The Beeching Legacy

By Phil Horton

The first edition of this popular volume has been out of print for several years and has become much sought after.

Produced in black and white, the first edition was the first volume in the series, taking a detailed regional look at the Beeching Report, its proposals for closures and modifications of the UK railway network.

The report has become legendary and the interest and debate it generated is no less today than it has ever been since first published. Indeed, with railways now rejuvenated and passenger numbers growing ever larger, the reflection on what Beeching got right and what perhaps in hindsight got very badly wrong makes for fascinating reading.

This new, expanded second edition has been completely reworked and is now published with color illustrations both new and replacing the original black and white images where possible. The text has been expanded and updated as appropriate and there are 32 extra pages, bringing the new edition to 192 pages.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Silver Link
• Release date: Oct 24, 2019
• ISBN: 9781911658795

Phil Horton

Philip Horton was born in Bath in 1947 and was educated there before leaving to go to university. He developed an early interest in two rather disparate subjects: natural history and railways. Both have stayed with him, the first as a career, the second as a hobby. He has had numerous articles published on a wide range of railway-related topics over more than 30 years. Latterly, he has been a regular contributor to the magazine Narrow Gauge World. It is, however, only since his retirement that his first book: Volume 1 of his ‘Beeching Legacy’ series: ‘The West Country’, based on his travels in the 1960s, was published by Silver Link in 2010. Four more volumes followed, which cover the whole of Wales and southern England respectively. A second edition of Volume 1 is about to be published. Three of his books: The Last Years of BR Steam Around Bath (no. 64), Rails to the Yorkshire Coast (no. 86) and The East German Narrow Gauge (no. 101) have appeared in Silver Link’s Nostalgia Collection.

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