Many railway lines in Britain that were closed in the 1960s are re-opening

All on the idea that people would drive to a main line station, park, then catch a train.

Except they never actually thought that, beeching and his chums were taking, uh, considerations, from the automotive lobby, just like his predecessors did when they ripped out the trams.

Cars suck for distance travel. Where did we ever get the idea otherwise?

FWIW, HS2 is mostly about increasing capacity, hence why it is parallel to existing lines. It moves intercity travel off the very busy WCML, which is near capacity, and is projected to remain near capacity after the opening of HS2 due to increase in commuter services and freight on the line.

The 1950s Modernisation Plan was British Railways' biggest misstep. Intended to bring BR out of the steam age, it was hobbled by politics, internal rivalries and short-sightedness: famously, dozens of new locomotive types were commissioned rather than standardising on two or three. To a large extent Beeching was a reaction against that ("you've had your chance") rather than an attempt to develop a successful railway for the 1970s and beyond.

Beeching did make some methodological mistakes (and again, there's much hindsight involved here, but many were pointed out at the time). I think the most infamous is not fully accounting for the traffic that branch lines fed onto main lines - a broad assumption that closing the branch line will save all its costs without impacting on the business elsewhere.

And BR under Beeching had an unwillingness to consider new ways of working that would have made the railway more economical. Eastern Region under Gerry Fiennes had great success with Paytrains - i.e. you remove the staff from stations and expect people to buy a ticket on a train - and in running short multiple units rather than full locomotive-hauled trains. In 2016 this is how most rural railways in Britain are run. But Beeching's BR refused to consider it on a national scale.

(Fiennes' book, "I Tried To Run A Railway", is an engrossing read and worthwhile for anyone interested in this part of history.)

Even twenty-five years ago when the privatisation of the railway was happening there was an expectation that passenger numbers would continue their downwards trend—certainly no though that it would end up with passenger numbers quickly increasing throughout more of less the whole country.

It's worthwhile pointing out that much of what was got rid of was duplicated routes: unless you have any expectation of the surviving route reaching capacity, what's the point in keeping a parallel alignment free? In the vast majority of cases, that rationalisation made sense, even in hindsight.

Here in Iowa (again) some of our rail right-of-way was repurposed as 'trails on rails' which means they paved an asphalt strip down the middle and called it a trail. Seemed like a good idea- it already goes near/through/between rural towns where folks can use a good trail.

They never funded their maintenance(!) so 20 years later most are only a shadow of their original form - rutted shattered asphalt fragments with small trees growing haphazardly everywhere; gopher holes make it dangerous even for equestrian use.

But good news! it can be reclaimed for rail again when needed.

Not for all of it was — there's certainly provision in places, but there's also parts where doubling would be incredibly expensive (the viaducts especially, where the maximum dimensions of the trains it has been built for are larger than it was originally built for, are inherently single-track now).

The more disappointing part is that it tends to poison the well for ambitious public transport projects in future. That Leith extension will come some time after the Last Trumpet.

But, you know, just as long as RBS got their lovely public funded tram linking Gogar Deathstar to town then it was all worth it.

The stations were all sold as part of Railtrack, although with a few exceptions they are operated by the train operators.

The initial franchises were largely for 7 years - the 14 year model came later. There was also no involvement from other national operators at this time - North-east and GWR were management buy-outs, although they fairly quickly sold themselves on to bus companies, Bus companies took over most of the rest of the franchises as well, leaving the rest to Sea Containers, Virgin (working 50-50 with... a bus company), and Connex which was basically a French bin lorry company.

National Rail is effectively just the remains of the BR branding, and was passed alongside the Rail Settlement Plan (which is very broadly the ticketing operation) to the Association of Train Operating Companies.

The East Coast line was abandoned twice as being not-profitable within the constraints of making the required premium payments to the government. Nationalization was reasonably successful, and the nationalized company did make premium payments, but they were not as much as National Express would have had to pay to retain the franchise.

> I think at this point there is a political consensus that its been a complete mess and a botched privatisation that either need to be redone or just be re-nationalised, though Conservatives try to not talk about it if they can (they implemented it).

Regardless of whether they're willing to, the non-ministerial Competition and Markets Authority undertook a project to "looks at whether increasing competition in passenger rail services could lead to better value for money and improve service quality"[0]. Nobody is bound to the results, but it seems compatible with what the Conservative policy has been: keep the privately run operators, but have them compete on-track (i.e., both run services) compared with the current status of just having them compete off-track (i.e., bidding for the franchise).

[0]: https://www.gov.uk/cma-cases/passenger-rail-services-competi...

No, it wasn't. The rail itself was sold off as Railtrack.

Following on from the Hatfield crash, after which it spent £580 million on repairing similar track faults as which caused the Hatfield crash, and a few hundred million more on compensation, which led to the failure of the company and it entered "railway administration" (essentially a special form of administration created along with the privatisation of the railways to avoid the railway ceasing operating when in administration). Network Rail then bought Railtrack in 2002, bringing the railway infrastructure back into public hands. Railtrack was then subsequently liquidated.

It's called "Network Rail", "National Rail" is the organisation that provides a joined up timetabling and ticketing system for all of the train operating companies (e.g. Virgin, GWR, ScotRail etc).

Network Rail operates and maintains the physical infrastructure upon which the trains run e.g. track, signalling, special trains (such as de-icers, permanent way test trains, leaves-on-the-line cleaning trains).

edit: prior to Network Rail there was RailTrack which went bust after the fallout from the Hatfield rail crash.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/tfls-london-o...

Normally I'd be against nationalisation, but having been a 'SouthEastern' commuter for over 20 years, I can only hope this will result in an improved service.