The Beeching report
By the early 1960s British Railways was losing money each year, and the government, which owned it, asked a businessman, Richard Beeching, to find a remedy. His report, The Reshaping of British Railways, was published in March 1963.
It concluded that much of the network carried very little traffic. A large share of the stations and lines handled only a small proportion of the passengers and goods, and the report proposed to close about 2,300 stations and some five thousand miles of line, a large part of the system, and to concentrate on freight in bulk and on the main routes between cities.
The consequences
Most of the proposed closures went ahead over the next decade, and many small towns lost their railway. The decision aroused strong opposition, and some people argued that the report had counted only the cost of a line and not its value to a community or as a feeder for the rest of the network. Others have pointed out that the rise of the car and the lorry would in any case have reduced the traffic on many branch lines.
Many of the closed lines have been used since for walking and cycling paths, and some have been reopened by volunteers as heritage railways. A few have even returned to ordinary service in recent years.