[quietbritishjim]

I know there's a lot of (very justified) vilification of Beeching, and Marples who was transport secretary at the time.

But actually Britain had leaned in hard to the railways, by undertaking a large modernisation scheme [1]. The problem is, they did it a bit too early, in the 1950s, when electricity seemed like a risky bet so they stuck with steam which was the UK's core strength.

Of course, that turned out to be a mistake in retrospect. In the 1960s, investing in the railways in any form at all would've seemed like making the same sort of mistake as just a few years ago.

One interesting analysis I saw about the Beeching cuts said that the worse sin is that they did not preserve rights of way i.e. when closing a line they should have built a road and run a bus service (as Beeching's report recommended) or at least preserved it for potential rail reopening, but in many cases they sold the land off to developers so the chance was lost.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=1955_Modernisat...

[samizdis]

Ian Hislop, the editor of Private Eye magazine and regular star of the satirical TV show Have I Got News for You, made a documentary 12 or so years ago - Ian Hislop Goes Off the Rails - which looked at the Beeching cuts and, more broadly, the history of the UK rail network. It's nicely done, and never descends into an anguished, hand-wringing rant. Sadly, it's no longer available on BBC iPlayer, but it's on YouTube (split into six episodes):

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=ian+hislop+off+...