The closures did not happen in a single year. They ran from before the 1963 report through to the early 1970s, with the heaviest years in the middle of the 1960s. This page sets out the chronology year by year, so that a line or station can be found by when it closed rather than by where it ran.
The shape of the decade
Closures were already under way in the years before the Reshaping Report was published on 27 March 1963. The report accelerated them, and the mid-1960s saw the withdrawal of many secondary and branch services across every region. Some of the most contested closures, among them the Waverley Route in the Scottish Borders, came at the very end of the decade. A number of routes proposed for closure were reprieved, and a few have since reopened.
The year-by-year entries are being compiled from the closure notices, with each closure linked to its line page and to the closures database. Dates are given carefully: the last advertised passenger train, the formal closure, and the lifting of the track are distinguished, because they often fall in different years.
Not every closure of the 1960s was a Beeching closure. Some lines had been listed for withdrawal years earlier; others closed for reasons the report never mentioned. Where a closure sits outside the Reshaping proposals, the entry says so, rather than folding every loss into a single story.