Basically puts the Beeching cuts down to the need to do SOMETHING after a decade of the railways losing ridiculous amounts of money and where many lines were of very limited value even including other social value. A few lines were probably not ideal to close but the planning, forecasting and accounting ability of the railways was very limited and it was hard to foresee some of the trends that would make them viable again. Focuses mostly on the political and economic aspects with the social stuff being very much secondary which makes the title a little misleading but with that caveat it's a well written narrative, although I'd have appreciated a few maps heh.

One thing that cropped up a few times was the total lack of co-ordination between road and rail. The Tories privatising road haulage etc in the 50s obviously hampered this significantly but it's mentioned that eg nobody on the rail side had any idea that the M25/26 was being planned along the path of the Westerham branch. This also led to rail replacement buses being useless because they just went from former station locations, which were generally in inconvenient places. There was also a failure to get to grips with the cost of roads - eg mention that one thing Beeching was wanting looked at when he left was increased taxes for heavy lorries because they weren't paying their way - apparently a concern shared at the treasury but never with any progress (In this case there's a suggestion one reason he left was because of his views on this conflicting with a TGWU official in the cabinet who were very supportive of road haulage).

The author doesn't consider anti rail bias as playing a significant role in the cuts. He points out motorways were promised by the Labour government in 1945 and the first finally opened in 1958 - if roads were seen as #1 priority more money would probably have been shifted from the hugely loss making railways. The assumption that rail was just going to continue to decline was simply based on the trends of the post war decades which saw a massive shift. It's important to view a lot of the switch to the car in this light, I think - it wasn't that it was being *forced* by the government, they were reacting to an incredibly strong trend that had alarming implications for congestion etc. There was no obvious reason to assume the trend would suddenly stop and people would switch back to less convenient trains (and this would certainly be true in rural areas where stations were inconvenient etc). From this perspective ideas like knocking down half of London to build the ringways seem due less to an infatuation with the car from planners and more fear of its effects. It's also worth linking this to assumptions made by railway planners - they didn't know what was being planned for road building but given the growth they assumed that most places which had road troubles would inevitably get theirs upgraded due to public demand and therefore it was safe to mark lines for closure. ( )