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Scotland’s Lost Branch Lines: Where Beeching got it wrong
By David Spaven. Published by Birlinn, 297 pages, £30.00, Hardback. ISBN 978-1 83983-019-8
In 1962 a Scottish civil servant called Frank Spaven sent his colleagues a memo pointing out that the cost of replacing and repairing wagon tarpaulins was greater than the supposed savings from closing branch lines. Sixty years later, his son David has chronicled the ruthless programme of railway service withdrawals that characterised that decade – and which failed to generate as much controversy as it should
