Abandoned: How The Beeching Report Decimated Britain's Railways | Timeline

I'm on a journey to rediscover the railways but this isn't a story of steel and steam, it's about people in 21st century Britain trying to get around without stressing themselves or the planet. It's just a nightmare, it's just you know you start your day and every day is like this. When you think the railway's been here for over a hundred years and overnight it's not there anymore, it's gone, the way of life is finished. It's a cock-up really, it's a classic British cock-up. This is the story of how Britain's great railway heritage, once the envy of the world, was squandered for short-term gain by decision makers who failed to see the long-term damage they were wreaking. One man carried the can for the carve-up of our railways, Dr Richard Beeching, and now in the 21st century we're still feeling the effects of the cuts he made in the 1960s. In my job as a travel journalist I see at first hand what millions of us have to put up with on the daily grind into work. It's particularly horrible on the Portbury 100 this morning, very busy traffic. In this film I'm setting out to travel from Portishead to Minehead by rail where I can and by car and bike in places where the trains don't run anymore. I want to find out what happened to communities affected by the Beeching report, a document that led to one third of our precious railways being axed. First stop, a small coastal community with big town ambitions. Portishead, North Somerset's answer to the south of France. A marina with shops, restaurants and a touch of glamour. What more could you want? Well how about a railway? Portishead once had a thriving passenger rail link with the outside world but Dr Beeching decided this and hundreds of other branch lines across Britain weren't paying their way. The transport minister at the time, Ernest Marples, was perfectly clear. Dr Beechinger, with whom I'm in very friendly relationship, cannot close a line that's subjected to a passenger line. Only the minister on behalf of the government can do that and I'm quite certain that we shan't close a line unless we're perfectly certain that there will be adequate alternative facilities. Nearly a century after the line from Portishead to Bristol first opened, the last passenger train pulled out in September 1964 in its place the people of Portishead now wake up to scenes like this. This morning I'm meeting one commuter who says she has no choice but to use her car to get to work in the centre of Bristol. Small car, small bike, look at that. Portishead's waterside location has made it popular with young urban professionals. Good morning ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the 842 from Portishead to Bristol. This morning's driver is Lisa Metcalf. Lisa is a marketing officer with the Soil Association based in the city just 12 miles away. It is a beautiful place to live and I was living here before I started at the Soil Association right in the centre of town so yeah I don't think I can afford to move back into Bristol at the moment. In theory it should take me less than an hour to reach the centre of Bristol by car but that's not the everyday experience facing commuters heading out of Portishead. Okay you've been going four minutes I reckon we've covered about a mile and we've reached gridlock what's going on? Oh this is difficult. You know this is the one main route out of the whole of Portishead just one road it's just a nightmare it's just you know you start your day and every day is like this. So much for 21st century progress and to think there was once a railway here. Leaving Lisa in the traffic I meet a man who fired the steam trains to Bristol. We used to leave Portishead at 8.18 with a steam engine and four coaches and we'd stop at eight stations on the way to Bristol and we still got to Bristol at 8.52 34 minutes. Well that is amazing and this is going back what half a century you could do it in basically half an hour yeah including eight stops. Traffic and Travel. BBC Radio Bristol. Very busy traffic due to the roadworks continuing on the M5 Avermouth bridge resurfacing there both ways but on the Portbury 100 it is close to gridlock I'm afraid out of Portishead particularly. Within the next two years fast growing Portishead is expected to become the biggest town in Britain without a railway not a good slogan. This is ridiculous half an hour more or less we've been going the train would have put you into Temple Meads station in Bristol already. If they had other options if they had you know like a rail network from Portishead then you know I wouldn't I would not drive. And Lisa wouldn't need to if the passenger train service to Portishead was brought back. What's remarkable is that most of the branch line here is still intact and three miles up the track it's already back in use. In 2002 the government put in 15 million pounds to help Royal Portbury docks reopen a rail freight service. The track was relayed between Portbury and Bristol and six years on it's a commercial success with up to 14 freight trains a day ferrying cars coal and other cargo throughout Britain. Such a pity then that the government didn't see fit to put in just a few million pounds more to relay the last three miles of track into Portishead itself. The man leading the campaign to bring back rail to