'Bomber Beeching': Undo vandalism and get Britain back on track, Tony Gosling

[Whitehall_Bin_Men]

14 Nov, 2014
'Bomber Beeching': Undo vandalism & get Britain back on track
Tony Gosling

https://www.rt.com/op-ed/205547-beechin ... k-britain/




When the 50th anniversary of Britain’s ‘Beeching Report’ passed recently, magazines TV and radio all marked the occasion with retrospectives on the man who took a hatchet to half the 4,000-odd stations and 6,000 miles of Britain’s railways.

Back in 1963, Dr. Richard Beeching ripped the heart out of the world’s first and greatest railway network, but not one of those articles or programs mentioned that Beeching had no qualifications whatever for what was an accountant's job. His expertise was metallurgy and he'd just helped develop Britain's first atomic bomb.

Britain was the first country to industrialize and used her manufacturing muscle to become the great empire in the 19th century. It wasn’t just technology, like the invention of the steam engine, but a national policy of mass urbanization, transferring labor from agriculture to armaments and industry that put Britain ahead of the world. Mass evictions of the peasantry, known as enclosures, kept the wheels turning in the factories, William Blake’s ‘Dark Satanic Mills’ were filled with hundreds of thousands of homeless men with hungry families to house and feed, desperate for money for rent and food.

The wider empire was built on one particular invention, the railway. Moving coal, iron ore, wool and other raw materials as well as manufactured goods off the canals and uphill, down dale, cheaply and at speed gave Britain the edge as a massive shipbuilding program projected Queen Victoria’s power across the globe.

Even as Britain’s influence waned between the wars and the deliberate retreat from empire post WWII to make way for the US empire, the railways underpinned everything, moving people, goods and services, wherever they were needed and with a minimum of cost or fuss.

Across the Atlantic in the 1920s, though, people were about to be forced off the rails. Rockefellers’ Standard Oil Company teamed up with the Firestone Tire and Rubber Company, Mack Truck and General Motors automobile lobby to set up a bogus public transport firm National City Lines (NCL). Streetcar (tram) companies all over the US were taken over by NCL, which deliberately failed to maintain or replace worn out vehicles.

As streetcar lines collapsed, commuters were persuaded to buy automobiles that were rolling off the new production lines. Though the Standard Oil monopoly before it had been broken up by US antitrust laws, the Rockefeller shareholding family was finding new ways to extend its influence. Part of the NCL plan was to make future governments dependent on them for fuel tax revenue.

It was Nazi Germany that brought autobahns to the world, followed by US freeways and eventually European auto-routes and motorways in the 1960s. The agenda was threefold: shift travel away from unionized public transport, increase oil consumption – and therefore fuel and vehicle tax revenue - and finally to shift power, forever, into the hands of giant private oil companies like Exxon, Shell and BP.

This was a brave new fossil fuel led world where a dependency on energy would drive economic growth like never before. Governments and people alike would have to get used to the car. Public transport was way too fuel-efficient.

Portishead railway station in 1960 (Photo from wikipedia.org)

‘Beeching Report’: Myth v reality

A two-week rail strike just before the 1955 general election in Britain, which some now believe was deliberately provoked for political gain, brought the country to a halt. A 'state of emergency' was declared two weeks into June and the political classes were reminded just how reliant the nation was on the whim of transport unions.

Although the oil companies hadn't made it public, North Sea Oil had also been discovered, so in order to attract US investment into the ambitious offshore drilling program there was pressure from the oil lobby behind the scenes to open up a vast new market for petrol in the UK before releasing the cash to build the rigs. The new oil stream must not be allowed to depress the world oil price and demand for the petrodollar.

With consecutive governments, particularly Tory Transport Secretary Ernest Marples - who owned road-building firm Marples Ridgeway - the industrial lobby got its way. Passenger travel on the railways would in future subsidize bulk freight transport.

