Rail travellers deserve better than a half-hearted attempt to reverse the Beeching cuts

Resuscitating the railways requires strategic vision, not photo opportunities from government ministers

Grant Shapps has parroted the same plan that Boris Johnson (AFP/Getty Images)

Long-suffering passengers on Northern Rail or TransPennine Express must wish trains in northwest and northeast England were as predictable as politicians’ promises to reverse the “Beeching Cuts” – the wholesale amputation of the nation’s transport infrastructure in the 1960s and 70s.

Chris Grayling, who in a crowded field may yet triumph as worst-ever transport secretary, said in 2017 that the government was looking at reopening routes such as the Ashington-Blyth-Tyne line in Northumberland.

At Christmas 2018, his Department for Transport (DfT) reiterated it was “working with promoters to explore opportunities to reopen routes cut under Beeching”.

Before the 2019 general election, Boris Johnson promised a £500m Beeching-reversal fund. And before the first month of 2020 is out, the current transport secretary, Grant Shapps, has parroted the same plan.

Evidently, if a policy is worth announcing once, it is worth announcing four times. But how worthwhile, exactly, is the half-billion-pound boost for connectivity?

The outstanding success so far in a fairly half-hearted campaign of Beeching reversals is the Borders Railway. The Scottish government restored 30 miles of track connecting the East Coast main line east of Edinburgh with a car park called Tweedbank. The project came in at £300m. But a £500m budget would have produced a more valuable and environmentally beneficial railway, with twin tracks, overhead wires and an extension of less than two miles to the historic town of Melrose.

Real vision would restore the line all the way to Carlisle, where it would provide priceless resilience for the rather too frequent occasions when either of the main north-south lines is disrupted. But in delivering election pledges, Boris Johnson’s government evidently prefers piecemeal and cheap over coherent and expensive.

The shadow transport secretary, Andy McDonald, promptly condemned the latest rail rehash as “meaningless.” Labour is less well placed to criticise the dismemberment of the national network that the Conservative government prescribed in the early 1960s with a campaign of butchery described as The Reshaping of British Railways. Much of Dr Beeching’s dirty work was put into practice under Harold Wilson’s administration from 1964 to 1970.

Grant Shapps chose to reannounce the rail revival at Fleetwood. Welcome though restoring the Lancashire port’s place on the rail network would be, Beeching’s cruellest cuts were those that severed arteries: Buxton to Matlock in Derbyshire, which disconnected Leicester from Manchester; the inland route across Devon, providing a priceless alternative to the storm-pummelled coast line via Dawlish; and the tracks that actually enabled passengers to travel from Cardiff to North Wales without visiting England, twice.

Resuscitating the railways requires strategic vision, not photo opportunities.