At one minute before midnight on Saturday 31st October 1964, the last passenger train left Blyth station in south east Northumberland for Newbiggin as passenger services along several lines in the area were withdrawn. The Newcastle Journal reported on the event:
“Mr. Bob Yellowley, a 70-year-old railway guard, blew his whistle and brought to an end the long history of the Blyth and Tyne line at the weekend. It was busier than usual for its last ever journey and left the station to the sound of exploding fireworks and the blare of the train’s hooter.”
Blyth, a town with a population of 40,000, was left without a railway service along with Newbiggin, Ashington, Bedlington and several other pit villages and towns. It was a scene which was being enacted across the country as the proposals contained in the notorious The Reshaping of Britain’s Railways (more usually referred to simply as The Beeching Report), published in March 1963, began to gather pace. The closure of the line to Blyth came towards the end of a year when over 1,000 miles of railways were closed. By this time closures had become so commonplace that this one only merited a couple of lines in the Railway Magazine alongside the lines between Aberdeen and Inverurie and between Keith Junction and Elgin, in Scotland.
Nearly 60 years on from the Report’s publication, it still causes controversy. Just two years ago the Secretary of State for Transport, Grant Shapps, said in the House of Commons that “I curse Richard Beeching every day in this job.” A few months later he launched a new fund proclaiming it would kick-start a reversal of the Beeching cuts. One of the first projects to get funding was a proposal to restore passenger services to these Northumberland towns.
One of the problems of attempting to form a judgement on the ‘Beeching Report’ and the subsequent closures is that many of the records used to justify individual closures have been lost or destroyed. However, information can sometimes be found in the archives of organisations other than British Railways or the relevant Transport Users’ Consultative Committee (TUCC). In this case information setting out the case for closure was shared with trade unions and this has been preserved in their records.
This article uses material from the National Union of Railwaymen’s archive in the Modem Records Centre at Warwick University.1 It looks at the case for closure as put forward by British Railways (BR) management and the counter-arguments from trade unions and local councils. In this way it aims to cast light on the more general debates about the way in which the closure programme was implemented.
A potted history of the Blyth & Tyne network
Before examining the closure in detail, it will be useful to briefly set out the rather complicated history of these branch lines. They formed part of what was known as the Blyth and Tyne network. This originated with the Seghill Railway which opened in 1840 from Seghill Colliery down to the River Tyne at Percy Main, a distance of about six miles. Although primarily intended to carry coal, the company started running passenger services on the route in August 1841. Growing congestion on the banks of the Tyne led to the development of Blyth as a major port for the export of coal and in 1847 the
