Dr Richard Beeching

Richard Beeching was not a railwayman. He was a physicist and engineer from the chemical industry, brought in to apply business analysis to a railway that was losing money heavily, and the report that carries his name became one of the most argued-over documents in British transport history. His name is now shorthand for the closures of the 1960s, though the policy behind them was the government’s as much as his.

Before the railways

Beeching trained as a physicist and made his career at Imperial Chemical Industries, where he rose to the board as a technical director. His reputation was as an analyst who followed the figures, and it was that reputation, rather than any railway experience, that brought him to government attention.

Appointment

He was appointed to the British Transport Commission in 1961, on the recommendation of a committee set up by the Minister of Transport, Ernest Marples, to advise on the reorganisation of the nationalised transport industries. When the Commission was replaced by the British Railways Board at the start of 1963, Beeching became its first chairman. His salary, said to match his ICI pay, was widely reported and became part of the controversy.

The reports

The Reshaping of British Railways was published on 27 March 1963. It set out, with maps and traffic tables, the case that a large part of the network carried very little traffic and could not be made to pay, and it recommended widespread closure and concentration on the profitable trunk routes and freight flows. A second report, The Development of the Major Trunk Routes, followed in 1965 and is far less remembered. The first report is examined in detail on the Reshaping Report page.

After British Railways

Beeching returned to ICI in 1965 and was made a life peer the same year, as Baron Beeching. He took little further public part in railway affairs. His reputation has been reassessed by historians since: some argue that the closures were driven by government policy and the assumptions of the age of the motor car, and that Beeching was the instrument rather than the author of that policy. Others hold that the traffic survey on which the report rested was too crude to justify the scale of what followed.