Britain: Clearing the Track

In the gloomy British Railways headquarters on London’s Marylebone Road, a room has been kept carefully locked for months, with its key entrusted to only one man. The room’s treasure: the data for a top-secret report on Britain’s rail system prepared by burly, brusque Dr. Richard Beeching, 49, who resigned two years ago as technical director of Imperial Chemical Industries to become the nation’s rail-car czar and the highest-paid civil servant ($67,000 a year) in British history. Last week the report was finally made public, and Beeching’s thoroughgoing case for a historic revamping of Britain’s railway system proved so compelling that the expected grumbles were outnumbered by the cheers. Said the Daily Mirror: “It’s tough, it’s brilliant, and it’s right.”

Cutting the Queen. The British invented railways, and oversold themselves on them. Britain has more track per square mile than any other nation and a rail station for every 2½ miles of track. Historically inefficient, Britain’s railways have become even more so since their nationalization in 1948, have lost money each year since 1953 at an increasingly alarming rate. In 1961 the loss was $381 million on revenues of $1.3 billion. As a businessman who believes that even a public service should be able to show a profit, Beeching was appalled by what he found. Fully half of the railways’ 17,830 route miles accounted for only 4% of the total passenger traffic and only 5% of the freight; half of the 7,000 rail stations produced only 2% of passenger revenues. Beeching hired away executives from such well-run firms as Unilever and Royal Dutch-Shell, surveyed every British firm that spent more than $28,000 a year on freight. The finding: British business was bedeviled by nearly 200,000 different freight rates.

Dr. Beeching’s prescription for what ails the rails is to cut service drastically. He recommends the closing of 2,363 passenger stations, and the suspension of passenger service on 5,000 route miles, most of which are already served by parallel bus routes; there would be no trains left on the Isle of Wight or north of Inverness in Scotland. Sparing nothing, Beeching even wants to shut down as uneconomical the station that serves the Queen’s Balmoral Castle in Scotland. Earmarked for scrapping are 1,200 of Britain’s beloved “puffing billy” steam engines, 350,000 freight cars and 7,800 passenger cars. By taking such measures, Beeching hopes to save as much as $412 million annually and eliminate much of the Railways’ deficit by 1970. But with Britain already plagued by rising unemployment, there will be labor pains if his ideas are adopted: he wants to pare at least 70,000 workers from the railways’ 475,000-man work force.

Liner Trains. Like most U.S. railroaders, Beeching also wants to carry more freight and fewer passengers. Hoping to attract more business from industry, he will ask for $280 million to start “Liner Train” service, in which piggyback trains would run between major British cities on frequent, fast schedules. Under Beeching’s plan, which Parliament is expected to adopt, the comfortable sound of the puffing billies chugging through the British countryside will become a thing of the past. Beeching is willing to trade it for the rustle of pound notes.