Changing tracks: can railways reconnect the UK 200 years on?
Two hundred years after the birth of the railway, the aftermath of the 1960s’ Beeching cuts are still being unpicked – but it’s not too late to harness the power of the rail to restore mobility, reconnect communities and reshape our future
Summary
Two hundred years after Britain’s first passenger railway, writer and host of #railnatter Gareth Dennis makes the case for a rail renaissance. Dennis explores how the legacy of the Beeching cuts still shapes inequality and disconnection in the UK – today perhaps felt most strongly in the places between towns and cities. With HS2 curtailed and mobility gaps widening, Dennis argues that restoring rail isn’t nostalgia – it’s a path to resilience, inclusion and growth.
This year, Railway 200 celebrates 200 years since the opening of the Stockton and Darlington Railway (S&DR) in the north-east of England. The historical significance of that particular moment in the development of railways to one side – the S&DR is neither the first of anything or the last of anything – it provides a welcome opportunity to evaluate what our railways have done, what they are for and how we can best harness them for good.
Railway realities
The earliest examples of railways we would recognise today emerged in Central Europe in the 14th century. Migration of Protestant mining engineers during the Reformation brought this technology to the UK, in places like Cumbria in the late 1500s. By the 1700s, high quality and easily mined coal gave Britain the edge in producing iron for the rails themselves, and in the 1810s the use of steam locomotives emerged as a practical way to greatly increase the haulage capacity of the system. The first modern railway began operation in 1830 – the Liverpool and Manchester Railway harnessed all of the technological developments of the preceding centuries and combined them with operational innovation and the capital freed by the demise of the transatlantic slave trade – at which point there was an explosion in the growth of the railway network, globally.
In the UK, this was led by hundreds of chaotic private enterprises, with many railway proposals essentially being elaborate frauds. This meant that the network lacked any real coherence, with duplication and doglegs being commonplace. Huge tracts of it were barely profitable, if at all. By the 1920s the railway network had already begun to retreat, a trend accelerated by the Second World War and nationalisation. Britain’s rail map required pruning.
From 1955 onwards, the nationalised railway industry invested massively in modernisation – including replacing and remodelling track, new centralised signalling, electrification and new fleets of trains – without an immediate improvement in its balance sheet, and government patience quickly ran thin. Unlike the embryonic motorway building programme, which was being delivered regionally by the then hugely powerful local authorities, railway modernisation was centrally administered with a need to satisfy the patience of the Treasury.
Industry reform followed in 1962, and the newly formed British Railways Board needed a Chair. Enter one of the great villains of contemporary British folklore: Dr Richard Beeching.
Beeching’s 1963 report, The Reshaping of British Railways, is possibly the most infamous white paper in British history, being remembered unfondly by many for swinging an uncompromising axe at the railway, intending to reduce network mileage by around a third and to close more than half of stations. Modernisation was already reducing railway mileage and simplifying railway operations, but Reshaping refocused these efforts, grasping the nettle of network and service ‘rationalisation’ far more assertively, listing what services would be lost, what stations would close and precisely how much smaller the railway would be.
As a result, then and today, it is understood as the ‘weapon that destroyed Britain’s innocence’, dragging us into the modern age where gently puffing branch lines were a thing of the past and the future was the motorway.
But our memory of this document is shaped by the story told about it rather than the actual impact it had. Beeching conjures up images of rolling soft countryside and stone cottage stations shuttered up mainly because it is the residents in these areas that had the time and wealth to paint that picture. Whether through the poetry of John Betjeman or the public campaigns in the Scottish Borders, the enduring memory of the ‘Beeching Axe’ is rural.
But the greatest negative impact of the government’s railway cuts – Beeching put his name to them, but successive governments enacted the closures – was not in lightly populated rural areas.
“Where the Reshaping report failed most deeply was in its inability to consider the long-term effects of its proposals on the fabric of a rapidly changing society”
In-between places
Where the Reshaping report failed most deeply was in its inability to consider the long-term effects of its proposals on the fabric of a rapidly changing society – one that would suburbanise dramatically from the 1960s up to the present day. Beeching hand-waved away the need for a deeper assessment of social benefit, determining that different measures of value based on such factors would have had a limited impact on his proposals. This was a severe oversight.
Much of the UK is a moderately populated hinterland including the villages and towns clustered around and between cities. A significant proportion of Brits live in these areas, which today are often post-industrial, poorly serviced and difficult, if not impossible, to access by public transport. And it is these areas that were most heavily impacted by the changes to the railway map.
Closing intermediate stations in favour of non-stopping long-distance trains, reducing or removing station capacity in city centres and closing local railway lines altogether – in all, these perfectly conspired to deny a rail service to a significant proportion of the population. Buses were intended to take up the slack, but the melange of private operators meant there was no coordination of services with what was left of the train timetable, and, in turn, those services were also reduced. People were pushed into their cars, locking up a greater proportion of their income into fixed costs. Car dependence then led to greater fragmentation of these areas as roads were widened and bypassed, deepening the sense of isolation of communities already suffering from sparse public services.
