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Comment by vixen99 | Hacker News Reader

Richard Beeching cut 100,000 jobs, closed 2,000 railway stations & 5,000 miles of track built at the cost of untold labourers' lives. Pollution, traffic jams and commuter misery were some of the results.

He was a public servant who knew he'd never have to bear the responsibility for his actions which affected millions.

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Don't stress the "public servant" overmuch. He was a buccaneering captain of private industry who was given five years' leave from his employer (ICI, Imperial Chemical Industries) to come and sort out the railways.

This was in the context of British Rail having just wasted a huge amount of public money: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_rail_transport_in_G... . Beeching did the job he was hired for and did it well: he wrote a report that identified which lines were profitable and which weren't. The politicians who took action based on these facts are the ones who bear the responsibility for those actions.

To be fair his analysis would be better described as nearly competent than "done well". Government ministers were responsible for approving the cuts he recommended (and a few he didn't), but they did so based on partial and often completely inaccurate figures and without any challenge to closure as the only option. Alternatives like de-staffing and removal of common carrier obligations could have transformed the economic case for a lot of lines, as indeed could the faster roll-out of diesels.

Burdensome taxes to support underutilized rail infrastructure cause misery too. We can call names at public policy, but that's not a good way to manage public policy. Efficiency has to matter too.

And, strangely, this article insists there's no central decision-making group for managing rail stations and lines. Then, how did Mr. Beeching manage to close all those lines?

A few decades after Beeching's cuts, British Rail was privatized in a rather half-baked fashion.

And interestingly enough, it now seems to be slowly creeping back the other way:

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.

I wish the UK had a high-speed rail network like the Shinkansen in Japan.

We're in the middle of trying to establish a high speed corridor at the moment, I'm all for it personally but honestly it's been a ludicrously expensive project so far and the opposition to it is huge and mounting.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Speed_2

TfL doesn't actually run the TfL Rail services—the big difference is their operator receives a fixed sum for operating them, compared with the other operators where they pay a fixed amount to the DfT and pocket any profit they get beyond that. Arguably, the big difference is that it means TfL Rail will only get investment if TfL decides, because there's no motivation for the operator to do so. At the same time, TfL Rail isn't in competition with the Underground, etc. so better inter-modal connectivity becomes more worth investment.

The operator also has no control over fares and branding, I'd argue that's a big difference too.

In practice, other British rail companies only seem to make improvements if the government pays for them most of the time too. There's very little actual private-sector investment in the railways; it basically just seems to be a license to print money.

Mostly, yes. One honourable exception is Chiltern's Project Evergreen:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chiltern_Railways#Project_Ever...

But then, Chiltern wasn't run by a bus company, but by a group of British Rail managers who knew exactly what they were doing:

http://www.oxfordtimes.co.uk/business/profiles/8227427.Histo...

I suppose it also helped that it was a line with potential to steal traffic from already overloaded intercity services to Oxford and Birmingham.

Chiltern are owned by Deutsche Bahn are they not? A state operator running a better railway, who'd've thought it. (And aren't the improvements all funded by the back door by central government anyway?)

There's plenty of improvements that are made by TOCs, though often not the things that get big headlines: service frequency increases are often done by the TOC, wifi on-board became commonplace on intercity services without government funding, etc.

Certainly there's plenty of cases where the improvements are only made because they're a requirement of the franchise specification (with or without funding), but I think it's unfair to say that all improvements have happened because of government intervention.

how did Mr. Beeching manage to close all those lines?

In the 60s, it was all centralised.

Does efficiency also matter for roads? Has anyone ever produced a list of all the unprofitable roads in the country?

Sure. I'm in the US. Iowa's DOT has constantly reevaluated the use of roads as land-use and rural residences change. Bridges de-commissioned; road maintenance turned to 'class B' which means no maintenance. In fact they recently re-committed their budget 100% to maintenance and 0% to new roads. Mostly because global weather instability has been really rough on our huge, vulnerable road network. Agriculture is important to us; every field has to have access to roads and markets.

That's great, but it puts Iowa in a tiny class of rational D's of T. Most governments find roads, streets, and parking to be obviously desirable.

When Beeching wrote the report the stations, carriages, services, and rail were publicly owned and centralised under one public company: British Rail.

In the mid-90s the services, carriages, and the stations were sold off as 14-year franchises to the private firms (most of which are actually public rail companies from other countries such as Germany and France), but the rail itself kept in a weird thing called National Rail that has an odd public/private structure that I don't understand. Ownership and responsibility for the network is somewhat unclear in many cases. 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).

There was an awkward period in recent years in which one of the private companies abandoned a major line as unprofitable and it was temporarily nationalised - it ended up becoming the most popular and profitable line while under public management. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_Coast_(train_operating_co...

> the rail itself kept in a weird thing called National Rail that has an odd public/private structure that I don't understand

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.

Oh sorry, I forgot that part of the history. I was a little young at the time so the Hatfield crash is not something I remember in much detail.

In terms of operations, the carriages were sold off for a song as 3 theoretically competing rolling stock operating companies (ROSCOs), which the francisees are pretty much obliged to lease from. These remain a license to print money.

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.

Sorry for a double-reply, but I missed this bit before…

> 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...

> but the rail itself kept in a weird thing called National Rail

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.

Point of information: it was Dr Beeching (PhD).

As the Beeching Report [0] itself states on page 6, in 1963 on gross revenues of £474.7m the total deficit was 33%; £-159.3m (net receipts £-86.9m, interest and charges £49m, capital interest £23.4m), which is 1.3% of the 1963-64 Public Spending of £12,000m.

[0] "The Reshaping of British Railways" http://www.railwaysarchive.co.uk/documents/BRB_Beech001a.pdf

But your society let him do this. Were there a massive uproar, this measure would probably be downsized or cancelled. I think we too should stop letting random public servants assume that kind of decision-making.

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