Talk Morgan Forums Community The Malvern Arms The end of diesel?

Beeching gets a lot of blame, but if you look at railway history many more miles were closed by the railways themselves before Beeching came up with his proposals.

Whilst you are all correct in highlighting the failure of government policy, and the savage acts of Beeching, whilst romanticising the age of steam. We tend to conveniently forget what lead to much of this. Firstly, the UK nationalised industrial base could not be updated and receive all the necessary investment out of the public purse (tax receipts), especially as the UK economy was in steep decline. . Secondly the level of industrial unrest within the nationalised industries, eg the coal miners holding the country to ransom at every opportunity forced change.

Weren't the 90's known as a period of strong economic growth? This was when the railway went private.

Absolutely, but Beeching and all the Industrial unrest, the 3 day week, the oil crisis was in the 60's and 70's into the 80's when the UK was known as the 'poor/ sick man of Europe' when inflation etc was so out of control, the UK had to introduce statutory control over price increases.

De-nationalisation first started back I believe in the late 40's/early 50's with British Road Services went private, followed by not in any particular order eg British Coal, BL, British Steel, GPO, ICL, British Ports Authority and so on over the decades till it was Railways time. It was clear that the government's polices weren't going to .or could afford to continuously fund out of taxpayers money an highly inefficient and with massive industrial unrest nationalised industries forever. The growing pension bill alone in the nationalised industries was becoming unaffordable back in the 70's let alone the enormous capital requirements necessary to modernise our nationalised infrastructure. Each nationalise industry had it's militant union leader, eg the car industry was Red Robbo who caused more wild cat strikes over nothing, an almost daily TV news item in the Midlands when I was growing up. Not help by failures of management and a complete lack of spare cash to do anything. all of which contributed to the breakup of the monopolies which crippled the UK Industrial base and eventually lead to more and more offshoring

As Graham says, it wasn't just a 'Beeching Thing' ... I remembered seeing a rail map of (independent) Ireland that reflected the same loss of service coverage ... unrelated to UK Govt .... I suspect just a consequence of the rise and development of other ways to travel. Found these on the web and joined them.



K

So far they haven't produced a van capable of towing a 2 Tonne digger further than the end of the road or a car capable of towing a 15 cwt caravan from London to Cornwall without multiple recharge stops.

An acquaintance briefly owned a plug-in hybrid that was touted as Ideal for short trips on battery power only. He tried it on a 25 km run to a town in the mountains not far from here. The road has multiple hairpin bends and the town is at an altitude of 700 metres higher than the starting point. The car could not make it on battery power. His conclusion was that it would be difficult for the car to do the round trip, on battery power only, to the nearest major town (10km away - 20-25km for the round trip) on a hot day with the aircon going.
He was also not all that happy with the performance.
After a few months he swapped the car for an ICE vehicle.

We saw a surprising number of EVs in Scotland, given the scarcity of charging points in the Highlands, and especially in Aberdeenshire with the focus there on oil.

Lots of home charging I would think. Outside the cities people tend to have room to park next to the house. We've owned our EV for 3½ years and never needed to use a public charge point despite it being in use practically every day.

There is a rumour about Aberdonians and spending which likely means they mostly do it at home on cheap rate, lets not waste that hard earnt cash.