Revisiting Dr Beeching – the butcher or the moderniser of the railway?

Robert Cochrane, Visiting Professor, Imperial College

05 April 2013

Robert A Cochrane has 50 years‚ experience of the planning, financial appraisal, design, construction and operation of transport facilities in Europe, Australia and East Asia. His railway experience as a designer and builder includes the standardisation of the Australian railway system and the construction of the Hong Kong Mass Transit System. As a planner, he carried out studies for the Channel Tunnel and for the improvement of trans-continental railways in Asia and the Middle East.

Beeching: what would he have made of HS2?

Derogatory phrases such as “Beeching the Butcher”, or “Beeching’s axe again!” tend to appear whenever there is a reference to the Beeching report or proposals are made to reduce rail services. And the effect of the “shortsighted closure of the branch railway and the village station under Beeching” forms an essential element in the local folklore of some 2,000 British villages. Yet few can have actually read the Beeching report, The Reshaping of British...