ABSTRACT
The closures proposed in the Beeching Report were only the first of a three-part programme of reshaping the railway network and can be seen as the conclusion of the process begun in the early 1950s of cutting out the railways’ dead wood. The second stage involved identifying a core network of trunk routes, on which it was hoped investment would be concentrated in the following 20 years. The task of collating information and building predictions took until late 1964 and even then the routes chosen in the report published as The Development of the Major Railway Trunk Routes the following January were not a definitive selection. The report identified a core network of 3,000 miles of trunk routes and by August 1965 the final stage of the process, an investigation of the remaining lines outside the trunk network, had identified an 8,000-mile railway network, much of which would have been open to freight only.1
