, which rarely works, between the two. Low

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