Even the newly-constructed state-of-the-art freight marshaling yards such as Whitemoor in Cambridgeshire were phased out, with the railways only taking container traffic or entire train loads of coal, ore, etc. for big business. One third of the rail network and half the stations had been closed.
Who was 'Ax Man' Dr. Richard Beeching?

Retired railway manager and author Ted Gibbins explained in his ‘Blueprints For Bankruptcy’ (1995) that the government’s British Transport Commission, later the British Railways Board too, had been consistently forced to keep fares artificially low by the government. The railways had been 'regulated' into making a loss year after year, when on a looser rein they could easily have turned a profit.

Both in 1963 and five decades later in 2013, commentators mused about Beeching’s credentials for the job of ‘reshaping’ Britain’s railways. And well they might. The plan was sold to public and politicians on two myths: those railways could no longer make money and that the door-to-door technology of the motor car was simply more convenient. Few seemed to envisage the long commutes and choked roads of today.

So it was with the stage set for the revolutionary motor car which was already sweeping across the United States and Germany that, out of nowhere, Beeching stepped on to the national stage with the grim news that Britain’s railways’ days were numbered.

In ‘Doctor Who? Atomic Bomber Beeching and His War on the Railways’ (2013 eBook), former editor of the British Aircraft Corporation’s magazine and MEP Richard Cottrell was the first to expose the Ax Man’s shadowy past.

Introduced to the British public simply as chairman of Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI) Beeching's link to explosives and nuclear weapons was never mentioned.

After a stint at the Woolwich Arsenal designing anti-tank weapons in World War II, Beeching had been moved on to the top secret ‘Tube Alloys’ project which was a cover for the development of the first British atomic weapons. At Royal Ordnance’s secret Fort Halstead base under the North Downs near Sevenoaks in Kent, Cottrell reveals, Beeching’s expertise in metallurgy made a key contribution to Britain’s rudimentary nuclear arsenal. The success of Britain’s 1950s atomic testing program brought Beeching the top job at ICI.

Qualifications in metallurgy and state-of-the-art explosives were not, you might think, the ideal qualification for a man whose job was to go through the accounts of British Railways with a fine toothed comb. No, the reason Beeching was hired was because the Conservative government had already decided his job was chop up the railways to make way for the motor car and they needed a figurehead that could keep his mouth shut.

With lines to be closed decided before Beeching's 'surveys' took place civil servants at the Department of Transport set about the simple but impish task of meddling with train timetables to make sure branch line trains left just before connecting trains arrived, nudging ever more passengers off the railways. Running costs of lines they wanted to close were grossly inflated, but nether rail unions nor public were allowed to see the figures to check them.

Where these fraudulent figures were exposed, as in the pamphlet ‘The Great Isle Of Wight Train Robbery’ (1969) press, public and political furor led to lines earmarked for closure being reprieved, but atomic Bomber Beeching ran a tight ship and exposures of his closure orders to scrutiny were few and far between.

A top secret de-industrialization plan was in place too. In late 1967, British Rail printed a secret 'Blue Book of Maps' with details of coalmines, steelworks etc. and associated rail lines secretly earmarked for closure over succeeding decades. Britain's devastating 1984/5 mine closure program and subsequent strike had been secretly anticipated by government and oil industry alike, decades before.

David Henshaw in his ‘Great Railway Conspiracy’ (1991) is one of the only analysts to have understood the secret Marples/Beeching axis untruth that rural rail, and urban rail outside London, could never pay its way, was simply propaganda cooked as a cover story, to take out the competition, by the oil industry and roads lobby.

An HST leaving the Cotswold Line at Wolvercot Junction, about 3 miles (5 km) north of Oxford. (Photo from Wikipedia.org)

Before addiction to oil & cars suffocates us all…

What hapless Britons are left with now after railway privatization in 1993 is the most expensive railway network in the world to travel on. In some places 10 times dearer than an equivalent journey in Austria, for example, a whole succession of racketeers from track and rolling stock owners to platform and turnstile operators draw their pound of flesh, from the great British public’s need to get around.