Portishead is Alan Matthews. Well it's only three miles to be relayed the rest of the line into Bristol is currently a freight line and is therefore operational. Okay it requires a new station at Pill and a new station here but it is only three miles to relay but I think there's a sea change now within local government within government itself that with high fuel prices with traffic congestion a quick easy way of getting in by rail is the answer. Even the port company running the freight service out of Portbury says a reopened passenger service is overdue. Everywhere else in the country where where we're on the railway line we're sharing it with passengers so why not this railway too. Last year we we handled 1.7 million tons of cargo on that line and that equated to over nine million road miles saved. And that's got to be a good thing. Heading inbound you've got queues stretching back towards the Gordana gate roundabout. And this is this is padding time now. Makes me want to cry. I'm gonna have to you know if I can stay with a friend a few nights a week so at least I'm you know I get to work on time. That's an incredibly stressful thing to have to do to actually have a weekend home and a midweek home when the two places are only 12 miles apart. It's ridiculous if you don't mind me saying so. I know it's appalling. Finally we're moving. Okay so this has been a particularly bad morning. Commuter hell in fact. But it's all made worse for thousands of car drivers like Lisa because they've got no alternative to the roads. Dr Beeching took away their trains. Two hours two minutes. What are you doing Lisa? I don't know. I mean you know an hour's a bit more I have respectable time than the two hours but I think it looks like I'm gonna have to move hands. Have a lovely day Lisa. Thanks a million. Bye bye. So it's come to this. Dr Beeching got rid of one third of the country's rail network as the government fanned our love affair with the car by building more roads. Now we're all paying the price. A transport system that's crippled by chronic traffic congestion. Oh Dr Beeching what have you done? Bristol Temple Meads. The most magnificent station in Brunel's kingdom of the train and the hub of the region's rail network. The trouble is most of the spokes are now missing. In Beeching's time official thinking was the railways are running out of steam. The car is the future. David Henshaw one of the country's leading transport commentators says Beeching ignored the importance of looking at the whole transport system and failed to predict what Britain might actually need in the future. It's a cock-up really. It's a classic British cock-up and I think we're now we're now regretting it. We're now a lot more people in the country traveling a lot more. Much more mobile population and we're now seeing the folly of closing these railway lines. In the 19th century in Britain we brought the railway to the world. We had brilliant engineers like Isambard Kingdom Brunel creating these masterpieces. Have we squandered our legacy? Yes we had the finest railway system in the world there's no doubt about it and I think in in the in the car centric mood of the 1960s it was seen as an anachronism. The Beeching report was much tougher on the railways than perhaps it should have been and we're regretting it now like crazy. I mean this railway station is at least twice as busy as it was in Beeching's era. It is now overflowing with people and it could be even busier if the branch lines leading into it more branch lines leading into it had stayed open. I think it's a tragedy yeah. In Portbury the reopened rail freight service has already had government backing but down the track three miles away the people of Portishead are still waiting for their passenger service to be restored. Yet it would cost less than the government subsidy that helped set up the freight line from the docks six years ago. North Somerset council recently bought the land where the missing three miles of track would go. Officials have met in secret with Network Rail both agreed to take things to the next stage whatever that means but why the delay? Portishead is a particular irony because the line closed in the 60s like many others uneconomic unneeded wouldn't wouldn't be necessary in the future. They derelict and then was completely rebuilt for freight quite recently so they've got modern infrastructure they've done the signalling all they've got to do is to reopen this short bit into Portishead itself. There's no political will. One thing that puzzles me is that even when everybody seems to be saying it's a brilliant idea to reopen a line they are talking about three four five years before a line can actually be open. Why is there so much foot dragging? Partly the structure of the industry nowadays privatisation has made it much more much more expensive and if I had a franchise to run trains for seven years or ten years I wouldn't be interested in reopening a branch line. I would see that as a very long-term project and it wouldn't be something I'd want to pay for. I would expect the money to come from central government. But back in the 60s it was Beeching's view that if the railways were to have any future they had to embrace a new vision of intercity travel with high speed high frequency trains and Beeching was right about that at least. Today intercity is more