Dr Beeching's rail cuts in Scotland: 60 years on, progress towards reversing the damage done is stalling – David Spaven

On Monday, hundreds of towns and villages across Scotland may rue the day 60 years ago when Dr Richard Beeching unveiled his infamous report, The Reshaping of British Railways.

With rail passengers haemorrhaging to private cars, the chairman of British Railways wrote a prescription which has ever since been associated with swingeing cuts in the network. The axe fell hard in Scotland, with some 850 miles of passenger railway closed between 1964 and 1972, the worst cut being delivered in 1969 when the entire 98-mile Waverley Route through the Borders was shut.

But Beeching’s approach to loss-making lines had a fundamental flaw. In a doomed rush to eliminate the industry’s financial losses, he chose to ignore the scope for infrastructure and staffing economies as an alternative to the ‘quick fix’ of closure. A classic example was the Dunblane-Callander section of the original route to Oban, where sensible economies could have eliminated superfluous track infrastructure and reduced signal box and station staff numbers by 85 per cent. Instead, it was closed.

The consequences of closures were profound. A 1980 study found that only a quarter of former rail users did not have their lives altered in some practical way. And in 2018, an academic report concluded that the one in five places in Britain that were most exposed to the network cuts saw 24 percentage points less growth in population than the one in five places that were least exposed.

By the 1980s, however, it had become clear that private cars were not the panacea assumed two decades earlier. Concerns about the environment, road congestion, local economic regeneration and social mobility fuelled pressure for rail solutions, and no fewer than 91 passenger stations have opened or re-opened in Scotland since 1970. Thirty-seven were on half a dozen routes previously carrying only freight traffic or completely abandoned – most notably the Borders Railway from Edinburgh to Galashiels and Tweedbank.

Ten years ago, on the 50th anniversary of the Beeching Report, there was optimism about further extensions of Scotland’s rail network. However, with the post-Covid decline in rail patronage and festering rail strikes, where do we stand now?

Previously, Scotland was ahead of England on rail route re-openings, but the momentum has been lost. The only line currently under construction is the six-mile link to Levenmouth (a ‘mothballed’ freight railway), and other potential re-openings face significant barriers from inflated rail construction costs and pessimistic official forecasts of patronage.

The performance of re-opened lines has made a nonsense of passenger forecasts, most spectacularly in the case of the three new stations in the Borders – Stow, Galashiels and Tweedbank – which in their first year saw, respectively, 313, 330 and 681 per cent more passengers than officially predicted. It was only political pressure, rather than an allegedly grim ‘business case’, which ensured the new railway was delivered.

A man dressed as Sir Walter Scott celebrates the creation of Borders Railway service, which re-established a section of the old Waverley route, in 2015 (Picture: Andy Buchanan/AFP via Getty Images)

The cost of constructing the Borders Railway suffered from two key factors: the past failure to protect the former alignment of the Waverley Route from breaches by housing, roads, etc (adding some 40 per cent to the capital cost); and the over-specification of too many elements of the new railway by Network Rail, symbolised by Stow. A village which previously had no CCTV cameras now has 40, all at the station!

With such barriers, what are the practical prospects for reinstating railways to other key locations which lost their trains in the Beeching era and its aftermath? When the Borders Railway opened, the mantle of being further from the rail network than any other towns of their size in Britain shifted from Galashiels and Hawick to Fraserburgh and Peterhead. A strong campaign has been developing to reconnect Buchan to the rail network, but governmental support has so far been lukewarm.

Official studies have focused on an initial 13-mile route from Aberdeen to Ellon, which has a population of over 10,000. But the most recent consultancy study estimated costs equating to nearly double to treble the cost per mile of the Borders Railway, despite the latter having suffered many more breaches of the alignment than the route to Ellon, which is now a walkway and cycle path.

Surprisingly, the consultants failed to examine the alternative of a ‘tram-train’ operation, a concept pioneered in Germany two decades ago. The core difference from ‘heavy rail’ operation is that a tram-train can negotiate sharper curves and steeper gradients, and the infrastructure is less expensive. Tram-trains can also – through their ability to switch from the main line to street-running – provide many more stops in key demand locations.

Another Scottish town which could enjoy tram-train operation is St Andrews, whose railway was axed in a ‘post-Beeching’ cut in 1969 and now has a population of nearly 18,000 – the third largest town in Scotland without a train service. Significant sections of the former heavy-rail route to St Andrews have been lost to development, suggesting that a tram-train solution (through to Dundee) is the most realistic option.

Along the corridor served until 1966 by the Deeside Line to Ballater, there has been significant population growth between Banchory and Aberdeen. A tram-train operation could utilise much of the former railway alignment, while its routing flexibility would ease difficulties on constrained stretches of corridor.

These towns are just a few of those which could benefit from a rail return, with the ‘modal switch’ from road transport cutting carbon, reducing road accidents and congestion, improving air quality, boosting local economic regeneration, and enhancing social mobility.

Beeching’s approach to closures was fundamentally flawed; governments subsequently failed to protect the old route alignments; and the official appraisal of potential line re-openings has – in too many instances – also been defective. So is there now the political will to deliver a step-change in the establishment’s attitude to a railway revival?

David Spaven, who spent his working life in and around the rail industry, is author of Scotland’s Lost Branch Lines: where Beeching got it wrong