Inter-City To Baker Street

Had the mentality of that age continued you'd be lucky to be left with Baker Street to Wembley Park. Marylebone was proposed to be bulldozed and the trackbed converted to a bus way. As for Birmingham, the home of the urban motorway, Snow Hill had to come back from the dead and Moor Street almost.

The same era that produced single leaf D stock and '83 stock.

How times change, Neasden Junction has just been relaid to allow 75mph running, previously 40mph.

I suspect that it is a bit fanciful to suggest that, had Marylebone closed there would today have been a service from Baker Street to Birmingham. I've always been under the impression that the Marylebone closure proposal would have seen High Wycombe line trains diverted to Paddington, with only the Aylebury via Amersham route being diverted to Baker Street, or more likely just the passengers diverted, by forcing them to change to the Met at some point en-route.
The line between Northolt Junction and Neasden South Junction and its stations would have been closed completely. Thus any resurgence of Birmingham trains via High Wycombe would originate from Paddington, which is of course the station they traditionally ran from.

It's a long time ago,but I recall the plan being to convert the GC tracks from the North Circular at Neasden on to a bus terminal near Marylebone Rd as the two-lane express busway.
Aylesbury via Amersham services given back to the Met and Banbury (then the "end of the line" for Marylebone trains)/Aylesbury via High Wycombe all to originate from Paddington.
It was thought that the stations between Northolt-jct and Neasden S-jct (which only had a peak-hour service anyway) could easily be closed as there were alternative transport links available.
Glad it never happened!
It was the tail-end of a grander "rail-into-road" conversion lunacy of the 80s,which also proposed a motorway into Waterloo along the viaduct.This got short shrift,but the Marylebone busway hung around as a plan for a bit longer.
Given the effective retention of Marylebone as a bus terminal,it's hard to see the advantage of the plan over the railway,apart from relieving Finchley Rd of its Coach traffic....but practicality wasn't really the issue,and the plan must be seen in the context of the irrational hatred of railways endemic in the Thatcher government.
Thatcher,it is said,proudly stated that she never rode a BR train during her whole time as Prime Minister.
Mind you,she also said that any man still riding a bus after the age of 26 could count himself a failure in life....but that's another story...

Some interesting hypotheses there. One of the things the government of the day quickly discovered was that you simply can't pass 2 road coaches through a double track railway tunnel without a serious risk of collision. As for 2 double deckers, forget it! Hence, going slightly off-topic, we have the great Cambridge mis-guided busway.

As for turning Waterloo into a coach station, think of all the coach driver jobs that would have been created; the chaos that would have happened at Richmond when they all leave the busway and join the Chertsey Road...

Remember, it was Thatcher who closed Acton Works, Chiswick Works et al. It was also one Mr. D. Thatcher who was a principal shareholder in the company that boughtChiswick works. Vested interest?

I agree with you entirely,Redsetter...but as Castlebar has pointed out elsewhere,these attitudes pre-date Thatcher in government circles,although she was most publicly associated with them.

It's always good to hear things that you always suspected,confirmed as true from a variety of sources,years later.
I grew up in the 70s and 80s wondering about the vandalism of the railways and the contrast between the Modernisation Plan and the commissioning of the Beeching report only a few years later.
Sometimes it is quite simply down to a few personalities and their weaknesses....but their decisions can blight a country for generations.
During the late fifties,the esablishment embraced roads and thenceforth have regarded railways as a nuisance only to be tolerated at best.
This was almost certainly,I realise now,to a great extent due to the enormous Construction lobby at work (Marples/McAlpine/Bovis),pushing at an open door in the Government....and,as the film "How to get ahead in advertising" written by Bruce Robinson points out....the Establishment hate the railways because they are ALREADY THERE and so what's to build? where's the profit? Where are the new jobs to announce?
We all know how one-sided and short-sighted this is,but it makes perfect sense to the construction lobby and a Civil Service trained to think along such lines for the last fifty-odd years.
It'll take a good few years yet,to expunge such attitudes....

I am glad Marylebone didn't become a coach station perhaps part of TfL. They may have based the design on VCS. This as a coach station
is an absolute disaster. No way can it cope with the number of passengers that travel by coach from there each day. An accident waiting to happen perhaps.

How on earth will it cope with next years influx of Olympic visitors

Come to think of it how will London cope. I myself will be going to the remotest part of Norfolk for two weeks sailing.

I know this is slightly of thread but is there a discussion going on about Olympic travel and how LUL will cope.

I know this is not the place to discuss Victoria Coach Station but as we are talking about transport in London I didn't think a brief mention wouldn't go amiss. Although I worked on LUL for 10 years then another six at the LTM. I have vey limited knowledge of the Bakerloo line including Marylebone. However I have used it once to travel to London from Wembley and found it to be quite a good station.

I think the plan that was mooted a few years ago about having Satellite coach stations around London so there would not be any need to cross London may have worked. This would have no doubt increased the loadings on other transport modes. I think TfL would love to dispose of VCS. Think of how much money they could get for all that prime Belgravia land.

Enough of this. Let the Met go back to Aylesbury

BTW I worked for for National Express for five and half years on the coach side so I have some knowledge of that company