Banks and hedge funds own the rolling stock which is leased to deeply-indebted train operating companies such as First Group, which leases the bare minimum of carriages. This leaves trains jam-packed with standing-room only through large parts of the day. Even the minimum fares seem carefully pegged just above what it would cost in petrol to make a journey by car. A legacy, perhaps, of the energy industry's economic imperative, still nudging rail commuters to buy a car.

Along with electricity, gas, water, telecommunications, defense procurement, airports, the Royal Mail postal service, home care and housing, rail travel is just another government-approved scam. With commuters lining the pockets of overpaid bosses and shareholders, and exorbitant prices for what should be national utilities, turning a profit, at home or in business, becomes almost impossible.

Like energy and housing costs, travel costs by rail or car are slowly bankrupting families and small businesses alike. If policies don't change, all that will be left will be the boards of directors of the giant transnational corporations who have won the favor of what is now the ultimate power in the Western world, the banksters.
New Zealand discovered state railways work for public

Perhaps Britain's free post war socialist health service and social security miracle meant the British had it too good for too long? Perhaps because the London media is too close to the City's dark heart? Or perhaps it's just because all the main political parties have sold out? But the British public, it seems, will put up with anything. Not so in New Zealand, where privatization of the railways brought about a political storm as well as a split in the Labour party. It was re-nationalized in 2008.

Meanwhile, as the British government sinks ever deeper into the black it will be forced to consider the astounding success of Britain's only state run East Coast Main Line region which is not only top-rated in the UK for customer satisfaction but, unlike the privately run regions, has paid over a billion pounds into the treasury.

Nevertheless the government is determined to sell off the East Coast operating company two months before the general election in March 2015.

"Reprivatization of the East Coast Main Line defies all economic logic and is nothing less than an act of industrial vandalism," rail union leader Mick Cash told the Guardian in September this year.

It seems even with such a crystal clear example of the only state run railway being the best in the country the government still determined to overturn it and set up another racket with a Tory party donor in charge and hundreds of thousands of captive passengers as the victims.

It's a tough ask, but perhaps so close to a general election, and with Labour toying with the idea of rail nationalization, they, together with the commuting public could break the combined lobby of the oil industry, road lobby, media and banks? The railway racket has come to sum up everything about Britain's post 'swinging ’60s' decline, but perhaps, as in New Zealand the angry voice of commuters, squeezed in like sardines, and the cold hard economic successes of nationalization can turn things around?
Beeching's accidental stroke of genius

Bomber’s legacy, though, hasn’t been all betrayal. By accident his hatchet fell at the same time that Britain’s steam locomotives, kept on well beyond their continental networks because of Britain’s plentiful supplies of coal, were being replaced by diesels.

Those steam engines chuffed off to the overgrown lines that Beeching closed, and as a result many have been preserved. Now over 150 charitable steam railways, some of which are regular enough to be used by commuters, are dotted across the country on the old closed lines.

It is as if those heritage rail services are biding their time, waiting for the day when the policy-makers slip out of the grip of the oil lobby, regain their sanity and re-lay the old tracks. Travelers can then once again begin to pay, for the first time since the 1960s, just a little more than it costs railway operator, to get where they need to go.


Beginning his working life in the aviation industry and trained by the BBC, Tony Gosling is a British land rights activist, historian & investigative radio journalist.

Over the last 20 years he has been exposing the secret power of the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) and élite Bilderberg Conferences where the dark forces of corporations, media, banks and royalty conspire to accumulate wealth and power through extortion and war.

Tony has spent much of his life too advocating solutions which heal the wealth divide, such as free housing for all and a press which reflects the concerns of ordinary people rather than attempting to lead opinion, sensationalise or dumb-down.

Tune in to his Friday politics show at BCfm.

