1949 London Railways Plan

Ruth Marples had been Ernest's secretary before she became his second wife. She became the owner of his shares in the company Marples Ridgeway when he had to sell them on becoming Minister of Transport.

This country was bankrupt after the second world war and there were bomb sites all over London which did not start to disappear until the early seventies; 25 years after the war.
Housing was the priority for the MacMillan government, not railways. Plymouth had to be rebuilt as did many cities. America was investing in Germany.

TV film series such as Gideon's Way (police series) which had a lot of location filming in London feature the devastation and poverty in London. Danger Man hourly series (spy series) often reflected the Wilson government obsession with exports which became the new priority.

It is ironic as bankrupt as the country was the NHS was created and we put on the 1948 Olympics despite food rationing continuing into the fifties.

It amazes me nowadays how our businesses are creating so many jobs in the current economic climate which is acting as a magnet for the unemployed of the world creating pressure on the railways, housing (thousands of houses being built in the South West to cope with white flight from the big cities), and the NHS.

Dr Beeching was asked the wrong question. For the previous century or so and for at least a couple of decades after Beeching, the policy assumption was that there was a profitable core to the railway system (and indeed to the bus and tube networks throughout the country). Indeed, the accounts of many operators (including BR) were in the black for some years after the War. With the benefit of hindsight, we know now that all these businesses were failing to renew their assets and were running the businesses down, but accounting practices then failed to show this. The railways were an acute case as most of the capital had been written off years before when the pre-Big four acquired lots of country branch line companies for a shilling in the pound with local shareholders taking the hit. This capital was never replaced so even the modest returns (3-4% pa) on the postgrouping system were based on the wrong numbers. The easy assumption was that this would continue after nationalisation. When the even the modest returns failed to materialise, the government had no alternative policy to hand - it still thought that efficiency savings could be found and the returns return, as it were.

You will notice that the state had, actually, no idea what the railways were for, and until it could answer that question, it was impossible to make the case for subsidy. The only reason the Beeching closures came to an end was that Ministers could no longer stand the continual political pain daily served to them by the constant drizzle of closures. ..They were forced shortly afterwards to start paying subsidies, but they still had no idea why (other than as the price of avoiding pain). The notion that subsidy is buying some quantifiable public good such as planning gain is a very recent one indeed so far as the national railway system is concerned. LT, of course, had spotted the problem back in GLC days and evolved a robust intellectual basis for subsidy. DTp resisted the extension of those processes to BR, still clinging to the belief that somewhwere there was a sunny uplands of self-sufficiency. Even sectorisation (and the subsequent development of O4Q) was intended to corral and expose the lossmaking services; unfortunately for the politicians, this had precisely the opposite effect as it showed the lossmaking services were concentrated away from the south east in marginal constituencies.

En passant, I might add that even if Beeching had been asked the right question "why do we have the railway system?", he would have , in the early '60s, not had any analytic tools to such as CBA or GVA to answer the question.

It is an open question as to whether the franchising system actually answers the question either. My money is on "no", as evidenced by the range of negotiated outcomes on fares and "improvements" that goes on after award - if there was a good or justifiable level of subsidy in mind, these things would have been fixed at the time of tendering.

@chris M -and therein lies the recent (ie in the last 40 years) difference between LT and BR. It's only since about the mid-90s that DfT has begun to pay any attention to the use of CBA embracing all those things you mention, and then not consistently.