I'm old enough to remember the Dr. Beeching rail cuts of the 60's, when some 5,000 miles of track and around 2,300 stations were closed. I was living in the popular seaside resort of Silloth at the time, on the Solway coast on the branch line from Carlisle. When the line was axed, the town's economy virtually died overnight.. a fate common to many other places in a similar position. The car was king, and road transport was the future. With the benefit of hindsight, the policy was perhaps both extreme and unduly focused exclusively on cost-savings. As for Nationalisation, a simple return to the old model would be disastrous in terms of the drain on the public purse, but selectively, there may well be busy routes and networks which could lend themselves to introduction of a modified methodology, and which could still be profitable . Alternatively, if the fine focus on profitability was widened in order to view the railways as a Government-funded public service, it might be possible to extend the Nationalised network and to accept that there will be costs. There would certainly be ecological benefits as road transportation was reduced, plus the movement of people and freight would certainly help to underpin local industries. A complex equation, but certainly worth a close look.