Much consideration is put to the death of the high street, but we can see how greater car usage justified (for contemporary policymakers) the rise of out-of-town retail and commercial developments, pulling jobs and housing demand out of areas still usefully served by bus or rail, in turn driving greater car usage, expanded road networks and reduced urban footfall as this doom loop drove even larger shifts to car-oriented development.
In turn, the lack of community identity, lack of public services, lack of meaningful jobs and general feeling of abandonment and isolation drove resentment politics that surged through the 2000s to today. Compounded with the unending rise in the cost of goods, energy and services, these areas have become politically volatile – and it can all be traced back to a decision about railways, albeit set into a wider set of policies ignoring the needs of the in-between places.
Further closure
In March 1967, Minister of Transport Barbara Castle began a process establishing a funding framework for railways which provided a necessary social good, acknowledging at last that an operating profit in a narrow commercial sense was an impossibility for Britain’s postwar railway system.
Beeching was long gone by this point. Railway closures continued into the 1980s, but the last year of significant contraction was 1970. British Rail had still not managed to find its way into overall profitability by then and so, by that narrow metric, reshaping had failed just as modernisation did.
The creation of the National Bus Company in 1969 had brought some level of coordination to bus services. However, the overall decline in bus services was not arrested, and there was no integration with rail provision. Then, less than two decades later, bus services were deregulated, obliterating a key component in Beeching’s justification for ceasing rail operations on many lines. Bus services continue to be cut to this day, with public transport provision in large parts of rural and semi-urban Britain being essentially non-existent.
Despite the long-lasting negative impacts of the Reshaping report on the fabric of British society, history judged Beeching’s dismissal of social benefit as a factor on the scale of railway closures as correct, as Castle’s social railway concept did not change the post-reshaping map very much at all. Cuts continued for a further decade.
Today, our contracted railway network is still trying to unpick the aftermath of Beeching. It is a jack of all trades and a master of none, with mixed traffic lines resulting in an intensively but inefficiently used system that prioritises long-distance passenger trains over local or suburban ones. High Speed 2 (aka HS2), originally intended to provide new high speed lines linking Manchester and Leeds in the north with Birmingham and London in the south, would have unleashed the full potential of our railway by taking the express trains – the ones that only stop in major stations – on to their own tracks. This would have freed up significant space on the existing railway for many more stopping trains, reversing the impact of Beeching by enabling more trains at more local stations, as well as creating capacity for more feeder lines to be opened to the in-between places that have suffered so much.
But this story of that enormous opportunity was not told, replaced in part by empty tales of economic rebalancing and faster trains. And that made it easy for government to throw the project on the skip when it wanted to tell a different story about Britain’s future.
“The choice is before us: abandon the in-between places for another two generations or change tracks”
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Beeching rerun
By 2023 the UK had abandoned delivering HS2 in even close to the shape it was originally intended. The consequences of that decision – one that the current government have dug in on rather than reversing – will be as long-lasting as those Beeching had his name pinned to exactly 70 years previously. Nearly two years on from that decision, and in a year of celebration of all that railways have given the world, the choice is before us: abandon the in-between places for another two generations or change tracks and unlock opportunity for millions, reversing real and perceived social injustices and setting the UK on a far healthier political course, where we can all be reminded what role the state can play in improving our lives.
The opportunity remains within our grasp. There is no material reason not to reinstate HS2 as planned – the land remains in public ownership and the economy is crying out for major capital investment. The social cohesion that has been eroded so severely over the last few decades can and must be stitched back together, and railways may be the most effective way of – quite literally – pulling us closer together again. Meanwhile, where rail investment has survived austerity cuts, we see enormous public demand for rail services in the in-between places, demand that is far beyond central government’s ability to predict: the Northumberland line snaking northwards from Newcastle is only partially complete with several stations still under construction. Yet its ridership has exceeded predicted levels by over five times.
Build it and they will come
In 2025, the railways’ purpose can be no more important: alleviate terminal political malaise and unlock sustainable growth. We don’t need new technology. We don’t need new models of funding. We don’t need to wait. The railway gives us the tools to fix the future, today.
RSA Spark: Railway 200 and beyond
Imagine a future where all our railways are designed to be good for the planet, to be built to last and to help people get skills and jobs, all while making sense for our wallets. As we approach the 200th anniversary of the first passenger service in 1825, we must consider how railways better meet the changing needs of future mobility.
This year, the RSA is proud to partner with Network Rail and Railway 200 on an RSA Spark brief to respond to this very opportunity. RSA Spark builds on the foundations of 100 years of the Student Design Awards for even greater impact. We welcome students 18+ from across the globe to grow and apply their agency, skills and creativity to real-world briefs that do good for people, places and the planet.
We are receiving and reviewing hundreds of creative submissions from students, and are excited to be exhibiting the most outstanding ideas at the RSA Spark Showcase in September 2025 at RSA House and on the RSA website. Sign up for updates or get in touch to partner on new briefs that we will be launching in September: rsaspark@rsa.org.uk
Gareth Dennis is an award-winning railway engineer and writer. He hosts the weekly #Railnatter show and is the author of How the Railways Will Fix the Future.
Sébastien Plassard’s classically inspired illustrations tackle modern concepts using imagery and linework reminiscent of mid-century drawings and prints.
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