popular than ever speeding me on the next part of my journey from Bristol Temple Meads on the Great Western Line towards Taunton. David look you and me we love trains we love train travel but we are in a minority as regular users of the railways. Can we really expect everyone else to subsidise our journeys? I don't think that's true anymore. I think traffic congestion is so chronic nowadays and that I believe people are coming back to the train in big numbers so it's not a case of the majority subsidising the minority. In any event no one looks at the economics of roads. You don't hear people say that road's losing so many millions of pounds we need to put subsidy. They don't talk about roads in the same language as they do railways and maybe that's the problem. Indeed Britain's intense love affair with the car simply keeps growing. Millions of us can't get enough for four wheels yet we can all see where it's heading. The daily nightmare of congestion on a scale that would have been barely conceivable in Beeching's day. Two hours to travel 12 miles from Portishead into Bristol. What a waste of precious time for Lisa and thousands of commuters like her. I left David Henshaw to continue onwards to Taunton. The next scheduled stop on my Beeching journey once played a crucial role in the life of the local economy. Crewe, Clapham Junction, Yatton. Yes for nearly a century this small North Somerset village was actually an important railway junction where three lines met. Today it's just a halt along the Bristol to Exeter line. In its heyday the Cheddar Valley was home to the area's biggest export. No not cheese but strawberries. Millions of them. 50 years ago the strawberry line from Draycott to Yatton ferried Cheddar Valley strawberries to the Midlands and beyond. This railway station used to be an important junction for three different lines from 1867 when the Cheddar Valley railway line was opened which ran from here down through Cheddar onto the city of Wells and also the Clevedon branch line that ran from here to the popular Victorian resort of Clevedon. It was popularly used by people and also the famous Cheddar Valley strawberries that were transported along the line to give it its name. But by the early 60s use of the Cheddar Valley line was already declining. Fewer passengers were travelling by rail and more growers were choosing to use road transport to get their produce to market. When the beaching axe finally came down on the strawberry line it spelt the end of an era for Yatton and the whole of the Cheddar Valley. But today the trains passing through Yatton run alongside the new face of the old Cheddar Valley railway. Let me take you down because I'm going to Strawberry Fields all the way along the strawberry line from Yatton right through to Cheddar. Fantastic! Hang on is that Penny Lane? All that remains of Congersbury station. Is that the sound of a distant ghostly locomotive? At the end of the strawberry line in Draycott south of Cheddar, Andrew Seeger's family have been growing strawberries for three generations. What was it like when the line was here? It was really good. We could put strawberries on the train and it would go to Gateshead, Liverpool and the strawberries were hardly damaged because of the smoothness of the railway line and then it had to go by lorry and of course it wasn't the same. It damaged the fruit more than it would on the train. The end of the strawberry line in the mid-60s coincided with a decline in local horticulture. Competition from Europe was undercutting fruit from the Cheddar Valley. But even if beaching was right to axe this branch there's still an enormous affection today for the train service that was lost. There was four special trains went out a day taking the strawberries and distributed them all over England. We fought for many years to keep the line open but we lost the fight and then the only means left was long-distance lorries and of course they would only take to towns with an economic load. Today David Sheldon, now 80 years old, is still growing strawberries. For him at least this is one way of life that will never change. Leaving the Cheddar Valley I ride west across the Somerset Levels. Tomorrow I continue my beaching journey from Taunton where the Great Western Line meets the West Somerset Railway built to serve the seaside resort of Minehead. Taunton. Trouble is I've missed the last train to Minehead by 37 years. Trains running along the 26 miles of track between Taunton and Minehead since 1874 but this one the 1315 to Minehead on today Saturday January the 2nd 1971 is one of the very last. There's an axe come down on this very pleasant but unprofitable line. Now the line's still there but if I'm going to get a train to the West Somerset Coast I've got a bit of work to do first. After beaching's axe the Taunton to Minehead line was almost all resurrected four years later to become a heritage railway but today there's a bit of a gap which means I have to leave Taunton station and take to the road to Bishop's Lyddiard four miles away. The A39 it's the main road to West Somerset and a pretty scary place to be when you're on two wheels. Well it's taken me 20 uncomfortable minutes to cycle here from Taunton. I saw a couple of signs along the way one was reassuring it said Bishop's Lyddiard which meant I was going in the right direction the