@TonyGosling
'Bomber Beeching': Undo vandalism & get Britain back on track
Bicester town station (Photo from Wikipedia) © Wikipedia

[TonyGosling]

Labour’s railway renationalisation should be directed at ROSCOs
Alejandro Gonzalez
Thu, Jul 18, 2024, 1:55 PM GMT+14 min read

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/labour-r ... 14697.html

The King's Speech at the State Opening of Parliament has signalled a significant shift in Britain’s railway sector, with Labour’s reform agenda aiming to renationalise passenger rail services. Labour plans to complete this transformation by 2029, leveraging break clauses in existing contracts to accelerate the process.

The forthcoming legislation will also establish Great British Railways (GBR) as a new public body to oversee the country's railways. This transition aims to improve service quality, enhance productivity, and reduce costs by eliminating fees paid to private operators.#

Privatisation & ROSCOs

The privatisation of the UK's railway system in the 1990s under John Major’s government resulted in the establishment of train operating companies (TOCs) and rolling stock companies (ROSCOs). TOCs were created to operate specific routes under franchise agreements. However, in September 2020, amid the Covid-19 pandemic and after 24 years, the government announced plans to terminate franchises for UK rail. Meanwhile, ROSCOs were established to own the passenger carriages and engines leased to TOCs and continue to operate in this capacity.

The pandemic lockdowns heavily impacted the profitability of TOCs, with revenues collapsing and government subsidies stepping in to keep the sector afloat.

According to Parliament's Public Accounts Committee, passenger train companies received £4.4 billion in subsidies in the 12 months up to March 2023, the latest year for which data is available. This amount marked a significant decrease from the £11.7 billion provided by taxpayers to support the passenger rail industry during the financial year 2020-21. In contrast, in pre-Covid 2019, passenger train companies required just £1.7 billion in subsidies.

In contrast, ROSCOs have thrived. According to the Office of Rail and Road (ORR), ROSCOs paid £409.7m in dividends in 2022-23, with profit margins soaring to 41.6%, as cited in The Guardian. These companies have benefited from "hell or high water" clauses in their contracts, ensuring lease payments continue despite falling passenger revenues.

Financial analysis by the ORR highlights that leasing costs for train operators fell slightly to £3.1bn last year but remain nearly 30% higher than five years ago, The Guardian reported in February this year.

The substantial profit margins and dividends of ROSCOs reflect a corporate arrangement where risks are socialised, and rewards are privatised. With taxpayer subsidies twice as high as pre-pandemic levels, the public effectively underwrites the £3.1bn spent annually on leasing trains.

The three main ROSCOs — Eversholt, Porterbrook, and Angel Trains — were created during privatisation and maintain their dominance today despite government efforts to bring in competition. Over the past decade, they have paid cumulative dividends of around £2bn. Eversholt, a subsidiary of CK Hutchison, paid £40.7m in dividends in 2022. Porterbrook, owned by a consortium led by Allianz and AIM, paid £80m. Angel Trains, majority-owned by PSP, paid £124.6m.

Rail union RMT's research indicates that Angel, Eversholt, and Porterbrook paid out nearly £1bn in dividends during 2020-21, despite significant taxpayer support to the industry. Much of these dividends went to overseas entities based in Luxembourg and Jersey.

As Labour moves towards nationalising TOCs, the public purse continues to subsidise ROSCOs' profits and dividends, suggesting these firms are prime candidates for nationalisation. However, the political appetite for such action is lacking. Keir Starmer's Labour prefers to address the widespread 'market failures' exhibited by TOCs in recent years.

However, under the existing arrangements railway leasing firms enjoy a highly advantageous position, and given the high entry costs for ROSCOs, a degree of competitive protection and unwarranted public subsidy.

Labour’s renationalisation efforts should focus on these rolling stock companies. By targeting ROSCOs, the government could reclaim a substantial portion of public funds currently diverted to private profits. This approach would ensure that the benefits of public ownership extend beyond operational services to include the assets and infrastructure critical to the railway system.

