To understand Britain’s relationship with its railways you can read learned reports and lengthy histories and economic analyses. But it is better to read “Thomas the Tank Engine”. The stories are set on the fictional island of Sodor—more or less Eden, for engines. There are cotton-wool clouds, lambs in the fields and an intermittently irascible deity (the Fat Controller). But as in Eden, shadows lurk. A steady stream of refugee engines arrive, bringing tales of the world beyond. There, they warn, stations are being closed; branch lines severed; engines dismembered while still alive. One engine gives way to despair at “the Dreadful State of the World”.

Such horrors do happen. On March 27th 1963 a boring-sounding bureaucrat published a boring-sounding report. It was called “The Reshaping of British Railways” and the bureaucrat was Richard Beeching. The report contained such chapter headings as “Stopping-Train Services” and the less-than-thrilling “Present Method of Handling Freight Traffic”. In cool, calm prose it explained how Britain’s future methods of handling freight and people would be different: 2,363 stations, it explained, would be closed and 5,000 miles of track removed from the passenger network. Britain’s railways must be reshaped “to make them pay”.

Rarely has a civil servant provoked such outrage. Thousands protested; newspapers lamented; a politician was even burned in effigy. To this day, for Britons of a certain age, he remains a bogeyman. The report itself metamorphosed into a variety of bloody metaphors: it was the “Beeching Axe” or the Beeching “scalpel”, and its consequences were “death”.

The Beeching report crept into everything from poetry (John Betjeman wrote a bad poem about it) to song and television—in the 1990s the BBC produced a short-lived comedy series called “Oh, Doctor Beeching!”. What the cuts removed was not merely steel and sleepers but an ideal. Until Beeching the country could still see itself as a place of quaint stations and polite porters and 4.50s from Paddington, an English sort of Eden. After, it could not. Beeching was not frugality: it was the Fall.

In truth, Britain’s railways had been in a bad way long before Beeching wielded his axe. In the 19th century railways had unspooled across Britain with Victorian vim and an equally Victorian absence of central planning. One train line to Canterbury finished six miles shy of the city centre because that was where the money ran out. The arrival of the motor car siphoned passengers away from the trains: by 1929 some stations already had less than 10% of their pre-1914 traffic. Laws and wars exacerbated problems. Government pricing obligations condemned rail to uncompetitive rates; heavy use of the trains in the second world war ran infrastructure into the ground.

By the 1960s the railways were in a very bad way. Poets such as Edward Thomas might immortalise Adlestrop, where the only sounds on the “bare platform” were the hiss of steam and the blackbirds. Accountants, however, wished for more noise. The railways were losing over £100m (£1.7bn, or $2.1bn, in today’s money) a year in 1962. Adlestrop was one of the stations listed for the Beeching Axe.

In the years since the report was published and the cuts enacted, anger has been replaced by analysis. It is now known that one of Beeching’s biggest errors was a breezy assumption that cuts would not cause decline but merely reflect it. Future population patterns, the report announced, will “be basically similar to that which exists at present”. That was nonsense: by reshaping British railways, Beeching reshaped Britain itself. A 2022 study by Stephen Gibbons at the London School of Economics (LSE) and his co-authors found that the places most exposed to the cuts saw much slower population growth than the places that were least affected.

Although Beeching had correctly diagnosed Britain’s problem—that its circulatory system was struggling—his cure was ill-conceived, says Terence Gourvish, an associate professor at the LSE. “The whole body was ailing” so “chopping off the fingers” didn’t help. Axing stations was not only ineffective (since it saved little money) but its results were irksome. Today it is all but impossible to traverse swathes of Britain without describing a “V” shape via London, since so many east-west lines went as a result of Beeching. Attempts to restart some of these routes have begun but progress is painfully slow.

In the small village of Carno in Wales (population: 736) the locals are in little doubt about Beeching. Carno sits on the Cambrian Line, a string of small stations that run, like beads on a string, across the hills of Powys. The arrival of the train in 1863 was revolutionary. A noticeboard in a nearby village divides its history into two distinct eras: the Romans and the railways. Bernard Evans remembers travelling to school on the line as a boy. “We were thinking we were going into the modern world.”

Then, in 1963, the modern world retreated. Carno appeared in the mournful lists of stations that ended the Beeching report—like names on a war memorial, as Charles Loft, a writer, puts it. It closed in 1965; a campaign to re-open it has so far failed. Trains still rumble past but they no longer stop. Now, saplings grow on the platform. When asked what Mr Evans thinks of the closures, his answers are telling not merely in their tone but in their tense. He wishes the trains still ran. And when asked about the long-dead Beeching, his reply is simpler still: “Shoot the bugger.” ■

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