• Rebuilding Shadwell DLR & Overground stations into one (IanVisits)
• Hidden Moorgate Station history and tour (LondonInheritance)
• Reversing Beeching options (RailStaff)
• 2 for 1 Tyne pedestrian & cycle tunnels in Newcastle (BeautyOfTransport)
• Over a thousand UK rail network trespass incidents since Lockdown (RailFreight)
• What happened to train travel after the 1918 Flu? (PriceTags)
• US Govt must decide if it wants pedestrians to die or not (Vice)
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“Reversing Beeching” should – of course – be named “Reversing Marples”
Beeching was instructed to do a specific job, with a very tight remit – deliberately designed to trash the railways, so that the unbelievably corrupt marples could make money.
Let’s not, ever, forget that.
The difficult bit is finagling the fonances, from various sources, against Treasury resistance.
The Treasury still hates railways
“Does the US government want pedestrains to die?”
Well, pedestrians are by definition not using the sacred motor car & are probably poor & brown, so they don’t matter, anyway …
Cynical, moi?
A large number of the ‘Beeching closures’ took place not under Marples, but after the Labour Government had been elected in 1964.
The Labour manifesto said: “The Government’s policy of breaking up road and rail freight co-ordination, of denationalising road haulage and finally of axing rail services under the Beeching Plan, have made things worse. Labour will draw up a national plan for transport covering the national networks of road, rail and canal communications, properly co-ordinated with air, coastal shipping and port services. The new regional authorities will be asked to draw up transport plans for their own areas. While these are being prepared, major rail closures will be halted.”
The Ministers of Transport who oversaw railway closures under the Labour Government were Tom Fraser and Barbara Castle – though Castle can be credited with the 1968 Transport Act, which provided for subsidies to socially necessary rail services.
There is an interesting document in the National Archives http://filestore.nationalarchives.gov.uk/pdfs/small/cab-129-120-c-41.pdf showing how Tom Fraser resisted efforts to have closures approved under the previous Government reconsidered.
@Greg
I think what the Treasury really hates is the British railway’s ability to make large sums of money disappear without enough to show for it, when compared with the perfectly adequate railways of our near neighbours. The Treasury makes the comparison, and it is hardly surprising it thinks it is being taken for a ride.
Whilst car design is a clear proximate cause of the increase in pedestrian casualty rate in the US, it is not the only reason why the pedestrian environment in the US is so threatening. There are other things that other developed countries have already done that would make a big difference if applied in the US. The US has a road accident rate more like a middle income country than a developed country, and is not the only place where many people have been upsizing their cars. It doesn’t help that many of these policy levers lie at state rather than federal level. There is often opposition to the things that other countries do on dogmatic rather than rational grounds, as with so much else in the US. And not much money for roads departments either.