Renationalising ROSCOs would address the core inefficiencies and inequities in the current setup, providing a more sustainable and equitable future for Britain’s railways. It’s time to reconsider the distribution of risks and rewards in the railway sector, ensuring that public funds serve public interests.

Who owns the trains? ROSCOs and repatriated profits

UK rail reform draft bill unlikely to impact ROSCO credit profiles: Fitch

"Labour’s railway renationalisation should be directed at ROSCOs" was originally created and published by Leasing Life, a GlobalData owned brand.

[TonyGosling]

Riding the ROSCO gravy train

https://weownit.org.uk/blog/riding-rosco-gravy-train

20 February 2024

You may not have heard of UK’s private train-leasing firms, the ROSCOs (ROlling Stock COmpanies), but if you’ve travelled by train in the last 30 years you’ll have made their acquaintance. Maybe, like Money Saving Expert Martin Lewis described last February, you’ve stood up for the whole of a long journey, cheek by jowl with your fellow travellers, on an over-full train with only one working toilet. Or a train advertised as having 10 carriages turns up with half that number. Does that sound familiar?

Three ROSCOs were gifted a trading monopoly out of the privatisation and carving up of British Rail in 1994. Today those ROSCOs own most of the 15,200 vehicles that are registered to run on Britain’s railways, and they make their money by leasing those locomotives, freight wagons, and carriages to the train operating companies. In 2023 the profits of the ROSCOs tripled from £122.3m to £409.7m. Every time you buy a ticket to travel, a proportion of the cost goes on paying the rent being charged by the ROSCOs to the train lines.

The three private ROSCOs are Angel Trains, Eversholt, and Porterbrook. And while our train services have endured austerity cuts, rail worker salaries are frozen, and we suffer regular fare increases (including the latest one this month), their Fat Cat Controllers have been riding the gravy train and creaming off huge profits subsidised by YOU - the taxpayer.

Taken together, the three ROSCOs have seen their net profit margins treble in a year from 14.3% to 41.6%, and they paid dividends of £409.7m in 2022-23, up from £122.3m in the previous year. They have paid cumulative dividends of around £2bn in the last decade and the highest-paid directors earn almost twice as much as the chief executive of Network Rail. Across our entire rail network, ROSCOs are where the real money goes.

In common with so many other of our privatised industries, this money travels straight into the pockets of overseas investors:

Angel Trains is 64% owned by Canadian pension fund the Public Sector Pension Investment Board (PSP), with 10% owned by Arjun Infrastructure Partners, a London-based asset management firm. In 2022 Angel Trains paid dividends of £124.6m, and Malcolm Brown, its chief executive, was paid £900k.
Eversholt is a subsidiary of the CK Group. Their portfolio of UK companies also includes Northumbrian Water and UK Power Networks, which delivers electricity to London and the East and South East of England. According to its latest accounts Eversholt paid dividends of £40.7m in 2022, while its chief executive Mary Kenny was paid just over £1m.
Porterbrook is 30% owned by AIMCO, a Canadian pension fund; 30% by Allianz, a German insurance firm; 30% by asset management firms in Israel and the UK; and 10% by EDF which is owned by the French state. Porterbrook paid dividends of £80m in 2022 and paid Mary Grant, its chief executive, £1.2m.

So what does this mean for you, the hapless train traveller? The effect of the ROSCO monopoly, combined with a leasing model which discourages the companies from investing in their assets, means that the supply line of new rolling stock is choked and the average age of the existing stock has increased (16 years in the last year before privatisation to almost 20 years in 2017/18). Profits which over the years could have gone into building up to 1,000 new vehicles have instead been syphoned off to keep investors satisfied.