other one wasn't it said 161 casualties in five years. Of course the beaching report was never asked to take into account the cost of lives lost or shattered in road accidents. Train travel is far safer than going by car and so much more civilized. Bathed in steam and nostalgia plenty of us hanker after a way of life that the 21st century has all but ended. West Somerset is among the most successful heritage lines in the country so far this year around 180,000 passengers have taken the train to Minehead. Down the road feeling bad, I don't want to be greeted this old way. So civilized. With me on the train to Minehead the railway's general manager Paul Conibeer. It's the romance especially with the steam engines here wandering through the glorious countryside that we have today. Paul surely with the economy being under stress and people worrying about their household budgets must be more and more difficult for West Somerset Railway to attract visitors. Yeah well I think we've got to be very careful how we market the railway now. We did have a successful August with over 42,000 visitors so people are still coming along to support us to make sure we survive through good times and difficult times. One thing we're striving for over the next two to three years to have a small two-car train running from Bishop's Lyddiard into Taunton to connect with our regular steam services. And let's not forget West Somerset used to be a living working railway line that took children to school and people on holiday to Minehead via the track from Taunton to Bishop's Lyddiard that's currently closed to passenger trains. At Willeton a brief encounter. Hello Angela. With a woman desperate to see this heritage line reunited with the main network at Taunton. My brief encounter is with Angela Lampleau. In government we hear an awful lot about joined up thinking. The problem if I may with this lovely West Somerset Railway is that it's not joined up to the rest of the country. You're absolutely right and that's something that we have been working with partners and with West Somerset Railway to actually get that link between Bishop's Lyddiard and Taunton up and running and it's going to be very soon happening I sincerely hope because we would actually like to get a commuter train running from Taunton to Minehead if the local people can demonstrate that yes they would use that service. Plus it would give people an opportunity to travel down from the Midlands, Birmingham all the way through to Minehead for a day without having to use their own vehicles. So again another benefit. But hang on this was a line axed because Dr Beeching decided it wasn't making enough money. Yet now with an average of more than 500 passengers every single day taking the train to Minehead this line is more popular than ever and thousands more visitors would use rail if only they could get a through train all the way. Of course the track's there and again the signalling's there. What isn't there is the political will and to some extent the railway company they're fine as they are. Most people come to these preserved railways by car and they don't see any particular need to spend millions of pounds reconnecting to network. After Bucklin's holiday camp West Somerset Railway is the second biggest tourist attraction in the district and the local economy benefits to the tune of more than six million pounds a year. Nostalgia is clearly good for business. Hello Simon good afternoon to you welcome to Blue Anchor. And the old ways do keep the trains running. Blue Anchor has the oldest working signal box in the country. It's like a giant mechanical computer which allows the railway to run safely. Of course all of this could probably be operated by one little microchip. Not that Alan Hammond could possibly agree with such heresy. There's nothing worse than just pushing a button and something happens. Somebody here is making it happen. When you've got a signal box like this with all the levers people are highly trained to do it and I think it's a very important part of our future and our past and to me it all goes into one. I'm almost at the end of my beaching journey arriving on the coast at Minehead by train just as the Beatles did in 1964. The Fab Four came here to shoot part of their first film A Hard Day's Night. There's a number of places I've simply never been to because they're too inaccessible. Madagascar, Mozambique and until today Minehead. Like millions of British travelers I don't have a car and I rely on the railways to get around and at the moment Minehead is one end of a line to nowhere. No disrespect to Bishop's Lyddiard. I've travelled from Portishead to Minehead to see for myself what happened to local communities who lost their trains in the 60s. I've got here by car, by bike and yes by train where I could. I reckon salvaging the wreckage left behind by Dr Beeching is taking far longer than it should because of politicians looking no further for the next election. Britain's given the world a great deal to be proud of. Shakespeare, football, folding bikes but the greatest gift of all is the railway. Somehow though in the 60s we let the wheels fall off. It's up to us to decide. Shall we board the express to a brave new world of train travel or simply take the all stations to oblivion? You choose but make it quick before we reach the end of the line.