Reshaping British Railways (1963) - Atomic Bomber Dr Richard Beeching a Metallurgist not Accountant

• Report rights infringement
• published: 12 Jan 2014
• views: 2713

The 1950s and 1960s saw the deliberate destruction of the greatest railway network the world had ever seen, before or since. The reason, opening Britain up to the US led international markets for oil. Enter a metallurgist who had worked on the UK atomic bomb project, could keep his mouth shut, and knew nothing about how to analyse railway accounts: Dr Richard Beeching. His partner in crime was Ernest Marples who made a personal fortune out of building Hitler's dream of autobahns, all over the UK. Another major motivator was to break the power of the rail unions, NUR and ASLEF, who had brought the country to s standstill in the run-up to the 1955 General Election. Buy high quality DVD of Reshaping British Railways (1963) and other contemporary films here http://filmstore.bfi.org.uk/acatalog/info_2965.html Doctor Who? The Atomic Bomber Beeching and his War on the Railways by Richard Cottrell (2013) The book describes the efforts of the British Government to force the diversion of rail traffic to roads and the motor transport industry by shuttering much of the rail network. A key figure in this scheme was Doctor Who? - Doctor Richard Beeching - a physicist who it is revealed in this book for the first time helped to design the British A Bomb during his wartime work at top secret weapons establishment. Hence Atomic Bomber Beeching and his War on the Railways. http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00CJJJD6C/ Tory Transport Secretary and road building civil engineering firm (Marples-Ridgeway) owner Ernest Marples appointed former 'Tube Alloys' British atomic weapons metallurgist Dr Richard Beeching as Chairman of the British Railways Board in March 1961. He would receive the same yearly salary that he was earning at I.C.I., the controversial sum of £24,000 (£367,000 in 2013 money), £10,000 more than Sir Brian Robertson, the last chairman of the British Transport Commission, £14,000 more than Prime Minister Harold Macmillan and two-and-a-half times higher than the salary of any head of a nationalised industry at the time. At that time the Government was supposedly seeking outside talent and fresh blood to sort out the huge problems of the railway network, and he was confident that he could make the railways pay for themselves, but his salary, at 35 times the level paid to many railway workers, has been described as "hush money". The Transport Act 1962 dissolved the British Transport Commission (BTC), which had overseen the railways, canals and road freight transport and established the British Railways Board, which took over on 1 January 1963. The Act put in place measures that simplified the process of closing railways by removing the need for pros and cons of each case to be heard in detail. It was described as the "most momentous piece of legislation in the field of railway law to have been enacted since the Railway and Canal Traffic Act 1854", The Beeching report was published in 1963 and was adopted by the Government; it resulted in the closure of a third of the rail network and the scrapping of a third of a million freight wagons. The General election in October 1964 returned the Labour Government 1964--1970 under Prime Minister Harold Wilson after 13 years of Conservative government. During the election campaign, Labour had promised to halt rail closures if elected but quickly backtracked, and subsequently oversaw some of the most controversial closures. Tom Fraser was appointed Transport Minister, soon to be replaced by Barbara Castle in December 1965. Castle published a map, Network for Development, in 1967 showing the railway system "stabilised" at around 11,000 route miles (17,700 km). Section 39 of the 1968 Transport Act made provision for a subsidy to be paid in relation to loss-making lines, however many of the services and railway lines that would have qualified had already been closed. A number of branch lines were saved by this legislation. After 1970, when the Conservatives were returned to power, serious thought was given to a further programme of closures, but this proved politically impossible. In 1983, under the government of Margaret Thatcher, Sir David Serpell, a civil servant who had worked with Beeching, compiled the Serpell Report in which it was again proposed that a profitable railway could be achieved only by closing much of what remained. The infamous "Option A" in this report was illustrated by a map of a vestigial system with, for example, no railways west of Bristol or Cardiff and none in Scotland apart from the central belt. Serpell was shown to have some serious weaknesses, such as the closure of the Midland Main Line (a busy route for coal to power stations), and the East Coast Main Line between Berwick-upon-Tweed and Edinburgh, part of the key London/Edinburgh link. The report was met with fierce resistance from many quarters and was quickly abandoned. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beeching_cuts#The_people_and_the_politics