lost railways

some thoughts on

Last trains: Dr Beeching and the death of rural England
Charles Loft
Biteback Publishing 2023
(original hardback 2013)

For the last 30 years and a bit I’ve been living in Oxford and very happily too. The one thing that bugs me is the state the railways are in. Although Oxford is located centrally and in the middle between the two biggest cities, there are no electric trains here and overall fewer trains leaving the station than, for instance, the small regional station of Düsseldorf-Bilk (which is my base when I travel in Germany, see photo and caption here). As recent events have underlined, the country has spectacularly failed to invest in modern high-speed rail, meaning that people routinely take planes from London to Manchester, Edinburgh or Glasgow.

When I want to go to London, I take the coach, as the train is unaffordable and diesel-powered anyways, so not much greener. When I want to see some other cities for a change, I take the Eurostar from there – cheaper, faster, and more comfortable than travelling within the UK.

There are no railways connecting us to neighbouring Oxfordshire towns except Didcot and Banbury which happen to be on the main line (the recent reopening of the Chiltern line has added Bicester). Going to Witney, for instance, you spend an hour each way on a bus stuck in a permanent traffic queue. Buses go every ten minutes or so, so there would have been enough demand for a train that would only take ten minutes. No trains to Abingdon, Wallingford, etc either. The absence of regional lines corresponding to the German Regionalexpress directly affects our quality of life here as people from the wider region drive into Oxford by default and thus clog our streets and pollute our air.

It has dawned on me over the years that these regional rail connections existed once, but were cut in the 1960s, mostly in the wake of the infamous Beeching report, an attempt to cut costs by closing unprofitable lines, stations and services. In Last trains (a general reader book based on the author’s earlier academic monograph on the topic), Charles Loft examines the politics around these cuts – which has relevance beyond the railways as the politics is similar around today’s dismantling of the NHS.

Reading it both as the history of the railways we’re missing now and of the other public services we still have but may lose soon, this is quite painful but important. The author tries hard to present a balanced view between the social usefulness of railways and the political imperative to save taxpayers’ money, and it is kind of comforting that it could have become much worse, and one of the scenarios examined under tory governments featured no railways whatsoever.

I learned that we owe the survival of the wreckage we still have not so much to foresight but to the electoral fallout that further cuts would have had. Essentially, Tories feared losing their support in the shires cut off from civilisation, whereas Labour feared the unions falling away. Everybody feared that Scotland and Wales might resent being cut off from the railways entirely by Westminster.

It is also remarkable that different branches of the government involved in allegedly modernising the country didn’t talk to each other. Thus, a shiny new city, Milton Keynes, was built from scratch in a place that simultaneously lost its rail connection westwards to Oxford and eastwards to Cambridge.

What I still find puzzling is that planners and politicians in the 1960s didn’t think through the effect that a total switch to car ownership would have. Although climate change wasn’t in the news yet, the sheer surface area needed if 60 million people move 40million metal boxes to wherever they want to go, requiring a multiple of their sizes in car parks and road surface, would have destroyed not just the countryside but also the cities. Well it largely has, but if the misguided “modernisers” of the 60s had pulled through with these plans (famously including an inner ring road across Christ Church Meadow, vetoed by the University), it could have become even worse.

Blackwells (bought it from The Last Bookshop in Jericho, actually, but can't find it on their website)

Loving the cover. Seeing that I have four separate railway families in my immediate ancestry, I may well be epigenetically programmed to become a railway nostalgic.

PS I wasn't aware of this, but just the day I posted this a feasibility study for the rail connection to Witney was published. Funny how the press release doesn't mention this connection once existed. They keep stressing it's a new line. The BBC report, however, does discuss the historic line and its closure in the Beeching cuts.