On top of that, the nature of the contracts between government and the train operating companies means that any shortfall between their revenue and their costs has to be met out of the public purse. This means we’re subsidising the rental cost of the rolling stock - almost a quarter of train companies’ operating costs.

No wonder that Mick Lynch, general secretary of the RMT union, says “there is a racket going on, where the structure of rolling stock leasing has just created massive dividends and massive profits entirely without risk.” Their complex financial arrangements are also very hard to untangle; which is possibly why Labour have not given the same commitment to bring ROSCOs in-house that they have for the train operating companies.

So remember, when you’re on the only train home, crammed together like sardines in a tin and clambering over scores of other commuters to get to your seat or the loo, that for the ROSCOs the gravy train keeps on rolling.

You can sign our petition to bring the railways into public hands HERE.

John Kay, Communications and Campaigns Support at We Own It.
John joined the WOI team in June 2023. Before that he worked in the Communications team at Oxford University Press. At 6’5” tall, he doesn’t like standing up in trains.

[TonyGosling]

'Bomber Beeching': Undo vandalism & get Britain back on track

By Tony Gosling, RT

https://www.panorama.am/en/news/2014/11 ... ing/166302

When the 50th anniversary of Britain’s ‘Beeching Report’ passed recently, magazines TV and radio all marked the occasion with retrospectives on the man who took a hatchet to half the 4,000-odd stations and 6,000 miles of Britain’s railways.

Back in 1963, Dr. Richard Beeching ripped the heart out of the world’s first and greatest railway network, but not one of those articles or programs mentioned that Beeching had no qualifications whatever for what was an accountant's job. His expertise was metallurgy and he'd just helped develop Britain's first atomic bomb.

Britain was the first country to industrialize and used her manufacturing muscle to become the great empire in the 19th century. It wasn’t just technology, like the invention of the steam engine, but a national policy of mass urbanization, transferring labor from agriculture to armaments and industry that put Britain ahead of the world. Mass evictions of the peasantry, known as enclosures, kept the wheels turning in the factories, William Blake’s ‘Dark Satanic Mills’ were filled with hundreds of thousands of homeless men with hungry families to house and feed, desperate for money for rent and food.

The wider empire was built on one particular invention, the railway. Moving coal, iron ore, wool and other raw materials as well as manufactured goods off the canals and uphill, down dale, cheaply and at speed gave Britain the edge as a massive shipbuilding program projected Queen Victoria’s power across the globe.

Even as Britain’s influence waned between the wars and the deliberate retreat from empire post WWII to make way for the US empire, the railways underpinned everything, moving people, goods and services, wherever they were needed and with a minimum of cost or fuss.

Across the Atlantic in the 1920s, though, people were about to be forced off the rails. Rockefellers’ Standard Oil Company teamed up with the Firestone Tire and Rubber Company, Mack Truck and General Motors automobile lobby to set up a bogus public transport firm National City Lines (NCL). Streetcar (tram) companies all over the US were taken over by NCL, which deliberately failed to maintain or replace worn out vehicles.

As streetcar lines collapsed, commuters were persuaded to buy automobiles that were rolling off the new production lines. Though the Standard Oil monopoly before it had been broken up by US antitrust laws, the Rockefeller shareholding family was finding new ways to extend its influence. Part of the NCL plan was to make future governments dependent on them for fuel tax revenue.

It was Nazi Germany that brought autobahns to the world, followed by US freeways and eventually European auto-routes and motorways in the 1960s. The agenda was threefold: shift travel away from unionized public transport, increase oil consumption – and therefore fuel and vehicle tax revenue - and finally to shift power, forever, into the hands of giant private oil companies like Exxon, Shell and BP.

This was a brave new fossil fuel led world where a dependency on energy would drive economic growth like never before. Governments and people alike would have to get used to the car. Public transport was way too fuel-efficient.

‘Beeching Report’: Myth v reality

A two-week rail strike just before the 1955 general election in Britain, which some now believe was deliberately provoked for political gain, brought the country to a halt. A 'state of emergency' was declared two weeks into June and the political classes were reminded just how reliant the nation was on the whim of transport unions.

