It was 60 years ago on March 27, 1963, that BR chairman Dr Richard Beeching’s report, The Reshaping of British Railways, was published. A seminal landmark in UK railway history, it took an accountant’s approach to the eradication of loss-making lines within a national basis, rather than region by region.
Despite the mounting BR deficits in the face of the mass switch from rail to road transport, the report was famously greeted with anger and hostility from large swathes of the public. In the campaign for the 1964 General Election that followed, Labour vowed to sack Beeching and reverse all of his cuts. Labour won – and not only continued with the Beeching cuts, but after his departure from BR, went on to make more of its own. On May 21, 1969, in a classic role reversal scenario, Beeching officiated at a ceremony to reopen a closed line – that of the former GWR Totnes to Ashburton branch, which had been restored for heritage purposes by the Dart Valley Light Railway Association after it took ownership in October 1965, its founders initially having looked at reviving the Kingsbridge branch that closed in 1963.
Sadly, despite its early success as a heritage railway and tourist attraction, part of the Ashburton branch could not stave off a second closure, when the northern section from Buckfastleigh to Ashburton was severed for the widening of the A38 into the Exeter to Plymouth trunk road. However, 10 years after the Beeching report came another landmark – one that what might well be considered the first example of privatisation of part of the national network, as opposed to the restoration of a closed line by an enthusiast group purely for heritage purposes. Shockwaves reverberated with the seemingly audacious announcement that the Dart Valley Railway was to buy itself a
