Thanks for the update Larry

Cheers for the update on the story, never thought I'd see you commenting on the railways though 😅

kzfaq.info/get/bejne/sLBldJuF2JepYpc.htmlsi=PY9vgavCCb0GfOnB

Well, 'restoration' would have involved relaying the tracks and running trains...

Sadly so many of places like this were turned in to holiday cottages

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tavistock_North_railway_station

he died win his happy place.

He probably would have been saddened that it was turned in to holiday cottages. The "flats" of the countryside.

@@WhatALoadOfTosca He probably would have been a damn sight more saddened if it was demolished. As it is, it's been restored and Grade II listed and there's even talk of bringing the trains back again - although not to that station.

@@gordonbruce2618 Either way not a good thing.

I wouldn't hold you breath, sadly. Only Scotland and Wales seem to be able to reopen railway lines.

I am guessing Stapleton was a Bodie rather than a Doyle fan. If you know, you know 😂

@@simonablett8613 Going on his haircut, yes. I was wondering what you were referring to there until I remembered The Professionals!

Are they? I really doubt it…

The people regret it. The government doesn't care.

@@_Madfly The government just cares about squandering millions on High Speed Rail.

The really shortsighted part wasn't the closures, it was the way the trackbed was parcelled up and sold off piecemeal, salting the earth so lines couldn't be reopened. It's not like the land was worth that much. Even Beeching himself didn't recommend that.

Serving all of 800 people a week it was doomed to close.

we are not yet the 51st state. like calling forwards attackers - in football ( not soccer )

In no way are you overthinking it because it's the absolute cold, hard truth. It's heartbreaking what happened to the industrial might of this once great land. All of it taken away without one single thought about what would happen to the communities that relied on those jobs and the sense of belonging that came with it. I see the chaos and apathy everyday here in South Wales. The Valleys have been utterly decimated ever since the coal mines were shut in favour of importing cheaper coal from China etc...

@@PJV1990 thanks Katie I appreciate you saying that. I work with an (amazing) guy that started the Men’s Sheds in Ireland. I hope there’s similar in Wales.

The 50s - 80s was en era were for whatever reason the government destroyed most of the old infrastructure

Tories gonna tory. It's what they do, asset stripping is their business.

@@Hackney_Boy-DoesntReadReplies the tories and labour are basically the same party. Both are leftist in nature. Now more so than ever.

Of course they do. It's Yorkshire.

That was the second series wasn't it? He lived an an old water tank in the first I think...

@@Larry Yes you are correct. I've got both series on DVD.

Yes @@Larry, he called it Castle Saburac or similar

It never made sense back then either ! Stranding rural communities to the bus. Many lines would have stayed open if Beeching could do maths. He only counted the revenue generated from the branch line, not from say London to the branch line. Furthermore, we now take into account things like social need and the environment. Just think of the waste, building lines, the construction deaths all to be ripped up. Sir John Betjeman knew we would regret it and he was right.

Sadly getting regular folk from A to B does not balance the books. Hence, we need to supplement that case with additional benefits.

You can live there. It is holiday cottages now.

It had boats instead iirc.

And now you can't buy tickets there either.

Beeching did not really come from a railway background and so it was thought of as a fresh look at the problem. Remember that the road transport lobby was well (or ill) represented in the government and with the rise in private car ownership a serious re-think was necessary on the part railways could play in an integrated system. That clearly wasn't going to happen. The Minister of Transport, Ernest Marples, with serious road transport interests, retired to, and died in, the South of France as I remember. There were some staggeringly filthy dirty tricks played in the anti-rail lobby to massage and downright falsify figures. But really the writing was on the wall at the close of WWII and 'The Railways' had been a convenient political football long before that!

