🚀 go-pugleaf

On 7 Apr 2006 04:45:28 -0700, angus_creech@hotmail.com wrote in
<1144410328.642461.71090@i39g2000cwa.googlegroups.com>, seen in
uk.railway:

> > The Big 4 had been closing branch lines during the 1930s (and earlier)
> > as road competition bit. WWII obviously meant other things took
> > preference, but I think we can reasonably assume that post-war the
> > closures would have recommenced as more and more people got cars, more
> > and more freight went onto the roads and the service levels offered by
> > the railway became less and less attractive to users.
> 
> I won't deny either that nearly all your points are valid, nor that
> many lines were kept open that were uneconomic, but clearly the Labour
> government at the time had an agenda -- one that did not include
> railways. Further to that, Beeching's criteria for closing
> lines/keeping them open were crude at best: 

You seem to assume that railway closures happened only in the 1960s,
and only as a result of the Beeching Report. They didn't.

Railways were being closed into the 1970s by governments of both
colours, blue and red.


[...] 
> Secondly, while road strategy may have been important, 

I did not mention road *strategy*. Read what I said, rather than what
you want to believe I said.


[...]
> While the British railway system was indeed a hulking, overweight
> behemoth, it's my belief that were it not nationalised it would've
> simply shed a few pounds, rather than going for drastic surgery.

If you research the behaviour of the Big 4 in rural England during the
1930s, I think you'll eventually come to the conclusion that drastic
surgery is precisely what would have resulted. The difference is that
instead of happening in a couple of decades, it would have been spread
over a longer time.

YMobviouslyV, of course.
-- 
Ross, in Lincoln, most likely being cynical or sarcastic, as ever.
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