Although the oil companies hadn't made it public, North Sea Oil had also been discovered, so in order to attract US investment into the ambitious offshore drilling program there was pressure from the oil lobby behind the scenes to open up a vast new market for petrol in the UK before releasing the cash to build the rigs. The new oil stream must not be allowed to depress the world oil price and demand for the petrodollar.

With consecutive governments, particularly Tory Transport Secretary Ernest Marples - who owned road-building firm Marples Ridgeway - the industrial lobby got its way. Passenger travel on the railways would in future subsidize bulk freight transport.

Even the newly-constructed state-of-the-art freight marshaling yards such as Whitemoor in Cambridgeshire were phased out, with the railways only taking container traffic or entire train loads of coal, ore, etc. for big business. One third of the rail network and half the stations had been closed.

Who was 'Ax Man' Dr. Richard Beeching?

Retired railway manager and author Ted Gibbins explained in his ‘Blueprints For Bankruptcy’ (1995) that the government’s British Transport Commission, later the British Railways Board too, had been consistently forced to keep fares artificially low by the government. The railways had been 'regulated' into making a loss year after year, when on a looser rein they could easily have turned a profit.

Both in 1963 and five decades later in 2013, commentators mused about Beeching’s credentials for the job of ‘reshaping’ Britain’s railways. And well they might. The plan was sold to public and politicians on two myths: those railways could no longer make money and that the door-to-door technology of the motor car was simply more convenient. Few seemed to envisage the long commutes and choked roads of today.

So it was with the stage set for the revolutionary motor car which was already sweeping across the United States and Germany that, out of nowhere, Beeching stepped on to the national stage with the grim news that Britain’s railways’ days were numbered.

In ‘Doctor Who? Atomic Bomber Beeching and His War on the Railways’ (2013 eBook), former editor of the British Aircraft Corporation’s magazine and MEP Richard Cottrell was the first to expose the Ax Man’s shadowy past.

Introduced to the British public simply as chairman of Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI) Beeching's link to explosives and nuclear weapons was never mentioned.

After a stint at the Woolwich Arsenal designing anti-tank weapons in World War II, Beeching had been moved on to the top secret ‘Tube Alloys’ project which was a cover for the development of the first British atomic weapons. At Royal Ordnance’s secret Fort Halstead base under the North Downs near Sevenoaks in Kent, Cottrell reveals, Beeching’s expertise in metallurgy made a key contribution to Britain’s rudimentary nuclear arsenal. The success of Britain’s 1950s atomic testing program brought Beeching the top job at ICI.

Qualifications in metallurgy and state-of-the-art explosives were not, you might think, the ideal qualification for a man whose job was to go through the accounts of British Railways with a fine toothed comb. No, the reason Beeching was hired was because the Conservative government had already decided his job was chop up the railways to make way for the motor car and they needed a figurehead that could keep his mouth shut.

With lines to be closed decided before Beeching's 'surveys' took place civil servants at the Department of Transport set about the simple but impish task of meddling with train timetables to make sure branch line trains left just before connecting trains arrived, nudging ever more passengers off the railways. Running costs of lines they wanted to close were grossly inflated, but nether rail unions nor public were allowed to see the figures to check them.

Where these fraudulent figures were exposed, as in the pamphlet ‘The Great Isle Of Wight Train Robbery’ (1969) press, public and political furor led to lines earmarked for closure being reprieved, but atomic Bomber Beeching ran a tight ship and exposures of his closure orders to scrutiny were few and far between.

A top secret de-industrialization plan was in place too. In late 1967, British Rail printed a secret 'Blue Book of Maps' with details of coalmines, steelworks etc. and associated rail lines secretly earmarked for closure over succeeding decades. Britain's devastating 1984/5 mine closure program and subsequent strike had been secretly anticipated by government and oil industry alike, decades before.