​​@@ianmayes8072you are right about the scumbag Marples. Government corruption to the max: Marples was half of one of Britain's biggest road building firms, raking in huge profits from government contracts to build roads, like huge parts of the M6 motorway, and the Awsworth bypass in Nottinghamshire, etc. Beeching is just the guy who was in the public spotlight, so to speak, and everybody blames him, but it was the scumbag Marples with his corrupt racket, (mis)using his position as minister of transport to close and destroy so many miles of our railway network (& putting so many 1000's of people out 0f work in the process) in order to force people on to the roads (and so giving himself an excuse that there was a need to build more roads), so creating more profit for his own road building company (and pocket). Just 1 casualty of his regime was the Peak line (Derby to Manchester), which was fully financially viable; there was no valid case for closure, yet Marples, who owned the Bardon Hill quarries in Leicestershire, didn't like the quarries in Great Rocks Dale (near Buxton) competing with his quarries, which they did by bringing their stone over the Peak line, so he misused his office to get that line closed. It was later found out that he was fiddling his taxes and doing the country out of £1000's of unpaid tax, was tipped off of impending prosecution, and skipped the country to avoid being arrested .

Railways were in decline after people much preferred to use buses and coaches in the 1930's and cars from the 1950's. Essentially, railways became obsolete and alarmingly ran huge losses for years long before Beeching.

@@ianmayes8072 Marples allegedly evaded tax payments and scuttled abroad (where his money was) before he could be detained here. He eventually got away with it and repaid a fraction of what he'd owed.

I too played on that railway back in the 60s when the track was still down. It was known as The Rusties in my day. We used to access it down a gully off Keyston Rd. I am old enough to have seen trains on the line.

Specsavers on Monday?

as other have said, the station is still there and is for let cottages. they have recently reopened some stations in that part of the country that where closed at the same time. So potentially it could reopen at some point

...or maybe even have the line reinstated as a now profitable service, like Okehampton is.

@@henryrolls1655 That's what they should have done nationally instead of HS2. It's far more profitable to already immensely rich people to be destroying peoples lives whose property is in the way plus the countryside as a whole than to have a far more sensible and cheaper alternative.

HS2 if completed properly would have relieved pressure on the WCML which is running at capacity opening up more freight paths and taking lorries off the road, as it is they've already cut the Leeds leg of HS2 and this week, announced that the Manchester section is under review and may now not be built and the final few mikes into central London has been put back by at least two years due to cost. So what we will end up with is a High Speed rail service that stars at Old Oak Common, a complete faff to get to from certain parts of London and only goes as far as Birmingham and then use existing 125 mph lines for the remainder of its journey so billions of pound will have been wasted as the link will not do what it was intended to do.

Not far away in Devon was a working station which never had trains. Dartmouth was served only by a ferry from Kingswear, connecting with services to Paignton, Torquay and Exeter. There is a long-standing proposal to reinstate a local service from Tavistock to Plymouth, and one day the missing section between Okehampton and Tavistock (now partly in use as a preserved railway) may return. This would provide an alternative Exeter-Plymouth route inland from the vulnerable, flood-prone main line.

No he means the man

@@Croydon387 I'm talking about the train station

some of the devon heritage routes havent done that well

Very funny. You forgot to mention that some of the planned routes have recently been cancelled.

Rumour is that HS 2 is to be renamed " The Sewerage Line" as it will eventually link two moslem cess pits, Birmingham and London.

I think that was 1977. If I remember correctly BR (InterCIty and Awayday) changed agencies toward the end of 1976.

Many small rural stations probably never saw even 800 a month!

Hmm! Beeching was a pal of Marples, Minister of Transport, who had considerable financial interests in the road transport sector. The railways had suffered massive under investment during and after the Second World War but a decision was taken (justified in many ways) to slow a switch of power source from coal to oil because coal was available in this country (at what later proved to be considerable political cost) whereas importing oil would have been a disaster since Britain's foreign debts were horrendous and the the balance of trade dire. That is why the standard class engines were built, to keep the railways going until we could afford the oil tointroduce diesel traction. But some of those in power were convinced they cuold make more money from road transport than from an integrated transport system. So reports and evaluations were commissioned. And in order to get lines closed , especially those with marked seasonal variations in traffic, were assessed at their quietest times. There are many examples of huge and quite unecessaryinvestment programmes (freight yards, electric signalling systems, engine sheds) just so they would distort the figures. ("We can't possibly keep paying this year after year! " Much later railway staff would still say"Look out. They're going to close the line!" every time something was renewed or improved.) It is all very well being nostalgic about railways but they did have to change. It is just that it could have been done better.

