Rather than be creative, I'll just re-post what I sat in the other thread:
It'd be interesting to give a newcomer to the UK (or someone who knows nothing about railway history) a map of the current rail routes and see where they felt the gaps in direct services and actual lines was.
You'd presumably get a list that included a number of "new towns" that had minimal rail access like Milton Keynes/ Skelmersdale/ Glenrothes (generally as they were built during the era when rail appeared to be failing - even if there was "a" station it wasn't serving the place fully/ there were no suburban rail services set up so a central station is a long way from houses)
You may get a few places that already had stations but were close to other "bigger" lines (e.g. I could see the logic in a spur off the ECML at Chester le Street down the Wear Valley to serve the city of Sunderland, maybe a link from Oldham to the main trans-pennine line in the direction of Huddersfield, maybe a link from Wrexham to the WCML at Crewe or from Manchester Airport to the WCML at Stockport)
You could have some chords between existing lines (I appreciate that the river/road at Newark mean that there's not much space for a Nottingham - Doncaster chord, but I could see that it would be the kind of thing that some people could argue in favour of, given Nottingham's poor links to the north - maybe a chord from the CLC or the Mid-Cheshire line onto the WCML - maybe something at Nuneaton to permit through Coventry - Leicester services, that kind of thing)
Maybe there'd be suggestions for through trains that wouldn't need any infrastructure improvements (e.g. some places don't have a direct train to a big city around an hour away - given that this is a threshold for regular travel patterns)
It's just so predictable though... Buxton *must* have a direct Derby service (not Stoke, not Macclesfield, not Sheffield, must be Derby), Tavistock and Okehampton *must* have a direct Waterloo service (who cares about whether extending the existing SWR services over more single track is going to make the carefully pathed slots at Waterloo less reliable), Colne *must* have a direct line to Skipton (even though a link to Keighley would be much better if journey times to Leeds are apparently so important)... the only possible "solutions" are re-opening lines that closed a long time ago
If HS2 followed the GC then a lot of the people complaining about it would have been in favour (and the "fifteen minute" time saving for "rich businessmen" would be A Good Thing because it followed the sacred route of our Victorian forefathers)
it was nice to discuss Dumfries - Lockerbie (Glasgow/ Edinburgh) on another thread recently, since it was a genuinely new idea and an attempt to solve an actual problem (maybe not a big enough problem, maybe you'll struggle to actually run any Dumfries - Lockerbie services into Glasgow/ Edinburgh, sure, but at least someone starting with a blank sheet of paper and trying to see if there was a way of solving it without automatically reaching for the long list of lines that closed decades ago.
It feels notable that the people who keep suggesting the same old routes (Tweedbank - Carlisle, Tavistock - Okehampton, Skipton - Colne, Matlock - Buxton, Wisbech - March, Woodhead, Harrogate - Northallerton etc) never seem to suggest anything actually
new on other threads. Sometimes I can see that re-opening an old route will be worthwhile (e.g. Ashington, Portishead) but the people who suggest these kind of lines never seem to have the imagination to suggest anything actually new.
For the same reason, it's always Nottingham to Glasgow that gets suggested - never Nottingham to (e.g.) Edinburgh or (e.g.) Hull to Glasgow or anything actually original - because the mentality is to come up with your answer first ("re-open an abandoned route!") and then work backwards to find a question that will give you the answer that you want. Which is why the most recent "Matlock - Buxton" thread inevitably suggested that we must close the East Didsbury Metrolink route so we could run direct London services through to a re-opened Manchester Central... it'd be nice to discuss something with a bit of original thought.
(as for Beeching, I think only a minority of lines that were closed happened as a result of his report - many many lines closed earlier - and other lines continued to be closed afterwards - e.g. he had wanted to keep Woodhead, it stayed open at the time but then BR closed it in the 1980s - I'm sure there are some decisions that look different in hindsight - but I'm not going to take lectures on "mistakes" that he made from the kind of people who can't even accept closure of useless things like Newhaven Marine/ Breich nowadays - if you can't agree with those getting chopped then I think you were always going to complain about any closure made because of Beeching - if you are upset about something like the Weymouth Quay line being replaced then you don't strike me as the kind of objective person who was ever going to agree with any closure ever)
Likewise locally to me, when apparently the suggested closure of Breich (approx. 150 journeys a year) provoked an "outcry" and forced Network Rail to spend two million quid rebuilding it. Ridiculous.
Brecih is a cracking example of the waste that the railway has to put up with because of the mentality that means we have to keep throwing money at what we have and cannot accept closing a station used by one man and his dog
Whilst I agree with this to some extent, it was problematic because the unions opposed "basic railway" measures as a threat to their members' jobs (ironic, really, given that the effects of closure were far worse), and it needs to be remembered that accurate accounting information wasn't easily obtained. There's been a lot of criticism over the methods used to survey train loadings, for example, but that really was the best available at the time, and the instant stats you can now pull out of a computer just weren't available. The stats Beeching had to work with were incredibly crude, but all things considered, I think he had a decent stab at analysing them to the best standards available at the time.
The Beeching Report is now 58 years old, and I think we sometimes forget how drastically the world has changed since then
I'm sure if he had access to the computers and the databases that we have nowadays he'd have made some decisions differently but he had to work with the information available. Maybe some could have been saved if Unions had been more flexible - but that's not his fault (as you say).
The UK has around fifteen million more people now than it did in Beeching's day (and the population travels a lot further for work than it used to), so no wonder the economies of some lines look a lot better now - e.g. the Midland Main Line only had a train every forty five minutes from London to Leicester in the 1980s (it's now four trains per hour but when it was only one train per forty five minutes then no wonder it wasn't economic to keep a second line open from London to Leicester and the GC shut - same goes for a few other parts of the country where there wasn't really sufficient traffic to keep one line open but traffic was shared across two parallel routes)
I actually think rationalising terminal stations was one of the more sensible things Beeching did, and is something BR (and even the Big Four) should have addressed earlier. Although it's occasionally left us with capacity problems, it's solved a lot of issues and made the railway easier to use. Do we really want to go back to the days where it was frequently necessary to get off a train at Edinburgh Waverley and change onto a service from Princes Street, which involved schlepping your luggage, kids etc. up Waverley Steps and half a mile down a very busy street, where the likelihood of being rained/snowed upon was very high?
Agree completely. We need to get over that. If we need new links between cities, we need to build them from scratch to meet modern needs. We need to get over things like the GC and Woodhead. They've gone. And often for good reason.
Agreed - we have complications in the cities that do have more than one central station - Beeching inherited a mess created by nineteenth century speculators and tried to tidy things up - people like to complain about the fact that Birmingham's HS2 station won't be at New Street (it will be slap bang next to Moor Street in the city centre, but people like to exaggerate just how long it'll take people to get between the unfortunately named Curzon Street* and New Street yet the same people are often the ones saying that they wished we had services in other cities split between stations at opposite ends of town (e.g. Nottingham)... I hope I'm not the only one who gets frustrated by the parallels here!
(I say "unfortunately named" because the station entrance and buffers will be at the Queensway end, by More Street, close to the Bullring, but the name suggests it's being built much further away, since Curzon Street itself is much further out of town)