David Henshaw in his ‘Great Railway Conspiracy’ (1991) is one of the only analysts to have understood the secret Marples/Beeching axis untruth that rural rail, and urban rail outside London, could never pay its way, was simply propaganda cooked as a cover story, to take out the competition, by the oil industry and roads lobby.

Before addiction to oil & cars suffocates us all…

What hapless Britons are left with now after railway privatization in 1993 is the most expensive railway network in the world to travel on. In some places 10 times dearer than an equivalent journey in Austria, for example, a whole succession of racketeers from track and rolling stock owners to platform and turnstile operators draw their pound of flesh, from the great British public’s need to get around.

Banks and hedge funds own the rolling stock which is leased to deeply-indebted train operating companies such as First Group, which leases the bare minimum of carriages. This leaves trains jam-packed with standing-room only through large parts of the day. Even the minimum fares seem carefully pegged just above what it would cost in petrol to make a journey by car. A legacy, perhaps, of the energy industry's economic imperative, still nudging rail commuters to buy a car.

Along with electricity, gas, water, telecommunications, defense procurement, airports, the Royal Mail postal service, home care and housing, rail travel is just another government-approved scam. With commuters lining the pockets of overpaid bosses and shareholders, and exorbitant prices for what should be national utilities, turning a profit, at home or in business, becomes almost impossible.

Like energy and housing costs, travel costs by rail or car are slowly bankrupting families and small businesses alike. If policies don't change, all that will be left will be the boards of directors of the giant transnational corporations who have won the favor of what is now the ultimate power in the Western world, the banksters.

New Zealand discovered state railways work for public

Perhaps Britain's free post war socialist health service and social security miracle meant the British had it too good for too long? Perhaps because the London media is too close to the City's dark heart? Or perhaps it's just because all the main political parties have sold out? But the British public, it seems, will put up with anything. Not so in New Zealand, where privatization of the railways brought about a political storm as well as a split in the Labour party. It was re-nationalized in 2008.

Meanwhile, as the British government sinks ever deeper into the black it will be forced to consider the astounding success of Britain's only state run East Coast Main Line region which is not only top-rated in the UK for customer satisfaction but, unlike the privately run regions, has paid over a billion pounds into the treasury.

Nevertheless the government is determined to sell off the East Coast operating company two months before the general election in March 2015.

"Reprivatization of the East Coast Main Line defies all economic logic and is nothing less than an act of industrial vandalism," rail union leader Mick Cash told the Guardian in September this year.

It seems even with such a crystal clear example of the only state run railway being the best in the country the government still determined to overturn it and set up another racket with a Tory party donor in charge and hundreds of thousands of captive passengers as the victims.

It's a tough ask, but perhaps so close to a general election, and with Labour toying with the idea of rail nationalization, they, together with the commuting public could break the combined lobby of the oil industry, road lobby, media and banks? The railway racket has come to sum up everything about Britain's post 'swinging ’60s' decline, but perhaps, as in New Zealand the angry voice of commuters, squeezed in like sardines, and the cold hard economic successes of nationalization can turn things around?

Beeching's accidental stroke of genius

Bomber’s legacy, though, hasn’t been all betrayal. By accident his hatchet fell at the same time that Britain’s steam locomotives, kept on well beyond their continental networks because of Britain’s plentiful supplies of coal, were being replaced by diesels.

Those steam engines chuffed off to the overgrown lines that Beeching closed, and as a result many have been preserved. Now over 150 charitable steam railways, some of which are regular enough to be used by commuters, are dotted across the country on the old closed lines.

It is as if those heritage rail services are biding their time, waiting for the day when the policy-makers slip out of the grip of the oil lobby, regain their sanity and re-lay the old tracks. Travelers can then once again begin to pay, for the first time since the 1960s, just a little more than it costs railway operator, to get where they need to go.