Quote Originally Posted by dml1954 View Post
The problem with what you say is that Beeching was actually affiliated to the Labour party and most of his recommendations were implemented by a Labour government who had strong ties (and probably large amounts of funding) from the road transport unions, who wanted to replace railways with bigger road networks and therefore benefit their own members at the expense of railway staff. The Conservatives did commission the reports from Beeching in the first place, due to the vast amounts of money being lost every year but to solely blame them for the current situation is way wide of the mark.
Yes there were some dodgy practices going on at the time too trying to force freight onto the roads away from the rails. Lorries mysteriously breaking down on level crossings and blocking the tracks for hours.
On paper it looked like it.made sense, but so many of the assumptions were flawed.