People feel sentimental about all the closures but in truth, nationalised railways had been running massive financial losses for decades,...branch lines never made a profit ever since inception.

@@malthusXIII-fo3ep the station closure wasn't what I was referring to. It was more about the guy caring for it, mostly by himself, and knowing he's been dead for decades now. It also reminded me of the film Silent Running in a way.

Hundreds of small, minor stations probably never saw even 800 A MONTH!

You just silly billy, you.

It is an americanism and also a colonialism. Probably Neighbours.

Note that it is simply referred to as a 'station' as was the common usage then. You might say 'Railway Station ' and we had 'bus stations but never train stations.

@irsw51 No it was common usage as railway station too and the correct term. The title is wrong. Thousands of young people say should of instead of should have. It doesn't make it right! It's a silly argument.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tavistock_North_railway_station

I’m sure this is the station I’ve seen on Four in a Bed that’s been made into holiday cottages.

I don't think that was the right thing to do they could have made it into tourist attraction and brought some economy to local area running steam trains you get people from all around the world coming and that can be run off gas not just coal@@jonathanw844

Try reading the comments.

Of course it’s real.

@@jemmajames6719 See above comment.

And most rural areas havent got reliable bus services or none a toll, Last bus leave villages into town either 3 in the afternoon or just after 6 and passengers are left stranded.

​@scottpeacock5492 Nit just rural areas. I live in a city and buses on routes out of the centre stop running between 7pm and 8pm, meaning no bus back if going into the city centre for the evening.

They measured the number of passengers on the tourist line from kings Lynn to Cromer on a Tuesday in. February. Ernest Maples the minister of transport wife owned a road construction company

The Beeching Report was a sham. Doing surveys when schoolchildren were on holiday, seaside places in the winter, that sort of thing. Beeching admitted he wished he could have closed more. The vile b'stard. He could not even add up. He only counted revenue generated from the branch line. But failed to add fares from say London. This makes a big difference to say seaside branches of you added the daytrippers and holidaymakers. He literally did more damage to Britain's railways than the Luftwaffe !!

​@keithmacdonal2466 most of the checks on lines performances were done like this...they knew what they were doing did the Tories..oh yes the Tory government..Beeching was the fall guy.

Ernest Marples and his road building business, these days it's Jacobs infilling old bridges to stop greenways being built. Never underestimate the car lobby.

Beeching only counted revenue generated from the branch line not the money from say London. If he had done his sums correctly, few lines would have closed.

@@Hackney_Boy-DoesntReadRepliesthe road network was pretty rough but even so more people indeed did the local journeys by car , it took ages to get the Okehampton by-pass planned approved and built which was the main bottleneck out of Cornwall to Exeter

​@@vicsams4431only around a fifth would have survived. Some lines were never going to survive. The worst of all of this is the tracks were lifted so quickly. When Labour took office they should have just mothballed lines,then we may have had some survive 😢

Using the financial model post Beeching, few lines would have closed. Indeed, had he done his sums right, he would have included revenue from cities TO the branch lines, not just counted revenue FROM the lines themselves. Then he fixed the figures, doing surveys when schoolchildren were on holiday, visiting seaside resorts in the winter etc. Beeching did more damage to our railways than the Luftwaffe !

And that was probably during the summer holiday season; dead in the winter. A heritage line before it's time, maybe it always was.

You are looking at this from a profit point of view and ignoring the public service aspect. As far back as the 1930s railway companies were looking at lower-cost ways to serve isolated communities using the existing infrastructure with lower-cost alternatives like diesel railbuses. Unfortunately WW2 put the kybosh on that! The motor car has been a blight on Britain. Road deaths dwarf railway fatalities, passenger mile for passenger mile (or at least they certainly did when I was working on the figures) and cars are a major contributor to atmospheric carbon dioxide, although no politician dares bit the bullet and say so!

Except for the weeds...